Love It or Leave It
June 28, 2008
Today I found this image, available for $14 on the front of a t-shirt, at americathebeautiful.com. It is one of those patriotic phrases that I find frustrating. Its practical use is to cut off criticism of America and its policies: "If you're so angry, why not go someplace else?" But does anyone imagine that this is really a choice? It's not like anyone has a say about being born in America.. so where is someone who does not "love" America supposed to go? There have to be positions between loving and leaving.. which we would understand if we considered the case of an individual growing up in contemporary Russia, where a person could be less than happy with the nation, but unwilling to leave at the same time.
I was thinking about this today as I continued to read about Crazy Horse. I got past Custer and Little Big Horn.. and am surprised at how quickly the big victory melted away into thin air. A large contingent of Sioux had no desire for a protracted fight with the Americans. In this position Crazy Horse was forced to adopt some uncustomarily aggressive policies to keep his war party together. When two envoys from the reservation appeared at his camp to urge peaceful settlement, Crazy Horse "openly threatened both envoys and their nervous hosts. 'We would never be allowed to take any one from that camp,' the envoys reported. 'If any left they would be followed and killed'" (254).
This sort of action on the part of Crazy Horse—and he follows through in some instances with punishment for fellow Sioux who leave the camp—is counted as a fall into isolation by Kingsley Bray in his biography. But how necessary it was for Crazy Horse to keep some form of unity is clear from the stalemated conclusion to the winter-fought Battle of Wolf Mountains. Bray writes:
...a party of five to six hundred warriors—little more than half the available force—mounted and turned their ponies downstream. With anger at the half-hearted response breaking his composure, Crazy Horse ordered the assembled people "to go down and meet [Miles]... or else move camp." [256]
Because of these warrior defections Crazy Horse was not able to put up the kind of large warrior force that proved victorious at Little Big Horn. In response he tries to enforce something like martial order on the customarily independent Sioux camps. It was a deeply un-Sioux kind of tactic.. but one that was necessary if the American military was to be successfully challenged.
As a nation America had some very powerful motivations at its disposal. No soldier could up and decide to withdraw from the a battle. He would be AWOL and punished. More important than the active threat of punishment was the battery of symbols that lies behind American power: flag and honor and patriotism. These are symbols that work to establish coercion in a body of men. It is striking that the Sioux had none of these mechanisms for inner control. The weakness of Native resistance would always be their lack of strategic cohesion and group solidarity.
Crazy Horse understood this dynamic and clearly tried to change it.. in the process introducing some practices that went totally against the grain of the Sioux way of life. (An example, by the way, of how the act of countering forces of change often leads accidentally to the very change one has tried to push away.) In effect Crazy Horse lacked the psychological mechanisms that come with being a nation-state.. and therefore had no chance at fighting the Americans for a long period of time. His efforts at physical coercion were the shadow of the unconscious coercion that we take for granted.
Persepolis on Film
June 26, 2008
For the past two years in my Islam class I have assigned Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. She is hardly what would normally be called a "Muslim" writer, but in her ability to highlight the absurdities of growing up in post-revolution Iran.. and then a very different set of absurdities in her account of life as an immigrant to Europe.. she has written a book that is valuable for my class. I have definitely been curious to see how the book would be realized in the form of an animated feature.
Unfortunately this version of Persepolis would be useless to me in my class—beyond the natural curiosity to see how a work transfers from one medium to another. The content is gone.. at least the parts that matter most to me. I can think of three specific themes that I miss:
1) In Satrapi's graphic novel there are a number of references to the continued strength of pre-Islamic history. This history is actively suppressed by the current religious leadership in Iran, but it survives in the minds of many people. When Marjane talks at the beginning of the film about imagining herself as a prophet when a little girl we are not reminded of Zarathustra, the founder of the Zoroastrian faith.. a detail that gives context for the possibilities of the imagination for a young girl growing up in Iran. One reason I like to teach Persepolis is that is gives a view of the competing historical narratives that are alive in the midst of an Islamic country.
2) In the book there are various references to specifically Shi'a religious practices. The cult of martyrs is present in the film, but it never has the specificity of the book. The ritual chest beating that goes along with the celebration of Ashura in Iran is another place where I get to step in and say something about Islam as it looks in Iran. Martyrs and chest beating can be seen in the film, but they have no special focus or explanation that goes with them.
3) The experience of women who are required to wear a head scarf when they go out in public is a fascination for students. The usual assumption is that these women are super conservative.. but then when you read Persepolis you see how quickly those scarves and religious clothes are tossed aside in a private setting. In the book Satrapi comments directly on dress codes: she itemizes male and female religious clothing and at another point shows how a trained observer can tell a lot about the shape of the woman underneath the religious clothes. This kind of reflection on clothes is absent from the film.
Maybe there were good reasons for leaving this religious material out—what, with the Danish cartoon flap not too far in the past. Iran lodged a formal complaint over the screening of Persepolis at Cannes.. but as much as no one wants to get on the bad side of Iran, the more likely culprit for taking out the references that I enjoy must still be the lack of faith in viewers to understand (or want to understand) religious and cultural details. The choice was evidently made to side-step the complexity of Iranian identity and religious particularities in order to emphasize the "universal" features of the work.
Crazy Horse and the Cosmos
June 24, 2008
Any telling of the life of Crazy Horse (1842-1877) must build up to the encounter with Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. This full biography by Kingsley Bray manages also to reconstruct his early life and the deep religious sensibility that made him a feared warrior.
His religion appears to consist of a concerted effort to harness the powers of the cosmos through carefully acquired associations. Crazy Horse rode into battle nearly naked:
...the new warrior chief was happy to ride as a Thunder dreamer: hair streaming loose, naked but for breechclout and moccasins, his body painted yellow, for the power of the Rock, and dotted with hailstone spots. [153]
This image makes sense of his appearance in the pictorial history of the Sioux by Amos Bad Heart Bull. We see Crazy Horse riding on a war pony and covered with spots. This is more than a weird decoration.. it is an attempt to draw upon the destructive power of hail.
This same associative way of thinking appears in other aspects of his preparation for war. Bray describes a charm bundle:
The holy men prepared a sacred bundle containing the stuffed skin of the hawk... Prayer and song imparted the contents with the sacred power of the hawk and other protectors...
The spirit of the hawk controlled swiftness and endurance, two of the warrior's key attributes. Henceforth he would regard the bird as his spiritual patron... Sometimes Crazy Horse would ride into battle wearing the whole body of the hawk tied in his hair; as the years passed and other visionary powers were granted him, he more usually made do with two or three of its feathers fastened at his crown. [60-1]
The pattern is again to locate in the natural world something that has a desired attribute (swiftness and endurance) and then to find a way to associate the bearer of those attributes with one's own self. The feathers of the hawk do just fine..
Bray makes the argument that not only was Crazy Horse connected to Thunder and the powers of the sky, but he also had an encounter with a Water Spirit, thus bringing him into contact with Lower World. His various preparations complete,
When he rode into battle, Crazy Horse was not simply a naked warrior with a curious paint design: his being crackled with the awesome destructive power of the total cosmos. [66]
That power was born of numerous associations acquired through rituals and visions.. and symbolized by some charm or design painted on the body.
I suspect that this building of power through association lies at the base of much of human culture. Perhaps a naked small human being just feels too puny all by himself.. and so the self must be connected by various mechanisms to something powerful. A culture like the Lakota Sioux would naturally pull their web of associations from the natural world. But what about us? Maybe the man who walks into a business meeting with an expensive watch and designer suit feels something similar to Crazy Horse: a feeling of power and rightness. For our culture—disconnected from the natural world—brands and logos become the bearers of associations of power. The vain business man might not be carrying the power of the cosmos.. but he feels as if he does!
Volunteering for Obama
June 22, 2008
Last week I met with a local organizer for the Obama campaign to talk about the opportunities out there for volunteering. At this meeting I also learned about an outdoor grill from 11-1 on Saturday at City Park here in Appleton.. which I made sure I attended. The tables themselves were decorated with small campaign images. There were about 25 people, including a number of young people who looked to be about college age or a little older. As I talked with some of these young people I learned that they were organizers sent here by the Obama campaign to get the campaign moving in Appleton.
I would not claim that this small corps of young people and the outdoor grill for volunteers was particularly electric or awesome. However, this kind of persistent local organizing is something that is going on all over the United States right about now. One of the organizers spoke wistfully of his work for Obama in the primaries and then mentioned that he was being sent to Alaska to start organizing up there. It is well known that Obama has a pretty decent campaign fund growing, but a large percentage of those funds come from small donors.. and Obama's grass-roots support bears a second fruit with this corps of young organizers and then the more extended network of volunteers.
One of the most surprising aspects of my experience talking with these organizers is how directly their methods line up with what I have experienced of evangelization. The goal is not to attack people with facts, but to share a personal story. during my first conversation with a campaign organizer, he began by telling a story about how the Obama campaign connected to him personally. Then the question to me was not what I thought about Obama.. but rather how supporting Obama made sense to me on a personal level. This was all quite reminiscent of the Evangelical attempt not to talk about doctrinal points, but to ask a more deeply personal question: What is your personal relationship to God? This is not to say that Obama and God are in any way equated by the campaign, but just to point out another in a long line of techniques that have crossed over from religion to politics. The goal in this case is to get people not only to express assent but to build a personal narrative that incorporates Obama. Such a narrative is one of the most effective tools for outreach and shaping the opinions of others.
Just to pursue this theme of narrative a little longer, I have a sample agenda for house meetings that the Obama campaign is seeking to host. The goal is to get 20 people to attend these meetings at the home of a volunteer. What will happen in this meeting? Here is the agenda:
0:00 Welcome & Introductions
0:05 Host's Story
Why did you take leadership in this campaign? Where do you come from, what one or two experiences in your life led you to decide to take responsibility?
Why are you hosting this meeting?
Introduction of Obama Organizing Fellow
0:10 Unite for Change Video
0:20 Organizing Fellow's Story
0:25 Group Discussion
Why are you involved in civic action? How have you been active in your community or our democracy? What inspired you to act and take responsibility?
0:50 Moving Forward, Taking Action
Help get more Americans to vote: register voters July 4th weekend
Host a house meeting
1:00 Close
That is the tight schedule for a home meeting. Note how the host is encouraged to develop a personal narrative about his/her involvement in the campaign. The Organizing Fellow also has an opportunity to tell a personal narrative. Finally the group has 25 minutes for expressing their own activity in the community. These house meetings are not about raising awareness about the facts related to specific issues, but about creating narratives and connecting people through those narratives.
This emphasis on building community and frames of meaning is something I appreciate about Barack Obama.. and something a candidate like Mitt Romney.. with his wealth and direct experience streamlining corporations.. could never really comprehend. It will be cool to have a community organizer as president of our country.
Narrative and Conviction:
The Thin Blue Line
June 20, 2008
The Thin Blue Line (1988) by Errol Morris is an example of a creative work that accomplished something in this world: it got a man (Randall Dale Adams) off death row. He had been convicted of killing a police officer in Dallas in November, 1976. As Errol Morris elucidates the case through interviews and re-enactments the verdict comes to look patently absurd. In the hands of Morris the documentary takes the place of a closing argument before a jury.. and we, as the audience, become the jury trying to decide whether we buy the narrative that is being laid out.
The documentary makes great use of disconcertingly simple illustrations. Running throughout are recreations of the crime.. with gun going off and police officer falling to the ground. Then there are also close ups of newspaper headlines and other printed materials. Formally this material allows for visual relief from the constant interviews, and more substantively it allows for small differences to be clarified in the mind of the viewer.
As the same scene plays out multiple times, with various versions adding or stripping away basic details, The Thin Blue Line calls to mind Rashomon. Witnesses and detectives put the events together differently and pretty soon we start to wonder if there really is a correct answer to be found in these competing versions. But the credit should go to Morris for never letting this disorientation or cloud of truth distort his construction of the events. The weight of presenting a clear narrative of the contested events.. and cutting through the accumulated versions.. was felt deeply by Morris. Despite the difficulty of finding and locating truth, it must be found.. the life of an actual man on death row lies in the balance.
We might have thought that something of the same weight would have been felt by the judge presiding over the original trial. As Morris drums home his case, it is hard to understand how the judge could not have seen through the false narratives that had been fabricated to convict this man. Morris interviews the judge, who provides an interesting detail of his own mindset during the trial:
I do have to admit that in the Adams case, and I really never said this, Doug Moulder's final argument was one that I had never heard before about the thin blue line of police that separated the public from anarchy. I have to concede that my eyes kind of welled up when I heard that. It did get me emotionally, but I don't think I showed it.
There, in this passage that comes and goes, we see the source of the title. And, further, we learn about the specific nature of the weight felt by the judge: above all upholding the police out of fear of the fragility of order. His more proper concern is with the innocence or guilt of this particular person of this particular crime.. which is a lot less inspiring.. and may not always bring tears to the eyes.
This brief statement from the judge is a perfect snapshot of the kinds of high and deeply felt values that often lead to the worst abuses of justice. I am sure we could speak with the guards and interrogators of the prisoners held at Guantanamo and hear some of the same high values expressed. How much more just the world would be if people could begin to really interrogate their deepest values and commitments.. the very things that bring tears to their eyes.
[The Thin Blue Line was released in 1988, but check out how lively discussion about this work can be on this post for Errol Morris' blog on the New York Times website.]
Reading Big Books
June 18, 2008
One unacknowledged result of the current centrality of colleges and universities in intellectual pursuits is the disappearance of the big book. Every society creates niches within which creative works are consumed. These niches range from the rigors of court life to the leisure of the country house. Creative works do not fill a random number of pages, but arrive in the world at a size related to their imagined social niches.
Higher education should not be viewed as somehow a force set apart from the market.. but as a social niche that actively shapes the way works are consumed. It does this through the establishment of narrow time limits within which works must be read. Each term here at Lawrence University lasts ten weeks.. and so myself and others cast about for books that will fit in well with this time frame. Each class must stand alone, so there is no possibility in working through a text over multiple terms. A class should cover four or five main texts, and those texts should be readable in about two weeks. Every instructor knows there are great books that are just too long or too involved to work as a textbook.
This is an issue not only in undergraduate settings, but graduate ones as well. The graduate seminar pushes for books that can be read in the course of a week (oftentimes "read" should be in quotation marks). I recall getting through the first section of Grammatology in a week.. and works by creative writers were often chosen to fit snugly within a week's worth of reading. I seem to remember Walter Scott's The Heart of Mid-Lothian getting switched out for a shorter novel in one class. This is no complaint, but it is a fact that many books which deserve time and attention get lost or mentally abridged because of the pressure related to the semester/term schedule.
I see a danger in this system. In the pursuit of knowledge it cannot be healthy if the system itself dictates the manner of approaching a subject. Our goal is to see through the eyes of a another culture and another era.. and yet here we are stuck asking which books will read well in the course of a term. Necessity wars against the deeper goal. This is particularly true of the study of the Middle East, I might add. There are a whole host of books that are too long to fit comfortably into our term system.. and so they get ignored. This applies both to classic works of Arabic literature and major Orientalist studies.
This year (as Emily will attest) I have been mulling over how to introduce big books to students. That is, the pleasure of carefully reading a demanding work that was written for a very different audience. These are the works that I personally most love to settle into. My current work on a translation of sections from al-Maqrizi's crazy-long historical work is one example of this.. but I have the notion that I could begin something of a big book reading group. The goal would be to every year choose a work that will engage us for the entire year.
I have two nominations:
1) Shahnameh, the medieval Persian book of kings, relating a history of Persia that reaches deep into the pre-Islamic past. Ferdowsi's book comes in at 900 pages, so it is not a work that can fit easily into a class.. but at the same time it is a work that should be read.
2) Prolegomena to the History of Israel by Julius Wellhausen. This is a example of the kind of ground-breaking older scholarship that few people actually read. It sets out the multi-source theory of the composition of the Torah. Granted, this is a book whose conclusions are dated and may make some uncomfortable assumptions about race.. but that is part of the point: to historicize the traditions of academic scholarship and to look closely at how convincing these arguments are (as opposed to the vague second and third hand repetitions of these ideas).
Joining House to House, Field to Field
June 15, 2008
photo used by Creative Commons License, by Flickr user latham
Barbara Ehrenreich has a new essay up at The Nation. She describes the growing colonization of America's spectacular natural sites by the ultra-rich.. including Jackson Hole, Wyoming (pictured above). She writes:
Of all the crimes of the rich, the aesthetic deprivation of the rest of us may seem to be the merest misdemeanor. Many of them owe their wealth to the usual tricks: squeezing their employees, overcharging their customers and polluting any land they're not going to need for their third or fourth homes. Once they've made (or inherited) their fortunes, the rich can bid up the price of goods that ordinary people also need--housing, for example. Gentrification is dispersing the urban poor into overcrowded suburban ranch houses, while billionaires' horse farms displace rural Americans into trailer homes. Similarly, the rich can easily fork over annual tuitions of $50,000 and up, which has helped make college education a privilege of the upper classes.
Hurray for Ehrenreich! Someone needs to be calling attention to the fundamental re-alignment of wealth that has been going on for some time now in America.. and the rest of the world, too.
This issue interests us here at Old Roads not only because of the injustice of this growing disparity, but also because of the way this wealth re-creates the landscapes that ought to be our national inheritance. In slow motion our landscapes are coming to reflect the class divisions that exist here in America the beautiful. We believe that a correction of this massive re-alignment of wealth into the hands of the ultra-rich is long overdue and should be a top political priority of any progressive agenda. How could anyone argue differently in light of facts such as this: The richest 1 percent of Americans currently hold wealth worth $16.8 trillion, nearly $2 trillion more than the bottom 90 percent.
Ehrenreich mentions the transformation of places like Griggs, Idaho, once the home of low wage laborers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Now the money is pouring in, "transforming family potato farms into vast dynastic estates." The scenario reminded me of Isaiah's warning:
Ah, you who join house to house,
who add field to field,
until there is room for no one but you,
and you are left to live alone
in the midst of the land!
The LORD of hosts has sworn in my hearing:
Surely many houses shall be desolate,
large and beautiful houses without inhabitant.
[Isaiah 5.8-9]
These are the kinds of prophetic warnings we should hear more often. Goodness, but that might mean class warfare or something. And besides, these ultra-rich can be oh-so-generous and give a few million here and there to philanthropic undertakings. So I guess we'll just let them rearrange our world in gratitude.
Debating the Role of Intellectuals
June 14, 2008
I've blogged once already on Prophet of Innovation, the new biography about the economist Joseph Schumpeter. But one critique of intellectuals bothered me:
In the short run, it is impossible for people generally, and even intellectuals, to ignore what seem to be unreasonable "profits and inefficiencies." They therefore have difficulty in seeing long-range trends in which capitalism is benefiting society as a whole. Uniquely among economic systems, therefore, capitalism "creates, educates, and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest." With its bountiful production, it underwrites the education of a class of hostile intellectuals who have no "direct responsibility for practical affairs" and little experience in managing anything. [358]
The passage begins with a good point. Capitalism works itself out over a long span of time.. and the justness of spectacular and easy profits should be judged with consideration of the fact that new innovations will someday undermine this latest windfall. Capitalism requires a long historical view, but it is necessarily perceived by people who have a short view.. i.e. by people who see an individual making millions of dollars in profits and respond: "that's not fair!" So capitalism, Schumpeter concludes, will inherently face social unrest as the long term benefits of the system remain hidden to those who are protesting against it.
This puts capitalism in an odd position: it ends up funding and supporting institutions that are outright hostile to its survival. These intellectuals have no "responsibility for practical affairs" and no experience managing an institution.. and therefore the ideas of these intellectuals must be out of touch with the deeper working of the economic institution that supports them. This is a view of the academic world widely held among political conservatives, with varying shades of nuance. The central point is that intellectuals are something of a fifth column, intent on undermining the system yet dependent on the system at the same time. And for conservatives the conclusion is obvious: these intellectuals are 1) hypocrites for living in a society with which they disagree, and 2) parasites upon the properly running system.
I discovered an interesting counter-argument to this view of intellectuals in Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization by Barry Kemp. Here we get a similar sketch of the position of the intellectual vis-a-vis the state, but with a decidedly different emphasis:
The fact that I am writing and the reader reading, instead of both of us gathering wild cereal grains, is possible only because in past times kingdoms and empires carved out oases of leisure for the gifted and the learned. Without the will to coerce his neighbors man would live in a perpetual Stone Age.
This cannot be denied. Paradoxically, however, it is the development of those attitudes, institutions, and traditions which inhibit absolute power and prescribe a universal morality for the conduct of affairs, and in so doing undermine the cosy ancient paternalistic view of the ideal ruler, that offers the principal claim to the existence of progress in the history of civilization. But whereas the great ruler and his admirers take care of themselves, the forces of rational opposition require nurturing. [1st ed., pg. 319]
This passage first calls into question the notion that capitalism is somehow unique in allowing a role for hostile intellectuals. More importantly it sets out a genuine historical place for these intellectuals: they are the ones who modify and humanize the power structures that are connected to the rise of civilization. Yes, intellectuals could not exist without structures of power and hierarchy, but within these structures they are able to work in a hostile or undermining manner to moderate the structures. Intellectuals in every culture thus represent the force of "rational opposition".
Without the historical presence of a rational opposition, we would still be living in the naked power structures of the earliest civilizations. Without contemporary intellectual effort the "right" of the wealthy to grab and lock down the resources of the world would go unchallenged.
Putting in the Time
June 13, 2008
Just got back to Appleton after four days at Denison University in Ohio. I was attending the al-Musharaka Summer Seminar sponsored by NITLE. The theme for this year was Crossing Borders. The goal was to put together a number of professors and librarians from liberal arts colleges to let them come up with ways to collaborate in teaching the Middle East and North Africa. My small group came up with the idea of using a wiki that we will call "Exploring Islamic Cities".. the idea being to create a space that can be used by our students to post their projects. As usual in these workshops some of the best time was spent just brainstorming about how to use and combine the resources available on the Internet.
I came away from the workshop more determined than ever to improve in my understanding of how to use various programs. I think it is a seriously wrong path to say: "I will get my IT folks to figure that out.." I don't think serious programming is in the cards for myself, but a deeper knowledge of tools like Flash and PHP would be wonderful.. and enable lots of my ideas. Eventually academics will have to stop thinking of themselves as elites who don't need to think about how programs work. Our goal should not be to produce the same old academic articles.. only now filed into an on-line database. Our goal should be to present our work in ways that are actively shaped by the medium of the Internet. That will mean—sooner or later—learning to mold our thinking along the lines of this new fantastically open medium for communication.
I really liked the comments of Rob MacDougall over at The Old is the New New. Concerning THATcamp (The Humanities and Technology) he writes:
If you’re a history or humanities graduate student looking to set yourself apart from the crowd, I strongly suggest thinking about getting involved in digital research. I’m afraid I don’t just mean a blog about robots. Demonstrate some programming chops along with your humanities education and there ought to be people who’ll want very much to hire you. Better yet, come up with some answers to the questions in my last paragraph. You don’t need a compsci degree, and you don’t need to be a math whiz. But you can’t be scared of your computer, and you do need to put in some time.
And that's a big deal: putting in the time. For me that means playing around with programs and experimenting. That, by the way, is one of the great uses of this blog: it functions as a giant sandbox of digital ideas. I get to put stuff together and try out ideas and see what happens. It is only over time that I get a sense of what works or doesn't work.
Here at the advent of my summer I am looking forward to getting started on some projects, which include:
1) starting up the Digital Cairo Project by the end of the summer.. including some translations of al-Maqrizi and basic time layers.
2) re-working this blog into a slightly cleaner version that incorporates more automatically updating features and a comment section for posts.
3) incorporating my sidebar topics into information that shows up on a GoogleMap
4) getting a new video camera and starting on some video projects (one long project and some shorter ones as well)
5) Learning how to use Flash well enough to incorporate it into some features on this site.
6) begin separate website for virtual travel forum.
But that will mean putting in the time..
War Rugs and Dramatic Interpretations
June 11, 2008
At the art museum here at Denison University is a show featuring Afghan war rugs. The reason for their name will become apparent as you let your eyes rest on the patterns and notice that the repeated elements are tanks and helicopters and guns. It is somewhat disorienting to see these tools of modern warfare worked into a traditional style. Somehow it would feel more natural to see swords and bows and horsemen.
To have this military stuff woven into carpet designs is surely a bad sign: too much contact with warfare. Kalashnikovs and tanks in the ordinary course of things should not present themselves as subjects for decorations.
The program for the exhibit hints at another point about these rugs:
Her aunts began weaving designs that depicted traumatic life events living through the tumultuous and violent 1980s and 1990s (Soviet-Afghan War and Taliban era). The aunts retell the details of personal memories illustrated in their rugs. Michgan acknowledges that she began weaving as a form of expression and for use in the home, but now weaves the rugs in part "because they will sell," a fact discovered by her family when their rugs were introduced to the marketplace.
So yes, these rugs originate in the experience of a war.. but their continuation was a result of popularity in the global marketplace. This exhibit at Denison's art museum could—to the eye of a cynic—be interpreted as something of a marketing plot. The serious business end of these rugs can be glimpsed at the website Afghan War Rugs, which offers some rugs for sale and provides details about collecting them.
Once I got over my surprise at seeing modern weaponry in the midst of traditional rugs I began to think about all the places in American life where weapons are present. I am thinking of the usual suspects: military toys for children and coffee table books at Barnes and Noble on Air Force jets or World War II. Meeting at the same time as our small NITLE sponsored al-Musharaka workshop is another workshop attended by a large contingent of guys in military uniforms.. along with others of undetermined affiliation. Above is a copy of their Tuesday schedule and you can see that their meetings are dedicated to technical matters related to weapons systems. So our carpets may not be lined with weapons, but American life is strangely infiltrated by the military.
Above you can see a few of the attendees for this parallel workshop learning about new systems for calculating torque, air pressure, and other necessities. What this stuff does is beyond me (and I was not going to ask anyone). But the presence here of this workshop is a reminder of the extent to which military applications creep downward into our lives.. and become something we take for granted.
Tonight as part of the al-Musharaka workshop we watched a drama performed by Laila Farah from Depaul University in Chicago, Illinois. It was a drama that wove together her own experience coming of age during the Lebanese Civil War with the voices of others who have had to affirm themselves against militaries and border guards (of all kinds). In a way it felt small as our audience of only about 20 people watched her perform and in performing resist. But it was brave and in the end a model for all of us to follow. How else can we begin to protest our militarized world than by simply speaking to whoever will listen?
Denison University in Ohio
June 10, 2008
An unexpected result of teaching at a liberal arts college is the constant opportunity to visit other liberal arts colleges. There is an economy of conferences and workshops that allows for mutual recognition. Year by year the colleges and universities of America will become better known to me.. along with the central tourist areas of big conference cities (San Diego, Washington DC, Chicago, Atlanta). These points make up a shared academic map.
Denison College, located in the tiny town of Granville about 40 miles outside of Columbus, Ohio, is a beautiful brick-dominated university. It is worth a visit, but it feels odd that I get four days to get to know this campus, wandering around the buildings for meetings and then into town for dinner, but will not get to see Columbus at all. The academic travel schedule is not particularly aligned with my desire to explore different parts of the country. I have to settle for these academic islands..
One feature of liberal arts colleges is the parade of buildings named after someone or other. This "someone or other" will always be an incredibly wealthy person. Above is just one out of many such named buildings on the Denison campus. I looked up F.W. Olin on Wikipedia and it turns out that he founded the Western Cartridge Company in 1898.. which manufactured ammunition. He left some of his fortune to the F.W. Olin foundation and the foundation in turn donated $6.1 million to Denison University for the construction of this science hall. The college and university landscape is largely a result of philanthropy.. which is a nice way of saying rich people looking to trade in their wealth for social prestige. I for one wish that such naming could be stopped.. so that we would not be stuck with this geography of wealthy donors.
The arguments about the inefficiencies of private health care could easily be applied to our system of higher education. Colleges and universities duplicate many times over the administration and infrastructure that could be streamlined with a more centralized system. On top of that, these institutions compete with each other to look prettier and have more amenities.. thereby attracting students, but thereby also increasing their expenses. In other words, the competition between institutions does not lead to efficiencies but rather to extravagant spending on plumage.
A
college education is a great expense which will put many students and families in debt for decades. Why accept this as a necessity? Why does the American public not fund public institutions that would provide their children and grandchildren with an affordable education? I guess that would mean paying a little more in taxes every year. So to avoid that we will stick ourselves tens of thousands of dollars of tuition fees at a private institution! It's the American way.
Fantasia on Gas Prices
June 6, 2008
Today the price of crude oil jumped to $138 per barrel. As it is here in Wisconsin we have been hovering right below the $4 mark for a gallon of gas.. and I am sure that before long the price will creep higher. Tonight I am going to let a speculative mental bubble run wild. What if the price of gas rose to over $10 per gallon? I don't expect this to happen any time soon.. but how would this influence our way of life?
I imagine the ease of long distance travel would change dramatically. It will not be the case that prices for air travel rise simply in proportion to gas prices, so that for every dollar higher of gas prices the airlines charge customers an extra $25 for a flight. No, prices will get higher and then as fewer people travel the prices will no longer reflect the scale discounts that are built into the system. If gas prices really shot through the roof the price of long distance travel would increase exponentially. One result of $10 gas would be a world in which our assumptions about travel are re-arranged. The era of casual 36-hour junkets to exotic locales.. even for the wealthy.. would fade into the past.
We would see the advent of a new localism. The reign of Wal Mart and other box stores is a direct result of the ability of corporations to manufacture things abroad for very little and then get them to local outlets with almost nothing in the way of transportation costs. A steep rise in gas prices will put that basic globalizing business model at risk. Local food and local goods will begin to look more and more attractive. At what point would a local woodworker be able to make a bookshelf or desk that is cost competitive with the cheapies on sale at Wal Mart? Higher gas prices would signal good news for all the people who make things.
Our retail landscape here in America would be slowly re-arranged if gas prices were to hit something like $10 a gallon. The trend over the past decades has been geographical expansion and profligate use of space. Downtowns have become home to specialty shops while the real heavyweight stores lie on the outskirts of cities.. but before long those downtown stores will start to look quite attractive to shoppers. People will have to begin thinking about how much they drive each week.. and as soon as people have to consider whether they can drive as far as the local Wal Mart, local downtowns will see a boom.
The internet economy I see continuing unchanged.. or even growing in importance. Businessmen will use the internet for virtual meetings in order to avoid costly flights. Books and movies will be available in electronic formats. Crucially, in a world that will is experiencing a severe trend toward localization, the internet will be a force for keeping people in contact with each other and allowing the continuation of something like a global culture even as our ability to travel easily back and forth between countries gets more restricted.
All in all, these results are hardly negative.. although the strain and stress involved with getting to this new localism will be high. Some people may even start to wonder why our political leadership in times of plenty (say, 1994-2007) did not adopt policies that would ease the inevitable run up in gas prices. Why were developers allowed to line their pockets with profits from housing developments that would cripple our economy in coming decades? Why was public transportation not a bigger recipient of tax aid so that people could someday have the option of leaving their cars behind? Why were the wealthy allowed to box us into a landscape that is only workable with low gas prices?
None of this was impossible to foresee. This could almost be an argument for a strong and specific tax aimed at those who profited most from this sell out of America. And that is another prediction: people will be angry.. very angry.. at those who got us into this fix. The challenge for the liberal in the coming decade is not to let the real culprits squirm away from their guilt by the usual moral equivocations and fuzzy numbers.
Advantage Outsider
June 4, 2008
photo used by Creative Commons License, by Flickr user OldOnliner
At the beginning of this week I made a presentation at Beloit College for their Cities in Transition Workshop. On Monday night we had a picnic dinner at the pavilion pictured above in Riverside Park. This is a chance to come out an learn learn something about country dancing.. and this was the backdrop to our meal.
That afternoon the topic came up about what is the advantage or disadvantage of viewing a culture from the outside. The consensus seemed to favor the importance of having an inside informant.. or else one risks all kinds of mistakes and false conclusions. That did not sit well with me and I kept thinking about all the ways that an inside informant can be a detriment to really understanding a place or an event.
For example the Islamic hajj. If one were to interview Muslims about their experience, the responses would be mostly a repetition of the pious benefits that Muslims are supposed to get out of the experience. In other words, people pick up the accepted phrases and terms.. and irrespective of what actually happens, they see the event in those terms. So say we could ask a pilgrim: "What was your sense of social relations while in Mecca?" The response would likely be that it was wonderful, all these millions of Muslims worshipping together irrespective of class or race or country of origin. But as I watch videos or see photos of the hajj, I am struck by how powerfully class and national identities are continued throughout the hajj, from the buses to the hotels to the tents set up at 'Arafat. A semiotic reading of the arrangements for the hajj will thus cut against a pilgrim's testimony as to how it felt. There can be difficult questions regarding the adjudication of such a conflict between outside and inside views.. but there is no obvious answer, especially once it is appreciated that human beings are lousy critical interpreters of their own world.
A second example would be the presence of class divisions in the American landscape. Americans are largely unconscious of class, and given that fact they are unlikely to reach for class as an explanatory concept for unequal neighborhoods. If we could interview an American while passing through a landscape that she knows well, and ask her about the changes in appearance that we are witnessing, then the answer may well hinge on individual choices or even the racial composition of the neighborhood.. or perhaps this American would deny any substantive change in the landscape. It would be the height of folly to accept this insider view instead of entrusting interpretation to the critical tools of an outsider.
I would of course welcome insider interpretation in almost any situation.. so I am not disparaging the idea of listening to what people say they are experiencing. But I am questioning the uncritical acceptance of an insider view just because they are insiders. There are mental traps connected with being an insider that are very difficult to spring.
Congrats, again, to Obama!
June 3, 2008
We said this at the start of the primary season (over five months ago!).. but it is the kind of thing I have no problem repeating. The idea of an African American running for president is stunning.. and deserves to be turned around in the mind for a little while. Further, I cannot think of a political upset of greater magnitude during my adult life. Hillary Clinton began this race with all the key advantages: her husband's connections and fund-raising circle, key elements of the Democratic party leadership, and higher name recognition among the rank-and-file of the party. Obama's win was a stunning feat.. although given the closeness of the contest it was hardly what we might call a slam dunk. Obama is a unique candidate.. and at this point it is not just our thoughts, but our emotions that will be with him as he makes his run at the presidency.
update: Even as the November campaign kicks into gear, it is important to register the fact while Obama will be a great positive step, he is not a miracle worker. The fundamentals of the American situation are clear. We face a great challenge in learning to modify out lifestyle so that we live in a sustainable manner. Global warming is one aspect of this, but the simple fact of the finite nature of global resources is another. Ask yourself the question: Can every person on this planet—all 6.7 billion of them—live like an average American? Obviously that is impossible, there is not enough oil or meat or other resources to go around. Then is America committed to keeping the rest of the world living on far fewer resources? If we are not willing to allow that, we will see a growing global equality, beginning in parts of China and India now, and this will mean that all the prices for staples will go up until we consume less. Or maybe we want to try to preserve the global inequality in resource consumption.. in which case we will need to engage in more wars that bear a family resemblance to Iraq: rhetoric of freedom mixed with the underlying strategic goal of resource allocation. I fear that Americans will not take kindly to the reality of the imperative of less consumption.. and will insist on holding onto a lifestyle that demands global inequality. And that is ultimately a vision of the world that the Bushes and Cheneys of the world know well how to exploit.
