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Ben A. |
Ben H. |
Doug |
Later |
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The Accidental Mossad
Hamas said the bomber was on his way to try to infiltrate into Israel, accompanied by another Hamas member and a guide, when they were stopped by the armed men.
The robbers forced the bomber to lie on the ground and tried to steal the bomb, but the militant detonated it, killing all three. The other Hamas man and the guide escaped.
There have been cases of rival groups stealing each other’s explosives, but no group claimed the two gunmen, and their families did not go to the hospital to take the bodies, indicating that the two were not militants, who are revered in Palestinian society.
A Hamas official said that whatever their intention, the two should be considered agents of Israel.
“Anyone who tries to stop a fighter from doing his work is a collaborator,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Trust those tricky Jews to use moral luck to their advantage. Every time a bus driver side-swipes the suicide bomber, or a waiter who serves tainted mayonaisse to a Hamas kingpin, Mossad recruitment increases! And in the latter case, is not the kitchen staff implicated en masse? These Zionists get more devious by the minute!
[Ben A.: 4/29/04 14:28] |
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Magnificent, Revelatory Quotation
"In art the mass of people no longer seek consolation and exaltation, but those who are refined, rich, unoccupied, who are distillers of quintessences, seek what is new, strange, original, extravagant, scandalous. I myself, since Cubism and before, have satisfied these masters and critics with all the changing oddities which have passed through my head, and the less they understand me, the more they admired me. By amusing myself with all these games, with all these absurdities, puzzles, rebuses, arabesques, I became famous and that very quickly. And fame for a painter means sales, gains, fortune, riches. And today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone with myself, I have not the courage to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term. Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, were great painters. I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and exploited them as best he could the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than it may appear, but it has the merit of being sincere."
--Pablo Picasso, Jardin des Arts (March 1964), trans.
Via this fine gentleman.
[Ben A.: 4/28/04 12:36] |
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Addendum on Eternal Sunshine
C.V. reports that I misidentified the speaker in my remix of the plan-making scene. He also suggests that the director had in mind the same explanation for the plan's success that I was trying, via my added dialog, to make explicit. "Perhaps rather than counting on our laziness, Kaufman is counting on our coming up with exactly what you came up with." A good point; maybe it's just a matter of taste whether you like the explanation spelled out for you. I think the extra lines (mutatis mutandis) ward off a slight whiff of logical incoherence, but maybe it's a sign of my bad taste that I give such high priority to logical coherence.
[Doug: 4/24/04 18:43] |
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My two cents on the progressive education/contrarianism topic
I have thought a lot about whether I am, or was, a contrarian, and about whether it is ever a good thing to be.
From roughly age ten to twenty-something, I identified myself explicitly as a contra, i.e. an opponent of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. This did not begin as a free-thinking provocation. We (my family, my parents, their friends, their kids) would go camping in northern Michigan. Part of this group (not my parents) were militant Republicans. Now one day I, John G., et al. were playing some variant of good guy/bad guy (Jedi/Stormtrooper, maybe) when someone, either my uncle Richard or Whitbeck (now chief judge of Michigan court of appeals), suggested that we play Contra, and use our tree branches to shoot down Sandinista helicopters. Under their tutelage, we developed this play mythos that was basically isomorphic to G.I. Joe, with Daniel Ortega as Destro, the Sandinistas as COBRA, and John's black lab Bluto as the head Contra. (Many of us still greet each other with the secret "Hail Bluto" sign.) The Contras were underdogs in this mythos, but you couldn't say that theirs was an "underrepresented perspective" where we were, namely in mid-Michigan public schools, since they simply weren't a topic at all there (unlike in Cambridge/Somerville schools). It wasn't until high school that the Contras became a tool of nonconformity for me. Not that my (suburban Philadelphia) high school enrolled many leftists. It was as preppy as public schools come. I was nonetheless becoming aware, mostly through Crossfire hosts and George Will's column, that there was a vapid liberal conformity paralyzing intellectual life in America. Whether this was true is a complicated matter (Reagan was president, after all) but the point is that I believed it, and was eager to go off to college and fight it, and went so far as to bleach "FDN" (the Spanish acronym of the main Contra force) onto my father's 1960's jean jacket and wear it around. (This is one of those details that belies my partitioning of my life into stages of Juvenile Seriousness, Ironic Anomie, California Epicurism, and Full Wisdom (the current stage). There's plenty of absurd gestures already in the supposedly serious high school stage.)
Moral? None, I guess. Or maybe that it is childish to identify with a cause. To advance a cause is fine (depending on the cause); it's when you weave it into your own self-image that it's dangerous, because then you can no longer think of it objectively.
In fact (if I may slip into gassy philosophical mode here) it is almost always bad to identify with one endpoint or another of any spectrum of human types or behaviors or opinions. Aristotle, Gautama et al. were right: wisdom is finding the middle course. This need not mean the median course relative to your time and place, the inoffensive "split-the-difference" position taken instinctively by the wishy-washy. The poles of debate here and now may have veered away from the absolute poles that you should steer between. The key is knowing when this veering has happened. For example, if you're French, and are arguing whether the government should control 70 percent or 50 percent of the economy, you ought to realize that it's happened. Likewise if you are an American ivy-leaguer deciding which of your talents, logical or creative, should guide your career choice -- meaning, toward corporate law or toward entertainment law -- your endpoints ought to be moved.
I have no idea where I was going with this, or even how I got started, but the wonder of the blog form is that I can remain guilt-free about this.
A much more focused, although equally pointless, observation
Today I walked past one of those "foot reflexology" places, with a chart in the window showing how every part of the body maps onto a part of the sole of the foot. To stimulate your kidney into better health, say, just squeeze your big toe. It occurs to me that there must be some bit you squeeze in order to stimulate the foot region. And there must be some topological fixed-point theorem proving that at least one node on the sole must stimulate itself. Shouldn't this cause a dangerous feedback loop? It's odd that you don't see more people's feet spontaneously combusting as they walk down the street. Unless, of course, the science of reflexology is not completely sound ...
[Doug: 4/24/04 17:43] |
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School for Scandal
NYT has a somewhat arch profile of the retiring headmaster of the private school Bernie attended from first through twelfth grade. Among the distinguished alumni, they failed to number one of the Beastie Boys.
Notwithstanding the success of many of the students, it always struck me that St. Ann's embodied a lot of the problems of progressive education. You have to consider not just the outputs but the inputs, too. The student body was already screened for high IQ. The shocking thing was how many graduates flamed out in spectacular ways. Of her closest friends, only about half wound up graduating from college on time. One guy managed to spend 4 years on and off at Harvard without completing freshman year (though he eventually wound up a Brown, a wise move given the origin of his inability to perform). Many met the world of grades, deadlines, and inflexible requirements and simply refused to be bothered.
[Ben H.: 4/22/04 13:39] |
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The Return of Explicitly Partisan Media
A while back, I speculated that McCain - Feingold would push interest groups into forming their own media outlets. It's happening faster than I thought. The NRA is starting up a Web TV operation. TCS has the story.
Watch, now, for the "reformers" countermove. Will they sacrifice 200 years of jurisprudence on prior restraint in order to close this loophole? If so, how will they try to tailor the restrictions? I can foresee the "reformers" trying to draw a distinction between "real" media and "partisan" media, possibly based on ownership. Of course, such a distinction is shockingly ahistorical, failing as it does to recognize the recent vintage of the journalistic objectivity fetish.
[Ben H.: 4/21/04 09:49] |
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The Parsippany Mistral
The hot winds are blowing tonight and I've been awake since 4 a.m. with thoughts tumbleweeding through my head: bits of Beethoven's seventh Symphony, the name "Kenneth Lumumba", sundry Java classes. What's worrying me most though is how evil you (Ben H.) have been here on the Mideast topic. I apologize for bringing this up again; I see that commendable efforts have been made in the GMT zone to get away from it, but I need to get this off my chest, and then I'm happy to talk more about peacock farms. Though I myself have stated that genocide might be warranted in extremis, our situation today with regard to the Arabs is not even in the suburbs of extremis. It occurs to me to declare you a monster and forswear further discussion (as you do to a half-billion Arabs). But my whole point has been and continues to be that you cannot do this (without being evil). Also, I think, Ben A. and I are in a privileged position to help you bring your monstrous views toward anonymous masses back into line with your more clement views toward people you've met. If only by exemplifying that care for doing good need not be moralistic puffery or "think of the children!" sentimentality. (And yet, come to think of it, it is worthwhile to think of the children while you write your proposals to kill them. I know you're imagining a clean zap-button process, because you said so, but this is just what makes your scenario kind of irrelevant. In real life you actually have to put them in the pit and shoot them.)
Like the love for Southern California, the joy of tweaking liberal pieties is something that unites the three of us. As I took the first to an unhealthy extreme, you relish taking the second as far as it can go, with far more genius then I could ever muster. And I don't use the word "genius" lightly: watching you destroy liberal pieties is like watching Ali, terrible and fascinating (moreover, terribly funny), and anyone who's met you knows that the small-screen adaptations here, lovely as they sometimes are, don't capture the full effect. I just wonder if you ever consider the cost at which you've honed this skill. I just finished reading Ravelstein, Bellow's portrait of his friend Allan Bloom, and though I don't expect I'll retain much from it, this much came across: you only perfect the persona at the expense of the person. Bellow is not, of course, insisting that this bargain should never be made. He's just saying that there's a cost, and it's a point that you, as an acute economist, ought to be receptive to.
[Doug: 4/20/04 07:05] |
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Alegoria Futbolista
You may have seen the news that Argentine Futbol hero (and, due to his "Hand of God" cheating in the '86 world cup, UK villain) Diego Maradona wound up on a respirator in intensive care after suffering a sudden collapse. It's not that surprising given his long and very public history of massive cocaine abuse and his morbid obesity. Maradona served as a standard-bearer for Argentina in its moment of sporting triumph. Equally, in his fall he embodies his nation's flaws. This is what I wrote in my daily update:
The big news in Argentina, however, is national hero Diego Maradona's collapse. The portly cokehead has managed to snort his way into intensive care. Maradona is the perfect allegorical representation of his country. Once, long ago, he was strong, skillful and rich. However, his arrogance got the better of him, he fell into progessively worse condition, and ultimately became incapable of competing on a global stage. He turned to addictive substances (in his case drugs, in Arg's case debt) to keep himself happy. He tried to revive his fortunes by relying on a Cuban model (Maradona befriended Castro and underwent some detox quackery there; the Arg government cozied up to Cuba and lurched left domestically). Ultimately, a bloated wreck, he crashed completely. Alas, for Maradona, the IMF cannot arrange a heart-lung transplant.
[Ben H.: 4/20/04 06:42] |
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UK Plumbing
UK bathrooms annoy me. The sinks at our office have two faucets. One dispenses hot water, the other cold water. In order to wash one's hands in appropriately warm water, one must plug the drain and fill the sink with a mix of hot and cold water; or, if one is lazy like me, turn on both taps and oscillate one's hands back and forth really quickly in order to create the sensation of washing in warm water.
This time, I expressed my bafflement at this arrangement to my London colleagues. Of course, I assumed they would just point out to me that the building stock is old and that technological limitations of the epoch of its construction required the two-tap configuration. Surprisingly, I got a very different answer. "Mixer taps," they unanimously declared, are unsanitary. "Mixer taps?" In the U.S., we don't need a word for "Mixer taps" -- all faucets are of the "mixer" (single) variety, making the distinction lexically otiose.
According to my colleagues, drinking from the hot water tap is like sipping from the septic tank. Therefore, they enforce strict separation (to my mind, though, a well-constructed "mixer tap" should allow one to shut off the hot water flow completely, but I'll leave that objection aside). One faction here maintains that the fact that the water has been sitting in a tank for a few minutes makes it dangerous. Another claims that the hot water somehow soaks up lead. One woman suggested that "dead birds get into the hot water tank," as though aviary infiltration is endemic in Albion. Is it just me, or is this weird?
[Ben H.: 4/20/04 06:14] |
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Indulge Me In One More Point, Free of Rhetorical Flourishes, Then On To The World's Peacock Farms, I Promise
Ben A., you correctly identify the two axes of the possibility frontier when it comes to dealing with terrorists: deterrence vs provocation. Of course, it is impossible to know exactly how a policy will work in advance of carrying it out. Yet, I think one can make an informed estimate based on what one knows about the target. Does the target have an articulated, realistic political goal? How has the target motivated its followers? What degree of control can be exercised over these followers (is there just a gas pedal or a gas pedal and a brake)? If the answers are "yes", "through making a strong case for the justice of its claim" (and not through whipping people up into a frenzy of hatred for whoever oppose them), and "a high degree of control", then clearly negotiation is worth a try. Let's take a couple of examples, and contrast them to the Arab one.
Let me start with one which has featured levels of brutality at least as high as the Middle East's, so that the difference can't simply be chalked up to the lower intensity of the conflict. The Tamils want either a higher level of autonomy or outright independence for a northern part of Sri Lanka. In that portion of the island they form an overwhelming majority. Their aspirations may lead to a dimished state of Sri Lanka, but in no way represent an existential threat to the Sinhalese. To motivate their followers they have pointed to how the Sinhalese have made advancement difficult for Tamils and Tamil-speakers by various unfair policies (Sinhala-only language policy in government, for example). Notwithstanding some recent fissiparousness, LTTE has functioned as a fairly coherent militia. As a result, one side of the political spectrum in Sri Lanka has advocated and advanced negotiation, which culminated in a cease fire. The leading hard-liner, Mrs. Kumurutunga, seems motivated in her instransigence more by personal grudge than anything else. Pop Vellipulai and my guess is you do very little to end the conflict and probably just motivate Tamils to carry on the fight.
Or, take the AUC (rightist paramilitary) in Colombia. AUC want the government to ensure the physical safety of Colombian landowners in zones which, up to now, the government has not made its authority felt. The state has surrendered the legitimate monopoly of force to "rebels" and criminal gangs in these areas. AUC has built paid paramilitary forces in these areas to take on the rebels and criminals. The government has recently gotten them to start decommissioning. They didn't achieve this through killing Carlos Castano. Instead, the Uribe government has stepped up spending on the military and has begun to reassert the power of the state in areas plagued by rebels and criminals. That, plus promised help in re-integrating AUC fighters into society proved sufficient.
Now, let's contrast that with another non-Middle East situation that I think illustrates a case where it was pretty clear ex-ante that killing the enemy was the only hope. The Shining Path of Peru wanted to turn Peru into something like Pol Pot's Cambodia. This goal was completely incompatible with the most basic aspirations of the vast majority of the Peruvian people. Shining Path's goals posed an existential threat to much of Peruvian society. Its fighters were organized in a loose cell structure and were motivated by brainwashing into a bizarro ideology. The charismatic and mysterious figure of Abimael Guzman held it all together. Negotiating with these guys would go nowhere. Taking Guzman out of the picture dispirited many of the members of these scattered cells and caused the organization to wither.
I think the Palestinian situation looks more like the last one than the former two. The true goal of the Palestinians represents an existential threat to Israel (we all know the true goal is "Palestine" from the Jordanian border to the sea). The Palestinian people have been motivated by a steady diet of loony, blood-libel style propaganda about Jews. The leadership has long ago smashed any "off-switch," such that the way to persuading the followers to change their behavior is not through the leadership. And we have ample evidence from the repressive Arab societies that oderint dum metuant works extremely well at bringing to heel this particular population: witness Mubarak, Assad, King Hussein and his "Palestinians", Sadaam Hussein, the Saudis, etc.
[Ben H.: 4/20/04 04:34] |
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Hydra Fallacy, Hydra Reality
I did not mean to imply, Doug, that force cannot backfire. Sometimes violence does beget more violence, and killing a terrorist (or criminal, or dissident) encourages others to carry his banner.
What I regard as fallacy however, is the elevation of this insight into universal law. Organizational skills are rare, leadership likewise. For every Bin Laden killed, encourages two replacements of equal ability, legitimacy, and stature. As I put it in an earlier post: if you kill every NFL quarterback Monday, expect a lot of running plays Sunday.
So I agree with Ben H that assassinating an organization's leadership will reduce its effectiveness. Whether that effect can be offset by other consequences seems like a very hard question to answer. To gesture towards even-handed, let me remark that while the right makes the same error about deterrence the left makes about incitement. It’s the policy that never fails! For hawks, killing terrorists always scares off potential Al Queda plotters (bonus phrases: “Better to be feared then loved” or “In that part of the world, all they understand is…”); for doves killing terrorists always incites innocent Arab bakers to drop rolling-pins and pick up RPGs. Even specific applications of these generalizations are rarely substantiated. The whole argument makes me tired.
As for the dehumanization of Arabs. It will not surprise you, Ben H, that I do find your causal call for mass slaughter repellent. I’d be more forceful, but am loath to fall into the (habitual) role of straight man responding to your hyperbolic flourishes. Well, maybe I’ll go part way down that path after all. We all saw those cheering Palestinian crowds after 9-11, and I doubt I am the only one in whom those images evoked the simple thought: gatling gun. But I recognized this impulse as an evil one, as, thank heaven, did those with more power than I. Those cheering did not kill anyone, nor, I think, would most take the opportunity if given. Yes, they are dangerous to us, and wish us ill. But most will not become killers, and given the opportunity, will express common humanity.
You know this, of course, but raise the rhetorical stakes to support the generalization of the “no man, no problem” solution: either Arab civilians die indiscriminately, or it’s an eternity of thralldom to cannibal Morlocks. It cheers me immensely that this is not the view taken by Likud, by Sharon, or by the IDF, who in the event took great care to minimize the risk the assassinations of Rantizi and Yassin posed to non-combatants.
I can’t imagine I’m telling either of you anything you did not know, or indeed that could not have been produced by a 4k “Ben A” emulator. So I leave off by renewing my pleas that we drop Middle East politics as a topic here. Surely in a world of wonder we can find other things to talk about: for example, three days ago I was chased a mile through Cheshire by a fat white dog, finally shaking him off at a peacock farm. Maybe we can build on that.
[Ben A.: 4/19/04 21:33] |
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The Mythical Hydra
It seems to me, from the presence of organized bomb factories, multi-national funding networks, and dual-track organizations ("separate" politcal and military wings) that most terrorism relies on more extensive infrastructure than you credit. "Hate" may ramify and replicate itself, but actual mass killing relies on careful tending. Look at, say, Bosnia (to take an example on my mind, since I saw the government present at the EBRD meetings yesterday). The Serbs and Bosnians still hate each other. Yet, with Karadic and Mladic put to flight, and their organization scattered, nobody is lobbing mortars into marketplaces in Sarajevo.
If, Doug, you are right that terrorism is hydra-headed, then we have nothing to choose from but total capitulation and your #3. And, to be totally, brutally honest with both of you, to reveal something you'll both no doubt find repellent, if a daemon granted me the power to bring about #3 with a snap of my fingers, I would snap them before a heartbeat had passed.
[Ben H.: 4/19/04 04:26] |
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The Definitive Explanation of Why You Should Not Dehumanize Your Opponents
... is not going to be written, at least by me, in the near future, so I'll have to content myself with a few observations I had intended to include in it.
1. The idea that every person is intrinsically valuable, that all human souls have some par value before God, that there is a universal right to life and the pursuit of happiness, is a chief glory of our civilization, and one of its foundations. If you deny this idea by saying that Arabs are genetically (or at any rate irredeemably) scum, it seems to me that you are throwing out a tremendous lot. I won't even begin to defend this idea here. It is often, as a matter of sociological fact, tied up with religious ideas that I don't believe. And maybe I could not come up with a completely cogent philosophical replacement for these religious underpinnings. Still: if you junk this idea, where are you left?
2. Granted that it will not make much difference, when you are confronted by a berserk ululating Palestinian with a dyamite belt, whether you call him a potentially valuable human with the bad luck to have been born into a debased culture of death, or an outright pig-dog: it has to matter in the long run (for questions of peace and stability) which thing you say about his people.
3. ... unless, of course, you kill all his people. You cannot kill all however many million Palestinians; it would be evil. From the media reports I see, 90% of Palestinians are mean, wretched, and small-souled. These are not capital crimes, though. A very small proportion are guilty of capital crimes, even if most of the rest dance in the streets upon their commission. "No man, no problem" may apply to, say, Jeffrey Dahmer. A five-million-member tribe is a different story.
4. This brings us to the hydra-headedness of terror groups. Ben A. is on record (I think; I didn't look for the post) as suspecting that this is a fallacy. Ben H. seems to agree. It has to be a good indication of hydra-headedness, though, when Rantisi's followers literally anoint themselves with blood from his mangled corpse. More importantly, I think your time horizon is too short. Killing these guys harms Hamas in a 6 or 12-month horizon, but leaves the whole Palestinian people (and, increasingly, all Arabs) with an even more vicious and implacable blood-lust for Israelis (and, increasingly, Americans).
[Doug: 4/18/04 23:49] |
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Critic For A Paragraph
[Addendum on this point, April 24]
Liked Eternal Sunshine. Quibble (and perhaps plot-spoiler, although I think it only spoils a part of plot that's rancid to begin with): During the central section of the movie, when Joel is running around inside his own memories and becomes conscious that he is doing so, he discusses with Clementine how best to avoid the erasure of these memories, as though Clementine were actually there with him. That's fine, since people in our dreams do speak to us, and since dramatic imperatives preclude making this whole section a pure monologue by Joel ... but it's only fine until the end of the section, when Joel and Clementine devise a plan to meet somewhere after he wakes up. And later, in the real world, Clementine meets him as planned. Whatever independence dream-Clementine may have as a fragment of Joel's scattered mind, she is clearly part of his mind, and cannot transmit ideas to the Clementine in the real world. Unless, I guess, the filmmakers are suggesting some occult link here. But they manifestly aren't. They are just counting on viewers' mental laziness to leave this flaw hidden, hoping that the dramatic need for the lovers to set a plan will be so strongly felt that its logical impossibility will be ignored. Suggestion for a DVD remix: add the following lines after Joel says "Meet me in Montauk":
CLEMENTINE
But Joel, I'm not really Clementine. I'm just a part of your mind.
JOEL
Well, if you're a part of my mind it's because I've gotten to know the real you so well. And if this particular plan occurs to me, maybe it's because I know it's the same plan you'd think of, if you were in my place, if we were inside your head. That is, if you would want to think up a plan at all ...
I think that ties everything up nicely. Incidentally, it should be taken as a tribute that I bother trying to fix this at all. 99% of the mind-warp/time-travel/brain-in-a-vat flicks I see are so incoherent that to critique their handling of their premises would be like looking for holes in the Teletubbies' backstories. Eternal Sunshine keeps its gimmick under control, and never lets it overshadow the characters. It does what I said Murakami's Bird Chronicle failed to do -- it uses a magical premise to shed new light on real life.
[Doug: 4/18/04 00:15] |
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Buh-Bye
Israel pastes mass-murdering co-monotheist Abdel Aziz Rantisi, head of Hamas. Of course, over here, BBC is letting one of his Pali bloodsucker friends hold forth about how the "fanatic Israeli government" killed him because he was a moderate. Riiiight. It seems like from the hysteria of the Palis since Sharon's withdrawal plan, they realize they have over-reached. Unilateral separation + Targeted Assassination = Game Over.
Yassir, watch your back!
[Ben H.: 4/17/04 15:43] |
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Tyranny of the Calendar
I'm heading out to London today for the EBRD meetings. The busiest day of meetings takes place Sunday. As has been the case every year the EBRD holds the meetings in London (every other year), it shares this date with the London Marathon. Not that London is the easiest city to get around under ordinary circumstances, but with the marathon going on it is completely paralyzed. One year, the main site for EBRD was nestled inside a dense loop of streets blocked off for the race. I couldn't figure out a way in other than jumping a barrier and running across the racecourse.
[Ben H.: 4/16/04 08:34] |
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My Trip to Aslan Pharmaceuticals
Like most business travelers, I loath leaving home. And over the next ten days I'm on a particularly gruelling itinerarry, happily, it seems to consist largely of imaginary places. For example, in England I stay in "Mottram St. Andrew; Prestby, Cheshire." This, clearly, is a joke name. There's no such place outside Evelyn Waugh. Nor, am I convinced of the reality of Aachen, Germany.
And while I have heard tell of Malmo, Sweden itself has always been a dubious entity. Do we have documentation of Swedish interaction with the rest of the world that postdates Gustavus Adolfus? I am skeptical.
Expect (yet more) sporadic posting.
Doug, I'll have plenty of time in airports to read Allison...
[Ben A.: 4/13/04 09:06] |
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Paper Money Is a Mug's Game
You've both razzed me for my tendency to shed coins the way cats shed hair, and I take your point. When I moved back to New York several years ago, I decided that I would more carefully husband my metallic currency. I set up a bowl on my bedroom window seat into which I deposited loose change. Over time, the bowl filled up and the coins began to occupy adjacent space on the window seat. By the time I moved out, most of the window seat lay under a coin-mail sheet; and, unfortunately, I didn't have any less loose change on the floor than I had in my previous apartments. I just went back to drop off the keys to my old apartment as well as to collect this little treasure trove of coins, which I brought to a Coinstar machine at Food Emporium. The tally ran to $125 dollars. That does not include all the foreign money. In sterling alone, I had almost $25 more. I had to shovel coins into the machine for nearly 15 minutes. At some point I noticed a hovering presence behind me. Some poor lady had shuffled in with a small bag of change. Not wanting to make her wait an inordinately long time, I did not reinsert the seemingly valid coins the machine kicked out, which themselves probably would have added another $10 or so to the tally. When I walked away from the machine, you would have been able to tell that I had been there... there were loose coins all over the floor...
[Ben H.: 4/10/04 18:01] |
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I'm No Midrash Master, But...
I am always a little uncomfortable aligning myself in a doctrinal dispute in which I have no important stake. There is something grating and insincere about all these non-Catholic newspaper scribblers instructing the Vatican about how it should deal with paedophilia among the priesthood by changing its doctrine in specific ways. As an atheist, then, I hesitate to opine too freely on most aspects of the contemporary practice of religion, even the Jewish religion into which I was born. However, I do attend my family's Seder every year, so I suppose I am entitled to weigh in on the innovations wrought on the Seder by the so-called "Reconstructionist" tradition. Stuff like Miriam's Cup. Miriam's Cup? I mean, ok, Elijah happens to be an XY, and he gets a cup. But he's an imaginary person. Somehow it is prejudicial to women's equality that we don't leave a cup of wine for an imaginary woman, too? What have we come to when we debate affirmative action for imaginary people? Maybe we should leave cups of water along with the wine out of solidarity with recovering imaginary dipsomaniacs. Modernizing Jews seem to have a singular knack for traducing the meanings of the holidays they seek to update. Giving gifts on Hanukah as a concession to Christmas: nice, isn't the whole point of the holiday resistance to syncretism? Passover reminds us of our connection to a little tribe that escaped bondage in Egypt many thousands of years ago; it is about continuity. This is last place to introduce innovations from 20th Century feminism or gay rights.
Like I said, I feel a little weird making the argument, since I have no brief to defend the integrity of what I consider to be a complete waste of time, but if the Seder is bunkum, then Miriam's cup is bunkum squared, a rational redesign of something fundamentally irrational.
[Ben H.: 4/8/04 11:50] |
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Don't Smear the Japanese
State Shinto and aggressive militarism were political innovations to Japan that ultimately did not have deep roots. The analogy to Islam -- or even to Wahhabi Islam -- is not apt, since it was born as a chauvinistic fighting religion and has long persisted as such. Veneration of the emperor, though, did have deep roots and, what d'ya know, that's still around. Unfortunately, the obnoxious aspects of Arab-style Islam are woven into the very fabric of religion. There's a much better chance that I wind up a puddle on post-apocalyptic Park Avenue within the next twenty years than that the Arab countries become as peaceful, productive, and free as Japan.
I like LGF by the way, although I think this site tends to be even a little more unvarnished in its truth-telling.
Better than both of these, though, is the brilliant Oriana Fallaci, who has a new book out, The Force of Reason, which expands on the argument she made in The Rage and The Pride. I'm so touched by the 5 cent gesture you have planned for my shade, Ben A., that if you remind me of your mailing address, I'll send you both books.
[Ben H.: 4/8/04 06:20] |
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Ben H, I know you approach this blog with the same spirit of vitriol-tinged whimsy that you bring to donut-eating and milk-gallon-chugging contests on the trading floor, and I can likewise attest to your sterling (really!) personal qualities and moral probity.
Those who know you less well, however, will likely find your comments on our co-monotheists (and, often, fellow citizens) of Arab descent over the top. Insanely, wildly, sanity-questioningly over-the-top, actually. So much so that one acquaintance of mine wondered if you shared a personal history with Muslims on par with T.E. Lawrence’s Turkish experience.
That can’t be good, right? And who wants to have an Arab friend click to the site and find their family referred to as ‘carpet-lickers’? Not me. So can I ask that we tone down/class up/or perhaps just table our discussion of Middle Eastern politics?
[Ben A.: 4/7/04 19:35] |
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That Depends
If more troops means more dead Arabs, I'm all for it. If it means more guys in the Reserves pulled away from their jobs to dig wells for ungrateful wogs, then I oppose it. We have been far too gentle. As I said at the beginning of this adventure, we needed to make the truculent segments of the Iraqi population feel like they had been soundly thrashed, such that their will to resist would be effectively broken. Instead, we let Al-Sadr get away with murder, we let looting Sunnis get away with goods of every description, and as a result we let the momentum get away from us. I hope that we really make an example out of Fallujah. I do not believe that doing a Guernica on these fuckers will somehow rally the rest of Iraq to their defense. The Kurds, the Turcomen and the Shia all hate the Sunnis and would be glad to see them suffer; at the same time, the mischievous among these other groups would not miss the message of the futility of resistance.
The first best choice, of course, would be to build a liberal polity through peaceful means. We should not ignore the possibility that Arabs, at this stage of their historical and biological development, are simply incapable of living together in a free society. In that case, we should fall back to our second-best set of objectives -- namely to ensure that Iraq does not again become a regional threat and does not, on the other hand, turn into a failed state. To achieve this goal, we might need to beat refractory elements of the population into submission and to install a strong, relatively undemocratic, pro-American regime. You know, people use the Shah of Iran as the avatar of all that's wrong with that approach, but he served his purpose for several decades and only faltered when Jimmuh Carter ordered him to behave like a Western European monarch.
[Ben H.: 4/6/04 14:10] |
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The Unspoken Argument
I realize this morning that I left out the reason why I didn't buy Kant's Compatibilism. Among the three of us it goes without saying. Here, for others, is the argument against academic philosophy that I currently prefer:
<BenStein>At this point it behooves us to distinguish between two forms of strong/weak distinctionalism, strong strong/weak distinctionalism and weak strong/weak distinctionalism ... </BenStein>
The Unclothed Emperor
That reminds me of my current argument against contemporary art, which again hardly needs to be spoken:
<JamesMcCretin>Great, fantastic. What this painting is doing, it's questioning the boundaries ... between boundaries, and questioning. I mean, it really puts into question the boundaries of the whole question of boundary-questioning! Greeeeeat!</JamesMcCretin>
The Unsnapped Picture
I had to trot out that argument last night à propos of a friend's friend, who (apparently) is a Palestinian artist with a piece in the Whitney biennial. Anyway that whole conversation was due to our just having attended the gallery opening of our mutual (non-Palestinian) friend Jane Mount in Williamsburg (the hip corner of Brooklyn). It was fun to see all the design-side folks from early Concrete Media days. Also saw Dan Pelson (the CEO as well as Jane's ex-boyfriend) who is always fun so long as he is not actively trying to sell you something. Actually, no, he can even be fun when he's selling you something, and that may account for his success. (It would, in any case, take a trained novelist to capture all the personalities of that company, which makes it sad that Emma McLaughlin, who worked there near the end, has chosen to write her sophomore novel about something else (and rumor says it's so bad that the publisher, despite the huge advance, may not even print it).)
Jane's Art was swell (she actually has talent and does not seem to be questioning any boundaries that I can see) but what was absurdly beautiful was the other people at the gallery opening. You know my friend Jason, who worked for a while at Concrete -- his wife Rachel always bitched about how pretty and well-dressed everyone was there. I thought she was just being bitter/resentful, but in retrospect it was a little weird. I mean, who locates their software company in Soho? Last night brought the whole aesthetic back. And it wasn't just the girls -- there was this group of three guys who I swear just walked off the set of Zoolander. I was going to ask them to do the "magnum" ... well no, I wan't, but I was going to take a discreet digital photo, only my friends wouldn't let me.
The Unending Loop
Except for the gallery opening, the last couple days have been a big drag. The project I'm doing at work keeps crashing because of an infinite loop in the XML parser I'm using. The world seems to have standardized on an open-source parser for Java, in javax.xml.parsers, which avails itself of some code in the package org.apache.crimson.parser, which itself seems -- the comments are a little vague but I'm inferring -- to have been written by a pimply teenager with a 2-liter of Code Red Mountain Dew in Skokie, Illinois at 3:15 a.m. I mean an infinite loop, hello? Who writes infinite loops? People have asked if I'm giving it well-formatted XML. But if it's invalid XML just give me an error message! Look, I should be able to stick my pasty white ass into an XML parser without it crashing my computer! Christ.
Of course, the reason I'm worked up is that the infinite loop is a metaphor for my whole work life now. Write some code, look at nytimes.com, get some junk food downstairs at the deli, check my mail, write a little more code ... my brain has worked up such momentum that I woke up at 5:00 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep. Probably should have meditated, but wrote all this instead. My loss. Possibly yours too.
[Doug: 4/2/04 09:15] |
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California Prescriptivism
Ben, it is indeed true that California life is not free of imperatives. It has its own imperatives, which differ from those on the East Coast. Yet, one cannot deny a difference of degree, as well. One can more easily shirk the duty of abdominal firmness in Los Angeles than one can ignore obligations of the east coast. When I lived in California, I used to repeat my theory that space is the foundation of many social virtues. In New York, citizens must live under extensive constraints because citizens must live together in the most basic physical sense. You had better work hard and grow rich, because if you don't, then our building can't raise its fees and make itself more posh. You need to raise your children to be perfect little angels because if you don't they are going to make noise hopping around upstairs from me or will bump me on the sidewalk. In California, one's can live a quite insulated life, unburdened by others' behavior and likewise untroubling to them. The density of California permits a laid-back attitude. In fact, one would have to be unusually censorious or zealous to feel justified in imposing duties on others in ways we find routine on the East Coast.
[Ben H.: 4/1/04 15:49] |
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Immanuel Kant Sweeps the Southland!
Let me depress war talk further down on the page and riff on the elusive SoCal X-factor mentioned by Doug. And who knows California better than Immanuel Kant?
A third [man] finds in himself a talent whose cultivation could make him a man useful in many respects. But he finds himself in comfortable circumstances and prefers to indulge in pleasure rather than to bother himself about broadening and improving his fortunate natural aptitudes. But he asks himself further whether his maxim of neglecting his natural gifts, besides agreeing of itself with his propensity to indulgence, might agree also with what is called duty. He then sees that a system of nature could indeed always subsist according to such a universal law, even though every man (like the South Sea Islanders) should let his talents rust and resolve to devote his life entirely to idleness, indulgence, propagation, and, in a word, to enjoyment. [AK 423]
Kant, of course, takes a hard anti-Islander line, but the point is that he’s describing Southern California. Just bedeck the population of Westwood in grass skirts and you’re there. The magic of SoCal, or at least the dream version we’re concerned with here, consists not in the removal of rain, sleet, and ugly people, but in the seeming suspension of the imperative to self-perfection.
It’s a dream version because that imperative doesn’t actually get suspended; California imposes quite stringent demands. The forms these demands take -- the imperative to be young, for example –- just don’t typically register with pasty East coast transplants. For the New Englander in LA, the absence of the familiar requirements to kill at work and to feign interest in Don DeLillo give the illusion of freedom. It rarely occurs to him that he has acquired a new obligation to develop rock hard abs.
[Ben A.: 4/1/04 01:43] |
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I blame myself for raising the topic, as it resists attempts at consensus building. But perhaps I’ll gesture in that direction. It’s true, as Ben H says, that all sorts of objections can be raised to the conduct of the war on Iraq. And it’s true, as Doug says, that we can find areas where we think the administration bungled.*
But can the main main thing, the truly remarkable thing about the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq really be the Administration’s incompetence? The current situation amazes me: the Taliban is out, Saddam is out, Uday and Qusai are dead. That's a stop-the-presses result, a history-changing result. If you had told me in 2000 that the state of play four years later would be Hamid Karzai ensconced in Kabul and Saddam in jail, I’d have been staggered. Hell, I’m not sure I would have believed that prediction in October 2001.
Yes, it’s one ugly, clumsy, bear, but the sucker is dancing nonetheless.
* Perhaps I am too slow to attribute incompetence to the administration. If so, it’s because I find it really hard to know how to assess these immensely complex decisions. What’s the standard for competence? Example: Bush and co decided to make an ally of Pakistan, the Taliban’s major patron, and then deposed the regime via special forces, air-strikes, and the northern alliance. Was this a terrible screw-up, allowing al-Queda brass to escape? Or was it in fact so obviously the right strategy that the administration should get no credit for following it? I have, frankly, no idea how to assess this beyond the basic belief that knocking off the Talban quickly, with little loss of American life, seems like a major accomplishment. Could it have been done better/more thoroughly? No idea.
[Ben A.: 3/31/04 18:48] |
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Burger Chauvinism
I've written before about obsessive New York "best-ism", that is, the tendency to spend a lot of time thinking about and arguing about who in the city is the best purveyor of this or that commodity. New York bestism devotes more attention to hamburgers that the city's ostensible commitment to haute cuisine would lead one to expect. Which places get tipped for "best burger" reveals one possible explanation of the prominence of burgers in the bestist ideology. So many people rave about Jackson Hole's offering. Have you guys eaten there? They serve up sodden lumps of grayish beef on soggy buns, loaded up with all the usual, unremarkable toppings. On no objective basis could one honestly maintain they serve even middling burgers. I think that proponents of bestism see the hamburger category as a way to disclaim their natural over-refinement, to show that they are down with the people, capable of deriving pleasure from the pedestrian. Jackson Hole is the ultimate pedestrian hamburger, emphasizing mass over quality; plus, Jackson Hole's atmosphere is aggressively prole.
As for myself, I think the city's expensive hamburgers are often worth the money. We've had Bobby Van's (the steakhouse) send over rather pricey hamburgers on special occasions at the office, and they are way better than Jackson Hole (which itself is not that cheap) and even (forgive me for saying so) In-and-Out.
[Ben H.: 3/30/04 12:03] |
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Greetings From Disgusting Lima, Peru
Just got into Lima, though I almost didn't make it. As I've written before, each year I become more averse to trekking to these IFI annual meetings. I have been looking for an excuse to cancel all week. My experience in getting here illustrates how the subconscious will try to achieve what the conscious mind desires but chooses not to pursue. I kept forgetting to book my flights with the result that no directs remained available by the time I had to purchase my ticket. Today, my colleague and I rode together to the airport for the first leg to Miami. I booked a car to LaGuardia. Of course, my flight departed from Kennedy. My colleague thwarted my subconscious mind's brilliant plan to derail the trip. At Miami, we had a three hour layover. We camped out at the LAN lounge until the very last minute. We then boarded the plane, where I discovered, to my chagrin, that my seat, 6F, did not exist. The stewardess, after going out to check, returned with the news that I had boarded the wrong flight. As it turns out, there are two flights from Miami to Lima that leave at exactly 11:50pm, one LAN and one American. I need not tell you that their gates lie at opposite ends of the airport. My colleague had indeed bought a ticket on the LAN flight, and I just assumed our itineraries were the same. Score another one for the subconcious. Alas, my dutiful conscious mind steered my out to the gate agent, where by dint of insistent wheedling, I convinced him to honor the American ticket. The funny thing is that back at the LAN lounge, the agent gave me a hard time about entering. Her english was quite poor, but she kept saying that my ticket was American. I said, yes, it was booked through American, and I came down on an American flight to Miami, but the Lima leg was code-shared through LAN. She disappeared with my ticket and my colleague's and came back saying that we should wait an hour or so for the next agent to arrive and ask for new boarding passes. My colleague went up and checked at that time and was told everything was in order. Of course, his ticket was in order; only I needed a new boarding pass! My sneaky subconscious allowed me to assume that whatever went for my colleague went for me, too...
Lima, by the way, is a total dump. I thought maybe it had changed since I last visited, by no dice. There seems to be a casino every three or four blocks. We're not talking Monte Carlo. They are mostly squat, cinderblock structures with a little neon thrown on for effect, and they advertise most prominently bingo and slots. I love the spanish word for slot machine: tragamonedas. It literally means "it swallows coins." With a name like that, you would think it would be a difficult amusement to sell. Apparently, not...
[Ben H.: 3/27/04 07:51] |
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Pang of Nostalgia
Be still my heart! My beloved Asia Noodle lives! I think I can actually see my old apartment in the background of your picture of Trader Joe's. The mall of my life had a few haunted spots, to which whatever business foolish enough to move in inevitably succumbed. That spot was one of them. Before it was a Trader Joe's, it was an Irish Pub of some kind. Before that, it was a nasty Mexican restaurant where Bernie's friends had a weekly Friday happy hour during their first year of grad school. Le Diplomat has always been in that mall, though I never frequented it. The mall has also changed its name yet again. Nevertheless, it's essence remains untainted. I miss it...
Obviously, Fashion Island is a much more impressive mall, but I don't have quite the same attachment to it. Living next door sounds grand. A competitor of ours has his office within Fashion Island, and from time to time he sees fit to send me taunts about the great view and even greater weather. As for me, though, if I could have my office in that small building at the center of the University Mall, I would take that over Fashion Island. I remember well the CPK -- and the Swedish chick -- whose name, by the way, was Liesl.
[Ben H.: 3/26/04 11:52] |
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Southern California: Reality
Ben A's post prompts me to dump my trip log, which is good as it's already bloated.
Dao and I flew Jet Blue to Long Beach for a long weekend. We'd planned this months ago, mainly to visit our new nephew Nicholas, and also Andrew and Sophie, who, although no longer new, have by that very fact escaped the stage where they look like E.T. (In fact they are absurdly cute.) Their parents and (maternal) grandparents (i.e. my mother- and father-in-law) recently moved from Garden Grove to a bigger house in Newport Beach. A fourth generation also made the move: Dao's maternal grandmother.
As it happened, she passed away, peacefully, while we were there, at the age of 94. She may have been the most formidable person never to reach five feet. One look and you knew where the tinge of matriarchy in all her descendents' families came from. And her black teeth did nothing to soften her appearance. (Upper-class Vietnamese used to consider white teeth vulgar. Incidentally, this gives Tom and Vien a foolproof way to make their kids brush: "If you don't, your teeth will look like great-grandma's.")
As Bà was a serious Buddhist, the thought of death didn't freak her out. Indeed she had planned everything out and bought space for her photograph to be maintained at one of the main pagodas in Little Saigon. At least I think she's still slated there; a lot of people stopped going there after the head monk (?) was seen cavorting with some chick. I remember meeting the guy at Têt last year and he did seem a mite too jolly. Maybe they should blacken monks' teeth so that they repulse women. Anyway, that year we also visited the makeshift pagoda to which many of the devout switched after the scandal, and that was interesting. It was a little bungalow in a mainly non-Vietnamese working-class housing tract; we had to park far away because the neighbors were getting annoyed at all the cars and the weird noises. Têt goodies were set up in the garage while flies buzzed around and the monks chanted in the living room. I was heartened. These guys were clearly in it for the enlightenment, and not for the fast money and glamorous women of the "establishment" pagoda.
Chanting is big in Vietnamese Buddhism. Bà had a tape player on continuous loop next to her sickbed and it kept going after she died. You could just hear it from the family room; one section had a loud backbeat that, from afar, reminded you of club music. What they were chanting is "Namo a di da phat", a Buddhist devotion apparently transliterated from Sanskrit. It's catchy and I've had trouble getting it out of my head as I work.
If you include their spouses, Bà now has 43 (I think) descendents, and a lot of them were in California last week. One can't keep them all straight, but I had interesting discussions with Dao's cousins Arthur (an aspiring novelist and MFA candidate at the New School -- one of the only people in the whole extended family not on the white-collar-professional track) and Lisa, who I'd remembered as a rambunctious terror who shrieked but never spoke, now, at age 10, remarkably sharp and articulate.
From my family we saw my uncle Stasys and aunt Irena, two of my favorite people in the world; the greatest tragedy in their house at the moment is that the beer keg in Stasys's bar ran out. I wish I had inherited more of the natural cheerfulness from that side of my family. We had lunch at Fashion Island Mall. Which brings me to ...
Mythic Southern California
Some of our readers may not know that Southern California, like Havenhurst college, is something that links the three of us bandarloggers together, each of us having spent a few years in Mallhalla post-college. I was going to say that Southern California is a common obsession of ours, but only for me did it really become an obsession. Every time I go back I feel a need to explain what Southern California means. For it means something very very important. Only it is hard to say exactly what. This frustrates me even more than my other obsession, the reconciliation of free will and causality, because I am at least working on an explanation of that, however slowly. Whereas I left California in 1997 without ever fully conveying its importance. I wrote some poems that I still like (I'll try to find and post them) and that capture the mood of what I want to convey. This is not a trivial thing; the So-Cal mood is what I prized most about my life there. But the poems don't explain much.
Southern California means, in the end, epicurism. The epicurism of Epicurus, I mean, not the luxury-connoisseurship caricature that's been made of his him (even during his own lifetime, apparently). This epicurism agrees with Buddhism that the important thing is to end suffering, and that nonattachment is crucial for that. The Californian has banished physical causes of suffering like rain, cold, and poverty, as well as a main mental cause, the obsessive attachment to work that plagues the East Coast. "Dude, relax." The Golden State is the end state of Fukuyama/Kojeve: human history has crossed the finish line here, and there is nothing for us to do but bask in the sun like happy dogs.
There is obviously something enervating about this way of thinking; it made me very happy for a year or two, and then radically depressed me, whereupon I moved back east.
Now I believe Buddhism lets you avoid this enervation far better than epicurism can, but an argument for that will have to wait.
Now, the slide show of Mallhalla.
A mall in Irvine dear to me and even more to Ben H:
I believe that dance club where the Asian would-be gangsters went has turned into a Trader Joe's. But I may be misremembering; maybe you can tell from the building on the right, which I believe is part of the complex you used to live in:
Several new (?) French-themed establishments, e.g. "le diplomate":
You'll be glad to know that Asia Noodle Cafe is still around:
Here is where we had lunch:
Sadly, In-N-Out has totally lost its exclusivity since we last posted about it. (As Ben A's post shows.) Everyone on the East Coast is hip to it, meaning it's not hip at all. Still, good cheap burgers, though our fries were soggy.
Now check this out. This is the view from Tom and Vien's new house. It's across the street from Fashion Island, and I am so not even kidding. The thought of moving in with them crossed my mind more than once. (Also, look carefully and you'll see "Newport Pain Management". I took this as a sign that I must complete a book explaining Californian epicurism.)
The koi pond.
"Forever 21" is near the koi pond. It was jarring, not to say funny, to leave bà's bedside with the chanting and the noble acceptance of death, and come here and see the liposuctioned 50-year-olds shopping for skimpy dresses.
Had lunch here too; their classic Thai chicken pizza. Was it to mark your return to the east, Ben H., that we came here with Joel, and were served by that absolutely stunning 16-year-old Swedish girl named Heike, whose beauty seemed to mock our idiotic decision to leave Mallhalla?
Unfortunately, we had filled our camera's memory by the time we visited Dr. Schuller's Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, site of the "The Hour of Power" and of the first drive-in church. There's a new Richard Meier visitors' center. What was really striking, though, was the old bell tower that looks like wreckage of the WTC.
[Doug: 3/26/04 10:55] |
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Speaking of Africa...
The Ivory Coast peace accord has collapsed. Chirac, that damned imperialist, has led his country into a quagmire!
Ivory Coast was, as you say, Doug, one of the few examples of a relatively stable, prosperous polity in Africa. I visited Abidjan back in 1998, just before the country fell apart, and I have to say that "relatively" is a key word in the claim.
Coincidentally, I am right now reading Norman Rush's Mating, which takes place in Bostwana. The novel does not traffic in the post-colonial sentimentalization of Africa, but rather presents a fair, unvarnished representation of Africa and Africans as seen through the eyes of a sympathetic, but by no means deluded, narrator. No "Magical Negro" rears his sage head here.
[Ben H.: 3/26/04 09:17] |
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Ben A. |
Ben H. |
Doug |
Earlier |
