From the Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma, Book 57 (pdf), a Soto Zen text:
My former master, the Old Buddha of Tiantong, on one occasion when old acquaintances among the elders from all quarters assembled and requested a lecture, ascended the hall and said,
The great way has no gate, It springs forth from the crown in all quarters; Empty space ends the road, It comes into the nostril of Qingliang. Meeting like this, Seeds of Gautama’s traitors, Embryos of Linji’s misfortune. Ii! The great house topples over, dancing in the spring wind; Startled, the falling apricot blossoms fly in crimson chaos.
A few thoughts on the speech. Overall, I found it pretty unconvincing. This is unsurprising, since I favor an immediate, orderly pullout from Afghanistan. Nevertheless, I understand why Obama felt the need to adopt this approach. He promised more attention to Afghanistan in his campaign, and so needed to give his generals' advice the old college try. At the same time, many Democrats in Congress (and the party base) have begun to realize the futility of the Afghanistan project, and want a quick end. Thus the temporary surge, coupled with firm(-ish) withdrawal pledge. Obama's a highly pragmatic man, and this approach seemed to balance the conflicting demands best.
However, I think the speech is dictated more by political considerations than any strategic insights. As Kevin Drum points out, Obama didn't actually lay out any new tactics. It's just 30,000 more troops doing roughly the same things they're doing now. The first question that came to my mind is: Why will this work? And the second: Why did it take so long to decide on something that amounts to just a troop increase? I didn't hear any answers to these questions.
The silver lining is that Obama has now committed himself to withdrawing most U.S. ground forces by 2011. We won't have to hold his feet to the fire about this. He's effectively given the Afghan leadership 'fair warning' that they're going to have to take over in 2011, come what may. I suspect Obama, running for re-election, will be glad to welcome troops home. The end of the mission will be celebrated in precisely the same terms Obama justified Iraq in this speech. Obama cleverly defined a 'positive outcome' in Iraq as giving the Iraqi people the opportunity to form a stable democracy, not ensuring that this outcome actually came to pass. That's what he'll say about Afghanistan: We gave the Afghans some breathing space and some elementary sense of order that enabled them to establish some form of functioning representative government. What they do with this chance is their business.
I know a few development workers who travel to Afghanistan frequently (not so much lately, of course), and they're not at all optimistic about what will happen once the Americans leave. As part of a grand compromise, many Afghan government ministries are run by former warlords and their minions. These people do not have any real understanding of what 'democracy' means, much less a desire to live by its rules. According to these development-worker friends of mine (German, mostly), once the Americans leave, the warlords will return to their customary way of thinking, which is driven by rational self-interest: As long as collaborating with the central government provides them with more spoils to enjoy and distribute than establishing their own fiefdom, they will stay in place, and continue to 'run' their ministries. (As my friends caution, the word 'run' should be used very loosely in this context.)
As soon as the calculus changes, however, the warlords will re-form their latent states-within-states. The calculus will change when (1) the Americans are no longer there to impose order; and (2) the flow of foreign aid and currency through the Afghan central government slows down. At this point, say my friends, the warlords' loyalties will shift, and the federal government will lose whatever slender claims it has to controlling the rest of the country. Which may actually be one of the less-bad outcomes, given that most of the warlords, as unsavory as they may be, are firmly opposed to the Taliban.
With their customary frankness, the Germans see no need to beat around the bush (so to speak), when it comes to the human naughty bits.* Thus we find Germany's biggest teen magazine, Bravo, hosting a feature called 'Every Vulva is Different!' (g)** on its website. Yes, there's even a 'Vulva Gallery'. Hours of fun for vulva fans!
Yea, this frankness extends even unto their vegetable gardens. Certain garden plants are somewhat suggestive in appearance, and the Germans call 'em like they see 'em. Thus, in this frilly lemon-scented gardening website called Gabi's Summer-Meadow (g), we see explicit descriptions -- and even shocking photographs -- of such things as the "condom chili", which is described as "a juicy[!], spicy fruit, very interesting [!!], ripens from green to orange-red." This is quickly followed by the "Black Penis-pepper" (pictured), which is described as a "black-purple[!], spicy fruit[!!], which ripens from green to black-purple to orange to red."
Duke University Press is about to publish a revised version of Stanley Ann Dunham's 1992 dissertation:
The book runs about 300 pages and focuses on a blacksmithing village called Kajar, in the province of Yogyakarta on the island of Java. The work has been whittled down significantly from its original form, which ran more than a thousand pages and investigated the socioeconomics of several village-based handicrafts, including batik, pottery, and the making of puppets used in shadow theater.
Dunham is Barack Obama's late mother, by the way. The piece about the book prompted me to take a look at Dunham's Wikipedia page, which I'd never done before. Turns out she was quite cosmopolitan, and a pretty damned interesting person all-around. I wonder if there's a good biography of her...
The Swiss minaret ban is just the latest in a series of raspberries European publics have given to their mainstream political leaders. Lessons:
Social desirability bias is alive and well in Europe. Lots of Swiss apparently gave pollsters the 'right' answer, then voted their actual views.
If you relegate an issue to the fringe parties, it doesn't go away. All the 'mainstream' parties dutifully came out against the minaret ban, and apparently thought their work was done. After all, how could the people enact a law after being instructed by the respectable political elite that it was a bad idea? Looks like the Swiss political elite may have to elect themselves a new population.
Allowing the people to alter the constitution by referenda can make politics a wild ride indeed. The people often have decidedly non-salonfaehig (a great German word meaning 'worthy of discussion in a salon') opinions, and referenda let their id come out. Several American states brought back the death penalty by using referenda, and California passed an initiative requiring all tax increases to be approved by a two-thirds vote of the state legislature. This has, of course, rendered California state government dysfunctional. But once the people have spoken, it's almost impossible to ignore them.
Next on the agenda, perhaps: A Swiss referendum bringing back capital punishment for those who sexually attack and murder children. The mainstream elite would uniformly denounce it, but nevertheless (or perhaps for precisely this reason) it would pass with a majority.
I'm not saying the minaret ban is a good idea -- far from it. Nor do I think the Swiss vote is a 'crisis'. It's a normal incident of life in political systems which operate (either implicitly or explicitly) on a model of Burkean trusteeship. The people occasionally defy the political elites, but soon enough, things are back to normal. After all, what's the alternative?
While rummaging through some used-book stalls at the University recently, I found this book (g), whose title translates as 'Joy, Discipline, Faith [the motto of the Hitler Youth]: Handbook for Cultural Work in the Camp':
It's a manual for leaders of Hitler Youth summer camps, published in 1943 (4th edition!) by the National Socialist Party. It features a short foreword by Baldur von Schirach. The book addresses many issues: setting up the camp, raising the official Nazi flag every morning and bringing it down every evening, 'communal' song evenings, marches, and ceremonies, and even what sort of writers should be invited to the camp to recite their work. There's a section on sayings and songs appropriate for camp life, and even a 20-page section on recent German history for camp leaders, told from a ...distinctive perspective. The words 'sacrifice' and 'betrayal' pop up frequently. There are also suggested 'political' songs and plays for the (apparently incessant) communal singing events as well.
I'll be translating sections of this fascinating document in the coming weeks. Here's a foretaste, from a section called: "Hosting a Writer" (Die Dichterlesung), pp. 220-222 (I translate the word Dichter with various equivalents below):
Visits by writers to the camp harbor a danger that it is best to eliminate during the preparatory phase. Not every writer who says truly important things in his writings has a personal appearance that is capable of holding its own with a camp full of exercise-honed young men. Camp life imprints individual boys strongly with the role model of an upstanding man who can speak in a loud, clear voice...
[Although poets in cities are permitted to slouch,] outdoors, in the camp, we want to hear only from men who, in their entire being and appearance, belong to our community (in the narrowest sense!). It should also be expected that young writers, if they belong to the Hitler Youth, should appear in the traditional summer duty uniform. If they are in another unit of the movement or not organized at all, they should still appear in clothing which is appropriate to the surroundings.
...
The writer should eat dinner together with the camp leaders, at the table sitting around the small camp flag. The boys should learn that poets -- and they often have a strange idea about this profession! -- eat the same plain bread that they do.
Afterward, the boys all go to the campfire, or sit in a large ring. The poet should, if possible, read to a group that is not too large, so that he can sit among them like a comrade among comrades. It is now up to the poet to get across his desired message by a mixture of spoken and read words. The leader on duty will have spoken with the poet earlier about which points the reading or lecture should be interrupted with a song.
...
Even when the poet must leave the camp on the same evening, he should never fail to take part in the lowering of the flag. At this point, he will stand behind the camp leader. The lowering of the flag should be an obligation for him, through which he fits into the life of the camp as a comrade.
Perhaps the most basic rule for the writer's visit to the camp is: it is better that no writer come to the camp as for such an occasion to go awry for any reason -- either through poor preparation or through the writer's clumsiness. Our boys should see the poet as a 'the people's bard', who lives in struggle and service as everyone else. They should believe him -- and precisely because the boys are ready to believe, a disappointment can ruin a great many things.
For reasons that have never really been clear to me, Paul Auster seems to be Europe's favorite contemporary American writer. Perhaps it's down to his heavy-lidded, writerly good looks, or because his last name means 'oyster' in German, or because his novelist wife speaks Norwegian. At any rate, his books are immediately translated all major European languages an many minor ones, and he is feted over here. Over at the New Yorker, critic James Wood wonders why:
A protagonist, nearly always male, often a writer or an intellectual, lives monkishly, coddling a loss—a deceased or divorced wife, dead children, a missing brother. Violent accidents perforate the narratives, both as a means of insisting on the contingency of existence and as a means of keeping the reader reading—a woman drawn and quartered in a German concentration camp, a man beheaded in Iraq, a woman severely beaten by a man with whom she is about to have sex, a boy kept in a darkened room for nine years and periodically beaten, a woman accidentally shot in the eye, and so on. The narratives conduct themselves like realistic stories, except for a slight lack of conviction and a general B-movie atmosphere. People say things like “You’re one tough cookie, kid,” or “My pussy’s not for sale,” or “It’s an old story, pal. You let your dick do your thinking for you, and that’s what happens.” A visiting text—Chateaubriand, Rousseau, Hawthorne, Poe, Beckett—is elegantly slid into the host book. There are doubles, alter egos, doppelgängers, and appearances by a character named Paul Auster. At the end of the story, the hints that have been scattered like mouse droppings lead us to the postmodern hole in the book where the rodent got in: the revelation that some or all of what we have been reading has probably been imagined by the protagonist.
Although there are things to admire in Auster’s fiction, the prose is never one of them.... When he thinks about actual America, however, his language stiffens into boilerplate. Recalling the Newark riots of 1968, he describes a member of the New Jersey State Police, “a certain Colonel Brand or Brandt, a man of around forty with a razor-sharp crew cut, a square, clenched jaw, and the hard eyes of a marine about to embark on a commando mission.”
...
The pleasing, slightly facile books come out almost every year, as tidy and punctual as postage stamps, and the applauding reviewers line up like eager stamp collectors to get the latest issue. Peter Aaron, the narrator of “Leviathan,” whose prose is so pressureless, claims that “I have always been a plodder, a person who anguishes and struggles over each sentence, and even on my best days I do no more than inch along, crawling on my belly like a man lost in the desert. The smallest word is surrounded by acres of silence for me.” Not enough silence, alas.
My day job occasionally requires me to don respectable-looking clothing. Yet, I don't like ironing and can't afford to send my clothes to the cleaners. The solution? Walbusch! It's a mail-order firm that offers impeccably stuffy clothing for the petty, and even the not-so-petty, bourgeoisie. There's nothing, literally nothing you can buy from Walbusch that would raise an eyebrow at a regional managers' retreat, or a seminar on the idea of nature in von Liliencron's late work. Plus, most of their stuff is ironing-free. You get it out of the washer, hang it up, and it pretty much looks wearable, without that cheap perma-press look. And it's not even all that expensive!
So I was sending them an email to get an order straight recently, when I happened upon the 'Titel' field in their email-contact form. One of the charmingly 19th-century things about Germany is the obsession with titles, which seems not to have slackened one micron since, say, 1867. And if there is any group of Germans likely to be persnickety about their titles, it's the kind of people who would order deeply respectable clothing apparel from Walbusch.
Walbusch understands their clientele. Oh yes, they do. Most certainly. Go to this page and click on the 'Titel' dialog-box, and you will see something truly majestic: a list of just about every title a German could possibly ever carry. The list starts with Abt (Abbot(!)), and then dazzles us with a cavalcade of social distinction, from Architekt to Botschafter (Ambassador), Baron, Prinz (Prince), Graf (count), zillions of kinds of Ingenieure (engineers) and Paedagogen (teachers educators), and some truly exotic creatures who perch in the higher echelons of administration: Oberamtsrat, Oberstudienrat,Hofrat and even Prokurist (no, it's not what you're thinking). The only one that's missing is Santitaetsrat. But if you're a MIN-RAT., whatever the hell that is, Walbusch has got you covered.
And why, pray tell, does a Prokurist give a shit whether a box of underpants comes with his title prominently displayed on the address label? Easy: because then all of the poor schlubs who took his order, packed his clothes, shoved the box in the cargo plane, drove it to his neighborhood, and delivered it to his front door will -- like his neighbors -- know that Maximilian Halbschmarotzer is a Prokurist, dammit!*
I have a weakness for grisly first-person shooters, and few have ever compared with Quake. Now, the compassionate humanitarians at Id Software have create a thrilling online deathmatch version of Quake called Quake Live.
Just the thing after a hard day of ratiocination!
Best of all, it's completely free, doesn't require any special graphics cards, and has no gimmicks or spyware or anything, as far as I can tell (and I'm persnickety). You just download a few small programs, create your character, and begin reducing other players to glutinous globules of glowing goo.
My handle is GiantMetalClown, if you want to frag me (if you know what I mean).
Wittenberg is a small East German town quite close to Berlin. It's most famous, of course, as being the place where Martin Luther, according to legend, nailed his 95 Theses (g) to the door of the Schlosskirche (Castle Church). Wittenberg was a university town before that, and remained one for generations. Many of the houses in the city center bear large white plaques with the names of famous scholars who lived or taught there. Wittenberg University has now been absorbed into the Martin Luther University of Wittenberg-Halle (g), and, judging by the how utterly mouse-dead it was on a Saturday night (to Englishize a German expression), all of the student life seems to have decamped for Halle.
The town apparently built a shiny new visitors' center after the Wall fell, anticipating an influx of protestant tourists which doesn't seem to have materialized. Wittenberg is nevertheless filled with Reformation-related museums and Luther-kitsch. You can visit the permanent exhibition on Luther's life, and the house where his colleague, Philip Melancthon, lived and worked (Melancthon's original name was Schwartzerdt, or 'black earth', he later 'grecianized' it into Melanchthon). Local stores sell 'Luther Burps' schnapps, Luther beer, and Luther bread. As you see in the slideshow, you can even get 'lutheran food' in Wittenberg (bland and rigid?). Martin Luther marital aids are apparently so common that we saw one discarded near a construction site.
What's odd about Wittenberg is the cheek-by-jowl juxtapositions in the city center. You'll pass a row of trendy shops in carefully-restored buildings, and then encounter an abandoned, boarded-up hulk. A faded legend identifies the building as a former soap store or brewhouse, but the bottom floor is now encrusted with tattered posters, and the windows on the upper floors are shattered. The alleys and courtyards around these buildings offer numerous poignant still-lives of decay and abandonment. One building featured an impressive set of deer antlers nailed atop an ancient-looking carved-wood deer head, presumably the former emblem of a pub, or taxidermist or hunting shop.
Signs of East German material culture, such as Barkas trucks (g) (the 'Mercedes of East Germany', the owner proudly informed us) and typical elongated-oval streetlamps, are everywhere. Not to mention the 'Kramladen' (junk store) that offered 'Soviet childrens' gas masks' and displayed an Obama 'yes we can' T-shirt with a gun muzzle pointing at it. The local Sparkasse Bank was recently vandalized, leaving an oddly beautiful pattern of fracture planes in the front windows. Graffiti was everywhere, much of it of thoughtful or enigmatic.
Overall, Wittenberg left a somewhat somber and desolate impression, despite the fine churches and friendly people. Perhaps it's more inviting in the summer...
Gulf Regional Advocacy Center (GRACE) GRACE is a private, non-profit organization in Houston, Texas that provides quality legal representation to people facing the death penalty. They're innovative, feisty, and stunningly successful. You can help keep their doors open by setting up small monthly donation at their website.
Zbigniew Herbert: Barbarian In The Garden The Polish poet travels through Western Europe in the early 1960s. He's got no money, no guarantee he'll be let back into his country, and a prodigious knowledge of European history. "If the gods protect one from organized tours (through insufficient funds or strong character), one should spend the first few hours in a new city following a simple rule: straight ahead, third left, straight ahead, third right. One can follow the curve of a sickle.... I have been walking for over an hour without coming across an historical monument."
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