A historical note

I just came across this old file -- written in January 1991.
Gulf War I, Bush I

"SCUDS" SADDAM, AMERICAN-STYLE HERO
by Geoffrey Fox

America loves a bad guy, the tougher the better. A guy who knows how to keep cool until the moment to unleash his deadly violence. A guy who betrays no fear when surrounded by vastly superior forces, and who combines shrewdness, courage and malice to damage his enemies even when it appears that all is lost. "Hombre," by Elmore Leonard, besieged by Mexicans. Butch Cassidy in Bolivia, John Wayne in the Alamo, Eddie Murphy in Korea, Rambo in Southeast Asia. Even non-whites may apply: the half-breed Billy Jack against the forces of law and order in the southwestern desert. Or Jimmy Cagney. Whose haberdashery gets more publicity than John Gotti's? Whose smirks, mumbles and rampages than the many movie "Godfathers'"? The American paragon is insolent, intransigent, and dangerous.

Maybe we've been misreading Saddam Hussein. Maybe he isn't so all-fired hot on Islam. Maybe he doesn't give a damn (to be polite) about the Palestinians, or even about Iraqi sovereignty in Kuwait. Maybe he's just seen too many American movies. Or maybe--and this too is possible--the values he learned scrapping on the dusty streets of Tikrit weren't too different from our own. Which means that to prevail, you've got to act tough, whatever the consequences. And prevailing is the only game worth the candle.

So, if this is the script, where does that leave our guys? All those airmen and sailors and soldiers and marines, from 28 nations, with tons of bombs to drop and thousands of missiles and many times more airplanes than Saddam ever had--if this is the script, then our guys are the cops, or the federales, the hordes of lawmen fought off by the heroic renegade.

Some people have been comparing him to Hitler. But that was a different movie, more like the evil Ming against Flash Gordon. This guy may be evil, a scourge of society--his own and those of his neighbors. The poison gas against his citizens, the horridly costly war against Iran, the invasion and pillage of Kuwait, and probably lots more crimes we're only dimly aware of. But as any American movie-goer knows, what counts is coolness under fire. He'll probably go down in flames at the end, and people in this country aren't likely to forgive him, and hardly anybody outside of Iraq loves him, but everybody, from our president on down, respects him.

And if Arabs have been as deeply influenced as we have by American movies, long after he is gone, his exploits will be sung in the souks and coffehouses as the people wait for the rise of a new Scuds Saddam.

Geoffrey Fox has no special knowledge of the Middle East, but he's seen a lot of movies.

Mahfouz & me

"... most people don't like reading about, much less identifying with, mediocre people who evade the truth until it rolls over them," writes biographer Blake Baley, to explain the lack of success of novelist Richard Yates. (A Tragic Honesty. Picador, 2003) This is clearly not a problem for A. K. Rowling, whose wizard is anything but mediocre. But since I'm no longer 13, and my peer group is a little different, I haven't yet sought out the latest Harry Potter book. Instead, my peer group, an on-line readers circle coordinated by Lale Eskioglu, is reading Svevo and Mahfouz.

June's reading was supposed to be Naguib Mahfouz's The Beggar. I haven't located it yet (it was out from my local branch of the New York Public Library), so I picked out another of his books to tell you about.

The Day the Leader Was Killed (Anchor Books, 2000; originally published in Arabic, 1985) takes place in Cairo not on a single day, but over an unspecified span of weeks culminating October 6, 1981. On that day a young low-level government clerk named Elwan Fawwaz Muhtashim explodes in rage at the bourgeois frustrations of his bourgeois love aspirations, and commits a folly that redeems his honor but will certainly destroy his career. On that day also, the symbol and partical cause of the frustrations of the urban middle class, President Anwar al-Sadat, is assassinated.

This is a slight book of limited ambition, a piece -- barely more than a chapter -- in Mahfouz's life-time oeuvre of huge ambition, to retell the whole modern Arab experience. He tells the story in alternate chapters from three first-person points of view: Elwan; his grandfather -- as old as the century, a retired school teacher who remembers his youthful participation in the 1919 "National Movement" and who sees Elwan's dilemma in that long historical perspective; and Randa, Elwan's long-time girlfriend and fiancée, who works in the same government office. She loses much of her respect but none of her affection for Elwan when, bowing to economic and parental pressure, he declares their engagement to be at an end.

It's slight, but masterful. I'm intrigued by the technique. I've done something similar -- a story from multiple points of view -- but not in first person. That approach poses different challenges (no author's voice to set the scene), while enhancing the subjectivity (each voice is unreliable in its own peculiar way). I may try that aproach soon. If you look at my collection Welcome to My Contri, you'll see that I've deliberately tried out different narrative devices (1st person, one narrator; 3rd person limited; 3rd person omniscient; dialogue; a story perceived by someone who understands everything but words, etc.). There are still new things to try.

Check out Lale Eskioglu's website.

Back on line

Apologies to my loyal readers (both of you). We had home networking connection difficulties, so that only one computer in this busy idea workshop could connect, and my confederate had a more urgent need (deadline for New York's 9/11 memorial competition). The replacement for our old home portal has arrived, so now everybody can get on line whenever. And now this is my first test of the new posting template (just revised) in Blogger. I'll be back in a few minutes, after seeing how this looks.

Affirmative action for the deserving only

Did you see Orlando Patterson's bizarre argument in the Sunday NYT (op-ed)? Affirmative action should be available only for "African-Americans, Native Americans and most Latinos" (which ones?) because they (and not later immigrants) deserve it. I guess he thinks that Chinese railroad workers and Japanese WW II internees, among others, never suffered serious discrimination. Patterson writes in Harvard-ese, which is a language designed to lull you into thinking it maybe makes sense until the incantation takes effect. He seems to think of himself as a Wise Elder for African American politicos, but I doubt that they are listening.

Waiting for the Tooth Fairy

It finally happened last night. The last fragment of one of my baby teeth wobbled free. Now, I've had that tooth for a certain number of decades -- fewer than ten, but more than two. Therefore its value has to be far greater than if I had put it under my pillow when I was kid, like most people do. I started calculating, 25 cents (the old rate, in my boyhood) at, say, 5% compounded over all those years ... But then I lost it! It was such a tiny thing, no bigger than a crumb, and we must have inadvertently swept it up and thrown it out. I'm heartbroken. But I'll get other chances to collect from the tooth fairy. Get your checkbook ready, lady, I still have three more baby teeth hanging on by their tiny roots.

The necessity of European anti-Semitism

Rudolph Giuliani, the man with a simple solution for every complicated problem, tells Europe how it can Stop the Hate of Jews in a NYT op-ed that appeared just a week after An Oxymoron: Europe Without Christianity by Kenneth L. Woodward. If Rudy read his hometown paper before submitting to it, he might see how much more complicated this problem is. I've been researching the Spanish conquest of America (for a book on the history of Latin American architecture and urbanism), and recently completed a novel about the rise of the Ottomans and the last days of Christian Constantinople, so I've been thinking a lot about these relationships. It is clear to me that Europe could not have become "Europe" without Christianity, and anti-Semitism was an inevitable by-product.

Before there was Europe, the Roman Empire had held together the lands all around the Mediterranean by military and commercial might, governing by Roman law but more or less indifferent to the multiplicity of religions. "Europe," without that overwhelming superpower, was able to bring itself together (more or less) by the shared religion. Danes and Irishmen only recently Christianized and older Christians like Spaniards and Italians needed enemies of their faith to remind themselves of their common values. Hence, the ideological urgency of Crusades and pogroms, and in Spain, the Inquisition (with so many languages in the Iberian peninsula, how else could Spain hold itself together?). Europe is past that stage now, one hopes, but until it developed mighty industries and commerce to achieve the same purpose, the common religion was essential to Europe's identity and power.

It should be obvious then that anti-Semitism is a very different, and much weaker, phenomenon in America. It was never essential to our identity. For most of us, the Atlantic Ocean was enough of a barrier between us and the non-Americans. Anti-Semitism here is an import, not as deeply rooted and therefore more susceptible to Giuliani's law-and-order remedies. Here we massacred "Indians" and lynched blacks, but that's another story.

Martin Waldseemüller

He's back in the news, the guy who invented the name "America." The last known surviving copy of the 1507 map he drew, inspired by Amerigo ("Americus") Vespucci's account of explorations, has been sold by Prince Johannes Waldburg-Wolfegg for $10 million to the U.S. Library of Congress.

Don't you love these names? The cartographer's is even better than the prince's, although "Wolfegg" has a certain charm. ("Egge" means "harrow," but that probably has nothing to do with it. Ever seen a wolf farming? I didn't think so.) "Waldseemüller" names both the ancestral occupation, and the approximate address. I may start signing myself Gottfried Dorfschreiber because I live in a village (Greenwich Village), or maybe Grossapfelschreiber or even Großapfelschreiber. What do you think?

Women: Get us while we last!

If I've got this right, we men are on our way to extinction. The Y chromosome, the only thing that keeps Us from being like You, has been decaying ever since the first Homo sapiens (Latin for "smart dude") hooked up with the first Mulier sapiens ("Eve"). So hurry! No telling what will become of us over the next millennium.

The same new study, made possible by the recent mapping of the entire human genome, reveals something I'd always suspected: men are (genetically) as different from women (1.5 to 2% of our genes) as we are from chimpanzees. No surprise there. But chimps may be smarter. Every time I start to pound my chest, I lose my grip on the tree limb. (See today's NYT article by Nicholas Wade.)

William Packard

"What do I myself mean by poetry? The mysterious charge of language that takes place when passion combines with consciousness to create rhythms, the inevitable and intuitive rhythms of the bloodstream, ear and eye and voice." -- William Packard, craft interview, NYQ (The New York Quarterly) 40, reprinted in NYQ 59.

News of Bill Packard's death (Nov. 3, 2002) reached me late -- I don't remember now which of my writer friends told me about it. My memory of him was buried deep among other layers of memory of writing efforts and contacts and barely stirred. But then this weekend, at the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses' "Lit Mag Marathon," I met Raymond Hammond, his successor editor at NYQ, the poetry journal that Bill had founded in 1969, and then read Bill's words in interviews, essays and poems in NYQ 59. Confronting his ghost reminded me of how frightening I had found him, when he came to lecture at the New York University Summer Writers Conference one year when I was also an instructor.

How could such a gentle, love-projecting, wild-eyed, dissheveled old bear frighten anybody? Especially when he was seated behind a desk at the bottom of the auditorium and I was safely seated in one of the back rows? I wouldn't have admitted I was frightened, but now I think that is the only explanation of my confused reactions as examples of poetic devices poured out of him in long heartfelt renderings of passages from the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Auden, Rilke, and maybe a dozen other poets. Bill Packard would look at you and into you, no deeper than he needed to, but far enough to probe your first line of defense, and challenge you like Rainer Maria Rilke's "Apollo" in a poem that Packard translated (also included in NYQ 59): "You must change your life."

NYT obit | NYQ obit (much fuller, and with a wild-man photo that Packard himself liked to use) | Council of Literary Magazines and Presses

Interview with Deborah Treisman

On The Connection with Dick Gordon. For all of us who hope one day to see our work in the New Yorker, this is important.