Can we talk?

I've just discovered Amy Gahran's The Right Conversation blog. Really provocative. She's got lots of ideas about how to get e-conversations going, and how to make them useful or at least enjoyable for everybody. Got me thinking about what I should be doing here.

As she points out, "In-person conversations generally must meet the highest standards of relevance, since they require more from you and are harder to get out of quickly.... Online media offers more control over which conversations you'll join, when, and how. It allows delayed responses and divided attention, which is a blessing for less-crucial conversations, or conversations in which you wish to think carefully about your contributions, conduct research, etc."

And of course, "Through hyperlinks and other cross-reference tools (such as tags), you easily connect online conversations, or introduce relevant materials such as articles."

Now, I'm asking your help: How do I get more conversations going here, to make this blog more lively, meaning more interactive?

I think I know at least some of the reasons that it isn't, so far. I've been using a print model. The whole technology of blogging is so new that most of us are still applying old, pre-Internet formats that barely take advantage of the new possibilities.

When I was just starting this blog back four years ago, I sort of imagined it could be a "magazine", with me as publisher and editor-in-chief and other people, with different specialties, as co-editors. That's easy (technically) to set up on Blogger. What I was imagining was maybe a more modest version of what Slate and some other sites are doing on a much bigger scale (and with backers). I still like that idea, but I didn't put enough effort into it to do the two necessary things: First, define the site's aim and target audience, and second, pull together a group of editors (could be just two or three, but you need a variety of voices). Basically, just what you'd have to do in a print magazine, but without all the tremendous start-up costs (paper, printing, mailing lists, etc.)

But that was too ambitious for me. Would have taken nearly all my time, when what I really wanted to be was not a publisher, but a columnist in a magazine or newspaper. So I began writing my little essays and comments as though they were op-ed pieces.

That has been fun, and occasionally I hear from somebody who likes what s/he reads here. But not often, and not so we get a conversation going.

Here are some things that I think I should be doing differently (if conversation is my aim, and right now that seems like a really good idea). (1) Not sounding off like an expert-- If I already know it all, why should you bother trying to tell me something? (2) Suggesting hypotheses rather than conclusions, and asking you to help me confirm them or disconfirm them. (3) Actively inviting comments, like I am now -- rather than just leaving a "comments" box for anybody who is so moved. (4) ANSWERING people's comments with public "comments" of my own, visible on the site, so anybody who wants to can jump into the conversation. The few times I've received comments on the blog, I've answered privately instead, so the only conversation possible is one-on-one instead of the free discussion the Internet permits. (5) Taking up and responding to people's suggestions about what to discuss here.

For example, a month or so ago, a friend asked me what I thought about Evo Morales in Bolivia. A reasonable question, since I'm keenly interested in Latin America. I didn't say anything on the blog because, frankly, I don't know what I think about Evo Morales. Or rather, I don't have any confidence that my impressions of the man are at all right. I think what I should have done is just say that, that is, here are my impressions but don't take them too seriously without checking other sources.

So here goes, Dirk, a very late response: First, you should know (a) Bolivia is one of the few Latin American countries I have not yet even visited and (b) I have only the slightest acquaintance with Aymara culture (from reading, not from personal contact). On the other hand, I am a trained sociologist and can sometimes spot patterns that seem familiar from other societies. My impression: He's a smart man, which is good if he is also a good man. And though he doesn't have a lot of formal education, he's a quick learner. He is a conversationalist, accustomed to dealing with conflict through dialogue with the aim of reaching consensus -- at least, I think so, because that's the way he got to be head of the coca federation and to become his party's candidate for president, and it seems to be the way he is behaving now that he is president. What I mean is that he listens. He also has a clear idea of what he wants to say (for example, to foreign heads of state), because he is the bearer of a message reached by consensus by his constituency. I don't think he can be manipulated by Hugo Chávez or anybody else, because he continues to be bound (by upbringing, continuing social ties, and by the racial definitions in his country) to represent that constituency. Just what constitutes that constituency is going to be the problem, the doubtful area as he comes under increasing pressure from oil and gas companies, secessionists in Santa Cruz, rivals for leadership of Aymara and Quechua groups, other trade unionists and so on. Who comes first in his chain of loyalties? Coca growers? Miners? The Bolivian poor generally, regardless of race or region? I doubt that he's figured that out himself. But I don't know. Maybe he has. And I wonder what he's doing to secure the loyalty of the army.

I can't offer more than this. If any of you have insights, I really hope to hear.

There are lots of other topics I've touched on in this blog -- literature, Spain, Venezuela, God, the romance of tramp steamers being among the most frequent -- and probably lots of other things I should be doing to stimulate conversation about them. I hope you'll use the comments box to let me know what you think, and let me and other readers answer.

Understanding Venezuela: Points of view

Although the Latin American news today is mostly about possible turmoil in Mexico, after a splendidly organized election and a disappointing performance in the Copa Mundial, Venezuela continues to attract attention. I've been asked where to find my comments on Hugo Chávez and current developments there. So, for those interested, here are the links.

On my main website, see
Venezuela: Background of the Conflict
which also has links to:
Hugo Chávez's Triple Struggle
and a short essay on Bolívar & "Bolivarian democracy"

Here's a more recent comment on Chávez & the chavistas from this blog, and a note on my brief face-to-face encounter with him in March 2002 (I liked him then, but didn't entirely trust him as a leader or thinker).

You won't find any mention of Chávez in my book The Land and People of Venezuela, which was published in 1991, before he gained national and international attention for his attempted coup and (apparently) assassination of the president, a messy affair that ended in shambles on Feb. 4, 1992. However you will find a fairly extensive description of the 1989 popular uprising in which Chávez was one of the officers ordered to suppress it, and which (he has said, and I believe him) got him started plotting in earnest to change the whole government structure.

Maybe it's time to write something new about the man and his movement.

Stereopticon view of PLAZA BOLIVAR. CARACAS VENEZUELA 1909, from HOMENAJE A CARACAS

The War Tapes

Two scenes especially struck me in The War Tapes, the 97-minute movie put together by Deborah Scranton from videotapes made by (mostly) three New Hampshire National Guardsmen during their tour in Iraq. The first was the portraits by Sergeant Steve Pink of the faces and destroyed bodies of some of the young men who had been defending Fallujah against the U.S. onslaught (actually digital images--army censors refused to allow Pink's actual video to be shown). We are rarely obliged, or permitted, to see the humanity of the enemy that Bush-Cheney et al. have created. The other is a detailed video tour (I think this was by Specialist Mike Moriarty) of a graveyard of U.S. military vehicles mangled, punctured, blown apart by explosions or bullets--each now-uninhabited chunk of twisted steel implying a story of violence done to the men who were in it. Again, the kind of image you're not likely to see on the evening news. Everything else--the mayhem, destruction of buildings, speeding convoys, IEDs--is unsurprising to anybody who has been paying attention, but it's especially vivid when seen through the windscreen of a HumVee.

Besides Pink and Moriarty, the other main contributor was Sergeant Zaher "Zack" Bazzi, a Lebanese-born, Arabic speaking college student and military nut, who reads the Nation and loves combat, to the great distress of his mother who lived, with him, through the terrible civil war in Beirut. He points out and analyzes the racism of his fellow soldiers, in this case anti-Arab, but sees it as inevitable and nothing to get in the way of his first responsibility, to see to the welfare and safety of his own men against Arabs who may very well be ready to kill them--or may not, it's hard to tell when you don't speak the language or understand the gestures.

What drives so many of the soldiers crazy, in fits of madness in the field or in more lasting PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), is the impossible combination of immense power and immense powerlessness. Power: Their weapons have the power to blow away a whole family or building, their vehicles to careen through traffic forcing every civilian vehicle off the path and any pedestrian to leap for safety or get smashed. It is a degree of power they have never experienced in civilian life. The enemy is powerful, too, though "assymetrically"--improvised explosive devices instead of airborne missiles, for example--so the powerful U.S. military must continually exercise its power just to keep safe. But ordinary Iraqi citizens on donkeys or in cars or on foot just have to stay out of the way. Powerlessness: They can't control their own actions, leave when they want to, or--for the most part, those who patrol in those heavily armored vehicles--even piss standing up.

When they get back home, they lose that great power which was never really theirs, but that they exercised on loan from the military machine. And so feel terribly vulnerable even though the enemy is no longer near. They are also free of the military constraints and so get some of their own, individual power returned to them--but after being conditioned to vulnerability, and seeing their buddies killed or horribly maimed, it's not enough.



The War Tapes is not just a movie. It is an on-going interactive event, its reach extended through the website and with communications with these and other soldiers. Check it out.

(The film could not be more different from Army of Shadows, which fuses many stories to tell one clear one. But in that struggle, the French résistants never had the illusion of great power, and--since they were all volunteers, with the opportunity to drop out (or change sides) at any moment, they must never have felt themselves to be powerless, not even when taken prisoner.)

Connecting passions: politics and fútbol

I admit it: The only professional sport I've paid close attention to in recent years has been international politics. But caught up now in the excitement of the World Cup, I was glad to find these sources relating my old obsession to my new, incipient one:

How to Watch the World Cup Commentary: On a game that often amounts to politics by other means, by Tony Karon

How Soccer Explains the World. An interview with Franklin Foer, by Bradford Plumer

Karon's piece compiles anecdotes which probably illustrate something about the game, mainly that it has diverse fans and conflicting vested interests, which you probably already suspected. Such scattered incoherence seems to be typical of most sports writing, which is one reason I've paid more attention to politics. Still, the anecdotes are entertaining and suggestive that something important is going on in global culture dynamics. The Foer interview is a little more coherent: it gives some idea what that might be, and how regionalism v. globalism may play out.

Photo of Carlitos Tévez playing for River, from Vale Chumbar.

Traveling the Andes in good company

Wright, Ronald. 1984. Cut Stones and Crossroads: A Journey in the Two Worlds of Peru. New York: Penguin.

A young archaeologist hitchhikes through the Peruvian Andes, seeking Inca and pre-Inca ruins, and encounters the chaotic, bumbling but still beautiful society created by the clash of ayllu Andean, semi-feudal Hispanic and now global capitalist cultures. It's a bumpy mosaic of a book, pieced together from the author's travel notes, readings, lessons and even songs in Runasimi, the language of the Runa or "human beings" that outsiders call Quechua. The personal notes are the most engaging, for his lively descriptions of places and the vehicles he uses to reach them, meals (he never acquires a taste for chuño or char'ki) and people (drunken officials, giggling girls, foreigners of various nationalities and purposes, and a surprising number of blind harpists). And of course

"…the vagrant scholar (myself?) who turns the pages of this land and thinks perhaps he understands it, but really is only looking at pictures, adding captions gleaned from books. All of us are poaching on a dying civilization to still the hunger of our own." Refreshing bit of self-awareness there.

Wright gives me the feel of parts of the Andes I have yet to see; I spent a week on assignment in Lima some years ago, and from there got to Cusco (or Qosqo) and Machu Picchu (or Piqchu), but it was a too-quick trip; I have yet to see Chavín in the north) or Tiawanaku or Copacabana (Qopaqhawana, an ancient temple site) in the other direction, nor did I spend the time Wright has exploring the Valley of Cusco. I also appreciated the language lessons and, particularly, the "Note on Runasimi Pronunciation." Now I understand why some write "Qosqo" instead of "Cusco" (or, worse, "Cuzco"): q (in this language) is a "Guttural fricative similar to North German ch in Achtung." The closest the Spaniards could get to this sound in their system was a c.

Wright has since become much better known as an essayist and novelist than an archaeologist. I just discovered him by accident, while browsing the NYU library shelves for works on the Incas. This just shows that I know too little about contemporary Canadian literature. I'm glad I found him; in this early book, he was already very good at sharp description with subtle wit. Check him out: Ronald Wright on Random House; and, more fun, this 2002 interview by Linda Richards.

Army of Shadows

We were deeply impressed -- as was everybody in the audience at Film Forum last night -- by Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 docu-thriller Army of Shadows ("L'armée des ombres"), about the French Résistance in its most difficult years, 1942-43. It is gripping for many reasons: the tense, controlled acting; the inherent drama of the story itself, based on Résistance memoirs by the pilot, Résistance fighter and author Joseph Kessel; and most especially for the mastery of tension by director Melville, himself a Résistance veteran who has added details from his own memories (and cinematographic cunning) to Kessel's story.

The movie is fiction, in that it compresses many real episodes and their protagonists into a few memorable characters. (For how he did it, and what proportion is fictional and how much absolutely authentic, see the 1971 interview of Melville by Rui Nogueira.) The central figure, 44-year old civil engineer and ranking Résistance commander Philippe Gerbier, played by Lino Ventura (a former champion wrestler, Ventura had previously been cast by Melville as a bad guy), is a composite of (according to Melville) 7 or 8 real people who really did those amazingly daring things. I don't know who the Simone Signoret character, Mathilde, is based on, but she's wonderfully brave, determined and tragic. But the figure who impressed me most deeply was Luc Jardie (Paul Meurisse), who is based in very large part on the historical Jean Moulin, put in charge of the Résistance by De Gaulle himself and charged with uniting its various factions. But Melville seems to have had someone else in mind also when he constructed the character. The real Moulin was a rather handsome professional politician, once France's youngest prefect. The fictional "Jardie" is a small, balding, and unhandsome intellectual (we see his several books on theoretical mathematics), supremely brainy as well as supremely cool and courageous, acting with moral clarity in some very complex dilemmas.

It is a kind of heroism seldom celebrated in American action films. But in the director's better-known gangster movies you can find these same quiet, manly virtues, which he learned the hard way. Born Jean-Pierre Grumbach, "Melville" was his nom-de guerre in the résistance.

Jean-Pierre Melville filmography
Bio of Jean Moulin in English
Dossier : "De Gaulle et Jean Moulin" Biographie par Christine Levisse-Touzé (in French). This has more complete information plus photos of Moulin.
NYT review of "Army of Shadows"

Double-dealing deity

I was surprised to read in the NYT yesterday that all the land of Palestine is waqf, given by God exclusively to the Muslim Arabs in perpetuity. No doubt the Hamas legal team has convincing scriptural evidence of this deed. But Jewish settlers have equally convincing evidence that God gave all that land to them, exclusively and in perpetuity.

This is not the first sign of the deity's duplicitousness. Jack Miles in God: A Biography (New York: Vintage Books,1995), points out how contradictory & unpredictable he is in the Tanakh (Hebrew Old Testament), undoubtedly because he is a synthesis of many earlier Mesopotamian gods & goddesses. He can be benevolent, cruel, petty, deceptive (he lies to Eve and Adam, saying they will immediately die if they eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge); he can be bargained with (e.g., by Abraham); then at the end of the Tanakh (which, unlike the Christian version, puts the prophets before "the writings," Psalms through Chronicles) he falls silent.

What fools they be who say "In God we trust." Eve not only survived, she multiplied (boy, did she multiply!). And the fruit of the tree of knowledge is all that can save us. We should all take another bite.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall

On Thursday, as the U.S. Senate was about to vote on its new immigration bill, scholars and political experts at New York University were busy "Rethinking Global Migration: New Realities, New Opportunities, New Challenges." (Click here for conference program and webcast.) The main conclusion (for anybody who was paying close attention) was how ridiculous and inadequate are the Senate's gestures. The only thing that can be said for the Senate bill is that it is not as punitive as the bill in the House, but none of these measures addresses the real problems in a realistic way. To wit:

• The Senate proposal would permit 200,000 "temporary workers" per year (the House bill would permit none), but we've got 500,000 crossingly illegally each month, according to Cristina Rodríguez (NYU). So the numbers are totally inadequate both for the emigration pressure from Mexico and for the labor demand on the U.S. side of the border, which is immense.

• The Senate's bill does not envision any reciprocal process in Mexico, such as "We will admit x number of workers legally if you (Mexico) commit to reducing illegal emigration from Mexico by that amount" -- an idea broached by Jorge Santibáñez (President, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Mexico).

• People will keep coming, even at the risk of their lives, as long as survival opportunities in the U.S. are so much greater than in their own countries, no matter how high or long or thick the fence. Most of those who come illegally don't even cross by land anyway, according to several the speakers.

• U.S. labor demands, for example for highly trained nurses from the Philippines and elsewhere, are making conditions even worse in the sending countries -- by diminishing services -- and thus stimulating emigration. That's not going to stop with the proposed legislation, but there could be negotiated ways of relieving pressure on the sending countries.

• The biggest issue -- implicit in the others -- is one emphasized by Saskia Sassen, enriched by her comparative studies of European immigration policies: No immigration policy will be tenable unless it is worked out in negotiation among both sending and receiving countries.

In short, we can't "secure our borders" on only one side. Nor would it be enough to enter a treaty with Mexico. The northward flow of migrants is regional, with great numbers from Central America and South America illegally entering Mexico just to cross it and get to the U.S. border.

This is just a start for my thoughts on the question. We still haven't talked about "assimilation" of immigrants, whether and how fast they will learn English and adapt to the "American way of life." One thing is obvious, though: a "guest worker" program just inhibits assimilation, by telling people they can never become U.S. citizens anyway. And of course letting 11 million or so people remain "illegal" isolates them, from services, police, and schools, making their assimilation almost impossible.

When in "Mending Wall" Robert Frost quoted another farmer saying, "Good fences make good neighbors," it was because he found the statement ridiculous. He went on to reflect,

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors?...
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." ...

In the 21st century, that "something" is globalization, the unstoppability of information, money goods and -- though at greater risk and cost -- people, regardless of borders. They only way to regularize the flows for the greatest benefit and least harm to all parties is through frank, honest and serious negotiations. A good place to start would be with Mexico and the countries to its south.

Good neighbors can make good fences.

Immigration: preparing to enter the debate

I know, I know. My participation is long overdue. After all, I did write a book about it, and more recently (2003), an op-ed on a the growing census numbers. The huge demos last March caught me by surprise -- I was in Spain and, frankly, had not been closely following the politics of what I had called the Hispanic Nation. I don't want to just give an opinion; this question is too important for pundits. Rather, I want to come up with some hypotheses, and maybe even a proposal, that will help us understand and deal with all the conflicting issues. Big job. A job for a sociologist.

Here are some things I've been reading to get back up on it, in rough order of interest:

• Nina Bernstein,100 Years in the Back Door, Out the Front, NYT Week in Review; also, click on Bernstein's link to see her other articles on the issue -- serious reporting.
• E. J. Dionne Jr., Divisive In Any Language (washingtonpost.com)
• Alicia A. Caldwell, Security plan worries N.M. town officials (AP, boston.com)
• Shikha Dalmia, No Free Ride (Knight Ridder, Tom Paine)
• Sandi Burtseva, Yes, We Know They're Illegal (Tom Paine)

To know the truth-- you have to try!

Check out the National Coalition Against Censorship, or subscribe to their printed newsletter (address on the site).