The Job

Thanks to Dirk van Nouhuys for sending this commentary on the financial crisis, from the Festival international de très courts ("very short" videos):

The Job

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Jewish Voices of Dissent on Gaza

Excellent article by my friend, the prolific social commentator César Chelala: Jewish Voices of Dissent on Gaza in Middle East Times.

Trampled rights

“Huzaifa Parhat, a fruit peddler, has been imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay Detention Center for the last seven years. He is not a terrorist. He’s a mistake, a victim of the war against al Qaeda,” begins Jonathan Shaw in The War and the Writ: Habeas corpus and security in an age of terrorism in the current Harvard Magazine. It's a necessarily long piece on a complex issue, vitally important to Americans and to America's place in the world.

June Jordan's revenge

Obama is June Jordan's revenge. A sweet and satisfying revenge that does no harm to anybody, but goes far to right an ancient wrong. You'll know this when you listen to Sweet Honey in the Rock perform "We Are the Ones" -- which you can hear along with other great songs on their website at that link.

Barack Obama must have heard Sweet Honey's version many times, and no doubt knows well the work of June Jordan, one of the sharpest and most politically conscious American poets of our times.

The line is the last one in her "Poem for South African Women," written in 1980, when the end of apartheid still seemed distant. Whether he got if from the song or directly from the original poem, Obama made it the defining call of his presidential campaign, and may its spirit guide his administration: "we are the ones we have been waiting for." To say it another way, it's up to us to make this a better world. The South African women and men were up to the challenge, and we had better be too.

June Jordan, unfortunately for all of us, did not live long enough to see this triumph. Her words still echo, though, in the minds of all of us who have read them or heard her read them in her rich voice. (You can hear that voice in a 2003 interview on Democracy Now!) Obama's campaign amplified them.

Here is the whole poem.

Poem for South African Women
June Jordan, 1980

Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands
by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land
into new dust that
rising like a marvelous pollen will be
fertile
even as the first woman whispering
imagination to the trees around her made
for righteous fruit
from such deliberate defense of life
as no other still
will claim inferior to any other safety
in the world

The whispers too they
intimate to the inmost ear of every spirit
now aroused they
carousing in ferocious affirmation
of all peaceable and loving amplitude
sound a certainly unbounded heat
from a baptismal smoke where yes
there will be fire

And the babies cease alarm as mothers
raising arms
and heart high as the stars so far unseen
nevertheless hurl into the universe
a moving force
irreversible as light years
traveling to the open eye

And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea:

we are the ones we have been waiting for.

2 crises

No answers today, just a question. Today's El País is dominated by two "stories", as journalists call them, though neither one has a clear narrative yet. One is the massive bombardment and now invasion of Gaza by the Israelis. The other is the gobal financial crisis. My question: How will these two huge events affect each other? Because in our closely interconnected world, the vibrations of any major shock are felt throughout the network.

There are other big "stories", i.e., events waiting for their narrative. The Russian pressure on the Ukrainians and the constricting of gas pipelines to most of Europe, for example. The big offensive by the government of Sri Lanka, etc. And down through other events whose ripples beyond their own regions may be felt less intensely. But for now let's just look at the first two.

Did the financial pinch have anything to do with the Israeli move against Gaza? War has always proven an excellent distraction from other troubles. And with no economic surplus, what else besides war can the candidates for premier offer to their citizens? The far more severe pinch in Gaza may also have a lot to do with the Hamas government's allowing, or encouraging, reckless and senseless missile attacks on Israeli civilians. People in the strip are so frustrated that they have to lash out at somebody, and Hamas must figure, better the Israelis than us.

And how will this huge escalation of violence affect global finance? Is it going to escalate the already widespread hostility toward Jewish financiers (and toward the far more numerous non-Jewish financiers wrongly suspected of being Jewish, just because they are financiers)? Probably it will, I think, and that is likely to be a pretext for more isolationist, nationalist economic policies by, for example, Muslim countries in Asia (Indonesia among them). Will it make a rapprochement of the U.S. and the Arab countries even more difficult, because of the U.S.'s knee-jerk support of Israel? Almost certainly. And is that going to further limit the U.S.'s power to affect markets?

As I said, no answers, just questions. These are some of the things to watch for, I think. In the long run, I don't think this invasion is good for the Jews or for anybody. Though it might be good for the short run aspirations of some Israeli politicians.

Middle East finance headlines (Financial Times)
Rice cancels Mideast trip to help with financial crisis (CNN)
Turning a crisis into an opportunity. By Nehemia Shtrasler (Haaretz)
Finance Minister: No Israel banks will collapse in global crisis (Haaretz)

For a happier new year

Happy new year -- I mean, let's all work to make this year happier than the way it is starting out.

The Israeli bombardment of Gaza is a great crime, partly but only partly provoked by the crimes of Hamas. I can understand the terror and rage of Israelis, who on top of all their other fears now find that places as far from Gaza as Barsheeba can be hit by Hamas rockets, but this latest massive response is no more likely to succeed than any of its predecessors. The continuing asymmetric reciprocity of violence (you kill 4 of my people, I'll kill 400 of yours) has never brought peace but has instead intensified the desire for revenge by Palestinians. And with or without kassam rockets, vengeful people always find some ways -- suicide bombs, runaway bulldozers, etc. -- to wreak their vengeance. Israeli politicians surely know this. So why do they, counter to the advice of their own generals, wage such an offensive at this moment? I think The Independent's Adrian Hamilton has the only plausible answer: Adrian Hamilton: Pure politics is driving this war.

I'm back at my desk (actually a new desk, in a new house) in Spain now and plan to resume more frequent blogging, mostly on events in Spain, which I am following closely. But sometimes more distant events, like Gaza, are so great that they demand comment even from non-experts. I am no expert on Mideast politics, but as a sociologist I do know how to recognize patterns of human conflict. This one won't be easily resolved, because the forces driving the conflict include powerful political pressures in both Hamas (which can't surrender its unyielding hostility to Israel without dissolving into nothing) and the two big right-wing Israeli parties, all of whom need to be seen to be violent. Best bet for the U.S. is to step back; U.S. government interference has always been naive and ended up being used by the hostile parties (mostly by Israel) for their own hostile ends. See How Not to Make Peace in the Middle East by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley in the New York Review of Books -- just out and already outdated by this latest attack, but with good historical analysis of the past failures of U.S. intervention. Also interesting are these Egyptian views of the conflict.

How to write about war

Somebody had left many boxes of books on the sidewalk on 76th Street between Fifth and Madison, and as Susana and I were walking back from our run in Central Park we stopped and scooped up a bunch. One was a very famous war novel that I had never heard of until our friend Hazel in Carboneras urged it upon us, Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong (London: Hutchinson, 1993). Another was a collection of short stories by Saki, pen name of Hugh Munro, whom I remembered from the delightful, chilling surprise of reading "The Open Window" long ago in high school.

I don't know how I had missed Birdsong -- a quick search on the 'net revealed that it has been a best-seller, there's been talk for years about a movie, and it has even inspired tours of the battlefields that figure in it. It really is a gripping read, especially those horrifying scenes from the trenches of France in 1916 and until the end of the Great War two years later. These are preceded and then intertwined with a kind of love story -- though "love" is an imprecise description for British infantry officer Stephen Wraysford's obsession with a vacuous, self-centered and dimly remembered Frenchwoman. No matter. Even the flightiest characters (including Stephen's Isabelle) are depicted convincingly. There is also a later story, set in 1978-79, about Stephen's granddaughter's search for mature independence and information about that grandfather. All of it clearly and sensitively related, though it is only the two terrible bloody years in France that really matter. Faulks has chosen to remind us of this war which (as his characters say and almost all real-life contemporaries said over and over) unleashed destructive forces so much greater than its predecessors -- including the cruel and bloody Boer, Russo-Japanese, and Balkan wars that immediately preceded it -- that it changed the world.

So it seemed an odd coincidence to find in the same serendipitous heap of books on the sidewalk of 76th Street the short, poetic piece, "Birds on the Western Front," in Emlyn Williams' 1978 edition of Saki's Short Stories.

The other stories here (there are about 60 in the book, a small sample of Saki's voluminous output) are mostly clever, extended jokes, playing on and confirming a public school Briton's class prejudices. They are often annoyingly sexist, in the light, silly manner of situation comedy. In fact, what gives pleasure in reading Saki is the absurd situations leading to startling outcomes (as in "The Open Window"). The characters are simply caricatures, and they all talk alike, however devious their intentions. But-- "Birds on the Western Front" is something else.

The frivolous, supercilious Saki was perhaps a cover for a somewhat more serious Hugh Munro, foreign correspondent (1902-1906) and author of serious-sounding tomes on Russian history and the pre-1914 turbulence elsewhere in Europe. In 1916, at the age of 46 (rather old to serve), he joined the British Army (Royal Scottish Fusileers) and was soon killed in a trench in France. "Birds", which must have been written just weeks or months before his death, ingeniously describes trench warfare without looking at it directly. Instead, it is about the birds whose natural habitat has been destroyed by cannonade, bombs and machine-gunning, but still must find some scrap of something for nesting and carrying on the only life they know. This is a marvelously effective denunciation of the war, still fresh even after the angry sentimentality of Wilfred Owen's “Dulce et Decorum Est” has begun to grate.

I wonder if Faulks was thinking of this short piece by Saki when he chose the title "Birdsong." If so, then maybe what he meant to suggest (with Saki) was that even through the worst horrors, life persists.

Here is my plot summary of and further comment on Birdsong, and rather less on Emlyn Williams' edition of Saki's Short Stories.

Photo of Ancre (France) after the battle from this website.

Holiday message from Roy Blount

This is too good not to share. I endorse the sentiments.

I've been talking to booksellers lately who report that times are hard. And local booksellers aren't known for vast reserves of capital, so a serious dip in sales can be devastating. Booksellers don't lose enough money, however, to receive congressional attention. A government bailout isn't in the cards.

We don't want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods. So let's mount a book-buying splurge. Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party. Buy the rest of your Christmas presents, but that's just for starters. Clear out the mysteries, wrap up the histories, beam up the science fiction! Round up the westerns, go crazy for self-help, say yes to the university press books! Get a load of those coffee-table books, fatten up on slim volumes of verse, and take a chance on romance!

There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they're easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves. Stockpile children's books as gifts for friends who look like they may eventually give birth. Hold off on the flat-screen TV and the GPS (they'll be cheaper after Christmas) and buy many, many books. Then tell the grateful booksellers, who by this time will be hanging onto your legs begging you to stay and live with their cat in the stockroom: "Got to move on, folks. Got some books to write now. You see...we're the Authors Guild."

Enjoy the holidays.

Roy Blount Jr.
President
Authors Guild

Crunching numbers, saving people

Collier, Paul. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Paul Collier deserves -- and has received -- great credit for developing a method of statistical comparison for identifying the very poorest countries and estimating the costs of such poverty to them and potentially to all of us (short life spans, HIV and other devastating diseases, political violence that spreads beyond their borders, etc.). He and his co-researchers are especially keen on finding correlations between such wretched conditions and various geographical, demographic and historical factors, and comparing them to countries which share many such characteristics but that have broken out of poverty -- most notably, India and China, still beset by many problems but developing.

Very briefly: Collier has identified 58 countries, together comprising about 1/6 of the world's population or nearly 1,000,000,000 people, which are not only extremely poor, but which are not developing at all -- that is, they are experiencing no economic growth whatever. He declines to provide the full list, but in the course of the book he names several: most are in Africa, others include "Haiti, Laos, Burma [Myanmar], and the Central Asian countries, of which Afghanistan has been the most spectacular" development failure.

These are all places caught in "traps" of: recurring civil conflict, an abundance of a single natural resource whose exploitation (mostly for the benefit of outside corporations and the local corrupt elite) causes neglect of all other productive areas, being "landlocked with bad neighbors," and/or suffering "bad governance in a small country."

His question: How to get these countries out of the "traps" of undevelopment and get their economies growing?

Aid doesn't work, because too much of it is eaten up in corruption and inefficiency -- though without it, people's lives would be even worse. Collier gives several woeful examples, but also singles out a few heroes who have struggled to limit or end corruption, for example in Nigeria and Uganda.

Military intervention could work very well in those places wracked by civil war and terrorism, if only the richer countries dared to use it and if they avoided the disastrous misuse in the U.S.'s spectacular and self-defeating deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The other African countries are themselves too poor to intervene effectively in Sudan, for example, or the Congo, and would need the troops, arms and logistical support of richer countries. To be seen as legitimate, such intervention would have to come at the invitation of groups in the country or region that had wide popular support. And without raising any suspicion that the intervenors' true goal was to seize natural resources, e.g., oil. Unfortunately, in Collier's view, the U.S.'s bungling in Iraq has given intervention such a bad name that when the French, for example, send troops to a civil war zone, they are ordered to stay in barracks when the fighting breaks out. And we all remember the passivity of the Dutch UN troops in Srebrenica. UN troops in the Congo also seem to be more concerned for their own safety than that of the populace.

"By contrast, the British intervention in Sierra Leone [in 2000], Operation Palliser, has been a huge success. It has imposed security and maintained it once the RUF [rebel movement] was disposed of. The whole operation has been amazingly cheap," Collier writes (p. 127). Another example that seems to me to have been very positive (though I think Collier would disagree) was Cuban intervention in Namibia and Angola, saving both countries from far worse fates -- but of course that occurred during the Cold War, which distorted everything and made all sides' motives suspect.

"So we should intervene," says Collier, "but not necessarily everywhere. Sierra Leone rather than Iraq is the likely future of intervention opportunities in the bottom-billion countries. Look at the contrasts between the two situations. In Sierra Leone our [i.e., British] forces were invited in by the government and hugely welcomed by the local population. In Sierra Leone we could not be accused of going in for the oil, as there wasn't any." (pp. 128-9)

We also need to change laws and charters in the developed world, for example, banking secrecy regulations that permit corrupt dictators to steal their countries' wealth and hide it. (He has much more to say about laws and charters, including a proposed charter for world democracy.)

Finally, he proposes "trade policy for reversing marginalization" -- ending, for example, protective tariffs for European and U.S. agricultural interests that make it impossible for African cotton producers, etc., to compete in the only lucrative markets.

There's a lot of good stuff here, and Collier and his team keep on producing more such pointed analyses. Check out the Paul Collier home page. His statistical work is a good starting point for finding solutions, but it is only a starting point. To understand phenomena such as massive corruption, suicidal terrorism (such as in Mumbai this week), and the consequences and contradictions of rapacious global capitalism requires much more than number-crunching. The "traps" he lists are not all really comparable phenomena, though the statistical method showing only their numerical consequences make them appear so. Being landlocked with few natural resources is a geographical and historical phenomenon. As Collier sagely remarks, the reason so many such countries are in Africa is that, in other parts of the world, territories that are landlocked and have few resources don't become countries -- so that is a historical political problem, dating from the way colonial powers carved up the continent.

"The Natural Resource Trap," i.e., being "too rich" in petroleum, or diamonds, or some other valuable commodity, is not a geographical fatality at all. What makes such natural wealth a "trap" rather than an asset is obviously a problem of the way markets are organized and who has the means to exploit someone else's wealth. Bolivia under Morales, for example, is working to turn its natural gas into an asset.

But if we can think along two or more tracks at the same time, keeping in mind the statistical correlations that Collier and other investigators generate while also thinking broadly and deeply about markets and other social process in the manner of, say, Ulrich Beck, Alain Touraine and others, we may seriously address these problems.

One minor quibble: The cover declares the book a winner of the "Lionel Gelber Prize for excellence in writing on international relations." It seems to me that the writing would have been more excellent had Collier found a better metaphor than "traps" to describe those difficulties and had he not repeatedly referred, with no apparent irony, to landlocked countries as "missing the boat" (of development).

Dominican tragedy

Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (San Cristóbal, 24 de octubre de 1891 - Santo Domingo, 30 de mayo de 1961), supreme ruler of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination 31 years later, continues to mark the lives of Dominicans, including those brought up far from the island and even those born after his death -- for example novelist Julia Álvarez, born in New York in 1950, and Junot Díaz, born in Santo Domingo in 1968 and brought up in New Jersey.

Junot Díaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning book,The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead Books, 2007) is, in its structure, a classic tragedy. Óscar de León, a.k.a. Oscar Wao (an ignorant classmate's pronunciation of Oscar Wilde) is more than a fat, nerdy kid from New Jersey who is also (we are given to understand) an extraordinarily gifted science-fantasy writer. He is also the bearer of a terrible hereditary curse, the fukú, which strikes him down right at the moment when he is on the verge of triumph: he has finally got laid, and he has completed or nearly so his magnum opus -- which however disappears before his survivors can publish or even read it.

The fukú in Oscar's family was unleashed when his grandfather, a cautious but prosperous dark-skinned doctor in a small Dominican city, dared to defend his family's honor by keeping his beautiful eldest daughter out of reach of Trujillo, whose favorite sport was deflowering virgins not so much for the sexual thrill as for the excitement of humiliating their fathers and brothers. The doctor's tremulous defiance leads to a series of disasters, including his imprisonment, the deaths of his wife and two elder daughters and the abandonment of the third, the infant Belicia, who is taken in by a family that so mistreats her that she is left with terrible burn scars on her back and even more terrible resentment against -- well, just about everything. The fukú is powerfully reinforced when Beli turns into an extremely sexy teenager (big ass and tits, combined with dark skin that Dominican men associate with voluptuousness) and falls hopelessly in love with The Gangster, a hit man who, it turns out, is married to a daughter of Trujillo. The furious wife sets thugs on Beli, who try and nearly succeed in beating her to death. Hustled off to New Jersey by her protectress, an aunt she calls La Inca, Beli becomes the angry, embittered mother of Lola and Oscar, transmitting the fukú by belittling her daughter and driving Oscar to retreat into his fantasies, his writing and voracious eating.

When Beli finally Oscar off to La Inca in the Dominican Republic, he too falls hopelessly in love with an impossible partner: a prostitute who is married to a very jealous cop. Trujillo is dead by now, but the fukú of his spirit lives on, in the atrocities of police who know no law can touch them. The fukú is a national curse, taking revenge on anybody who seeks to love freely and generously. In short, the faceless minions of the fukú, dressed and armed as policemen, kill him.

All this is told by Yunior, another aspiring writer who lusts after Lola but can't stop himself from screwing other women (and thus sabotaging his relations with Lola) and becomes an odd-couple companion of fat Oscar. Yunior's speech is a mix of English, Spanglish and weirder locutions from the science fantasy literature that he, Oscar, and Junot Díaz seem to know very well.

This was not a lot of fun to read, however. At least for me. Oscar, until the very end of the book, is a colossal bore: a grotesquely fat momma's boy, so passive you want to shake him -- which is what Yunior tries to do, at least sporadically. And Oscar's inner life, his imaginary world, is populated by science fantasy novels which, if you don't know them, amount to simply puzzling references to what must be imaginary planets, heroes and evil-doers. His older sister Lola, who gets a chapter all of her own, is more attractive, a rebel against her mother, but we don't get to know her well and her rebellions don't much matter to the story. The only truly interesting characters, ones who actually take action and make things happen, are the once tortured and now despotic Belicia, a monster you can sympathize with, and the fukú, a malevolent spirit with a truly nasty sense of humor, tempting and destroying the innocents. The good things about the novel: a strong portrait of the adolescent frustration of a nerd, the gross but sometimes clever Spanglish rap of Yunior, and the reminder of true grotesque brutality bequeathed to that small country by the dictator Yunior persistently calls "the Failed Cattle Thief." The painfully detailed destructions of beatings to near-death or even death by rogue cops are based on real incidents that still occur -- we know, something like that happened to someone close to us.

In Díaz's vision, the fukú seems to have swallowed the whole country in hopeless corruption. For a view of a more buoyant, happier Dominican Republic where people are creating things and finding solutions to problems -- though still watching out for unpredictable and potentially violent cops -- check out my Estampas dominicanas: pequeño álbum hablado (in Spanish), a report on a week's adventures mostly among architects and writers, in Santo Domingo and La Vega (we were there in 2001 for the IV Seminario Erwin Walter Palm de Arquitectura y Urbanismo de América Latina y el Caribe, at the UNPHU). And then there's all that fiction by Dominicans living and writing within the country, in Spanish -- the fukú, though usually unnamed in those other works, is nevertheless frequently present. No one has been able to escape completely the curse of a dictator who killed so many, stole so much and humiliated a nation for more than thirty years.

Junot Díaz's website.

Other good fiction about the Dominican Republic and Trujillo's long shadow includes:

• Mateo, Andrés L. La balada de Alfonsina Bairán.
• Álvarez, Julia. In the Time of the Butterflies.

And the most famous of them all, a novel that Junot Díaz seems to be measuring himself against (his character Yunior frequently refers to it in sarcastic tones),

• Vargas Llosa, Mario. La fiesta del chivo.

Photo: Death mask of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, from website 30 de mayo de 1961: Ajusticiamiento del Tirano