Kings & Cabbages

This is an old book review I’ve written up: and I’m posting on the blog because, well, its better than letting it molder on my desktop.

The Original: paunchy, stolid . . . & heroic?

John Adams Review

McCullough’s John Adams is a worthy read. McCullough has the art of storytelling; he knows how to make his subject powerful, compelling and relatable. By the end, the reader sees John Adams as larger than life, but  relatable, as well. The balance between Hero and Everyman is well done; you can admire him for the sheer scale of his project and empathize with him in the thick of his struggles, personal mortifications, familial trials, and political rivalries.

What made Adams a Hero: his cause (the idea of political liberty) and his absolute (heroic) dedication to it. What made him an Everyman: McCullough’s attention to the dense web of relationships—wife, family, friends, mentors, colleagues, and rivals—that he negotiates in the course of life and work. The ending was superb . . . transforming a quote from one of the letters written by Adams on personal aggravation, disappointment, and the grand delight of life, into the man’s own epitaph. John Adams says the final word for himself, and what words. They sum up both his reflectiveness, his perspective, his humaneness in the complex emotions, and his sense of humor

The Man
It’s worth saying a few words on Adams himself. Character study is a pretty fascinating business: to chart out someone’s personal qualities, and sometimes use it as a mirror to further our own goals of personal excellence. I’m awed by Adams’  devotion to reading: it’s part of the 18th century culture of letters I guess, to see reading as a disciplined pursuit, rather than a hobby or distraction. I guess it considerably helped Adams that Youtube wasn’t around at that time.

“Drawing up reading lists and embarking on a course of study is what any man or woman of excellence must do. One must master absolutely some areas of knowledge and thought (in his case, the classics and law) not neglecting to revisit and re-inform himself of them throughout life, while all the while reading and having correspondence with individuals from diverse fields of work so that one is a truly well rounded individual.”

His correspondence with Benjamin Rush, the physician and founder of modern psychiatry, is a great example of this ethic. Also, we can learn from Adams the discipline to keep a diary and record impressions and lessons of life that might otherwise be lost like “leaves on a stormy wind.” According to McCullough, Adams was faithful diary writer, never swerving even if it were to jot down a line through the turbulent times of his life.

Paul Giamatti looks a lot better . . . he's got the resolute look down cold.

Personally, what I admire most intensely is Adams’ dedication and loyalty to relationships, no matter what the personal cost. His dedication in personally answering the thousands of letters that came during his presidential tenure is a case in point. His long friendship with Jefferson is a good illustration. The regard and attachment he cemented with Jefferson, during their tenures in the congressional committee of the Declaration of Independence, ambassadorship in France and England, and other posts, was plenty tested during the later years of presidential rivalry. In his writings and business dealings, Jefferson comes across as rather cold (hello, some of the man’s slaves were his own kids . . . whom he freed only on his deathbed). The mechanistic, Newtonian view of the universe he subscribed to as a man of the Enlightenment, in which the most powerful law was perhaps self-interest, is reflected in the way he approached human connections as well.

But even when Adams learned of Jefferson’s treachery in hiring muckrackers in a smear campaign during their presidential battles, even while he came to revise his understanding of the Jefferson behind the courtliness and gentlemanly reserve, he still maintained connections that somewhat flickered back into life during their post-retirement correspondence. He never slammed the door shut on a relationship he valued.

We can also find plenty to admire in his relationship with his wife, Abigail . . . the letters are amazing, sketching a meeting of minds and personality. Clearly, the two loved each other as husband and wife, friends, companions, helpmates: a supportive, multi-textured marriage. She was his equal in every way, and one of his most trusted advisers in the presidency; he respected her above the mutual bonds of dependence. A man’s capacity to see his wife as an equal is nothing to sneeze at, certainly not in the 18th century (nor today, despite the lipservice that’s paid to it . . . we are living in an age when the ideal woman is to be a Kim Kardashian, I suppose).

The Workers for Political Liberty
The ideas were already there. Jefferson and Adams didn’t come up with anything; we can ignore the somewhat grandiose claims of US mythmakers on the Founding Fathers inventing modern democracy. They wrote, spoke, and implemented ideas that had already been developed by Locke, Montesqieu, Hume, Hobbes, and other philosophes (who themselves took plenty of leaves out of scholarship from Africa, the Islamic world, etc . . . but that is a subject for another day).

But in Adams and Jefferson, we can also see a tremendous contradiction in these philosophies of social/political independence. First, European universalism-exceptionalism: their belief in man’s inalienable rights conflicted with Euro-tribal/national racism. It’s quite a convenient way to limit the “inalienable” clause by qualifying whose a man and who isn’t; and obviously, the peoples of Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East as man, weren’t men. Second, suffrage and political representation granted to citizens  vs with class elitism, where the “natural aristocracy” as Adams puts it, was supposed temper the impulses of the “mob” (Hobbes’s distrust of human nature, conflicting with political rights).

In fact, Adams horrified reaction to France’s revolutionary government instituting a unicameral legislature is a good example of this interesting schizophrenia. The brutal crackdowns in Shays’ Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion (essentially led by dispossessed farmers, who saw no benefits from the Revolution and did end up losing the land and moving west) is another. Jefferson’s stirring eloquence against the evils of Negro Slavery, contrasted by his refusal to free his own slaves so that they could labor for his debt on grounds of “self preservation” (but which really meant preservation of his princely lifestyle).

The later political careers of men like Adams and Jefferson are quite interesting; they show how the liberals of the Revolution became the conservatives of the new American government. The Revolution ended up replacing one elite gobbling power and resources, with another. At the end of the day, the rebellion was about the fact that the British were cutting into too great a share of the American planter/mercantile class’ profits. The revolutionary experiment was about shattering a political glass ceiling, only to swiftly replace it with an economic one. These are my critiques of McCullough’s portrait work: it’s too glowing, too caught in the golden haze of post-national romanticism. The good old days . . . the larger than life Founding Fathers . . . well, perhaps the US hasn’t corrupted the political program they set down, perhaps the later generations followed the blue print only too well.

So, I’m supposed to be a TA this coming school quarter (me, a TA! . . . who would have believed it?). Anyhow, I submitted my weekly reading plan on the selected class theme—Heroes and Superheroes. Response: apparently, I need to add more movies because surly, 18 year old math majors aren’t going to slug through reams of cultural theory.  I was particularly recommended District 9, the recent South African sci-fi flick  that’s been making waves on the indie-film circuit. I checked out the trailer and had mixed feelings:

I haven’t watched it, so it seems awfully unfair to be judgmental: but it just looks so gosh darned dark. A mix of Independence Day, Cloverfield, and The Day the Earth Stood Still, as James Berardinelli puts it. If there aliens in the universe who were to enter into our world, they should slap the global movie industry with a libel suit for the way they’ve been used for our meta-reflections into human nature.

The reason I’m fond of Star Trek (the series, not the ridiculous new movie) is the blend of optimism about science and humanity: technology is enabling, and it is a matter of collective education to progress to a point where we stop using our know how to oppress others. District 9 seems to plunge straight into our Armageddon complex: i.e., our 20th century crimes prove that we are hopelessly fallen, and the only road ahead of us is cataclysm and destruction. Umm, okay.

I get the point that District 9 makes interesting parallels with apartheid, genocide, etc. But really, do aliens have to be repulsive looking robots? Do human characters have to show up their physical ugliness by worse deeds (i.e., making the point ad infinitum that we are psychically, morally repulsive, etc?). At some level, this is a failure of imagination; we can’t imagine an alternative, and that is why we are foreclosing other possible futures. Imagination is a powerful thing, after all; its self-fulfilling.

So anyways, I’ll watch District 9 . . . and will then post my own review. But I might end up teaching it, regardless of my feelings .  . . I’m sure the kids will love it.

As a grad student, it’s impossible not to notice the massive downsizing of academia. Forced faculty/staff furloughs, bureau-induced early retirements, downsizing of departmental budgets, curtailed admissions, the American university is simply not what it used to be. As the OC register lamented, the UC system is facing transformation as  “either a factory for BA students or an online correspondence school. All at double the tuition.” Education is no longer a middle class entitlement (and a skylight for the poor): its an entrenched space of privilege surrounded by steep moats. The drawbridge will only fall for knights mounted on armored steeds; peasants need not apply. What else is downsizing?

• The prison population: cash strapped state governments can no longer keep their prisoners and are approving early release for good behavior, reduced sentences, and other tricks. Perhaps a more humane approach than reducing the budget for prison meals and the other necessities that sustain prisoners’ bodies for programs of punitive brutalization: yes, I’ve read that in news reports too. Advanced track rehabilitation has a charm to it, but the precondition is a civil society that can resocialize its (?) chastened sons and daughters. Question is, what exactly are these prisoners returning home to? What skills can they count on in an economy where resumes are becoming paper fodder? On a certain level, the government owes them this remediation: a nation that bankrolls shark-faced financial greed on its people’s despair has no moral authority to incarcerate men whose crimes are on a far far smaller scale. But … and there is always a but. What is the consequence of releasing brutalized men into an already shredded civil society?

• The sad remnants of economic/business diversity: the economic collapse has been incredibly convenient for orgs with the chops for monopolization. In particular, US banks are consolidating into behemoths that are disconnected from local regions where they developed. So far, 87 US banks have gone out of business this year. As federal money encourages bank to eat bank and government suspends anti-trust rules designed to guard against consolidation, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, and BoA have carved out vast satrapies across the nation’s economic landscape. The collapse of corporate diversity is incredibly convenient for the national security industry too, come to think of it;  gov fusion centers will find it easier to work with a few partners with their massive databases. What long arms you have, grandmother! The better to grasp you with, my dear.

• Children with homes. As cited in an article in today’s NYT, “the number of schoolchildren in homeless families appears to have risen by 75 percent to 100 percent in many districts over the last two years, according to Barbara Duffield, policy director of the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth.” The average age of homelessness in the US is now 9 years of age. In a word: who’s drawing the borders of the new Third World?

How do these numbers add up? The answer is simple: they don’t. The logic of hypercapitalism makes sense on the absolutely atomized level of the individual: but on any kind of collective level (even on the level of the one of the few approved collectivities in the US, the business community) it looks like cliff-ending roadway. How the equation is reeling, and what will the line bring in?

[Gated communities to Tent Cities].

Africa is incredibly beautiful; before going there, the only things I knew about it that Charlize Theron came from there, its the parsley bed for Hollywood stars with a yen for international motherhood, and that you have a lot of droughts and dying people there. Its stereotypical to fall in love with Africa (Isak Dinesen). Maybe I have, though? The land just pulses with life. Every land does–nature is just so uniformly miraculous–but there’s less of a corporate stamp on the landscape than in the US.

View from Louis Trichart Resthouse: Sunrise in Africa

Botswana Lake 2

And the Gorgeous Cape Town: no place ever made me want to pack up and move so bad as the Cape.

Pic of the cranes on the bay: View from Hotel

Textile stall in Cape town Market

View of Tabletop Mt. from the Car

Parrot in the Capetonian Hotel; if you tried to pet it, it would bite your fingers.

Cape Town View

Bob Marley in Cape Town Market: he's right up there with Barack Obama and Michael Jackson as the most popular stars in SA

Someone's house in the Capetown mountains; can see the bay on the one side and the mountain chain on the other

The same house; also has a swimming pool. Sighhhh . . .

More pics to come. Keep posted!

This August, I traveled to South Africa; it was an amazing trip. So much to see, so much to feel—and to eat. We were with an book tour that visited around six or seven cities–including a foray into Botswana—over a hectic 19 days. I traveled to Jo’burg, Pretoria, Louis Trichart, Mafikeng, Port Elizabeth, and Durban. As a US progressive, the most famous thing about South Africa is apartheid; the triumphant story of Nelson Mandela trumphing the brutal Afrikaan government and bringing democracy to the racial oligarchy. Most interstingly, the news on the street is that apartheid is alive and kicking; it’s been transposed from legislation into economics. South Africa still has four classes of people; coloreds (9%), whites (8%), Asians (3%), and blacks (80%). Just imagine—the smorsgaboard of racial diversity I’m used to seeing in the US distilled down to a neatly topographical four classes. Reconciliation just meant launching a tiny class of black haves, dressed with the  rhetoric of social equality; most of the black population still lives in  shanty-towns.

I’ve never seen houses like these, not even in the slums of Lahore; a mass of rickety patchwork tin huts with the clothes drying on the lines outside, the fissures and gaps and slats welcoming the play of elements. Here’s a photo taken from my cellphone from the bus; it couldn’t zoom and the quality is slightly crappy, but hey.

Not even the poor people huts in neighboring Botswana looked like that. Minorities higher up in the food chain, such as the Indians, have had luck in capitalizing on the new opportunities and venturing into mainstream. You hear a lot about how the black leaders (Jacob Zuma) are missing the opportunities the whites are giving them in changing the condition of the people, but the fact for the masses is that it’s incredibly hard to lift yourself up against the decades of legalized brutalization: apartheid afterall, was a precise system of control in the way people lived, worked and died. The bulwark of roads, infrastructure, and distribution of resources enabling it to work is still in place. One of our hosts said it best about the violence in post-apartheid society; it’s not that apartheid made society safe, it just contained the effects of the brutalization and degradation. Now,  the violence has exploded into society at mass.

Rhetoric notwithstanding, its clear to see that the haves and have-nots are still divided along racial lines. Walk into a roadside Wimpy’s by the highway (which btw, has great coffee . . . Starbucks, eat dust), and most the people sitting and dining are whites. Wealthy cities like Cape Town are mostly white. The society is a lot like the title of Franz Fanon’s book, only in reverse; black mask, white face. Promote the image of a few black capitalists, models and literati, but the hands on the scepter of the mining, logging, agricultural, minerals and precious gem corporations are still mostly white. The Indian community is an interesting reflection of the social contradictions. They feel squeezed in the middle between the white and black capitalists (the non-white races have significant tensions dividing one of the other).

(Reflections on Durant’s Age of Faith)

So many definitions of extremism. Ironically, they’re framed in the binaries of comparison so loved by public media and that are inherently—extreme. Is extremism the opposite of reason? Is it the opposite of Western?

History tells that extremism can be found in avowed atheists as well as men of God. It is not bound by any geography. It is found in the rule of policy levied by our kings and administrators as well as in lines of resistance.

Julian I credited with the Hellenistic spurt after Rome cracked like Humpty Dumpty should seem a splendid paragon of reason and balance. He loved the philosophers, was an avowed Pagan, rebuilt Greek temples smashed in the Christianization of the Roman Empire, and collected libraries. He also persecuted Christians, lusted after Persia, and created bloodbaths in his excessive animal sacrifices,

Power wants us to believe that those without power are most prone to the extreme. Rather, its stinks up hovels and palaces, revelries and seminaries, and streets and pulpits, one and all. My friend, you could be extreme if I woke up on that whim. If I was one of media oligarchs controlling world news.

Balance and tolerance are the works of civilization; its complex thing after all to remember context, to say that two apparently contradictory statements could be correct, and to admit the principle of uncertainty to the point of saying “I believe you are wrong but I will defend to the death your right of saying it” [Voltaire].

Tolerance is an act of godliness in Islam. We learn that man becomes great when he sees human will, insight, and knowledge is limited. That is the condition for speculating on alternate possibilities of truth within the frame of Divine guidance. Not that there is no truth but that he may not know it. Truth is not the property of powerful men or institutions. It just is. It was accessible to the occasional humane king on the throne as well as the great faqirs of South Asia. It’s accessible to you and me.

Every civilization sways towards the extreme when its foundational compass is broken. It could be an civil institution, a constitutional tract, or the narrative process of memory. In South Asia, civil society disappears because the family dies. In the US, the constitution splinters under the ponderous weight of hubris. “As stiff twin compasses are two/ Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show/ To move, but doth, if th’ other do.” [John Donne]

I just finished watching one of Bollywood’s mega hits of 2007: Bhool Bhulaiya. The production values were fantabulous . . . Bollywood certainly doesn’t suffer from underfunded cinema budgets. The movie opens with a young Indian prince returning home from (where else?) America with his mod scod wife to take up residence in his haunted palace, much to the horror of his extended family. I settled in for 4 hours of the normal Bollywood flick with anticipation: the lovely Vidya Balan played the modern wife, the prince was suitably good looking, there was a lovely, romantic musical number in the start. (KK, love your voice!)

But as the movie wore on, I began to feel shock. Could it be that India, after a vigorous feminist movement, India, the country of heroines like Arundhati Roy and ladies of the Narmada Dam campaign, is regressing to reactionary antidiluvianism? The ghost of a mistreated dancer from generations past seems to strike and things start going horribly wrong, especially to the young princess. The Levi-clad, laptop-comfy prince obviously doesn’t believe in supernatural hoo-haa. He does apparently believe in prosecution on suspicion, accusing his jilted cousin (’cause, losing a hot guy like him is enough to drive any chick psychotic). Next, a famous Indian American psychiatrist—Akshay Kumar going for comedy but coming off as buffonish—is called in to treat the cousin. On his expert advice, she is then shunned by her family and locked up in a room. And when we are treated to a indigestible psychological explanation for how it’s the young princess who is possessed by the ghost of the murdered dancer, there is painful sequence in which a pundit called in for exorcism actually strikes the crazed lady with a stick. That sound you hear? That’s The Feminist Mystique going up in flames.

India is trying to recreate the ideal Aryan culture that it believes it lost with the coming of Islam to India (a narrative processed straight from the history books of British Orientalists). I’m from that part of the world and have been watching Hindi movies forever, but now, I actually have to read the subtitles. Not that it’s surprising, what with Bollywood being one of the major vehicles to Sanskritize the language of the subcontinent. But with the culture and traditions, patriarchy is also making a comeback. This is where you have women touch their husbands’ feet in a recognition of their godhead (as in, pati dev), where lower classes deferred the value of their whole existence to the comfort and desires of the upper castes, and where respect for parents is conflated to a situation in which they have an unhealthy degree of influence in their children’s lives: Ekta Kapoor’s soap serials, anyone?

Traditional forms of authority are given uncritical validation. In Bhool Bhulaiya, you have an ecstatic ceremony for the prince’s return, where all the villagers turn out to watch the royal return to his palace in a carriage drawn by a white horse and get coronated with a diamond decked turban. That’s really nice, except India is apparently a democracy. And his wife, before the musical number says something that roughly translates as: “I’m so blessed you have made this unworthy thing [nacheez] to be your Rani.” I’m blessed I didn’t have dinner before I started watching this flick or it would have gone through an unpleasant trajectory.

With the separation of India and Pakistan, both nations have tried to turn their back on what was a brilliant shared culture and tried to ethnicize their shared heritage. So, here, you have Gandhi-esque pastoral scenes of village pundits meditating under trees, rituals at the holy river Ganga (presumably . . . its nice that the prince’s state is located in a part where the Ganga flows through), Bengali dance sequences, all set in the backdrop of Mughal architecture with those unmistakable arches and embellished wall paintings. There’s also the obligatory Muslim song sequence, where Muslim forms of worship are portrayed in an elaborate (and usually ritualistically wrong) sequences that serves to exoticize and other Islam: setting Islam apart as something strange and foreign, not a force that was integrated with the very fabric of the subcontinent for hundreds of years. Only as far back as Umrao Jaan and Pakeezah, Hindi films represented Indian Muslims with a naturalism that could only come from home. Now, we’re a fashion that’s slated to go out of date.

For me, Bhool Bhulaiya is exactly what the name suggests; something that deserves bhool-jana (forgetting).

The past week, I went to see The Great Debators with a friend. The opening shot announced that this was indeed a “big” film; the smooth, panoramic shot of the Southern Texas’ forests and mangroves not only set the scene, but spoke volumes about the production values, the expertise, and the money behind the movie. Clearly Oprah Winfrey and Denzel Washington also felt the need for a change from the low budget movies in which black men inevitably end up cavorting around in women’s clothes or fat suits (sometimes both at the same time). Thank God.

James Berardinelli sees the movie as the epic struggle of Wiley College’s talented black debate team to rise up against the racism that infected the 1930s South. The heart of darkness unveiled in The Great Debaters is of course, the lynching scene; as Melvin Tolson drives his team to a competition, they come across a gathering of white rurals congregating around the charred body of a young African American hung on a tree. “Was he a farmer, was he a sharecropper?” wonders one of the debaters later on. “They lynch people in Texas,” the young James Farmer Jr. tells his Harvard audience in the concluding debate. True, the ignorance and brutality of South deserves to be recorded as one of the darker chapters in human history. At a salon I recently attended, we saw printouts of historical lynch scenes where some members of the the white audience congregating around lynchings were actually smiling in glee. Clearly, there is no darkness like the darkness in the heart of man. Read the rest of this entry »

It was like a replay of another celebrity death. As when Diana died, there was the morning wakeup, the hurried relating of the news, and shortly afterwards, the television blare filtering through the house. Montages of an elegant woman killed in a brutal fashion. Death’s shock factor of “now she’s here and now she’s not”, never so vivid as when someone famous passes. Dark hints of political conspiracy or terrorist reapers evoked. All this might have been shared with any other viewer of the morning news. But for a Pakistani American, there is an added dimension to the shock. A staple of the Pakistani political world had been shot down. It was almost as if Coca Cola had been killed.

Condolences have poured in from world leaders. Mostly, she is portrayed as a martyr, a fallen redeemer of Pakistan’s democratic soul, a toppled champion. Benazir was at her attractive 54 year old prime and pop culture is prone to painting her passing as a Joan of Arc going down in a blaze of political virtue. The emotion and violence surging across Pakistan, with brown skinned people weeping, shouting, rioting, seems to support the dapper mourning of the international political leaders. But does it?

Benazir was an able television president. She looked good; her austere features, regal bearing, and erudition made her standout from the regular mass of beefy and barely literate Pakistani politicos. Her father’s roti, kapra, makaan rhetoric gave her some ability in the line of populist outreach. Her training in Radcliff College and Oxford University in the 1970s gave her requisite familiarity with discourses of democracy and feminism that are the passports for winning international legitimacy since the United States became a world superpower. She made a far better impression when giving speeches in English rather than in Urdu.

Benazir’s image as a feminist leader injected a splash of exoticism to a highly traditional formula of power building followed by third world women political leaders. The daughter of a landlord family in Pakistan’s Sindh province, she cemented her alliance to Pakistan’s traditional elite by marrying Asif Ali Zardari, a landlord from the neighboring Baluchistan province. She was also instrumental in reinforcing Pakistan’s status as an American ally in the post-Cold War era. Her two terms as Prime Minister were darkened by charges of corruption. As reported by a 1998 New York Times article, a corruption inquiry found over $100 million channeled in real estate and foreign bank accounts.

Many of her ardent supporters became incredibly disillusioned by her administration’s corruption, preferential politics, and Pakistan’s growing indebtedness to the World Bank and IMF. While she emphatically denied the corruption charges, her lavish lifestyle in the United States and England was compromising. While exiled, she supported the United States’ 1998 missile attacks on Afghanistan, and on her 2007 return, promised to crackdown on terrorists and extremists in her country. Given the massive political will that Musharraf has lost through the the army’s summary arrests, detentions, and various raids on the citizenry in the name of the War on Terror, its unclear how her contribution to Pakistan’s people would have been distinguished from the Army General’s. This is of course, if we evaluate work for democratization as building true representative institutions and safeguarding people’s civic liberties, rather than merely a round of elections.

An informal poll in the people of Pakistan before this tragic event would have revealed a desire to elect anyone who was not Musharraf. If this poll probed deeper, it would uncover a wish for a true and independent leader unstained by scandal and betrayed hopes. The real tragedy of the Pakistan is not that democracy has been snuffed out by the death of a charismatic politician. It is in the growing fear and uncertainty in the people. It is in the downward spiraling quality of life, where cooking oil has become a luxury and jobs and opportunities for education for the children have graduated from being a dream to a chimera. It is in the iron clamp on their rights by a General charged with lassoing in quotas of terrorists by the US government and still accused of unsatisfactory results. Benazir’s death is a tragedy, but more so is the lives lost in the mayhem. The tragedy of Pakistan is in the conditions of a people whose political sponsors are losing the game of nations.