Friday Roundup

On July 1, 2011 By JonathanIn Culture, Current Events, Politics, WarLeave a comment

George Orwell and Ideology: ‘George Orwell is paradoxical in the best sense: he is beyond doxa, outside the camps and categories of conventional political discourse. Admiring critics snip and squeeze, but Orwell will not be tailored into an ideology. An anticommunist nonpareil who never doubted that it was necessary to support the United States against the USSR, Orwell in 1948 expressed a preference for Henry Wallace, that scandal to Cold Warriors. In fact, although Orwell called himself a socialist, he scorned both socialism and capitalism as those terms are ordinarily understood, because he rejected the modern political doctrine which is the foundation of both.’

Our Corporate Military: An excellent rebuttal to Nicholas Kristoff’s horrid article in the NYT a couple weeks back. ‘Aside from that, I think Kristoff has it exactly backward: The military is almost a parody of American corporate culture. It’s riddled with hierarchy, with Taylorist/Weberian bureaucratic work rules and standard operating procedures, and all the irrationality that goes with them. The only difference is, the pointy-haired bosses wear a different kind of uniform. If you’ve ever seen the movie “Brazil,” or read Dilbert on a regular basis, you get the idea.’

Hilaire Belloc on Property: Old but still quite good critique of industrial capitalism and a presentation of an alternative and better world. As I’ve written before, the basic tenets, and many of the techniques and and strategies, of distributivist thought and praxis are more or less the same as market anarchism and mutualism. Our primary differences lie in the role of the state: Belloc and Chesterton were, I think it is fair to say, ‘minarchists’ of sorts, envisioning a highly constricted, highly democratic state, but still a state, with a role in securing the new economic order, and a lesser role in maintaining it. Otherwise, distributivism and market anarchism are very much in agreement about what a better world would look like: an economy and society made up of small-holders, small firms with distributed production (on this note, see Kevin Carson’s A Low Overhead Manifesto), widespread worker-control and cooperative firms in situations where large industry is still required, and deep networks of mutual aid and support.

Mao Inc. China’s Terribly Successful Communist Party Turns 90: ‘China’s communists have not been shy. Little is sacred, while almost everything can be bought, even the Great Hall of the People. When the party is not in session in the magnificent building, with its more than 300 rooms and enormous paintings, companies like Ford and Kentucky Fried Chicken can rent space at astronomical prices.’

Why Does the War Go On? ‘Tens of thousands of American troops will remain for at least three more years, some of them will be maimed or killed, and Obama offered no good reason why.’

Friday Roundup

On June 24, 2011June 27, 2011 By JonathanIn Culture, Current Events, WarLeave a comment

On Anagorism: ‘As a free market socialist and a free market anarchist, I simply seek the kind of society Kropotkin described, in which the state is replaced by voluntary associations and federations of such associations. Whether people associate through the cash nexus, the informal economy, or the gift economy, is entirely up to them.’

African Village Uses Tech to Fight Off Rape Cult: This is mutualism in action: in the absence of even the semblance of ‘official’ State security, the enterprising people of Obo are working out ways to resist the ‘primitive accumulation State’ of the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Planting Seeds of Hope: How Sustainable Activism Transformed Detroit: ‘And they lament that small dialogues—between youth and elders, between neighbors, between people of different backgrounds, and between activists from various cultural and political traditions—cannot match the force of large demonstrations involving tens of thousands. What they don’t understand is that our goal in creating Detroit Summer was to create a new kind of organization. We never intended for it to be a traditional left-wing organization agitating masses of youth to protest and demonstrate. Nor did we intend that it become a large nonprofit corporation of the sort that raises millions of dollars from government, corporations, and foundations to provide employment and services to large populations.’

Government Attempt to Get Dirt on Prominent Anti-War Blogger: Slow-creep repression of dissent. Not really surprising, though.

Consumer Group Asks Congress to Fight Catch Shares: Another instance of ‘privatization’ that is in fact a socialization of costs and a privatization of profits, favoring already powerful and wealthy entities.

Friday Roundup

On June 17, 2011June 17, 2011 By JonathanIn Current Events, Politics, WarLeave a comment

Yes, It is a Police State: ‘Since 9/11 the biggest threat to the American people is not radical Muslim terrorists, nor deranged domestic terrorists, but the terrorists with the blue uniforms, badges, and body armor. Their weapons of mass destruction are not bombs, but state-approved guns, latex-gloved hands, and a profound disregard for our rights. Until we stand up and say, “Enough!”these terrorists will keep winning and our rights will continue to be lost.’

A Trojan Horse in ‘Higher Education’: Nothing terribly new here, but still good analysis with considerable justified heat: ‘higher ed’ as we know it has long been a racket, the dual streams of state and big capital flowing in and out of the academy, leaving it in ruins.

Prison Break: ‘Certainly the incarceration of people who have violated no rights is an important part of America’s prison problem. But I don’t think that covers all of it. There are also moral problems, I think, with the incarceration of rights-violators — which means that high incarceration rates are going to be something worth complaining about even when the prisoners are guilty as hell.’

‘Public Service?’ I’m Taking my Business Elsewhere: It’s not the sort of service anyone needs; it’s certainly not indispensable as our progressive friends seem to think.

U.S. Special Ops Troops Deployed in Mexico, Leaked Briefing Confirms: Not really all that surprising.

When Only the ‘Crazies’ See the Bank Bailout for What it Is: A good leftist review of one of the American State’s most spectacular interventions on behalf of financial ‘capital’ (one hesitates to call it capital, which implies something substantial…): ‘From the outset in 2009, the Obama Plan has been to re-inflate the Bubble Economy by providing yet more credit (that is, debt) to bid housing and commercial real estate prices back up to pre-crash levels, not to bring debts down to the economy’s ability to pay. The result is debt deflation for the economy at large and rising unemployment – but enrichment of the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population as economies have become even more financialized.’

Papers, Please

On July 2, 2009 By JonathanIn Culture, Current Events, Philosophy, WarLeave a comment

One of the most effective means of State control is the relentless production of required papers, permits, documents, and so on, from business licenses to drivers licenses to Social Security numbers. When a person has not met the vast number of government requirements the State has the “right” to harass and commit violence against that person. And since we are taught, virtually from birth on, that filling out papers and carrying our documents and meeting every jot and tittle of government regulations is not only necessary to avoid physical pain, but also morally good (how would society function without it?), we rarely question the value or justice of the endless regulations and documentation the State requires. The documentation regime- an integral part as well in the bureaucratic sense of totalizing control, in which every object under the State’s rule is documented and accounted for- is continually expanding, as the State seeks to extend its tentacles into every last aspect of life. And once established, one can hardly just decide to ignore it; in this both State and Capital are willing partners, as government documentation becomes necessary for transactions in the “private” sphere. Part of this, of course, is just the State’s desire to expropriate as much wealth as possible; hence anything that is “undocumented” is evil. Undocumented workers and undocumented transactions generate little or no revenue for the State and are hence evil. And when persons and entities ignore the documentation regime, they become less visible to the State and increasingly harder to control. Most importantly, when we ignore the documentation regime, when our lives are not tied into the control mechanisms and papers of the State and Capital, we begin to feel less a part of their systems, and begin to feel that our existence is not so directly tied to their existence. We begin to question, consciously or unconsciously, the legitimacy of an all-embracing State.

All of that is apropos of this article: Texas pastor protesting traffic stop arrested. The pastor and his congregation made several “mistakes” vis-a-vis the State. The accused driver lacked one of the many offical papers required for movement; as any centralized State knows, controlling and regulating human movement is absolutely vital to maintaining power. The church, apparently, also lacked proper papers, in this case an “occupancy license” required to hold services. Again, undocumented anythings are a danger to the State, even- perhaps especially- churches. Just ask the Chinese State- properly documented, “law-abiding” churches are not a threat; it is the congregations that refuse to be absorbed into the system that pose the true threat. Finally, the pastor made the mistake of a genuine protest: he was directly confronting the excercise of State power. Protest in the sense of marching on the Mall or something is no threat to the State; it serves in fact as a catharsis, an outlet for popular anger. Some governments, of course, savage all forms of protest, from petitioners to street marchers; other, arguably more savvy ones, integrate protest. But only within limits. This pastor overstepped those limits and met the consequences. For while governments, here and everywhere, largely rely upon the built-in acceptance and acquiesence to their policies, the threat of real physical violence is ultimately the source of power and authority. Papers or pepperspray, or worse.

One last point- the documentation regime is only part of the tendency, on both the part of governments and big capital, to reduce the person to a number, a aggregate of data, for purposes of control and marketing. Gabriel Marcel, the Catholic existentialist of the last century, wrote in several of his works about this tendency of the modern world to subsume all other aspects of human identity in offical information and data; the tendency continues and has arguably increased in the internet age, particularly for marketers. However, the internet also poses a challenge,since it is considerably harder to control, and is hence the cause of endless anxiety for governments from Washington to Beijing. At any rate, the documentation, person-reducing tendencies of State and Capital stand in stark relief to the iconic, “personalist” ideology of the Church. An icon, for example, is not a passport photo; it is not a reduction of the person into a mass of statistics and numbers. Hagiography is not, to the frustration of historians for the past couple of centuries, raw information, but is instead closer to a hymn or poem directed at the saint being honoured and held up as an example of transformed, Deified humanity. Even monastic life, which at first glance seems to be the most regulated aspect of Christian life, reveals a surprising latitute unallowable by modern governments, as abbots and spiritual directors mold their judgment and suggestions for each individual under their tutaleage. As the letters of two solitaries and spiritual directors from sixth century Gaza, Barsanuphius and John, reveal, the “rule” for one spiritual disciple may be entirely different from another, as one disciple is encouraged to fast more or pray a certain number of times, while another is directed in an entirely different manner. John and Barsanuphius, of course, are not relativists in any way; rather they recognize the differences between different people, different states (in Sufism a similar practice is embraced under the idea of differing maqam, stations of the spiritual life, that vary from one person to another).

Finally, the presence of Christ in the Church is in general disruptive to attempts by both State and Capital to exert their control; again, the most expansively totalitarian regimes of recent years understood this quite well and sought to control and co-opt the Faith as much as they could. Jesus does not carry papers; or rather, His “documentation” in the world ultimately moves in channels different from and ultimately uncontrollable by any temporal State. The central action of the Eucharist breaks into a world of data and person-control, as an undocumented Savior offers His Body and Blood for each person in His Body, food and drink “without cost,” in Isaiah’s borderless gathering of the peoples on the Mountain of God. From Baptism to Eucharist, Christ offers an identity rooted, not in regulations or marketing or fear or lust, but in a Living Savior Who unites each person with Himself and calls Him to theosis, to transformation in God. And surely anyone genuinely living the baptised life, inhabiting the world not of endless documents and statistics and advertising campaigns, is a far greater threat than any violent revolutionary or marching protestor.

Criminalizing Everyone

On June 28, 2009June 28, 2009 By JonathanIn Culture, Current Events, North & South, Peace, WarLeave a comment

A few posts back I discussed the disturbing trend in some parts of the American political landscape to categorize all “right-wingers” as being in some way inherently dangerous and violent. The more radical “liberal” voices in America have called for surveillance, pre-emptive arrests, and other measures that only a few months ago they would have decried. But a few months ago the other Party was in power. Now their Party is in power, and that makes all the things Bush et al did completely kosher. Because one’s own Party can do no wrong.

But I digress. Going back to the subject at hand, part of this trend to vilify “conservative” or “right-wing” elements includes such glorious acts of legislation as the “Hate Crimes Bill” that Alexander Cockburn has rightly condemned for its brazen assaults on free speech, as well as erasing the whole idea of equality before the law. Some animals are more equal than others. Measures like “hate crime” legislation, as well as the whole cultural milieu that reeks with disgust and loathing for lesser Americans- that is, conservative, right-wing, rural, uneducated, excessively religious, and so on; Americans who do not share the cultural, religious, and moral norms of the American elite and their followers. Many of the “wrong sort” of Americans are in the South, and many of them are lower-middle class or poorer whites, but not all. African-American Pentecostals in northern urban areas are just as frightening to the Great and the Good, though harder to attack and loathe due to their membership in one of the ostensibly “protected” groups.

But the usual target, or intended target anyway, of elite loathing and disgust is probably white, probably lower-middle class, somewhat educated perhaps (but not sufficiently in any case), “reactionary,” and dangerous. Particularly when they have guns- and God knows a bunch of them have guns. Sometimes their guns and their Bibles meet, and that’s a perfect storm of scariness, as in this weekend’s (rather bizarre to be sure) Kentucky guns in the church-house event. Everything about the situation is incomprehensible and frightening to many other Americans- the liberal elite, the “creative classes,” the Great and the Good in general. Read the comments at the New York Times article- the readers hailing from the East Coast, West Coast, Midwest maybe, but mostly the urban, elite, and educated seaboards- to gauge the levels of fear and disgust. The basic drift: these people are dangerous. They have guns, they have Bibles, they are not like us.

It follows then that these people, these backwards, Bible-toting and deer-killing crackers, need, at the very least, regulating, controlling. Some of their actions- whether it’s “hate speech” or gun-toting or child-raising- must be criminalized. Some of them need to be locked up, whether it’s as part of the war on hate or the war on guns or whatever.

Criminalizing vast swathes of the American population is of course nothing new. Many of the inhabitants of our inner cities and our outer rural hinterlands are part of a vast criminalized class as part of the war on drugs; occasional stabs at “reform” are occasionally made, to be sure, and some states are trying to reel back the extent of their criminalization of so much of society, but only because of rising costs and declining revenues. No one is particularly worried about the fact that we have consigned so many people to be perpetual “criminals,” always subject to the violence of the State and the violence of the drug-market and all its related evils, from broken households to prostitution to unstable inner-city economies. No one is worried because the inhabitants of this criminal class are also the wrong sort of people, are unattractive people, and, crucially, right and left pretty much agree on this. The left might moderate its language and sometimes its actions with weak calls to “reform” or greater emphasis on “rehabilitation,” but that’s about it. Undocumented immigrants comprise another “criminal class,” but their criminalization is at least somewhat more controversial, probably because many “illegal immigrants” are, after all, rather hard to condemn: hard workers, thrifty, family-oriented, and perhaps even physically attractive (certainly more so than, say, an inner city hooker or meth addict).

But to the already existing criminalized classes, some in this country would very much like to add another: the gun-toters, Bible-thumpers, intolerant hicks, however you want to label them. And at least some of the gears are in motion, certainly the ideological.Will the effort to create a new criminalized class succeed? Perhaps. But at the same time it could well overburden the system: there will increasingly be few people left in America who have not been criminalized, as whole states are in effect consigned to the outer darkness, their inhabitants condemned by the Great and the Good for any number of infractions. And the newly criminalized are unlikely to just lay down their guns- literally and metaphorically- and accept their lot; even more unlikely are they to reform their thoughts and accept their legislated proper behaviour. Rather, one should expect “blowback,” just as our meddling and cultural imperialism in other parts of the world have had less than pleasant consequences. Treat anyone like a colonial subject and he will react; if you continuously inject violence into a situation do not be surprised at the results. The strain of criminalizing so many in so much of American could perhaps prove to be too much for the system to bear- how many people can one nation realistically lock up? How much of the population can the State directly antagonize before it loses its ability to control and coerce all of them? How long before blowback, violent or otherwise? To be clear, I do not want to suggest that we will face, say, vast swathes of rural Southern America producing terrorists or something, anymore than most Muslims have become raging jihadis after years of American provocation. Nor is it likely- though I may be wrong- that the criminalization of “right-wingers” will ever reach the extent of the criminalization associated with the drug-war. But in the event of any ongoing campaign for mass criminalization, the results will not be pretty, and will certainly not contribute to a more decent and more just society.

Rising From the Ashes

On June 3, 2009June 3, 2009 By JonathanIn Culture, Current Events, Gospel, History, North & South, Peace, Politics, Travel, WarLeave a comment

I spent part of this week in and around Atlanta, the ever-expanding capital of the ‘New South.’ I’d not been to Atlanta in years, other than in passing while traveling; this week I wandered around the city some, both intentionally and unintentionally, since I didn’t get a hold of a decent map until the last day of my visit. It’s a big city; most of my experience in urban navigation has been in ‘Old World’ cities where my means of transport was my own two feet, and in New Orleans, a city set apart from pretty much every other North American city I’ve visited. Atlanta is, I suppose, the South’s paradigmatic example of the modern city- big, ever-expanding, new and shiny (in the up-scale parts anyway, never mind the poor parts for the moment), with precious little of any considerable age, even for North America. Of course, General Sherman bears some blame for that, but not very much; there wasn’t a whole lot there back when my unfortunate ancestors were getting shot up at Kennesaw Mountain and Peachtree Creek.

There are of course some sections of the city that are fairly old and historic, and feel it. Auburn Avenue, which was the center of African-American life and commerce after the imposition of segregation in the early twentieth century, has some wonderful old and funky buildings; the Episcopal Methodist Church with its hodge-podgy neo-Gothic and big blue neon ‘Jesus Saves’ sign on the steeple is singularly wonderful, and is still in good shape. Further up the street, the Park Service has purchased and renovated a whole neighborhood worth of old buildings associated with Martin Luther King Jr., who was born and spent his boyhood in one of the old houses. But the stretch of street running back from the historic site is, with all its lovely old structures and venerable history, pretty decrepit. As my friend and I walked up from downtown towards the MLK site, we were approached by a homeless man offering an impromptu tour, followed by a request for donations. The whole area is now run-down, boarded up buildings and heavily armoured likker and mini grocery stores here and there; our homeless tour-guide told us he lived back up under an overpass of the interstate which now dissects the area.

The historic site is quite nice itself however, a sudden imposition in the immediate landscape, neatly trimmed shrubs, a rose garden, a fairly new looking museum, as well as a new Ebeneezer Baptist Church (the old one is still there, though it is at present closed up for renovations). There are signs up in the National Historic Site warning visitors against giving anything to ‘panhandlers,’ reminding one of signs in less urban Park Service sites prohibiting the feeding of bears.

The area went down, as we say, in the late sixties; before it had been a thriving center of African-American businesses, churches, and residences, with it’s own economy and tradition of mutual aid. If the segregationist regime rejected their money, the entrepreneurs of Auburn Avenue reasoned, it was their loss- so they built up their own economy, and thrived. Dr. King’s family came out of this milieu, and the determination and communal (but deeply personalist) sense of mutual aid and support would go a long ways towards the successful challenging of the segregationist regime and its systematic but ultimately untenable oppression. This was one of the things that struck me most as I looked at the exhibits in the museum, and has always struck me about the civil rights movement, particularly in its early stages- it was community-based, and broad-based, with people of many cultural and socio-economic backgrounds and standings coming together in a truly powerful movement. The men and women who challenged the segregationist State did not have to resort to bombs and guns; they had built up lives and communities powerful enough to take on even a violent and deeply entrenched regime and succeed, without turning to violence and oppression themselves.

Returning to the gritty shot-up feeling streets of which Auburn Avenue is only one, one has to ask- what happened, and what can anybody do about it? Auburn Avenue itself is an icon of what has been happening in our cities and towns for years now, what is happening right now as I write. Desegregation had its part, of course- African-Americans were no longer restricted to their own self-contained economy, and could take part in the wider economy and succeed there- leaving behind in many cases places like Auburn Avenue. But this is hardly the only explanation, or even the primary one. At the same time as desegregation was going into affect other programs, Federal and otherwise, were coming on-line, many under the title ‘urban renewal.’ As one line was erased new ones were laid down, often with the best of intentions, but often resulting in Federally-supported ghettos. The drug war has only escalated and grown more violent and more deeply entrenched; the ever expanding field of operations of the Mexican drug cartels only harbours more violence and destruction, and it’s not up-scale gated communities suffering the brunt of the violence and the corruption and rot.

There are other problems as well- job losses, poor education, and so on- but they all share the quality that few of them are exactly intentional. Much ‘urban renewal’ was meant to help the poor, at least ostensibly, or was at least supported by people who wanted to do good. Of course, plenty of it was deliberate in partionining off the poor, especially but not exclusively minority poor, from the elite enclaves. There is ridiculous highway a few blocks from my neighborhood here in Knoxville that, I am pretty sure, was built primarily to separate downtown from the much poorer, and darker-skinned, east-side neighborhoods; maybe there were no such intentions, but the effect is the same. The drug war is supported by well-meaning people, and I am sure at least some of those carrying it out have only good intentions and genuinely desire to do good. The damage is the same though.

The problem is further presented though- the evils and problems afflicting places like Auburn Avenue are so various that they are hard to fight against. There is no segregationist regime that we can unite against and battle; there are no straight-forward targets, as much as we would like for there to be. There is less ground, too, for people to stand on, as so many urban- and otherwise- communities are shot-up and worn out. The work that is needed- and here I start to really preach to myself as much as anyone else- is personal, is on the ground, and is probably not going to yeild immediate or impressive results any time soon, maybe ever. The great failing of the American elite- who are often very well-intentioned people- is to generally stay safely away from the poor and the decimated places, while sympathizing for them, in the abstract, and proposing solutions that are sure to work in theory, in principal. But while there are some genuine general policy solutions no doubt- the drug war comes to mind- they are only a part of the solution, probably not a terribly important part.

When it comes down to it we have to stop thinking in terms of helping the poor, or saving the inner city, as if the poor were a different species or something (albeit an endangered and valorized one), capable of being saved through the right policy enactments or a sufficiently large charity pay-out. In the end, working to end the violence and destruction of our cities is a struggle for ourselves; it is not a case of our aiding the poor and downtrodden in their struggle; we are all in this together, my struggle is your struggle. I cannot cut myself off from the rest of the world; my sin afflicts my neighbor and it afflicts me, just as the violence and deprivation of endless war and seeping poverty are part of my struggle, against the violence and evil in my heart and the violence and evil that come from outside my heart.

Our Auburn Avenues are not going to be magically transformed overnight; if there is going to be change, it must begin in our hearts- my heart- and work outward, person by person, community by community, in knowledge of each person and place’s particulars, and with love for them, love that, in imitation of the love of God, offers itself in becoming one with the sufferer, by becoming a co-sufferer, from the inside, with all the danger and dirt and darkness that comes with being inside of a suffering world, a suffering humanity.

Pro-War is Not Pro-Life!

On January 14, 2009January 14, 2009 By JonathanIn Culture, Gospel, Orthodoxy, Peace, War1 Comment

From Metropolitan Jonah’s message for Sanctity of Life Sunday:

All the sins against humanity, abortion, euthanasia, war, violence, and victimization of all kinds, are the results of depersonalization. Whether it is “the unwanted pregnancy”, or worse, “the fetus” rather than “my son” or “my daughter;” whether it is “the enemy” rather than Joe or Harry (maybe Ahmed or Mohammed), the same depersonalization allows us to fulfill our own selfishness against the obstacle to my will. How many of our elderly, our parents and grandparents, live forgotten in isolation and loneliness? How many Afghan, Iraqi, Palestinian and American youths will we sacrifice to agonizing injuries and deaths for the sake of our political will? They are called “soldiers,” or “enemy combatants” or “civilian casualties” or any variety of other euphemisms to deny their personhood. But ask their parents or children! Pro-war is NOT pro-life! God weeps for our callousness.

Moral Clarity on Gaza

On January 10, 2009 By JonathanIn Current Events, Peace, WarLeave a comment

Steve has a good post on a the ‘war’ in Gaza (the conflict is so one-sided it’s difficult to refer to as a war): Moral clarity, moral ambiguity, moral confusion.

US mainstream media coverage of this conflict is an almost case-book example of war propaganda: part of this is due to the IDF’s ban on foreign journalists entering Gaza, but it’s also very much reflective of American media attitudes and willing compliance with the ideology of American foreign policy, of which the Palestinian conflict is but one- very public- facet. After all, as bears repeating, many of the weapons Israel is unleashing on the people of Gaza are courtesy of Uncle Sam, by way of the compliant American tax-payer.

God have mercy on us all.

O Tempora

On December 8, 2008 By JonathanIn Culture, Current Events, Politics, Read, War1 Comment

Two articles with contents one would be hard pressed to make up, and both of which I could image being the content of Wendell Berry’s nightmares.

First, the editors of the Oxford Junior Dictionary decided to take out lots of old, good, pleasant-sounding words having to do with God, the countryside, and history, and replace them with horrible nasty words having to do with technology, pop culture, and colourless academic/policy hack speak. One need hardly look further for a snapshot of the destructiveness of post-industrial capitalist culture, really.

Some of the words removed: mistletoe, goblin, altar, bishop, monastery, monk, psalm, saint, sin, duchess, duke, decade, heron, kingfisher, lark, ox, oyster, thrush, weasel, apricot, ash, county, cowslip, fern, hazelnut, primrose, sheaf, walnut, willow.

And some included: Blog, voicemail, attachment, database, cut and paste, celebrity, creep, citizenship, EU, brainy, boisterous, bungee jumping, committee, compulsory, biodegradable, dyslexic, food chain, trapezium, alliteration, curriculum, classify, block graph.

Of course, I doubt very much the editors have any particular animosity towards God or saint or trees or countryside. Rather, for them, those things, being impractical, have no place in a child’s vocabulary. They defend the removals by arguing that Britain is now a multifaith, multiculture society- but then why not include words having to do with other faiths and cultures? And why remove the countryside words? No, rather, what they meant is Britain is a society in which either no goes to church or into the countrside, or rather, they ought not, and they certainly aren’t to be expected to read or write about it.

Second, it turns out that big government ‘conservatism’ (what are we conserving, again? Oh, right, big capital!) is a jolly fine idea, really, writes Bill Kristol. Small isn’t beautiful– it’s not very practical nor very likely, not unlike those outdated words the wise Oxford editors jettisoned. Of course, not just any big-government is meant- no, while silly ‘liberals’ want to repair roads and bridges and schools, what we need are bigger and better bombs and bullets. Why bother about building bridges when you could be blowing up bridges in other people’s countries? Yes, Mr Kristol tells us, government should be limited- limited to war, destroying domestic freedom, and saving corporate capitalism.

Strangeness in the Stacks, And On Seeing (And Refusing to Hate)

On December 6, 2008December 6, 2008 By JonathanIn Culture, Current Events, East & West, Gospel, Islam, Peace, War1 Comment

This afternoon I made a quick run from my office to the library to retrieve a couple books on early Islamic historiography. Normally this sort of book retrival is as uneventful as one would probably imagine it to be. Not this afternoon. I come to the correct section- the DS38s- an area I’ve been in and out of this semester, and remove a volume. I notice that a piece of paper is stuck in it, which I remove (one time I found five dollars in a library book and often hope I will find some more, though so far no more luck, though I did find 200 dirhams on a dirt road outside of Fes in March…). I open the folded paper, and am greeted with the words (I promise you none of this is made up): ‘Attention Muslim Visitors to America! Here are rules for getting along in America.’

The paper then proceeds to list, um, rules for Muslims in America, which include such enlightening things as: ‘You do not have the right to enslave anyone at any time for any reason [shoot!]. This is going on in Mauritania, in Darfur, in Sudan [somewhere between Darfur and Mauritania, right?] and elsewhere in the Moslem world. Muslims must approve, since they don’t even protest against it.’

‘You do not have the right to riot or pillage…’

‘You come here to expecting to practice your religion, yet your home country persecutes other religions. You should be grateful to this country instead of hostile. Until your country [the Moslem one, I guess- that really big one you know] cleans its own house, it has no business criticizing America for anything. Respect other people’s rights in every way or leave.’

Etc. After recovering from the shock that we’re apparently not allowed to riot and pillage, and therefore having to immediately adjust my evening plans, I looked around in the DS38s, and found more of these fliers stuck in books. In one book (a translations of the early Islamic historian al-Tabari’s work on the ‘Abbasids) there were two copies (everyone knows terrorists are really into those crazy cat ‘Abbasid caliphs). However, there were no fliers in books outside of the DS38s, which was perhaps the most bizarre part of it. I didn’t think at the time to look in the section of the stacks with the books on Islamic theology, jurisprudence, etc., so I’ve no idea if these fliers were more widely distributed. Why the DS38s- did our zealous defender of America suppose those horrid foreign Muslims mainly read historiographical work? One can only speculate. At any rate, it was an all around strange experience, not least for the reminder that my particular field of study- medieval Islam and Eastern Christianity- has all sorts of very immediate inroads in everyday life, even here in East Tennessee. It was also a reminder- not that one is needed- that for many people in this country, their only image of Muslims is the violent fundamentalist, the crazy bearded man in a cave, the zealot gunman in Mumbai, or some vague (heavily bearded and turbaned) figure flitting about a madrasa. This is the image they project on all Muslims, everywhere, including those who live and work and worship here.

I don’t know what it’s like for Muslim immigrants here in East Tennessee; a few weeks ago I talked with a young man from Bulgaria who had been working in Pigeon Forge on a temporary visa. While not Muslim, he had an accent and looked ‘Eastern’; he said that occasionally people would come in and speak in their most affected local accent and in general try to yank his chain, knowing that English was his second language. I had a roommate earlier in the year who was working at a JiffyLube out in North Knoxville; he is from Maine and sounds like it. His co-workers constantly harrased him over his origins, until he finally left the place. Feelings towards Latinos here seem to be strained at the least, which is strange since there are so few Latinos around. So I wonder- with just the evidence of my library propogandist to go on- if the same sentiments flow towards people from the Islamic world. Probably, if I had to guess. And let’s be clear- the sentiments that lay behind my anonymous writer are at the least racist: all Muslims are, secretly if not openly, party to the worst of crimes, are part of the Problem. You may be tolerated here, but only barely, and we don’t really trust you, or want you here. Maybe it’s too much to call the web of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim feelings (some of which lie just under the surface and only show up in public from time to time, maybe over a secretly Muslim Presidential candidate…) hatred, but I’m pretty sure parsing it that way is all too often accurate.

Hatred of the brown-skinned peoples of the dar al-islam has been both facilitated by and fostered by our wars in the Middle East. Being able to reduce all Muslims and Arabs to that image of barbarian bloodthirsty (or secretly restrained for purposes of infiltration) savages lets one think about the war in Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever else without associating the deaths incurred with real humans; those people are not my neighbor, are not even really human. Muslim people are people who are either shooting and blowing up things or getting blown up and shot; that is what they are there for and nothing can change it (‘they’ve always been like that’). Of course this is nonsense, and many of us know that it’s nonsense. But it’s powerful nonsense, and it infiltrates our minds and hearts, even when we recognize it for what it is. Way back in the spring while in Morocco I had been reading the news out of Iraq online, and I recall reading some particularly troubling stuff. I took a walk down towards the old city, and as I walked I looked at the people- men, women, kids- I was passing, and thought: people who look like this are the ones dying every —- day in Iraq, with my tax money, my unspoken acceptance. People like this, like the family I’m living with [see the photos below], like the people I am seeing now, living alongside. Real human beings. Of course I’ve long known all that- but for some reason it just clicked, and I nearly broke down with emotion, there on the sidewalk between the Hotel Zalagh and the McDonalds… These ‘bloodthirsty savages’ that we are conditioned to throw all together in one horrible image and hate- they have lives, dreams, children, flesh, blood, souls, voices, faces.

So. That leaves me a long ways from a bizarre occurrence in the library stacks.

Lord have mercy.

Said Muhammad, Saida Fatima, and their two kids, Maryam and Yusef.

This man, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, makes excellent fried bread. He also helped me practice my fusha Arabic (though one of his friends suggested I ought to drop the classical stuff and just do ‘street Arabic’!)