NYT: Bobos in Paradise

It is not every day or month that one can read in the New York Times about certain Deirdre, "who is that rarest of things: a transexual, new-Christian, postmodern, minimal government conservative." Especially since I know personally one Deirdre who almost fits that bill.
Read the first chapter of the reviewed book either on the New York Times website or here


Bobos in Paradise
Review by JIM HOLT

The heft, the air and the title of this book all promise a big thesis. But what the devil could that thesis be? At no point during my reading of the 500-plus pages — an experience by turns piquant, maddening, edifying and wearying — was I altogether sure. Sometimes the author appeared to be arguing that capitalism makes us virtuous. Sometimes she seemed to be saying that virtue is the most important ethical idea we have. And sometimes she more or less announced that Love Is Bigger Than Economics. Each of these is a potentially interesting claim. But where, amid the luxurious orgy of quotations, epigrams, pop-cultural and poetic allusions, charts, lists, etymologies, asseverations, innuendoes, zingers and brickbats, was the meticulous reasoning that might establish their truth?
Perhaps, though, such a complaint misses the point. Deirdre McCloskey is a maverick, and in more ways than one. A classically trained economist — Harvard Ph.D., junior appointment to the star-studded University of Chicago economics department, résumé packed with rigorous quantitative research — McCloskey broke ranks in 1985 with “The Rhetoric of Economics,” which mocked the pretensions of economists to scientific objectivity. What the profession needed was less highfalutin mathematics and more emphasis on persuasion, stories, rhetoric: so she argued. Or he, I should say. For, at the time, Deirdre was still a man named Donald. In 1995 McCloskey broke ranks again by choosing to undergo a sex-change operation, the central event in her memoir, “Crossing” (1999). Currently a distinguished professor of economics, history, English and communication at the University of Illinois, Chicago, McCloskey is that rarest of things, a transexual, new-Christian, postmodern, minimal-government conservative. She is also, by her own avowal, “a tough urban girl who can take it as well as dish it out.”
And dish it out she does. Foremost among the many, many recipients of McCloskey’s abuse are those who (she thinks) misunderstand the nature of morality. How do we determine what is right and wrong? Modern moral philosophers have offered two sorts of answer. One focuses on consequences: according to the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, for instance, the right action is the one that results in the greatest happiness for the greatest number. The other focuses on the acts themselves: for Immanuel Kant, the right action is the one that conforms to a certain idea of duty, regardless of consequences. (Thus, by Kant’s lights, it is always wrong to kill an innocent person on purpose, even to save the world.) McCloskey will have neither of these; each, she thinks, wants to reduce ethics to “a quick little formula, the pocket-sized card.”
In the last few decades, however, an alternative to utilitarian and Kantian ethics has emerged, one that harks back to the ancient philosophers. It centers neither on acts nor on their consequences, but on character. According to “virtue ethics,” morality cannot be captured in a universal code; the right thing to do in a particular situation is what a virtuous person would do. And how do we identify a virtuous person? Aristotle defined virtue as a quality of character that makes for a life well lived. Then he characterized the good life as a life lived in accordance with virtue. Circular? Today’s virtue ethicists obviously don’t think so, but they have nevertheless struggled to come up with an account of human nature that would give some definite content to the idea of virtue.
McCloskey likes virtue ethics for two reasons. First, it elevates stories over abstract rules. The guide to action becomes “What would X do?” where X is to be filled in by one’s moral exemplar of choice, who might be drawn from the Bible, say, or from a Jane Austen novel. Second, virtue ethics lends a womanly touch to moral theory, which has long been a “guy thing,” with masculine notions like justice and autonomy shutting out feminine notions like caring and love. Many of the movers behind virtue ethics, she notes with satisfaction, have been women, like Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch and Martha Nussbaum. (On the other hand, some pretty important male philosophers — Alasdair MacIntyre, Bernard Williams, John McDowell — have also played a role. One man that McCloskey decidedly does not want on her team is William J. Bennett, who, she observes with some severity, pumped his royalties from “The Book of Virtues” into slot machines.)
In taking the question “What sort of person ought I to be?” as fundamental, virtue ethics entails a richer moral psychology than its rivals. Yet it is not very useful in resolving ethical dilemmas. Should I betray my friend or my country? Utilitarianism at least yields an answer (friend). Virtue ethics tells me to do what a virtuous person would do in the circumstances — scant guidance for anyone who lacks the virtuous person’s built-in ethical know-how. And the egoistic emphasis on cultivating one’s virtue can easily lead to a preening moral vanity, not to say self-infatuation. How much more likable the Kantian ideal of doing the irksome thing simply because it’s your duty, damn it.
McCloskey does not trouble to rebut such criticisms. Instead, she submerges them in a flood-tide of contrary quotations from other thinkers. (She has read the library, and won’t let you forget it.) Her real interest is in applying virtue ethics to capitalism, and to capitalism’s distinctive product, the bourgeoisie. In “The Rhetoric of Economics,” McCloskey mocked bourgeois man as a ludicrous character, “at once master and servant, inclined therefore to hypocrisy and doubletalk, ’umble and yet pompous.” But she appears to have had a change of heart. McCloskey now sees the bourgeoisie as a noble class, the chief repository of the virtues instilled by commercial life.
And what are these “bourgeois virtues”? Thrift? Punctuality? Respectability? Cleanliness? McCloskey has nothing so dismal in mind. Rather, she is talking about the four classical pagan virtues — courage, justice, temperance and prudence — plus the three Christian virtues of faith, hope and love. Especially love. Here is something her fellow economists are incapable of capturing in their arid quotations. “Modern capitalist life is love-saturated,” she declares, as “markets and even the much maligned corporations encourage friendships wider and deeper than the atomism of a full-blown socialist regime or the claustrophobic, murderous atmosphere of a ‘traditional’ village.” We already knew that markets make us rich. But McCloskey wants to convince us that markets are also good for the soul.
Here is where things ought to get interesting. Even fans of capitalism concede that it can have a corrosive effect on morals and community ties. Critics have argued that it fosters consumerism, greed, narcissism, Gesellschaft over Gemeinschaft, anomie, Enron. . . . The bourgeois is a beastly little creature — so say the German Romantics, D. H. Lawrence and, in a rather drier way, Francis Fukuyama. How might these people be proved wrong? The pro-bourgeois case would start with the historical observation that liberal values like tolerance and freedom have been a product of commercial life. It would proceed with the careful marshaling of evidence that capitalism can be ethically beneficient — that, for example, markets generate trust. And who better to construct such a case than a polymath econometric virtuosa like McCloskey?
But instead we get rhetoric. There is polemical hand-waving (“Who says?”; “I think not”; and, most logically decisive, “Point, schmoit”). There is sophomoric sarcasm: Stephen Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, is mocked for his reasoned stand against religion, and the French philosopher André Comte-Sponville is dismissed with stale jokes about Gauloises and Jerry Lewis. Anecdotes masquerade as data: the evidence against the Marxist thesis that work is alienating under capitalism is the author’s perception that Chicago garbagemen seem to enjoy emptying trash bins. McCloskey is contemptuous of scientists like Steven Pinker for trying to explain the origins of virtue along Darwinian lines; yet her dogmatic counterclaim — “Every human is born in sin, and must seek redemption” — doesn’t greatly advance the argument.
And how strong, really, is the correlation between bourgeois virtue and laissez-faire capitalism? Like her friend Milton Friedman, McCloskey would like to see the role of the state much reduced. She says she dreams of “literally one-third to one-fifth of the government we now have.” Yet a social democracy like Sweden, where the state plays a far greater role in society, would seem to be the very soul of bourgeois virtue by many objective standards, with less violence and more solidarity and trust than the United States.
McCloskey probably won’t sway many readers who do not already share her convictions, but for all the book’s flaws one can’t help being impressed by her verve, erudition and fitful brilliance. When she argues that Vincent van Gogh was actually a good bourgeois, or that Jesus, notwithstanding the Sermon on the Mount, was pro-commerce, the rhetorical moves are as deft as the claims are surprising. And who would have imagined that the film “Groundhog Day,” in which the annoyingly smug Bill Murray character comes to see the point of humility and love, epitomizes the process by which virtue is inculcated? But it is a little dispiriting to hear McCloskey announce that this book is merely the first of four (!) projected volumes by her on the subject of virtue and capitalism. Somewhere within this loose, baggy monster there has to be a slim, cogently argued treatise struggling to get out.
Jim Holt, a regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, is working on a book about the puzzle of existence.

WSJ: Delta Will Fly to London!!!

Delta to Buy United New York-London Route

By a WALL STREET JOURNAL Staff Reporter
July 29, 2006; Page A2

Delta Air Lines, Atlanta, said it has agreed to acquire a long-coveted New York-to-London route from United Airlines, Elk Grove Township, Ill., for as much as $21 million.
The daily route from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport to London's Gatwick Airport falls short of the more lucrative route into London's tightly restricted Heathrow Airport. The deal is subject to approval from the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Delta, the third-largest U.S. carrier in terms of passenger traffic, filed for bankruptcy-court protection last September. Delta says it will continue to lobby in favor of an Open Skies agreement that would allow Delta and other carriers locked out of Heathrow the right to fly there. Under the agreement with UAL Corp., United's parent, Delta would pay $13 million initially, plus four $2 million installments due annually through 2010. If Heathrow routes become available, Delta would discontinue the payments.

Dada exhibit

Very nicely organized exhibition of Dada art. By city, not chronologically. As always, MoMA is incapable to hire professional enough curators to eliminate typos, errors and gross misjudgements from the labels.

Where I have been so far...

and here is an update to the October 2005 map.... So far I have been in 24 countries which makes roughly 10% of all world countries. It is a long way to go....




create your own visited countries map

Sonetto

by Robert Mezey

Jupiter, and a crescent moon,
And a blue that could not be
More blue without being black -
The colour of mortality,
To me. The low moan
Of an owl calling for its mate,
And nothing calling back;
Just crickets ratcheting.
There's nothing I can do but sing
How much I miss my friend,
How achingly, how long . . .
But quietly: it's late,
A few stars glisten,
Jupiter, Venus . . . True,
It's not much of a song,
Croaked out into evening wind,
But it is a song. It's what I do,
Should anyone care to listen.

NYT: Who Started It...

He Who Cast the First Stone Probably Didn’t
By DANIEL GILBERT

LONG before seat belts or common sense were particularly widespread, my family made annual trips to New York in our 1963 Valiant station wagon. Mom and Dad took the front seat, my infant sister sat in my mother’s lap and my brother and I had what we called “the wayback” all to ourselves.
In the wayback, we’d lounge around doing puzzles, reading comics and counting license plates. Eventually we’d fight. When our fight had finally escalated to the point of tears, our mother would turn around to chastise us, and my brother and I would start to plead our cases. “But he hit me first,” one of us would say, to which the other would inevitably add, “But he hit me harder.”
It turns out that my brother and I were not alone in believing that these two claims can get a puncher off the hook. In virtually every human society, “He hit me first” provides an acceptable rationale for doing that which is otherwise forbidden. Both civil and religious law provide long lists of behaviors that are illegal or immoral — unless they are responses in kind, in which case they are perfectly fine.
After all, it is wrong to punch anyone except a puncher, and our language even has special words — like “retaliation” and “retribution” and “revenge” — whose common prefix is meant to remind us that a punch thrown second is legally and morally different than a punch thrown first.
That’s why participants in every one of the globe’s intractable conflicts — from Ireland to the Middle East — offer the even-numberedness of their punches as grounds for exculpation.
The problem with the principle of even-numberedness is that people count differently. Every action has a cause and a consequence: something that led to it and something that followed from it. But research shows that while people think of their own actions as the consequences of what came before, they think of other people’s actions as the causes of what came later.
In a study conducted by William Swann and colleagues at the University of Texas, pairs of volunteers played the roles of world leaders who were trying to decide whether to initiate a nuclear strike. The first volunteer was asked to make an opening statement, the second volunteer was asked to respond, the first volunteer was asked to respond to the second, and so on. At the end of the conversation, the volunteers were shown several of the statements that had been made and were asked to recall what had been said just before and just after each of them.
The results revealed an intriguing asymmetry: When volunteers were shown one of their own statements, they naturally remembered what had led them to say it. But when they were shown one of their conversation partner’s statements, they naturally remembered how they had responded to it. In other words, volunteers remembered the causes of their own statements and the consequences of their partner’s statements.
What seems like a grossly self-serving pattern of remembering is actually the product of two innocent facts. First, because our senses point outward, we can observe other people’s actions but not our own. Second, because mental life is a private affair, we can observe our own thoughts but not the thoughts of others. Together, these facts suggest that our reasons for punching will always be more salient to us than the punches themselves — but that the opposite will be true of other people’s reasons and other people’s punches.
Examples aren’t hard to come by. Shiites seek revenge on Sunnis for the revenge they sought on Shiites; Irish Catholics retaliate against the Protestants who retaliated against them; and since 1948, it’s hard to think of any partisan in the Middle East who has done anything but play defense. In each of these instances, people on one side claim that they are merely responding to provocation and dismiss the other side’s identical claim as disingenuous spin. But research suggests that these claims reflect genuinely different perceptions of the same bloody conversation.
If the first principle of legitimate punching is that punches must be even-numbered, the second principle is that an even-numbered punch may be no more forceful than the odd-numbered punch that preceded it. Legitimate retribution is meant to restore balance, and thus an eye for an eye is fair, but an eye for an eyelash is not. When the European Union condemned Israel for bombing Lebanon in retaliation for the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, it did not question Israel’s right to respond, but rather, its “disproportionate use of force.” It is O.K. to hit back, just not too hard.
Research shows that people have as much trouble applying the second principle as the first. In a study conducted by Sukhwinder Shergill and colleagues at University College London, pairs of volunteers were hooked up to a mechanical device that allowed each of them to exert pressure on the other volunteer’s fingers.
The researcher began the game by exerting a fixed amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. The first volunteer was then asked to exert precisely the same amount of pressure on the second volunteer’s finger. The second volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. And so on. The two volunteers took turns applying equal amounts of pressure to each other’s fingers while the researchers measured the actual amount of pressure they applied.
The results were striking. Although volunteers tried to respond to each other’s touches with equal force, they typically responded with about 40 percent more force than they had just experienced. Each time a volunteer was touched, he touched back harder, which led the other volunteer to touch back even harder. What began as a game of soft touches quickly became a game of moderate pokes and then hard prods, even though both volunteers were doing their level best to respond in kind.
Each volunteer was convinced that he was responding with equal force and that for some reason the other volunteer was escalating. Neither realized that the escalation was the natural byproduct of a neurological quirk that causes the pain we receive to seem more painful than the pain we produce, so we usually give more pain than we have received.
Research teaches us that our reasons and our pains are more palpable, more obvious and real, than are the reasons and pains of others. This leads to the escalation of mutual harm, to the illusion that others are solely responsible for it and to the belief that our actions are justifiable responses to theirs.
None of this is to deny the roles that hatred, intolerance, avarice and deceit play in human conflict. It is simply to say that basic principles of human psychology are important ingredients in this miserable stew. Until we learn to stop trusting everything our brains tell us about others — and to start trusting others themselves — there will continue to be tears and recriminations in the wayback.
Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is the author of “Stumbling on Happiness.”

Pushkin and Merimee

A Letter to the Editor of the TLS:

Sir, -Reviewing Antony Wood's translation of Pushkin's The Gypsies and Other Narrative Poems (June 30), Rachel Polonsky affirms that "The Gypsies", with its free-loving Zemphira and her death at the hands of Aleko, is a "direct source for Prosper Merimee's and Georges Bizet's Carmen". Merimee knew George Borrow's The Zincali (1841), which includes a laudatory reference to Pushkin's poem; he might have read a French translation that appeared in Le Temps in 1833. To see it as a direct source for his Spanish tale has tempted several critics.
However, the origins of Carmen go back to encounters and anecdotes that Merimee described in his Lettres d'Espagne of 1830, and a real event that (according to a letter to her) the comtesse de Montijo (then the comtesse de Teba) had told him of in 1830, in which the prostitute heroine killed by her lover was not yet a Gypsy (he claimed that he made her a Gypsy only because "j'etudie les bohemiens depuis quelque temps"). Behind the narrative of possessive lover and independent mistress lie also Abbe Prevost's Des Grieux and Manon Lescaut.Carmen first appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1845.
Merimee did not then know Russian (he started learning the language in 1848); later, in a new edition of Carmen in 1852, he included in the volume, together with two other previously published stories of his own, three of his translations from Pushkin, including "The Gypsies". But "free" Gypsies are everywhere in Romantic literature, including in Merimee's own Chronique du regne de Charles IX (1829).
Perhaps more important than the question of dates and precisely when Merimee could have known Pushkin's poem are crucial differences between the two works:
Carmen is the embodiment of desire and caprice, but bound by the "loi des Cales"; Don Jose a representative of order and discipline, albeit impulsive, unstable, inclined to violence; they are two individuals, and the value of the natural and primitive, present in both, simultaneously fascinating and dangerous, remains, as always in Merimee, highly ambiguous.
In Pushkin, Aleko's passion and jealousy spring from the impossibility of any return by a Romantic "exile from civilization" (as Polonsky aptly terms him) to the primitive paradise and the natural order represented by the Gypsies.
PETER COGMAN
141 Bellemoor Road, Shirley, Southampton.

LRB: Heaps upon Heaps

by Jenny Diski
review of Lion’s Honey: The Myth of Samson by David Grossman
Canongate, 155 pp, £12.99

Look at Chapters 13 to 16 of the Book of Judges, and what do you see there? Is it Samson the hero, Samson the lummox, or Samson the poster boy for gang moronics, for self-destructive, incommensurate revenge? According to David Grossman, all Jewish children when they first hear the story learn to call him Samson the Hero. He is wrong about this, but then my Jewish childhood was not in Hebrew or in Israel. I recall the Samson story mainly as an early introduction to the power of three. ‘The Philistines are upon you, Samson,’ Delilah says three times (just as, probably in the same Ladybird series, God called Samuel from his sleep three times before Eli the priest realised Who was on the line). The Samson story fitted comfortably into the familiar format of traditional tales and myth I was reading then (and I suppose too that it readied me for the present-day storytelling of ‘education, education, education’ and suchlike sorry political rhetoric). A grown-up reading of Samson a few years ago (the same King James Version that is offered at the beginning of Grossman’s translated essay) left me initially bewildered and remembering a large, blandly handsome boy of very little brain at school who, when I was 11, was my first boyfriend for about three weeks before he dropped me, and I experienced my first guilty relief at escaping the boredom between the trial-and-error French kisses, even as I smarted at the insult and missed having a hunk for my own to flash at my far more glamorous sisters-in-prepuberty.
Samson: the very occasionally touching knucklehead who hasn’t the faintest idea what he is doing or why, and has all the muscles of Superman and all the insight of a brick. You could imagine him doing what he’s told in an army patrol, or hanging out at a loose end on a street corner with some equally dim-witted friends, except that Samson doesn’t seem to have any friends. He has parents, he has a wife for a while, he has relations with prostitutes and he has a girlfriend who finally does for him, but almost invariably he acts and walks alone. Well, it’s not surprising: he hasn’t had a haircut since birth and he’s given to acts of viciousness generally out of all proportion to any insult done to him. On the strength of an early one-man massacre he judged Israel for twenty years, which is surprising until you remember that Arnold Schwarzenegger is governor of California. Samson, though, on second thoughts, is more psychopath than gangbanger or lovable dolt. One thing I wouldn’t call him, then or now, is hero.
The thing about the Bible, though, particularly the Hebrew Bible, is that it provides a surface story into which the reader can dive and come up with all manner of interpretations. There can’t be very many books in the world with which a reader can have such fun. Like a playground with all the right equipment but not too much of it, it offers the imagination as much scope as it can use for speculation. Jump in anywhere and read the empty spaces, the unspoken, the roaring silences, repetitions and patterns with as much care as the words (especially in a good modern translation that is true to the laconic language of the original), and you’ve got a narrative wonderland at your disposal. The old rabbis understood well enough about the gaiety of conjecture. Ambiguities throughout the Torah caused and permitted them to speculate and then to argue with previous (and even forthcoming) speculations, building an enchanting dialogue of maybes and what ifs. Worried about the problem of fish when God decided to destroy all life by flooding the world? The rain that fell for forty days and forty nights was hot and the fish in the sea were boiled to death, one commentary argues. Oh no, says Rabbi Yaakov Culi in the 18th century: ‘The only creatures that survived the flood were the fish. The Torah informs us that “everything on dry land died,” specifically to exclude the fish, which did not die. The fish survived even though the water of the flood was boiling hot. They were able to escape to the depths of the sea, where the water remained cool.’ This is the delight of poetry and riddle, which reading at its best – coupled with writing at its best – produces. And the Bible, of all writings, even for those of us who can only read it in translations, provides unlimited possibilities for close, quirky readings that lurk in the crevices of the language.
What I find very hard to see in the Pentateuch is any suggestion of the transcendental. After a couple of beginnings of the world where geography and biology are set in motion, and the bad behaviour of Adam and Eve, Genesis describes life starting over with Noah, who is a disappointment, and then once again with Abraham, in the search for an individual to stand as founding father for the people called the Hebrews. The God seeking out his people offers only posterity, never an afterlife, just like any secular leader. But then it’s a story told by the Hebrews themselves to account for themselves. A history, you might say, or a myth, if you will – anyway, a story. The Pentateuch is the narrative of the developing nationhood of a small group of people who came from Mesopotamia and settled in the south on the land of other already established nations: Midian, Canaan, Moab, Amon and Philistia.
At the time of Judges, the Hebrews are divided into 12 tribes who live with different amounts of tension between themselves and their neighbours in the land they call Judea. In Judges, the Jews tell themselves why they have not been welcomed with open arms by those who were already there. It was, the biblical narrator explains, not because people object to incomers taking land that is already inhabited, but because the Children of Israel repeatedly sinned against their sponsor, Yahweh, and with each sin the Lord arranged punishment in the form of conquest by the strangers on the Israelites’ borders. Geopolitics will not do for Yahweh’s People: only their own solecisms can account for loss of territory or sovereignty. Once you have a god on your side, nothing can go wrong unless you activate his anger and he strengthens the Philistines against you. Consequently, the Israelis repent and Yahweh has to find a way to expel the outsiders who are oppressing his now forgiven people. In turn Gideon, Jephthah, Ehud, Shamgar and Deborah become the nation’s warrior liberators and then judges. Samson’s turn comes, but he is an anomaly who can’t be said to have chosen to liberate his people by his actions so much as kill a lot of Philistines because they happen to annoy him: ‘Strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.’ God seems to have forgiven the Hebrews again so he obliges Samson and ‘the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.’ An unintended national liberation on Samson’s part; a somewhat casual attitude to life on the part of God.
Some modern commentators, though, write Samson up as a ‘tough Jew’, one who strikes back at his enemies and nails the calumny of Jewish victimhood. When his fellow Judeans, cowering under the yoke of the oppressing Philistines, are prepared with a shrug of apology to give Samson up to them as they demand, he allows himself to be led into the enemy’s midst and smites them good and proper. He lets rip with a handy jawbone. ‘And Samson said, With the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps, with the jaw of an ass have I slain a thousand men.’ But this is only the middle of a long inventory of smitings. First Samson killed 30 men of Ashkelon for their clothes to pay off a bet made with his wedding guests who had wheedled the answer to his riddle out of his Philistine wife. Next, after he went home to his parents to sulk and his wife went off with someone else, he set fire to three hundred foxes tied tail to tail and burned all the growing and stored foodstuff of the Philistines. When they retaliated by burning his wife and her father for bringing the disaster on them, Samson in response ‘smote them hip and thigh with a great slaughter’ and then, in a brief spasm of wisdom, went to live up on a hillside out of the way. At which point the men of Judah come to him and tell him that he is causing too much trouble for them, they only want a quiet life – who doesn’t? – and could he please give himself up. Certainly, Samson says, and a thousand men, heaps upon heaps, pay the price.
David Grossman situates the ancient image of Samson the hero, and his modern interpretation as the tough Jew (how could he not?), in modern Israel. Those who would see Samson as a tough Jew, Grossman explains, ‘esteemed . . . his ability to apply force without any restraints or moral inhibitions, an ability which history withheld from the trod-upon Jews for millennia, until the establishment of the state of Israel’. ‘Samson’s Foxes’ fought in the 1948 War of Independence; a ‘Samson’ unit was created during the first Palestinian intifada in the 1980s; Israel’s nuclear weapon programme was once known as the ‘Samson Option’. Samson’s shadow, the suicide bomber, is noted. Clearly, Samson doesn’t represent the same thing to an Israeli Jew as he does to a Jew from the Diaspora.
But Grossman is equivocal. He acknowledges ‘a certain problematic quality to Israeli sovereignty that is also embodied in Samson’s relationship to his own power’. But it isn’t a case of not knowing one’s own strength: the problem arises from a lack of practice. ‘The reality of being immensely powerful has not really been internalised in the Israeli consciousness, not assimilated in a natural way, over many generations.’ It leads to giving ‘an exaggerated value to the power one has attained; to making power an end in itself; and to using it excessively; and also to a tendency to turn almost automatically to the use of force instead of weighing other means of action’. Grossman’s discomfort as an Israeli is clear, but he is still apologising for Samson’s and Israel’s excesses by suggesting that they are victims of victimhood. Tough Jewry but with mitigating circumstances. The fault lies with history and always and for ever Jews can be no more than their reaction to what has happened to them.
The essay dissolves into a distressing mixture of popular psychoanalysis and sentimentality: a plea for understanding that pulls out all the emotional stops. Samson’s thuggery is a result of his extraordinary experience, ultimately a lack of maternal love that leaves him a stranger in the world, who will never find his place and settle. At the heart of it is a notion of the family and how it ought to be. It’s a recognisable image but as mythic as the Samson story itself. Manoah, his father, is weak, vacillating and suspicious. His mother, who is not given a name, is visited either by a messenger of God or has an affair with (could it be?) a Philistine, and although barren becomes pregnant. She tells her husband that the child is to be a Nazarite, dedicated to God: no alcohol, no haircuts. Manoah exhibits disbelief and demands to see this messenger for himself, though when he does, he stops arguing, overpowered by the power of the man/angel. A bad beginning. A doubtful origin and different from the other kids.
But the true centre of Samson’s problem, according to Grossman, is his mother (of course) who tells Manoah of the special role of the forthcoming child with the words: ‘For the child shall be a Nazarite to God from the womb to the day of his death.’ In Grossman’s view, this is a child who will not truly belong to his mother and her realisation of this causes her to freeze emotionally. No woman, apparently, can contemplate the natural death of the foetus within her. It is, says Grossman, against the ‘natural instincts of parenthood’. The formerly barren wife of Manoah knows ‘with a deep womanly intuition’ that the child is to be a public event and therefore she distances herself from it, ‘something inside her is blocked, stunned, frozen.’ He imagines her thinking: ‘Will I be able to give him the bountiful, natural love that for so long I have yearned to give a child of my own?’ This ‘will not be a child who can be raised according to one’s natural instincts alone’ (though for that you might think any child would be grateful). As a result Samson ‘will always lack the capacity for simple human contact that comes so naturally to most people’. The pages are filled with such unexamined social and psychological expectation, with the assumption of what must be normal and what the consequences must be of a falling short of this picture of family harmonics.
Grossman is entitled to his interpretation of the text like anyone else, and the notion of the strangeness and loneliness of Samson and his inability to understand it is intriguing, but the normative assumptions and their presentation are as cloying and unconvincing as the saccharine family moment Grossman imagines when, on the way to his wedding, Samson scoops the honey from the belly of the lion he killed. The biblical text reads:
And, behold, there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcass of the lion. And he took thereof in his hands, and went on eating, and came to his father and mother, and he gave them, and they did eat; but he told them not that he had taken the honey out of the carcass of the lion.
Grossman says:They say nothing, do not ask, he doesn’t tell, and nevertheless it is so appealing to imagine Samson waving his hands high, and his parents, doubtless smaller than he is, jumping at him with their mouths wide open and tongues hanging out, and Samson howling with glee, playing with his parents, touching them and dancing for them and laughing with them like any normal person, with the honey dripping, flowing down a cheek, sliding to the chin, being licked up, as the laughter swells to the point of tears.
It is Grossman’s contention that Samson is the emotionally disfigured child who becomes the frustrated artist (the honey episode, the killing of the 30 men for their coats, the tying and burning of the foxes’ tails all a kind of performance art), whose work turns murderous when he cannot receive love, desperate as he is ‘for the embrace of a caring, compassionate parent’ and betrayed always by the women in his life. And somewhere in all this is the state of Israel. The Samson state, not properly born and nurtured and therefore given to violent tantrums and excessive – though hardly artistic – behaviour to those it feels unloved by.
And, liberal though I am, I come up against the thought: what about behaving decently to others? Just that. Even if you’ve been unloved. Or especially if you’ve been unloved. What about making an art of empathy, or simply an elementary human choice not to cause suffering just because you’ve suffered, or because you figure it’s a good enough excuse to behave just like everyone else? Perhaps Grossman would say that the unloved Samson can’t help himself and is not in control of his emotional responses. He is probably right. Many people aren’t and clearly Samson wasn’t capable of control, but the individual Samson and the state of Israel are actually not bound by the same emotional imperatives. We ought perhaps to try much harder to keep separate the lives and passions of individuals and the behaviour of nations. But analogy is apparently irresistible, though the Palestinians might be forgiven a hollow laugh at Grossman’s conclusion that Samson’s final act, killing three thousand partying Philistines and himself into the bargain, set a precedent: There is no escaping the thought that Samson was, in a sense, the first suicide-killer; and although the circumstances of his deed were different from those familiar to us from the daily reality of the streets of Israel, it may be that the act itself established in human consciousness a mode of murder and revenge directed at innocent victims, which has been perfected in recent years.
Jenny Diski’s On Trying to Keep Still, a travelogue and memoir, appeared recently. She is the author of Only Human, about a patriarch and his wife, among other novels.

TLS: Flesh out

by David Coward

TLS 06.09.2006

CONSUMABLE METAPHORS. Attitudes towards animals and vegetarianism in nineteenth-century France. By Ceri Crossley. 322pp. Peter Lang. Paperback, Pounds 37 (US $62.95). 3 03910 190 0

In the beginning, God set man above the beasts of the field. He made him king of creation and supplied animals for his use and pleasure. Much much later, Darwin showed that actually we are all in this thing together. Meanwhile, legend, bestiaries and fables exploited the belief that humans can acquire a better sense of their own nature by reference to the world of animals. In due course, materialist philosophers caught up with them and concluded that mankind should be more modest about its place in the scheme of things. We are animals too and whatever superiority we may have imposes fraternal obligations. It was one of the many problems the Enlightenment bequeathed to the nineteenth century.
After 1800, the great chefs who had once served the now fallen French nobility began to practise their arts in public. They invented the restaurant and, competing for custom, devised endlessly delicious ways of putting protein with blood in it on a plate. In so doing, they presented French animal-lovers with an enduring moral dilemma and made life difficult for campaigning vegetarians.
Yet as Ceri Crossley shows, with scholarly objectivity and much good humour, concern for animals and their welfare rose throughout the century. Consumable Metaphors is a fascinating report on the "animal question" as a reflection of nineteenth-century France's changing view of the world.
From the start, it was assumed that we are what we eat. Meat means self and aggression while vegetables signify altruism and sweet reason. Carnivores argued that if God or nature wished us to be vegetarian, we would not have canines and such meat-friendly intestines. Zoophiles, appalled by human arrogance and the horrors of animal husbandry and the abattoir, derived a general principle from dietary issues which could be applied to many areas of personal and collective life. The meat-versus-vegetarianism debate reflected the same tension as those that existed between progress and conservatism, male and female, cynicism and belief, war and peace. Human psychology was not improved by the blood of animals: are not butchers notoriously insensitive? And since boys who pull wings off flies almost invariably grow into husbands who beat their wives, teaching the young to be kind to our four-legged friends should be a primary aim of education.
Meat-eating was equally the enemy of religion: Jesus, who ended animal sacrifice by making the eucharist vegetarian, ate no flesh and his message, consequently, was one of love and peace. History itself demonstrates that all progress is attributable to the vegetarian branch of humanity and all destructive phenomena - wars, persecutions and oppressions -are the work of meat-eaters. Not that the meat-eaters have always had it entirely their own way. By 1789, aristocratic carnivores had been so weakened by consuming the animals they hunted that they were easy prey for impoverished and therefore meat-free Republicans who, alas, quickly caught the carnivorous habit:
how else to explain the bloodlust that was the Terror? In political terms, the taste for meat explains the appetite of Capital for the sweat of Labour, the oppression of women by men, and the exploitation of colonial peoples by imperial powers.
The debate was carried on at varying levels of sense and eccentricity by famous names (Lamartine, Michelet) and minor enthusiasts for whom Crossley clearly has a certain affection, like Jean-Antoine Gleizes, "the greatest vegetarian philosopher" of the age, or the militant novelist Rachilde, who liberated laboratory mice and once stuck a hatpin in a vivisectionist to demonstrate that needles hurt. But he is less patient with Alphonse Toussenel, "hunter and gastronome", anti-Semite, proto-fascist and a crank who wanted "bad" animals (tigers, snakes and the like) to be exterminated. Between them they founded societies for promoting animal welfare and new diets, and they fought the ideological battle across a range of issues:
the domestication of animals, vivisection, vegetarianism, cruel sports, animal psychology and, increasingly, science, which, by 1900, explained the chemistry of digestion but also promoted the benefits of zootherapy, a treatment involving the strapping of a suitable animal to any diseased limb.
After 1870, the vegetarian lobby made the political dimension of the debate explicit. The tensions between Church and State, between conservatism and republicanism, were not so much effects of history, class and greed but a function of diet. Yet even deeper concerns were mobilized. Defeat in the Franco-Prussian War had created an obsession with French national decline and degeneracy, of which our maltreatment of animals was one instance. Did helpless sheep and cows bring out the dark side of our nature? Were civilization and our vaunted humanity precarious delusions? The vegetarian lobby promised physical, moral and spiritual salvation.
In the event, the ethics of animal welfare remained low on the agenda and over time the less earnest attitude to diet based on the mouth-watering marvels of French cuisine has prevailed. But whether the role of a lamb is to gambol in a field or brown in an oven, Crossley's chronicle of the forgotten pioneers of vegetarianism provides much food for thought.

WSJ: 24

As it happens, I have been doing the same thing as Dorothy, namely watching Seasons 4 and 5 of that show. Unlike Dorothy, I watched the show in High Definition, something that had been lost to Dorothy, since she relied on an old DVD technology. The show is addictive, and has to be watched to be believed. The last season began to annoy me more than entertain. The endless "Are you sure?", "Oh my god, Jack!" and "I'll use VPN on a subnet" wore out my patience. The other big problem with the show is the lack of acting talent, so that any time a "real" actor like Season 4's Shohreh Aghdashloo or 5's Jean Smart shows up they immediately put everyone else at a disadvantage. The writing for these actresses did not give them much to work with, but the real acting does not need much. For the rest of the crew, the moral problems seem to be centered around "life of someone in my family vs. the rest of the nation". Strangely enough, only Jack makes the "right" decision. Everyone else says "don't kill me" and then proceeds to do eagerly what the terrorists ask them to do. One, only man so far has made the choice as Jack would do it.
Yes, I do, really, really do want Jack's cell phone coverage and his batteries. They are amazing. Have you seen John McCain's cameo? Fantastic!


By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
Page W1

The News That Fox's "24" led all other series in Emmy nominations could not have surprised the multitudes still captive to its hypnotic powers. For regular viewers (it's been five years since Jack Bauer and his counter-terror unit first hit the screen), the entire business of awards and nominations is very much beside the point -- which is to miss no hour of the brew of triumphs and calamities that is life at CTU in Los Angeles -- though Emmy talk may serve as a reminder that this hour that has its fans by the throat week after week is, after all, a show-business enterprise.
Not that it would make a difference. The willing suspension of disbelief that Kiefer Sutherland's fabulous Bauer and his impossible exploits continue to win from audiences may well have no match in television history -- a fact that has more than a little to do with today's real-world history of terrorist depredations and jihadist threats, as everyone, those viewers included, knows. It is, for huge numbers of them, the point of the show. Every time the otherwise tender-hearted hero of "24" slices a terrorist up, mashes the knee of a wounded plotter, or worse, in order to extort information about an imminent attack that could destroy the lives of Americans by the millions -- that is the point. Let someone else call the ACLU or Amnesty International.
In Season Four, which boasts the sharpest writing in the series, someone does make such a call. That someone being, deliciously enough, the chief terrorist, Marwan (played flawlessly by Arnold Vosloo), whose long-nurtured plans to launch a nuclear strike on American soil are about to be realized when he learns that someone involved in the plot has been taken into custody -- and that secrets will be forced from him that will undo everything. Reaching for his cellphone, Marwan crisply orders someone to "Call Global Amnesty. Tell them an innocent man is being tortured at CTU headquarters in Los Angeles."
No one needs subtitles to grasp the real-world suggestiveness of the scene in which a "Global Amnesty" -- read Amnesty International -- lawyer walks in with a marshal and a judge's order, stops the questioning and gets the subject released -- not before delivering a mini-lecture on human rights. The only man with information that can avert the nuclear strike is being marched off to freedom -- not that the insubordinate Bauer is about to allow it, as the graphic scene, in which he extracts the information in the front seat of a car, soon makes clear.
Much else about the series, including its addictive quality, can become clear in a remarkably short time. This I discovered when I set about catching up with all of the episodes -- an undertaking inspired, a few months ago, by the sight of two colleagues who raced from their cubicles one day to hold forth about "24": a series I'd seen only in bits and pieces. Here, I had to note, were two calm, serious men not given to intense talk about television offering urgent advice. "You have to see it. And keep your eyes on the screen. Don't think you can run to the kitchen for a minute. It moves too fast -- you'll miss five developments."
Full-Voltage Shocks
So it happened that I watched, over the past 5½ months, every episode of "24" ever shown, abetted by the packs of DVDs that made it possible to get through a season in a few days and maybe one weekend bender. Not that one felt any wish to rush through them. Production values this impeccable, suspense more reliable, even, than in "The Sopranos," don't come along every day. Best of all in the suspense department, and it's a rarity, nothing ever telegraphs "24"'s shocks -- its unmasking of traitors and moles, its Byzantine plot turns. All arrive at full voltage.
A good thing, too, since the series is not without its absurd elements, which have to do, invariably, with relationship troubles. Seldom can we find Bauer rushing to a helicopter or a CTU vehicle, calamity being only minutes away, without interruption via a cellphone from one or another of the extraordinarily vapid women in his life, none more irritating than daughter Kim (Elisha Cuthbert), a character who has, it's reported, inspired hopes in more than a few "24" fans that someone take her out, and soon. The strong and interesting women in the show tend to be, mainly, treacherous vipers of one kind or another, among them President David Palmer's scheming wife, Sherry (Penny Johnson Jerald) -- other than, of course, the beloved, chronically dyspeptic Chloe (Mary Lynn Rajskub), a character whose name recognition is by now global.
It is worth noting, too, that the just-completed Season Five has gone somewhat awry. This was largely the result of the writers' focus on a corrupt and treacherous new U.S. president, Charles Logan (Gregory Itzin) -- a slack-jawed opportunist intended as a Nixon look-alike -- and his befuddled, if vaguely principled wife, Martha (Jean Smart). She's meant to remind us -- this is not subtle -- of Martha Mitchell (wife of Attorney General John Mitchell), whose reported threats to expose Nixon's Watergate secrets became something of a problem for that White House.
Monsters and Thugs
As it turned out, the show's writers, who had had no problem, earlier, creating entirely believable American leaders, models of honor and decency -- take that heroic specimen, President Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) -- seem to have fallen on hard times in Season Five. Something, it seems -- some sound aversion to the perverse, perhaps -- had dried the imaginative juices, undermined their capacity to fashion credible characters out of the monsters and thugs they had conceived of, now the new leadership in the White House: among them, an American president who joins in a terror plot against his own nation, who approves the assassination of a former president, whose White House is a nest of traitors and rogue-army assassinators.
How much easier to have conceived of steadfast, unfailingly respectful Jack Bauer, a magical character Kiefer Sutherland inhabits with improbable naturalness. When the script calls on him to say "I'd give my life for you, Mr. President," we can believe him. Twentieth Century Fox doesn't need convincing -- it has given Mr. Sutherland a $30 million contract for the next three years of "24."

Hartford Atheneum

This wonderful museum Atheneum in downtown Hartford houses a huge collection of Americana as well as some of the more "classical" art and objects. My favorites are the mummy from the early Roman period, Fra Angelico and a sly "Loose Company" by Jan Sanders van Hemessen from 1543.

Sultan of France

by Sudhir Hazareesingh
review of CORRESPONDANCE GENERALE, II. La campagne d'Egypte et l'avenement 1798-1799. Napoleon Bonaparte. Edited by Thierry Lentz, Gabriel Madec, Emilie Barthet and Francois Houdecek. 1,266pp. Fayard. E48. - 2 213 62139 X.
The second volume of Napoleon's Correspondance generale covers the period between early 1798 and late 1799 (Volume One was reviewed in the TLS of February 18, 2005). The letters mostly deal with the Egyptian campaign which Bonaparte led as the Commander-in-Chief of the Armee d'Orient. It is easy to understand why this expedition has fascinated historians. Immediately preceding the successful coup d'etat of 18 Brumaire, the campagne d'Egypte was a critical moment in Napoleon's march to supreme power in France. But the enduring appeal of the Egyptian expedition has broader origins. Napoleon took a contingent of some 160 scientists with him, helping, among other things, to pioneer the science of Egyptology. The year 1798 also witnessed the beginnings of France's colonial presence in North Africa and the Middle East, with Napoleon's attempts to introduce European forms of civil and political administration to a land which had hitherto been dominated by the feudal Mamelukes. Above all, we have here an intriguing early encounter between Western values and the culture of Islam, rendered all the more absorbing by Napoleon's evident (albeit always self-serving) fascination with the "Mahometan" religion.
In the six months that followed the French occupation of Cairo, Napoleon revolutionized the colony. He created new political institutions (whose elites and functional powers were rigorously subordinated to French rule), organized health services, established a postal system, rationalized the procedures for tax collection, and much else. Through the Institut d'Egypte, the latest discoveries of Western science were brought to the country; the geographical contours of its hinterland were mapped out; and Napoleon himself accompanied the expedition which found the vestiges of the canal built by Ramses II to link the Nile to the Red Sea. The Egyptians were impressed and somewhat bemused by all this frantic activity, while careful to keep the French on their toes. The historian Al-Jabarti, who wrote extensive first-hand accounts of the French occupation, reported that after Claude Berthollet put on a grand display of chemical wizardry at the Institut, a sheikh asked through an interpreter: "This is all well and good, but can he make it so that I would be in Morocco and here at the same time?". The French scientist replied with a shrug of the shoulders.
"Ah, well", said the sheikh, "he isn't such a sorcerer after all."
The chief sorcerer was Bonaparte, and he went to great lengths to portray himself as both omnipotent and benevolent, even trying to blend French Revolutionary discourse about justice, equality and reason with effusive praise for the central tenets of Islam.
The "Sultan El Kebir", as he became known, surrounded himself in Cairo with religious and spiritual leaders, who were sufficiently impressed by his credentials to declare his arrival in Egypt as a portent of Allah; he celebrated the festival of the Prophet with as much zeal as the anniversary of the Republic, and even wrote that "l'instant est arrive ou tous les francais regeneres deviendront aussi de vrais croyants".
However, Napoleon refrained from following one of his leading generals, who converted to Islam and became known as Jacques Abdallah Menou.
Yet all these pleasantries were overshadowed by the one overriding imperative which dominated Napoleon's thinking: the conduct of war. Although it ended in the failed siege of Saint Jean d'Acre, which helped to precipitate Napoleon's return to France, the Egyptian campaign was not without its successes, which (in duly embellished form) were reported back and helped to consolidate Bonaparte's legend as an invincible military leader. The letters underline the importance of a number of commanders who would play a key role in Napoleon's later campaigns: the ubiquitous Berthier, his dependable chief of staff; the humane Desaix, the "just Sultan", who would gloriously save the day (and die) at Marengo a few years later; and the future Marshals Murat, Marmont, Lannes and Bessieres, all destined to greater things in the years to come. Some of the most remarkable figures of the Napoleonic legend also rose through the ranks during the Egyptian campaign; in August 1798, Bonaparte ordered the promotion of a young captain named Bertrand, who had distinguished himself at the Battle of the Pyramids. As the Emperor's Marechal du Palais, Bertrand would not only remain with him throughout his later campaigns and his exile in St Helena after
1815, but also return to the island in 1840 to bring back Napoleon's remains to France.
But if Egypt contributed anything to the legend, it was mostly to its darker side. Conditions on the ground were atrocious, with extremes of heat and cold, and a host of diseases (notably the plague and opthalmia) decimating French forces. Even though they despised the Mamelukes, the populations of parts of Egypt and Palestine joined battle against the French occupiers, showing a courage and resilience which provoked the exasperation of Napoleon. French forces were constantly harassed, and -an anticipation of later disasters in Spain and Russia -any soldier straying from his lines risked capture and death (and not a pleasant one). Conventional battles did not always go well, either; set ablaze by rolling bales of hay, the troops of General Damas suffered a humiliating defeat on the mountains of Nablus (hence the proud epithet of the city to this day: Mountain of Fire). Caught in the vortex of escalating violence which overwhelms all military occupiers, the Egyptian campaign rapidly descended into savagery, with the French abandoning every principle of ius gentium. After a popular revolt in Cairo in October 1798, the French killed
2,500 people and fired fifteen shells into the Al-Azhar mosque, which was then overrun and desecrated (putting something of a dampener on French claims to be the protectors of Islam).
Following the pillage of Jaffa, Bonaparte himself was moved to write that he had just witnessed "toutes les horreurs de la guerre, qui jamais ne m'a paru aussi hideuse".
Earlier, after hearing of the killing in France of old men and pregnant women suspected of royalism, Napoleon had written an angry letter to the Revolutionary authorities in Toulon: "le militaire qui signe une sentence contre une personne incapable de porter les armes est un lache". Now, Bonaparte himself was ordering the execution of prisoners (most notoriously, around 3,000 men massacred at Jaffa), the drowning of women, the burning of entire rebel villages; Jenin was thus one of many areas which were torched ("il ne faut pas qu'il reste une maison").
What does all of this reveal about Napoleon on the eve of Brumaire? It is not easy to tell.
He subsequently claimed that he dreamed of pushing on to Constantinople, and returning to Europe crowned as the "Empereur d'Orient", but this (as with most of his later utterances) was probably a preparation for his legend. At the time, he was so far removed from any orientalist fantasies that his observation on reaching Gaza was that "les citronniers, les forets d'oliviers, les inegalites de terrain representent parfaitement le paysage du Languedoc; l'on croit etre du cote de Beziers". Nor should too much be read into a rare letter to his brother Joseph, in which Bonaparte complains of the "barbarie" of Egypt and confesses his emotional hollowness: "je suis ennuye de la nature humaine".
This was probably less a response to the deviousness of "ces coquins d'Arabes" than a reaction to the news that Josephine had been seen frolicking in Paris with yet another young stud. In truth, the violence he unleashed during the Egyptian campaign -"je serai terrible comme le feu du ciel" -was akin to his relationship with Egypt itself: he used it when it suited his immediate interests, and abandoned it completely when it no longer did. In this sense, the Sultan El Kebir was ready to become Napoleon.

A trip to Hartford

My peripatetic life brought me to Hartford, CT, the town of Mark Twain and Mary Baker Eddy. Beautiful views from the top floor of Hilton Hotel.

Jersey Rt. 10

This little Ukrainian Orthodox Church is currently closed and the site is for sale by the owner for re-development. So sad...

NYT: Immigration -- and the Curse of the Black Legend

By TONY HORWITZ (NYT) 1673 words
Published: July 9, 2006

VINEYARD HAVEN, Mass. - COURSING through the immigration debate is the unexamined faith that American history rests on English bedrock, or Plymouth Rock to be specific. Jamestown also gets a nod, particularly in the run-up to its 400th birthday, but John Smith was English, too (he even coined the name New England).
So amid the din over border control, the Senate affirms the self-evident truth that English is our national language; ''It is part of our blood,'' Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, says. Border vigilantes call themselves Minutemen, summoning colonial Massachusetts as they apprehend Hispanics in the desert Southwest. Even undocumented immigrants invoke our Anglo founders, waving placards that read, ''The Pilgrims didn't have papers.''
These newcomers are well indoctrinated; four of the sample questions on our naturalization test ask about Pilgrims. Nothing in the sample exam suggests that prospective citizens need know anything that occurred on this continent before the Mayflower landed in 1620. Few Americans do, after all.
This national amnesia isn't new, but it's glaring and supremely paradoxical at a moment when politicians warn of the threat posed to our culture and identity by an invasion of immigrants from across the Mexican border. If Americans hit the books, they'd find what Al Gore would call an inconvenient truth. The early history of what is now the United States was Spanish, not English, and our denial of this heritage is rooted in age-old stereotypes that still entangle today's immigration debate.
Forget for a moment the millions of Indians who occupied this continent for 13,000 or more years before anyone else arrived, and start the clock with Europeans' presence on present-day United States soil. The first confirmed landing wasn't by Vikings, who reached Canada in about 1000, or by Columbus, who reached the Bahamas in 1492. It was by a Spaniard, Juan Ponce de León, who landed in 1513 at a lush shore he christened La Florida.
Most Americans associate the early Spanish in this hemisphere with Cortés in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru. But Spaniards pioneered the present-day United States, too. Within three decades of Ponce de León's landing, the Spanish became the first Europeans to reach the Appalachians, the Mississippi, the Grand Canyon and the Great Plains. Spanish ships sailed along the East Coast, penetrating to present-day Bangor, Me., and up the Pacific Coast as far as Oregon.
From 1528 to 1536, four castaways from a Spanish expedition, including a ''black'' Moor, journeyed all the way from Florida to the Gulf of California -- 267 years before Lewis and Clark embarked on their much more renowned and far less arduous trek. In 1540, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led 2,000 Spaniards and Mexican Indians across today's Arizona-Mexico border -- right by the Minutemen's inaugural post -- and traveled as far as central Kansas, close to the exact geographic center of what is now the continental United States. In all, Spaniards probed half of today's lower 48 states before the first English tried to colonize, at Roanoke Island, N.C.
The Spanish didn't just explore, they settled, creating the first permanent European settlement in the continental United States at St. Augustine, Fla., in 1565. Santa Fe, N.M., also predates Plymouth: later came Spanish settlements in San Antonio, Tucson, San Diego and San Francisco. The Spanish even established a Jesuit mission in Virginia's Chesapeake Bay 37 years before the founding of Jamestown in 1607.
Two iconic American stories have Spanish antecedents, too. Almost 80 years before John Smith's alleged rescue by Pocahontas, a man by the name of Juan Ortiz told of his remarkably similar rescue from execution by an Indian girl. Spaniards also held a thanksgiving, 56 years before the Pilgrims, when they feasted near St. Augustine with Florida Indians, probably on stewed pork and garbanzo beans.
The early history of Spanish North America is well documented, as is the extensive exploration by the 16th-century French and Portuguese. So why do Americans cling to a creation myth centered on one band of late-arriving English -- Pilgrims who weren't even the first English to settle New England or the first Europeans to reach Plymouth Harbor? (There was a short-lived colony in Maine and the French reached Plymouth earlier.)
The easy answer is that winners write the history and the Spanish, like the French, were ultimately losers in the contest for this continent. Also, many leading American writers and historians of the early 19th century were New Englanders who elevated the Pilgrims to mythic status (the North's victory in the Civil War provided an added excuse to diminish the Virginia story). Well into the 20th century, standard histories and school texts barely mentioned the early Spanish in North America.
While it's true that our language and laws reflect English heritage, it's also true that the Spanish role was crucial. Spanish discoveries spurred the English to try settling America and paved the way for the latecomers' eventual success. Many key aspects of American history, like African slavery and the cultivation of tobacco, are rooted in the forgotten Spanish century that preceded English arrival.
There's another, less-known legacy of this early period that explains why we've written the Spanish out of our national narrative. As late as 1783, at the end of the Revolutionary War, Spain held claim to roughly half of today's continental United States (in 1775, Spanish ships even reached Alaska). As American settlers pushed out from the 13 colonies, the new nation craved Spanish land. And to justify seizing it, Americans found a handy weapon in a set of centuries-old beliefs known as the ''black legend.''
The legend first arose amid the religious strife and imperial rivalries of 16th-century Europe. Northern Europeans, who loathed Catholic Spain and envied its American empire, published books and gory engravings that depicted Spanish colonization as uniquely barbarous: an orgy of greed, slaughter and papist depravity, the Inquisition writ large.
Though simplistic and embellished, the legend contained elements of truth. Juan de Oñate, the conquistador who colonized New Mexico, punished Pueblo Indians by cutting off their hands and feet and then enslaving them. Hernando de Soto bound Indians in chains and neck collars and forced them to haul his army's gear across the South. Natives were thrown to attack dogs and burned alive.
But there were Spaniards of conscience in the New World, too: most notably the Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas, whose defense of Indians impelled the Spanish crown to pass laws protecting natives. Also, Spanish brutality wasn't unique; English colonists committed similar atrocities. The Puritans were arguably more intolerant of natives than the Spanish and the Virginia colonists as greedy for gold as any conquistador. But none of this erased the black legend's enduring stain, not only in Europe but also in the newly formed United States.
''Anglo Americans,'' writes David J. Weber, the pre-eminent historian of Spanish North America, ''inherited the view that Spaniards were unusually cruel, avaricious, treacherous, fanatical, superstitious, cowardly, corrupt, decadent, indolent and authoritarian.''
When 19th-century jingoists revived this caricature to justify invading Spanish (and later, Mexican) territory, they added a new slur: the mixing of Spanish, African and Indian blood had created a degenerate race. To Stephen Austin, Texas's fight with Mexico was ''a war of barbarism and of despotic principles, waged by the mongrel Spanish-Indian and Negro race, against civilization and the Anglo-American race.'' It was the manifest destiny of white Americans to seize and civilize these benighted lands, just as it was to take the territory of Indian savages.
From 1819 to 1848, the United States and its army increased the nation's area by roughly a third at Spanish and Mexican expense, including three of today's four most populous states: California, Texas and Florida. Hispanics became the first American citizens in the newly acquired Southwest territory and remained a majority in several states until the 20th century.
By then, the black legend had begun to fade. But it seems to have found new life among immigration's staunchest foes, whose rhetoric carries traces of both ancient Hispanophobia and the chauvinism of 19th-century expansionists.
Representative J. D. Hayworth of Arizona, who calls for deporting illegal immigrants and changing the Constitution so that children born to them in the United States can't claim citizenship, denounces ''defeatist wimps unwilling to stand up for our culture'' against alien ''invasion.'' Those who oppose making English the official language, he adds, ''reject the very notion that there is a uniquely American identity, or that, if there is one, that it is superior to any other.''
Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado, chairman of the House Immigration Reform Caucus, depicts illegal immigration as ''a scourge'' abetted by ''a cult of multiculturalism'' that has ''a death grip'' on this nation. ''We are committing cultural suicide,'' Mr. Tancredo claims. ''The barbarians at the gate will only need to give us a slight push, and the emaciated body of Western civilization will collapse in a heap.''
ON talk radio and the Internet, foes of immigration echo the black legend more explicitly, typecasting Hispanics as indolent, a burden on the American taxpayer, greedy for benefits and jobs, prone to criminality and alien to our values -- much like those degenerate Spaniards of the old Southwest and those gold-mad conquistadors who sought easy riches rather than honest toil. At the fringes, the vilification is baldly racist. In fact, cruelty to Indians seems to be the only transgression absent from the familiar package of Latin sins.
Also missing, of course, is a full awareness of the history of the 500-year Spanish presence in the Americas and its seesawing fortunes in the face of Anglo encroachment. ''The Hispanic world did not come to the United States,'' Carlos Fuentes observes. ''The United States came to the Hispanic world. It is perhaps an act of poetic justice that now the Hispanic world should return.''
America has always been a diverse and fast-changing land, home to overlapping cultures and languages. It's an homage to our history, not a betrayal of it, to welcome the latest arrivals, just as the Indians did those tardy and uninvited Pilgrims who arrived in Plymouth not so long ago.

NYT: Postal Worker Survives Saw Attack

By REUTERS

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. postal worker who was attacked on a New York subway platform by a man wielding two power saws said his assailant didn't say a word as he tried to cut through him. Michael Steinberg, 64, was critically injured on Thursday by a man who had grabbed the cordless tools from a cart used by construction workers at the 110th Street station on Manhattan's upper west side.
``He was trying to cut through me and he never stopped,'' Steinberg was quoted as saying in the New York Post newspaper on Friday. ``The motor kept going on and he never stopped -- for two, three, four times, he never stopped.'' Steinberg told reporters that his assailant said nothing during the attack that happened at about 3:30 a.m. as he was on his way to work.
A hospital spokeswoman was unable to comment on Steinberg's injuries or condition but the newspaper said he suffered a deep slice across his abdomen as well as a punctured lung and a broken rib. A New York City police spokeswoman said Tareyton Williams, 33, of the Bronx, was arrested following the attack and charged with attempted murder, robbery, and criminal possession of a weapon.
The attack came about three weeks after a man was arrested for stabbing four random victims over a 24-hour period in Manhattan. Two of the knifings occurred in the city's subway system. But a report last month by the FBI on violent crime in the United States showed New York was getting safer.
Over the past decade, city authorities have changed the face of Times Square and other areas of Manhattan with tough policing that has led to a sharp drop in violent crimes in tourist areas. The New York murder rate of 6.7 per 100,000 people is among the lowest of major cities in the United States, with less than half as many murders per capita as in Miami, Dallas, Chicago and Houston, according to a report in The New York Times.

Trip To Korea: The Last Day

Day 6. Time to leave the country. The Korean Airlines Elite Lounge is truly a marvel. Food was impeccable, selection of alcohol impressive, free bottles of water aboundant. These pictures represent my boredom - having nothing to do for two hours before the departure of my plane.
Doubt if I ever come to Korea for itself, but I definitely will use Korean Airlines to travel to Southeast Asia - there's China, Mongolia, Vietnam, Laos, Japan and Cambodia yet to be visited, preferrably in that order :)

Trip to Korea: Day 5

Day 5. Train trip to Gyeongju, the ancient capital of Silla Kingdom.




Now, how boring these tombs REALLY are!... the palace at least has some nice views and a pond. A group of American women was strolling at the same time, so of course I had to ask them what the heck they are doing in this neck of the woods. They came to visit their daughter/sister who came to teach English to a city nearby. They have skipped going to Seoul, since they are afraid of big cities, the town they live in has exactly one traffic light and a church. Mahvellus.



The market next to the train station is mostly food and the basics. Mostly elderly. Mostly on the floor. Mostly poor.




At the Seoul Train Station after a speedy ride on the TGV Korean Version, 300km/h almost all the way through the tunnels and bridges built especially for these trains.

Trip to Korea: Day 4

Day 4. A bus trip to Sokcho, a small village on the East Sea. The bus itself was supercomfortable, with ample seating, footrest, personal fan etc. Surprising, but 80% of Korea's surface is mountains. One biological stop where I saw this "foreigners only" sign and then within an hour - Sokcho!





Sokcho - a very small port, though the boats from Vladivostok come almost daily, it happened to be the place of some Asian games a couple of years ago, and so now it has become an architectural centre of East Korea, with its splendid helix tower and SuperWide Screen Theatre.




An hour-long boat ride along the shore of the East Sea. The highlight of the tour was a stop for some statue on the top of the hill (the excursion was in Korean, so I have no clue). When the boat stopped, the sea waves showed their strength and two women in the cabin felt very ill. To cheer them up, their friends started singing VERY loudly and banging on the tables. Needless to say, the sick women puked non-stop all the way back. Priceless.




By far, the best lunch. The fish was chopped up right in front of me, then cooked and placed on a slow burner. Delicious! and yes, it rained, so the smudge you see, is a raindrop :(



On the way back to Seoul, I took the wrong bus (non-express) and it exhausted the hell out of me and everybody else on board. But nothing that a bottle of Soju could not smooth over. Highly recommended. Drink thoroughly chilled. For a description and a picture, see Wikipedia :)

Trip to Korea: Day 3

Day 3. Walking through the city on my way to see the old palaces.



A small palace that serves as a tomb to kings and queens of yester years smack in the middle of Seoul and next to a huge marketplace.



Another big palace Changdeokgung. A guide who spoke Korean was quite vivid and interesting, he manipulated the crowd like a magician.



A very quiet place in Changdeokgung palace. Would be a great place for a quiet Sunday afternoon, but one cannot enter the palace at will, only as part of a tour. Guards heckle everyone who strays off the tour.




A beauftiful traffic woman who regulated cars and people with such grace, bowing with utmost respect after each turn. Mesmerizing!