A ceux qui se lèvent tôt

par Quentin Bertoux

Vashti McCollum Dies

Vashti McCollum, whose lawsuit to stop religious instruction on school property led to a landmark ruling by the United States Supreme Court in 1948 to protect the separation of church and state in education, died Sunday in Champaign, Ill. She was 93. Her death was confirmed by her son James, whose refusal as a fifth grader to attend voluntary religious instruction led to the lawsuit.
Mrs. McCollum, who called herself an atheist in Illinois court proceedings but later preferred the word ''humanist,'' said her son was ostracized and embarrassed by his schoolmates because she refused to let him attend the religion classes at his public school in Champaign. The classes for Protestants were on school premises; Jews and Roman Catholics went to religious buildings elsewhere.
She also contended that the classes were a misuse and waste of taxpayers' money, discriminated against minority faiths and were an unconstitutional merger of church and state.
After losing in two Illinois courts, Mrs. McCollum won an 8-to-1 decision by the Supreme Court. Justice Hugo L. Black, who wrote the majority opinion, said the practice in Champaign was ''beyond all question'' using tax-established and tax-supported schools ''to aid religious groups to spread their faith,'' and, he added, ''It falls squarely under the ban of the First Amendment.''
A critical issue in the case was whether the Constitution's ban on establishing religion meant that all sects must be treated equally, as lawyers for Champaign argued was the case in their schools -- or whether it required strict neutrality between belief and unbelief, Mrs. McCollum's contention. She won.
''The First Amendment rests upon the premise that both religion and government can best work to achieve their lofty aims if each is left free from the other in its respective sphere,'' Justice Black wrote.
The case was also important because it extended the First Amendment's protections to the states by using the due process clause of the much later 14th Amendment as justification. As such, all other cases that test Jefferson's wall of ''separation of church and state'' -- including school prayer, aid to parochial schools and sectarian religious displays on public property -- descend from this case.
The language used in comments immediately after the Supreme Court's ruling would percolate in debates for decades. The Catholic bishops, for example, accused the court of making a religion of secularism.
In 1952, the Supreme Court revisited the issue of religious instruction in Zorach v. Clauson. The 6-to-3 ruling in that case held that a New York program allowing religious education during the school day was permissible because it did not use public school facilities or public money.
Vashti Ruth Cromwell was born in Lyons, N.Y., on Nov. 6, 1912, and grew up in Rochester. She was named for the queen of the Persian King Xerxes depicted in Esther 1 in the Bible who refuses to obey her husband's order and is divorced for her spunk.
Her father, Arthur G. Cromwell, was an architect who read the works of atheists like Spinoza and Thomas Paine, then read seven versions of the Bible. After letting the conflicting ideas germinate for years, he had become a vocal atheist by the time his two daughters were in college, James McCollum said.
Mr. Cromwell was president of the Rochester Society of Free Thinkers and had persuaded the state education commissioner to end religious instruction in the schools of the one county in which it was permitted before his daughter filed suit to accomplish the same thing.
Vashti Cromwell received a scholarship to Cornell, but the money ran out during the Depression and she transferred to the University of Illinois, where she majored in political science and took courses at the law school. At the university, she met John Paschal McCollum, a professor of vegetable crops in the horticultural department, and they married in 1933.
After her children were older, Mrs. McCollum earned a master's degree in mass communications at the university.
She is survived by her sons James, of Emerson, Ark., Dannel, of Champaign, and Errol, of Moline, Ill.; her sister, Helen Curtis, who lives in a Rochester suburb; six grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
James McCollum, the oldest son, said that he at first had wanted to attend the religion classes, but that his mother objected. After a few months, he was allowed to go, but found the classes childish and ''silly.'' The next year, he said, he told his parents he did not wish to attend.
His mother talked with the school system's superintendent, but he said there was nothing he could do. She was careful to say that she was making no criticism of religion, The New York Daily News reported in 1945.
She then sued with the help of a local Unitarian minister and financial support from a group of Jewish businessmen in Chicago. Her opponents, in addition to the City of Champaign, were church federations.
A dramatic moment during the initial trial of the case came when Mrs. McCollum's father said he did not believe in God, and a gasp went up from the crowd. Later, James McCollum said the same thing. Both ''affirmed'' that they would tell the truth instead of swearing by God. Mrs. McCollum called herself ''a rationalist or an atheist.''
Time magazine observed that the trial shared ''features that made the Scopes 'monkey trial' a sideshow'' of the 1920's.
In the three-year legal battle, Mrs. McCollum received physical threats and was fired from her job as a dance instructor at the university. At Halloween, a mob of trick-or-treaters pelted the McCollum family with rotten tomatoes and cabbages. The family cat was lynched.
Mrs. McCollum wrote a book on the case, ''One Woman's Fight,'' became a world traveler and served two terms as president of the American Humanist Association.
''We don't bother ourselves with the question of whether there is or isn't a God,'' she said in a speech in 1948.
Correction: August 30, 2006, Wednesday An obituary on Saturday about Vashti McCollum, who successfully pursued the Supreme Court case that banned religious education in public schools, incorrectly described the religious beliefs of Thomas Paine, whose writings influenced the thinking of her father. Although Paine was frequently described as an atheist by his critics, he was actually a deist.

NYT: Search and Defend

THE profiling of behavioral cues to identify terrorists is the latest trend in American airport security. The Transportation Security Administration began experimenting with the technique last December at a dozen airports, and after this month’s reported bomb plot in Britain, agency officials said they wanted to train and redeploy hundreds of routine screeners at airports across the nation by the end of next year.
There’s no question we’d all like to improve airport security. But investing heavily in seemingly high-tech methods like behavioral profiling isn’t the answer, and may make air travel less safe on the whole. To understand why, consider that just a few days after the introduction of stringent carry-on limits following the British bomb scare, a 59-year-old woman from Vermont boarded a Washington-bound jet at London Heathrow Airport, became unruly, and caused the plane to be diverted to Boston. A careful search discovered that she’d brought on the plane several cigarette lighters, matches, a screwdriver, hand lotion and bottled liquids.
How she managed to get those items through heightened screening is still unclear. What is clear, though, is that this passenger helped expose the Achilles’ heel in airport security: the basic search.
Behavioral profiling — especially the cut-rate version the T.S.A. has in store for us — is not going to help in this respect. Learning to defeat poorly trained screeners is a lot easier than learning to fly a jumbo jet. The likely result is that our newly minted behavioral detectives will be singling out and searching the wrong passengers.
Behavioral profiling is by no means new. In the mid-1960’s, Paul Ekman, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco, began researching how facial muscle movement relates to emotions. He noted several thousand facial muscle combinations and put together the Facial Action Coding System — an intricate, 500-page catalog of facial expressions.
read more
Since then, there have been many studies of the ability to detect truth and deception, but they have been largely disappointing. A review of the literature published in 2000 found that in experiments where subjects were trying to detect whether others were telling the truth or lying, the subjects had an overall success rate of 56.6 percent — slightly better than a coin toss. In the studies that broke down their data, it was found that subjects were able to determine that they were being lied to only 44 percent of the time — meaning that they would have done better closing their eyes and guessing.
A few studies have found that certain elite, highly trained professional groups may beat chance under specific conditions; however, a comprehensive survey of those also concluded that their accuracy rates overall were unremarkable. As Dr. Ekman himself noted in 1999, almost all the studies “have found that accuracy is close to chance.”
Some anecdotal evidence is becoming mythic, but it’s largely misleading. The most common involves Ahmed Ressam, the millennium bomber, who was apprehended at the Canadian border in 1999 trying to smuggle bomb-making equipment. Mr. Ressam became a suspect when a customs agent felt that his itinerary seemed unusual and that he was acting oddly.
Many credit his arrest to a profiling plan put in effect by Raymond Kelly, then the head of United States Customs and now New York City’s police commissioner. True, under Mr. Kelly, the Customs search success rate improved by 25 percent while the overall number of searches decreased by 75 percent. But his profile rested on six factors, only two of which were behavioral. The four other factors involved canine searches, incorrect or suspicious paperwork and specific intelligence or contraband implicating the suspect. It’s unclear how much of the improved success turned on behavioral cues alone.
The remarkable track record of the security force at Ben-Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv — no successful hijackings ever— is also often chalked up to behavioral profiling, but that too is naïve. For three decades, the airport has had intensive security practices and a sky marshal program. All departing passengers are interviewed and subjected to one-on-one searches that, according to Rafi Ron, former head of security at Ben-Gurion, take an average of 57 minutes per person.
Israel is thought to have had the most success with behavioral profiling. But again consider how the Israelis do it: they recruit their officers mostly from the military, subject them to stringent tests in order to weed out all but those with above-average intelligence and particularly strong personality types, and give them nine weeks of training in behavior recognition.
This is a far cry from the T.S.A.’s program: recruits are routine screeners, required only to have a high school degree and a criminal background check; they are given four days of classroom training in observation and questioning techniques, three days of field practice, then sent out on the job.
Rather than divert hundreds of screeners and untold dollars to high-tech fantasies, we need to invest those resources in hiring more routine screeners and giving them better training in basic searches.
If we want to change the system, a better idea would be to eliminate most carry-ons and emulate high-security prisons. In my experience, most prisons operate the same way: first I check my briefcase, overcoat, belt, cellphone and all unnecessary items at the reception. I then take everything out of my pockets — wallet, pen and paper. A guard conducts a thorough pat-down search and physically inspects my property and shoes. We’re done in less than a minute.
Sure, this would not be 100 percent foolproof. But, in combination with our sky marshal program, it would be far more likely to prevent future terrorist hijackings than giving a bunch of unqualified screeners a cursory education in face reading.
Bernard E. Harcourt, a law professor at the University of Chicago, is the author of the forthcoming “Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing and Punishing in an Actuarial Age.”

NYT: Bank of America

Not only there is certain identity confusion on the part of the Bank of America (Asia) Ltd., it is selling some of its branches to a Chinese bank, which will probably name it something like Chinese Bank of America (Asia) Ltd.

Friday at the Met

Friday at the Met (part 2)

Late coffee

WSJ: What To Do When You Retire?

The Over-50 Crowd Takes to the Road In Paid Big-Rig Gigs

Couples Find Second Careers Driving 18-Wheelers; Gone to Look for America
By STEPHANIE CHEN
August 24, 2006; Page A1

At a truck stop diner along Interstate 5 near Tigard, Ore., Daniel and Becky Ford were fueling up on pancakes and black coffee for the 2,200-mile run to Dallas they were about to make in a Freightliner tractor-trailer stuffed with auto parts.
It was the 10th week on the open road for Mr. Ford, 57 years old, and his 51-year-old wife, who chucked their old life in rural Pennsylvania in May for a cramped truck cab that keeps them moving 22 hours a day.
Their new career is taking them to places they always dreamed of visiting but couldn't afford. "When the money is tight and you have other worries, you can't be too adventurous," says Mrs. Ford, a former hairstylist. "Becky and I serve as our own boss," says Mr. Ford, a former carpenter. "We can stop wherever we want."
Faced with a worsening shortage of long-haul truck drivers, freight carriers are turning to the RV generation, aggressively recruiting older couples like the Fords to climb behind the wheel. Schneider National Inc., the Green Bay, Wis., company that hired the Fords and put them through driving school, fishes for applicants through AARP, the advocacy group for people 50 and older, and has a Web page for "mature workers." This fall, the American Trucking Association plans a billboard and television ad blitz to lure older drivers.
"We just thought if Ma and Pa can drive the Winnebago, maybe they can drive the 18-wheeler," says Tim Lynch, a senior vice president at the trade group.
Since 2000, the number of service and truck drivers 55 or older has surged 19%, to about 616,000, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. The percentage jump is quadruple that of truck drivers overall. At Schneider, about 3,000 of the carrier's 15,000 drivers and independent contractors are older people.
The hiring binge has dramatically increased the number of husband-and-wife driving teams, and truck makers are trying to make their big rigs feel more like rolling homes away from home. Paccar Inc.'s Kenworth Truck Co. unit introduced a new model in March with leather beds and heated seats. Volvo Trucks North America, part of AB Volvo, has begun production of trucks with a full-size bed in the cab comfortable for couples.
Johnson's Corner, a truck stop halfway between Denver and Cheyenne, Wyo., that claims it has been open 24 hours a day since 1952, has begun ordering outdoor magazines and Western novels for older drivers who don't like the standard fare of hot-rod and girlie magazines, said Chauncey Taylor, the truck stop's owner. A new whirlpool and massage chairs are available for "those who have weary bones," he says.
Women drivers at Prime Inc. can get their hair and nails done at a salon that opened two years ago in a 40,000-square-foot facility that the Springfield, Mo., refrigerated-truck carrier runs in its hometown for drivers and other employees. "Even if they are away from home, we want to give them the same amenities everyone else would have," says Don Lacy, the company's safety director.
Terri Lynch, 58, who began driving a truck with her husband, Joey, in 1992, now has a cellphone jammed with the numbers of wives who take turns behind the wheel with their spouses. She makes weekly calls to new husband-and-wife driver teams, peppering them with advice on how to make marriage coexist with life on the road. "You just have to learn to work with each other," Mrs. Lynch tells other truck-driving wives.
Older drivers don't face any extra requirements because of their age. Most carriers send recruits to commercial driving school. Drivers must pass a physical exam required by the federal government, but there is no mandatory retirement age as there is for commercial pilots, who under Federal Aviation Administration rules must retire at 60. On the road, among all drivers, those 55 to 69 have the lowest fatality rates for adults, according to a 2004 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report.
Truck companies with baby boomer drivers insist their safety record is at least as good as that of younger drivers. Older drivers are especially cautious, says Steve Vogel, president of Vogel Safety & Risk Inc., a safety consulting firm in Bolingbrook, Ill. Riding shotgun with a spouse also can make drivers less likely to speed, tailgate or go berserk at road-hogging cars.
At larger carriers, older husband-and-wife drivers often get health insurance, a 401(k) plan, and two or three days off every two weeks. Annual starting pay is roughly $66,000 to $90,000 per couple, enough to entice many middle-aged spouses approaching a financially precarious retirement. The $1,000 a week that former office secretary Betty Ewing, 53, and her husband, Ed, each make driving for CRST International Inc., Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has allowed them to build a house in Texas. On the road, they read mystery novels to each other to pass the time.
Many couples are won over by the chance to see sights that seemed out of reach before they hit the road. Wayne and Zella Gerdts of Hortonville, Wis., dashed to Niagara Falls during an eight-hour layover four years ago. She has developed an interest in collecting Native American pottery, sometimes shopping for Navajo vases while her husband plays casino poker. Mrs. Gerdts, 65, turned to trucking after being laid off by the insurance company where she worked for 14 years.
The Fords can stop wherever they want along their company-assigned routes, as long as their loads are delivered on time. They already have visited 44 states, stashing postcards on the dashboard from stops along the way. Earlier this summer, Mr. Ford emerged from an old Western shop in El Paso, Texas, with a pair of ostrich-leather cowboy boots, and the couple made a detour off I-84 in Utah last month to see Devil's Slide, a limestone formation.
The auto-parts run to Dallas was a three-day slog with a tight deadline that left no room to wander. So Mr. and Mrs. Ford enjoyed watching thick forests along the highway sharpen into focus like a Polaroid picture. Bouncing through Oregon's Cascade Mountains, she noticed something flicker through a corner of the windshield. "Look," Mrs. Ford said, touching her husband's shoulder as she pointed out a faint rainbow receding into rain clouds.

Tristichs by David Harsent

after Yannis Ritsos

A wind off the mountain
fills the bedrooms:
fir trees, pines, cypresses, an eagle.

***

Now he knows your secret
he will keep it always
on the very tip of his tongue.

***

Rose-pearl light of dawn. Three boats,
barely visible. Flowers in one; in another,
oranges; in the third, my mother.

***

Soft smoke clinging
to roof tiles:
oh, Ithaca, Ithaca

***

White lights of noon.
White marble statues.
That white bird knows my mind.

***

At the tomb of the Unknown Soldier
we remember
how well we forget the dead.

***

You naked in bed beside me.
Me beside you in bed, naked.
The owl is a liar; don't listen.

New Bank of America Building

The Durst Organization and Bank of America have begun construction, on the world's most environmentally responsible high-rise office building, a 2.1 million square foot, 54-story crystalline skyscraper located in the heart of Midtown Manhattan.

The Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park will serve as the headquarters for Bank of America’s operations in New York City, and house its global corporate and investment banking, wealth and investment management and consumer and commercial banking businesses.

Located on the west side of Sixth Avenue, between 42nd and 43rd Street, the high-rise office tower is scheduled to open in 2008.

For more information, click here

Manhattan 360° Panorama

A nice Manhattan panorama - click on the image to see a larger image. Please keep in mind it is almost one and a half megabytes! (1.5MB)

Lincoln Center

Bush read a book by Camus? wha?

Camus Comes to Crawford
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON

Strangely enough, we find two famous men reading Albert Camus’s “The Stranger” this summer.
One is Jean Girard, the villainous gay French race car driver hilariously played by Sacha Baron Cohen (a k a Ali G and Borat) — the sinuous rival to Will Ferrell’s stocky Ricky Bobby in “Talladega Nights.”
Girard, a jazz-loving, white-silk-scarf-wearing, America-disdaining Formula Un driver sponsored by Perrier, is so smooth he can sip macchiato from a china cup, smoke Gitanes and read “L’Etranger” behind the wheel and still lead the Nascar pack.
Frenchie contemptuously informs “cowboy” Bobby that America merely gave the world George Bush, Cheerios and the ThighMaster while France invented democracy, existentialism and the ménage à trois.
The other guy kindling to Camus is none other than the aforementioned George Bush, who read “The Stranger” in English on his Crawford vacation and, Tony Snow told me, “liked it.” Name-dropping existentialists is good for picking up girls, as Woody Allen’s schlemiels found, or getting through the clove-cigarette fog of Humanities 101. But it does seem odd that W., who once mocked NBC’s David Gregory as “intercontinental” for posing a question in French to the French president in France, would choose Camus over Grisham.
Camus is not beach reading — or brush reading. How on earth did this book make it into the hands of our proudly anti-intellectual president?
“I don’t know how ‘L’Etranger’ made it onto his list,” Mr. Snow said. “I must confess, I read ‘L’Etranger’ 25 years ago.” The rest of W.’s reading list was presidentially correct: two books on Lincoln and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Polio: An American Story,” by David Oshinsky. (Not a word by Merleau-Ponty.)
Debunking the theory that W. had a sports section or Mad magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy” tucked inside the 1946 classic of angst, Mr. Snow noted that he and the president had “a brief conversation on the origins of French existentialism, Camus and Sartre.” Pressed for more details by an astonished columnist having trouble envisioning Waco as the Left Bank, the press secretary laughed. “Confidential conversation,” he said, extending the administration’s lack of transparency to literature.
He brushed off suggestions that the supremely unself-reflective W. was going through a Carteresque malaise-in-the-gorge moment: “He doesn’t feel like an existentialist trapped in Algeria during the unpleasantness.”
It takes a while to adjust to the idea of W., who has created chaos trying to impose moral order on the globe, perusing Camus, who wrote about the eternal frustration of moral order in human affairs. What does W., the archenemy of absurdity as a view of life, kindle to in C., the apostle of absurdity as a view of life? What can W., the born-again monogamist, spark to in C., the amorous atheist? In some ways, Mr. Bush is supremely not a Camus man. Camus hated the blindness caused by ideology, and Mr. Bush wallows in it. Camus celebrated lucidity while the president keeps seeing only what he wants to see.
Mr. Bush’s life has been premised on his confidence that he will always be insulated from the consequences and the cruelties of existence, unlike Meursault. W. or his people always work to change fate, whether it’s an election or the Middle East.
If you think about it long enough, though, it begins to make a sort of wacky sense.
“The Stranger” is about the emotionally detached Meursault, who makes a lot of bad decisions and pre-emptively kills an Arab in the sand. Get it? Camus’s protagonist moves through an opaque, obscure and violent world that is indifferent to his beliefs and desires. Get it?
If there was ever a moment when this president could regard the unanticipated consequences of his actions, behold the world littered with the very opposite of what he intended for it and appreciate the gritty stoicism of the philosophy of absurdism, this is it. Iraq in civil war. Al Qaeda metastasizing and plotting. Hezbollah, Iran and Syria knitting closer, celebrating a “victory” in standing up to Israel, the U.S. and Britain, and mocking W.’s plan for a “new Middle East.” The North Koreans luxuriating in their nuclear capability. Chávez becoming the new Castro on a global scale.
Maybe next the president should pick up Camus’s other classic, “The Myth of Sisyphus.” Was there ever a national enterprise more Sisyphean than the war in Iraq?
If there was ever a confirmation of Camus’s sense of the absurdity of life, it’s that the president is reading him.

A trip to Boston

The myth of airport security

by Martin Samuel

The best defence against terrorism is good intelligence and police work, not a ban on mineral water

“THIS IS THE BUSIEST airport in the world at the busiest time of year,” said Heathrow’s chief executive officer Tony Douglas. “To suggest we could continue as if nothing had happened is frankly ludicrous.” Except, actually, nothing had. Not at Heathrow, anyway. No suspected terrorists were apprehended at or on the way to the airport, no bomb-making material was found on airport land. It never is. Look at the clear plastic box on display at every security checkpoint. Nail files, scissors, corkscrews, pen knives. No guns or bombs. Shortly to be joined by paperback books, cuddly toys and a litre of Buxton’s finest. But still no bombs.
Today, Britain’s state of alert will be downgraded from “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God” to “Is it me or is that bloke with the beard sweating a bit?” which means small hand luggage will be allowed, but no liquids. Water bottles being the new shoes — remember Richard Reid, when everyone was under attack from Hush Puppies? — it is absolutely vital that we do not take liquid refreshment on to planes. Trains, fine: because, of course, whoever would think of targeting the rail network in Britain? Not this year, anyway. Well, I’m certainly feeling safer.
The heightened security was necessary, we were told, because when a plot is uncovered, there is no guarantee its many tentacles have been disabled. A splinter group, in fear of discovery, could be panicked into a drastic early plan. This speculation has logical fear at its root. What does not make sense, though, is why the only suitable venue is an airport and why a psychopath with an explosive cocktail would still attempt to get through an area heavy with detection aids, instead of taking the 9.30 from Euston untroubled and blowing it to kingdom come just as it hits 100mph through Watford Junction. Welcome to the illusion of security, folks, as thousands of people who could not possibly be terrorists stand in the rain outside Heathrow, brainwashed into believing that what they are going through is necessary or particularly effective.
Airport security will never be anything more than a last resort, when all else has failed. If someone is heading for the gate with the bomb-making equivalent of an Ikea flat-pack, someone in the dark arts department hasn’t been doing his job. In this case, we believe, the security forces played a blinder. The most efficient conqueror of terrorism — good intelligence married to good police work — remains the best hope of saving the day. In the circumstances, a few extra precautions are needed. But this? We are so frightened of adopting measures that might offend the vocal Muslim community that we have managed to install a system that makes everybody a terrorist. And if everybody is a terrorist, then nobody is.
Police investigating the Yorkshire Ripper murders interviewed Peter Sutcliffe nine times without making the connection between man and crime; hardly surprising considering the haphazard nature of the process. After the murder of Wilma McCann in 1975, 11,000 suspects were questioned; after the seriously assault of Maureen Long in 1975, 300 police took 12,500 statements; when a £5 note connected the killer of Jean Jordan to particular wage payments in the Shipley and Bingley area, he was one of another 5,000 under scrutiny. By treating everybody like the Ripper, police allowed Sutcliffe to merge into the crowd. Jaded investigators, working through another scattergun list of suspects, stopped believing the man in front of them could possibly be Jack. He was just another nobody to be written up and filed in a system so meaninglessly exhaustive that floors were strengthened to cope with the weight of paper. That is what happens when security throws a big net over the crowd.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, three of the five hijackers on American Airlines Flight 77 triggered scanner alarms at Washington Dulles airport. Majed Moqed and Nawaf al-Hamzi set the warning off more than once, and both were then searched with handheld wands. Almost anyone who has flown knows this experience. It must happen thousands of times each day. You smile and mug your innocence; he wearily searches again, plainly expecting little more than a chunky watch. At Washington, the security officials found what they expected, nothing, and let the passengers on their way. Approximately two and a half hours later, Flight AA77 hit the Pentagon like a guided missile and 189 people died.
The first voice I heard on radio last Thursday told me the pointlessness of profiling because terrorist organisations were sophisticated and would use operatives from outside the targeted group. Maybe it was somebody from the Muslim Council of Great Britain, an organisation which, by its very existence, suggests we are not all the same.
No matter. The anti-profiling argument is like saying if the police keep pulling in fat, shaven-headed, white troglodytes covered in tattoos, England’s football hooligans will cleverly start recruiting from the ranks of hip, urbane black people who are all itching to get hopelessly pissed, sing “No surrender to the IRA” and be tear-gassed by the Carabinieri. Nonsense. In the event of racial profiling, there will be no Mid-Surrey Branch of al-Qaeda forming on the hoof. As for cunning disguises, we know them. There are two looks: beard on and beard off. Call me fanciful, but when Mohammed Atta imagined his meeting with the Almighty and his many virgins, he did not picture himself done up like Mrs Doubtfire. The quicker we can get the white matrons through, the more thoroughly we can check those that by age, race, behaviour or appearance fit what is becoming not so much a profile as a cliché.
Alternatively, we carry on as we are. Everybody is a terrorist on planes, nobody is a terrorist on trains, and there is as much chance of locating explosive murder among Italian speed skaters or Saga holidaymakers as within the ranks of misguided Muslim youth. In other words, get in the queue, Britain, drink your water and shut up. Now, doesn’t that feel safe?

Yura

Fridays at the Met

Smell Like A Fish

by Jonathan Hodgkin

WHEN A GENE MAKES YOU SMELL LIKE A FISH. And other tales about the genes in your body. By Lisa Seachrist Chiu. 219pp. Oxford University Press. Pounds
15.99. (US $27). 0 19 516994 8

Body odour is part of being human. We are all smelly to some degree, but some of us are smellier than others. In extreme, and fortunately very rare cases, a person may suffer from a pathological condition that causes them to emit a fish-like stench, with catastrophic effects on their interactions with other people. Lisa Seachrist Chiu takes this condition, called fish odour syndrome or, more technically, trimethylaminuria (TMAU), as the starting point of a tour of notable human genes. TMAU is a good place to start, because it is a straightforward example of a disease caused by mutation in a single gene, which encodes an enzyme called FMO3. What FMO3 does is to break down one of the by-products of normal food digestion, trimethylamine, which is a nauseatingly fishy compound; so if someone is deficient in FMO3 production, they accumulate trimethylamine and become incurably smelly.
Chiu goes on to describe an assortment of other human genetic diseases, ranging from well-known, single-gene abnormalities like phenylketonuria, Huntingdon's disease and haemophilia, to more complex disorders involving multiple genes and environmental factors, as well as complications such as imprinting and X chromosome inactivation. She ends with a chapter on molecular studies of human evolution and development, and a brief epilogue on single nucleotide polymorphisms and their potential for a new revolution in medicine.
This survey of human genetics, written for a general audience, is readable and sometimes engaging, but it is carelessly written and inconsistent in the level of explanation used. Technical terms are introduced before being adequately explained, and several of the stories are left dangling unsatisfactorily, or ended with a laboured pun. Chiu also misses some key points -for example, she writes about the discovery of FOX2P, the first candidate for a "gene for language", but fails to mention one of its most exciting and suggestive properties, namely its remarkably rapid evolution. Better books of this type have been written, such as Matt Ridley's Genome (1999) and Armand Leroi's Mutants (2003). When a Gene Makes You Smell Like a Fish has the advantage of being reasonably up to date, but otherwise there is not much to recommend it.

Go ahead, press the button!

Go ahead, press the button! Нажми на кнопочку, ну нажми!

NYT: Iranian 101: A Lesson for Americans

What a surprising (to me) article! I have always been under the impression (solidly supported by years of first-hand experience) that compared to most Europeans (including the British and the Irish populations), Americans were the kings if disingenuity and politeness for politeness' sake - saying things they do not mean or the exact opposite. The infamous Costanza "it is not you, it is me" routine always seemed to me the perfect embodiment of that "justifiable" duplicity. So to discover that an American finds Iranians too polite, lying and insincere was quite a shock to me.

The Fine Art of Hiding What You Mean to Say
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN (NYT) 1295 words
Published: August 6, 2006

TEHRAN - IT is certainly unfair to accuse all Iranians of being liars. The label is judgmental and reeks of stereotype. The more appropriate way to phrase the Iranian view toward honesty, the way many Iranians themselves describe it, is to say that being direct and telling the truth are not prized principles in Iran.
Often, just the opposite is true. People are expected to give false praise and insincere promise. They are expected to tell you what you want to hear to avoid conflict, or to offer hope when there is none.
There is a social principle in Iran called taarof, a concept that describes the practice of insincerity -- of inviting people to dinner when you don't really want their company, for example. Iranians understand such practices as manners and are not offended by them. But taarof is just one aspect of a whole framework for communication that can put Iranian words in a completely different context from the one Americans are familiar with.
''You have to guess if people are sincere, you are never sure,'' said Nasser Hadian, a political science professor at the University of Tehran. ''Symbolism and vagueness are inherent in our language.''
This way of communicating is suddenly essential for Americans to understand. Increasingly, it appears that the road to peace, and war, runs through Tehran. And so hearing what Iranians are really saying, not what Americans think they are saying, has become a priority. Iran has outsized influence with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. It has profound influence with the newly empowered Shiites of Iraq. And it is locked in its own fight with the United Nations Security Council over its ambition to develop nuclear technology.
And yet, understanding each other -- forget about agreeing -- is complicated from the start.
''Speech has a different function than it does in the West,'' said Kian Tajbakhsh, a social scientist who lived for many years in England and the United States before returning to Iran a decade ago. ''In the West, 80 percent of language is denotative. In Iran 80 percent is connotative.''
Translation: In the West, ''yes'' generally means yes. In Iran, ''yes'' can mean yes, but it often means maybe or no. In Iran, Dr. Tajbakhsh said, listeners are expected to understand that words don't necessarily mean exactly what they mean.
''This creates a rich, poetic linguistic culture,'' he said. ''It creates a multidimensional culture where people are adept at picking up on nuances. On the other hand, it makes for bad political discourse. In political discourse people don't know what to trust.''
It is not a crude ethnic joke or slur to talk about taarof, but a cultural reality that Iranians say stems from centuries under foreign occupation. Whether it was the Arabs, the Mongols or the French and the British, foreign hegemony taught Iranians the value of hiding their true face. The principle is also enshrined in the majority religion here, Shiite Islam, which in other lands is a minority religion, often at odds with the majority. There is a concept known as takiya in which Shiites are permitted, even encouraged, to hide their belief or faith to protect their life, honor or property.
''When you tell lies, it can save your life,'' said Muhammad Sanati, a social psychologist who lived for years in England before returning to Iran in 1982. ''Then you can see the problem of language in this country.''
Diplomacy everywhere is the art of not showing your hand, and if Iranians have shown skill at forcing negotiations over negotiations, or winning by stalling, it would be an overstatement to say that it can be explained solely by a culture of taarof. But Western diplomats based in Iran say that Iran's cultural foundation gives it a leg up when dealing with the more studied negotiating skills of the Americans.
Perhaps more important, such diplomats and Iranians themselves said, Americans need to understand Iran's approach to interpersonal communications in order to understand the complexities Iranians face in dealing with each other. Analyst after analyst said that after centuries of cloaking their true feelings, Iranians are often unsure whom they can trust when dealing with each other, let alone foreigners.
One Western diplomat, who insisted on anonymity because that is standard diplomatic protocol, said it was possible that when Iran said it could not respond before the end of August to the West's offer on its nuclear program, that it was not only a diplomatic maneuver, but may also have been a nod to the reality of internal Iranian politics. Major decisions on the nuclear issue involve consensus at the highest levels of the political elite. But consensus can be hard to achieve when interpersonal communications, at least initially, are defined by taarof, mistrust and different political agendas, the diplomat said.
At the same time, understanding the cultural/moral foundation of a community can also help Americans understand whether or not an agreement was actually reached, even when the Iranians seem to say that a deal is done. ''You can translate words, but can you translate feelings?'' asked Saeed Leylaz, a political analyst and former government official in Tehran. ''British diplomats are more successful with us. They understand our ways and our culture.''
Indeed, Americans and Iranians speak two different languages. Americans are pragmatists and word choice is often based on the shortest route from here to there. Iranians are poets and tend to use language as though it were paint, to be spread out, blended, swirled. Words can be presented as pieces in a puzzle, pieces that may or may not fit together neatly.
''In Iran, you praise people but you don't mean it,'' Dr. Sanati said. ''You invite people for all sorts of things, and you don't mean it. You promise things, and you don't mean it. People who live here understand that.''
Today, Iranians are expecting the United States to take the time to understand its culture. It has seen America fail the test of cultural translation in Iraq.
''It is up to America to understand us, because it is stronger,'' said Mr. Leylaz, the political analyst. There are differences of opinion about how much taarof, or indirection, or as some people call it, expediency, actually affects public discourse. People in Iran assume that when a politician offers something he knows he can't deliver, it is taarof. They don't call it a lie.
But what about when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sends a letter to President Bush. Is it sincere, or taarof? The letter has been interpreted by some Iranians as the president trying to follow the path of the Prophet Muhammad, who sent letters to his enemies, or of copying Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who sent a letter in 1989 to Mikhail Gorbachev. Some have called it naïve, or just bad politics. Certainly its import is unclear, but to all of these people, it seemed intended as a serious overture. Washington, in contrast, dismissed the letter as irrelevant because it did not address any of the substantial issues on the table. It wanted Tehran to be more direct.
Dr. Hadian, who was a childhood friend of the president, suggested a different approach: ''If you talk to Ahmadinejad you have to consider taarof.''
''Taarof is a sign of respect, even if we don't mean it.''
Muhammad Atrianfar, publisher of the reform-minded daily newspaper Shargh, said Iranians find Americans easy to deal with because they are straightforward. That, he implied, could give Iranians an advantage in any negotiations. But for Americans to understand Iranians, he said, they must recognize that with Iranians, ''the mind thinks something, the heart feels something else, the tongue says something else, and manners do something else.
''It doesn't mean people are lying,'' he said. ''They are just dealing with you with a different character.''

LRB: Do I see or do I remember?

Elias Khoury writes about the Israeli invasions of Lebanon

It is the time for death in Lebanon. Anyone who has followed the country’s modern history might well be confused. In 2000 Lebanon’s resistance expelled the Israeli army from the land it had occupied in the south. A popular intifada expelled the Syrian army in 2005. How could a minor military operation undertaken by Hizbullah send Lebanon back to square one? We seem to be entering a labyrinth from which nobody can find the way out. The only certainty is that Lebanon is facing destruction, that the dream of restoring the country to independence is on hold.
In 1978 Israel devastated Lebanon and established a military cordon in order to protect its northern settlements from the PLO’s Katyusha rockets. The country became the site of a series of wars, invasions and retreats. Then in 1982 Israel, under the leadership of Menachem Begin, decided that a decisive victory was necessary. Armoured columns invaded Lebanon, and reached the outskirts of Beirut. The objective was to get the Palestinians out of the way and to end their hopes of creating an independent state. Yasir Arafat and his men were forced to leave Lebanon by sea and go into exile in Tunisia.
With the massacres in the camps of Sabra and Shatila, the Israelis visited new humiliations on the Arab world. They were convinced that the confrontation on their northern border was over, and that their armies had managed not only to end the threat against them, but also to subjugate the Palestinians and the Lebanese. It didn’t work out like that. Arafat moved to Ramallah, where he would become the first Palestinian leader after the nakba of 1948 to live until his last days in his homeland, and the Israeli army was forced to withdraw from Lebanon.
Why has the battle between Hizbullah and the Israeli army assumed such proportions now? The question is of course bound up with all the other questions surrounding the Palestine problem, and bound up too with the oil wealth in the Middle East that has become a curse.
Lebanon emerged as a distinct entity after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The state founded in Damascus by King Faisal I after the end of the First World War was supposed to include Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, but then Palestine became a British mandate, and the Zionist movement took over there. After the Second World War and the end of the French mandate in Syria and Lebanon, both countries became independent, but Syria seemed to lose its identity, unsure whether it should ally itself with Iraq or join a political union with Egypt. Then in 1963 there was a Baathist coup in Syria, and Hafiz Assad, an air-force officer, triumphed in the subsequent power struggle, becoming president in 1971. Assad extended his sphere of influence to Lebanon and turned it into a pivot of regional politics during the latter stage of the Cold War.
Lebanon was unaffected by the military revolutions in the Arab East after 1948. It was an oasis of cultural freedom in a region dominated by revolutionary military regimes. It was also the region’s weak spot, vulnerable to outside influence, since the religious diversity of its citizens meant that it was difficult for the state fully to control internal security or foreign policy. There were severe strains in the first years of independence, reaching a climax in 1958 with the surge in Arab nationalism which resulted from Nasser’s influence. A small-scale civil war that year ended in an Egyptian-American settlement after US marines landed in Lebanon.
Since 1978 Lebanon has been subjected to five Israeli invasions, each aimed at destroying rockets: in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and 2006. On each occasion the Israeli army fought only against semi-organised Palestinian and Lebanese militias. Did the Israelis score a victory in 1982? You couldn’t call it that, not after the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, nor could you call 1993 a victory, involving as it did the recognition of the PLO. After Israel’s 2000 withdrawal under fire, during which the inhabitants of northern Israel were required to live in shelters as rockets were launched by Hizbullah, that description seemed even less appropriate.
A war but not a war, because the aggressors did not acknowledge the existence of the other side, until the Palestinians agreed to what was tantamount to surrender at Oslo. But they did not in the end surrender, and Israel took advantage of the attacks of 9/11 to bring down the Palestinians’ more moderate leaders. This led to total chaos in occupied Gaza and the West Bank. The violence that has engulfed Lebanon today is part of this pattern. When Palestinians in Gaza succeeded in capturing one of Israel’s soldiers, Israel refused the logic of reciprocity. Instead it has plunged Gaza into a state of lethal anarchy. Israel refuses to exchange prisoners because it sees Hamas and Hizbullah as terrorists. The problem in Gaza and the West Bank is clear: Israel wants to create cages and ghettos for Palestinians. In Lebanon the situation is more complex.
The Israelis say they do not want to occupy Lebanon. This is also what the Americans say about Iraq. The issue, however, is not what they want but what they are doing. Can Israel tolerate religious and ethnic chaos on its borders? Is it performing a service to the United States by trying to weaken Hizbullah, Iran’s strongest ally in the region, prior to the opening up of the Iranian nuclear file? What is clear, beneath the drone of the missiles hurled at the southern suburbs of Beirut, is that Israel, realising it is incapable of destroying Hizbullah, has decided to destroy Lebanon. But the madness is not just Israeli. Much of the Arab world is following the road to self-destruction, via a fundamentalist ideology that, perhaps unwittingly, reflects the worldview of Bernard Lewis’s disciples, the neo-orientalists.
Lebanon is caught between Israel’s strategy and Syria’s. Israel, like the wolf in sheep’s clothing in Aesop’s fable, has taken on the role of the victim. But Israel also claims that its prey is not a sheep but a wolf, and it’s certainly true that Israel forces it to act like a wolf.
Syria’s strategy, fashioned by the late President Assad and used whenever his regime was under threat, can be understood by adapting the story of Abraham and Isaac. Syria needs a lamb to sacrifice instead of a son. If necessary, it will appear to protect the lamb, making the lamb seem to be wolf-like, even as it waits to be sacrificed.
Lebanon has been caught between these two strategies for thirty years. But now there are new actors on stage: the US and Iran. In the 1980s, the Americans encouraged Iraq to contain Iran by means of a crushing war, just as they gave Syria the task of imposing peace on Lebanon. The fear now is that the US has given Israel a green light to destroy Lebanon. The Iranians adopted sensible policies in Afghanistan and Iraq, and have been the sole beneficiaries of the turmoil of the American war. Iraq has more or less collapsed into their hands: with the withdrawal of the US and British armies it will become a civil war zone directed by Tehran. Afghanistan is permanently on the edge of an abyss. Iran exploits this by trying to destabilise America’s allies in the region. The way the United States and Iran behave on the battlefront in Lebanon will decide the fate not just of Lebanon, but of the whole of the Middle East.
It has been clear during the first days of the confrontation that Hizbullah has prepared for conflict in a manner that has aroused admiration in a region where wars with Israel have resulted only in frustration. It is clear that Hizbullah’s weapons are not only intended for the defence of Lebanon but are being held in reserve for a greater battle, a battle to defend Iranian nuclear weapons. Lebanon has to join the battle against Israel not because it wants to, not because there are still Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails, but because the only options Israel offers the Arab Middle East are to submit or to collaborate in the crushing of the Palestinians.
This is not to defend Hizbullah’s military strategy, or a Syrian vision that is based on exporting tension beyond its borders at the expense of the Lebanese and Palestinian people. An alternative strategy must emerge in the Arab world, before fundamentalism takes over everything, turning every Arab country into a site of battle and destruction. The last bastion of secular resistance, the PLO, has been destroyed. Perhaps Arafat made a mistake at Oslo, but a greater mistake was to allow the corruption of the Palestinian Authority, which meant that it was unable adequately to react to the rising tide of fundamentalism. A fresh vision based on justice, peace and democracy is needed. The problem is the influence of the Arab oil states, which are oligarchic both politically and culturally. Lebanon is today paying the price for their folly and impotence and their subordination to the United States.
I do not exonerate the Lebanese from responsibility for the horrors that are taking place. Building a democratic country is the duty of all Lebanese. The different religious groups have to find a way to unite in a political project. Factionalism and fear will make it impossible to confront the weapons that are destroying a country that has risen from the rubble only to find itself once again buried in rubble.
Before me I see the same images of death that I witnessed 24 years ago. The pictures themselves, the noise of invading aircraft in the skies of Beirut and all over Lebanon, are the same. Do I see or do I remember? When you are incapable of distinguishing between what is in front of you and what you remember, it becomes clear that history teaches nothing – and clear too that what the Israelis call war is not war but merely the first skirmishes of a war that has not yet begun. Woe to anyone who believes that this massacre is war. Since 1973, the Arab world has fought only on the sidelines.
The Israelis should take care not to deceive themselves and believe that they have achieved victory, because the nature of such non-wars is that they can be repeated over and over again.
20 July
Elias Khoury is director and editor-in-chief of the culture supplement of the Beirut daily An-Nahar. His most recently translated novel is Gate of the Sun. His piece in this issue was translated by Peter Clark.

Henry James and Constipation

by Peter Porter

The mail creeps into Florence with the sun
And I, along these lotos-lettered tiles,
Touch at the door of disappointment; smiles
Of fellow-guests I am ashamed to shun
Adorn the corridors and I assume
The living William's in a letter in my room.

Your strictures, William, if I call them thus,
Are Medical Injunctions, similar
To that one body-mind self-avatar
We hold is Moral Truth. The impetus
Of our distinct decorums, like our bowels,
Stays with the Signoria and the men with trowels.

Why do we quit our shores of sense to seek
Something no better, but much longer known?
Their masons' trowels! We think perhaps we've sown
The present with the past. Is Boston weak
In wanting to declare a glorious pose
Just truths a waiter winks or scholar might disclose?

Dear Henry, says the word-within-the-words,
You've eaten Europe, now digest it well:
Alice, yourself, all Jameses should dispel
Inheritance, as migratory birds,
Wingspanned enough, approach the classic coasts
Of Excellent Ambush, hangmen's shadows, faction's ghosts.

The pills are packed, small dictionaries of hope,
Encyclopaedias encroaching on
The Atlas where the motorist may swan
The shore. Old Europe's by new Huxleyan soap
Made clean. One half-Swiss hint from Burckhardt and
All Art lies open like an oyster in the hand.

In Rome one day at Carnival a flour-
Bomb surprised me, covering me in white,
A proper suiting for the Church of Night,
If somewhat vulgar. Climb the tallest tower,
View any landscape here, its sepulture
Is cold retention, derogated, anal, dure.

De Quincey had my trouble -opium
For him, for me, inaction, looking on,
The bathroom stalled, the crucial moment gone.
The Bread of Culture, eaten crumb by crumb,
Chokes off all other appetite, and we
Who will one day be prints exist as effigy.

The picture of itself, The Great Good Land,
Which waits your passage in the sired boat,
Is not so truthful as a brother's coat,
Your many-coloured words. We understand
Each other who were not made here, but seek
The broad bestowing stream fed by clearskin creek.

The mail leaves town, I've often noted, by
The Porta Roma, wheels retarded, carrying
Enchantments far back home, the marrying
And dying, gossiping -this claimed life's wry
Postmark of ancient lore and new device
Is Advent of Degree, point made, distinction nice.

The Boston Office

Nike Savvas

Nike Savvas with her artwork Atomic: Full of Love, Full of Wonder at the Art Gallery of NSW yesterday. It took 10 days to install.
Photo: Jon Reid

Images of the Day

Haiti, a woman gets a medical treatment.


А в Южной Африке сейчас снег!!! Скоро я туды поеду...

NYT: The Looming Tower

The Evolution of Al Qaeda and the Intertwining Paths Leading to 9/11
Review by MICHIKO KAKUTANI

“The Looming Tower,” the title of Lawrence Wright’s remarkable new book about Al Qaeda and 9/11, refers not only to the doomed towers of the World Trade Center, but also to a passage in the Koran, which Osama bin Laden quoted several times in a speech exhorting the 19 hijackers to become martyrs to their cause: “Wherever you are, death will find you/even in the looming tower.”
Mr. Wright’s book, based on more than 500 interviews — ranging from Mr. bin Laden’s best friend in college, Jamal Khalifa, to Yosri Fouda, a reporter for Al Jazeera, to Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief — gives the reader a searing view of the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, a view that is at once wrenchingly intimate and boldly sweeping in its historical perspective.
Though the broad outlines of his story have been recounted many, many times before, Mr. Wright fleshes out the narrative with myriad new details and a keen ability to situate the events he describes in a larger cultural and political context. And by focusing on the lives and careers of several key players on the “road to 9/11” — namely, Mr. bin Laden; his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri; the former head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal; and the F.B.I.’s former counterterrorism chief, John O’Neill — he has succeeded in writing a narrative history that possesses all the immediacy and emotional power of a novel, an account that indelibly illustrates how the political and the personal, the public and the private were often inextricably intertwined.
Mr. Wright’s book suggests that “the charisma and vision of a few individuals shaped the nature” of the contest between Islam and the West. While “the tectonic plates of history were certainly shifting,” promoting a period of conflict between those two cultures, he contends, the emergence of Al Qaeda “depended on a unique conjunction of personalities” — most notably, Mr. Zawahri, who promoted the apocalyptic notion that only violence could change history, and Mr. bin Laden, whose global vision and leadership “held together an organization that had been bankrupted and thrown into exile.”
The book also suggests that the events of Sept. 11 were not inevitable. Rather, bad luck, the confluence of particular decisions and chance encounters, dithering on the part of United States officials and a series of absurd turf wars between the C.I.A. and F.B.I. all contributed to Al Qaeda’s success in pulling off its nefarious plans that sunny September day.
Compared with the authors Peter L. Bergen (“Holy War: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden”) and Jonathan Randal (“Osama: the Making of a Terrorist”), Mr. Wright spends less time on the crucial role that the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan played in shaping the jihadist cause. Instead, he has drawn upon many documents in Arabic and a host of interviews with jihadis to provide an arresting chronicle of the many formative events that shaped Al Qaeda over the years and Mr. bin Laden’s long, winding road to war against America. His book provides an amazingly detailed look at daily life inside Al Qaeda, and the motivations, misgivings and political goals of individual members.
Mr. Wright begins his story with an account of the life of Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual father of the Islamist movement: he recounts how a sojourn in America in the late 1940’s radicalized the Egyptian educator, how he was later thrown in prison by the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser, and how his writings and eventual execution in 1966 made him a martyr and hero to a fledgling revolutionary movement. Mr. Wright then goes on to describe the radicalization of Mr. bin Laden, the heir to one of Saudi Arabia’s great fortunes, who grows from a shy boy who loved the American television series “Bonanza” into a solemn, religious adolescent influenced, some say, by a charismatic Syrian gym teacher who was a member of the Muslim Brothers organization.
Mr. Zawahri, an Egyptian doctor whom Mr. bin Laden got to know in Peshawar in the 1980’s, would have an even more formative impact. Indeed Mr. Zawahri emerges from this volume as an evil mentor, drawing ever “tighter the noose of influence he was casting around” the young Saudi by surrounding him with handpicked bodyguards and presiding over his medical treatment (possibly for Addison’s disease). Mr. Wright argues that before meeting Mr. Zawahri, Mr. bin Laden was “not much of a political thinker,” and he quotes the Saudi’s first biographer, Essam Deraz, saying he thought Mr. bin Laden had the potential to become “another Eisenhower,” turning the celebrity status he had achieved fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan into a peaceful political life. But that wasn’t Mr. Zawahri’s plan.
It was Mr. Zawahri, whose adamantine resolve was hardened by the torture he endured in Egyptian prisons as a young man, Mr. Wright notes, who introduced the use of suicide bombers. And it was Mr. Zawahri who was keen from the start on using biological and chemical weapons. As for Mr. bin Laden, it apparently took a long time, after his stint in Afghanistan, for him to settle on a subsequent plan of action.
During his exile from Saudi Arabia in the Sudan, Mr. Wright says, Mr. bin Laden “was wavering — the lure of peace being as strong as the battle cry of jihad.” Agriculture “captivated his imagination,” and he reportedly told various friends that he was thinking of quitting Al Qaeda and becoming a farmer.
Yet as Mr. Wright tells it, the continuing presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia (after the first gulf war) continued to gnaw at Mr. bin Laden, and the movement of American troops into Somalia in 1992 (on a humanitarian relief mission) made Al Qaeda feel increasingly encircled. In meetings held at the end of 1992, the group “turned from being the anti-communist Islamic army that bin Laden originally envisioned into a terrorist organization bent on attacking the United States.”
Mr. Wright not only traces how Al Qaeda evolved — from an opponent of two of America’s enemies (the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein) to America’s sworn foe — but he also gives the reader a visceral sense of day-to-day life at its training camps. His descriptions echo the observation made by other experts like the former C.I.A. officer Michael Scheuer that Mr. bin Laden is not opposed to the United States because of its culture or ideas but because of its political and military actions in the Islamic world. Mr. Wright observes that Mr. bin Laden allowed his younger sons to play Nintendo and that Al Qaeda’s trainees often watched Hollywood thrillers at night (Arnold Schwarzenegger movies were particular favorites) in an effort to gather tips. One of Mr. bin Laden’s wives favored “brand-name cosmetics and lingerie, preferring American products”; another held a doctorate in child psychology.
Intercut with the portraits of Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri are equally compelling ones of the flamboyant F.B.I. counterterrorism chief John O’Neill (who died on 9/11, having left the bureau to become chief of security for the World Trade Center) and a small band of C.I.A. and F.B.I. operatives, who for years had worried about Al Qaeda and who, in the months before Sept. 11, worked furiously, in the face of bureaucratic complacency and in-fighting, to head off a probable attack.
The failures of the C.I.A., F.B.I. and N.S.A. to share information — and their failure to stop the 9/11 hijackers — have been voluminously documented before, but Mr. Wright’s narrative is so lucid and unnerving that it drives home the stupidity, hubris and dereliction of duty that occurred within the United States government with unusual power and resonance.
Mr. Wright is equally scathing about the Bush and Clinton administrations. He notes that terrorism was a low priority for the Bush White House when it took over in January 2001. And like Mr. Bergen and Mr. Randal, he argues that the Clinton administration’s reaction to the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa — launching cruise missiles at an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in a failed effort to kill Mr. bin Laden — helped turn the terrorist into a global celebrity and enabled him to mythologize himself further.
Mr. bin Laden’s goal in striking the American embassies and bombing the American destroyer Cole in 2000, says Mr. Wright, was to “lure America into the same trap the Soviets had fallen into: Afghanistan”: “His strategy was to continually attack until the U.S. forces invaded; then the mujahideen would swarm upon them and bleed them until the entire American empire fell from its wounds. It had happened to Great Britain and to the Soviet Union. He was certain it would happen to America.” When neither the embassy bombings nor the Cole bombing was enough to “provoke a massive retaliation,” Mr. Wright suggests, Mr. bin Laden decided “he would have to create an irresistible outrage.”
That outrage, of course, was 9/11. Though American forces would not become bogged down in Afghanistan — at least not immediately in the fall of 2001 — another, longer war was on the horizon. On March 19, 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the start of the war against Iraq; more than three years and more than 2,500 American deaths later, the United States is still there, fighting just the sort of asymmetrical war Mr. bin Laden so fervently desired.

Cuba without Fidel

TLS: The art of conversation

by Alberto Manguel

review of Stephen Miller's CONVERSATION: A history of a declining art
368pp. Yale University Press. £15 (US $27.50).
0 300 11030 8
TLS July 12, 2006

For many years, Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo got together in the evenings to talk. In the mid-1960s, through a series of trivial circumstances, I became the lucky witness to many of these conversations. For hours on end, over a dismal meal of boiled vegetables and overcooked rice, in Bioy’s vast and dilapidated Buenos Aires flat, the three would discuss an infinite number of subjects with intelligence, lightly carried erudition and wit. Listening to the three friends talking was like listening to a chamber orchestra playing an improvised concerto. One voice would suggest a theme, the others would pick it up and play on it, then abandon it in order to simultaneously attack several others, the whole peppered with quotations, anecdotes, tidbits of esoteric information and jokes. Bioy once made a list of the subjects he remembered they had discussed: it is three pages long and ends with “the autobiographical books of George Moore, Victor Hugo, Housman’s poems, Toulet’s contrerimes, and the formulation of ethical principles”. Whoever attended the dinner was forced either to enter the conversation according to implicit rules of subject and tone, or to drown in the flow of words. A third possibility (which I timidly chose) was merely to sit and listen.
Similar in appearance, but utterly different in their essence, were the gatherings of Roland Barthes, Severo Sarduy and François Wahl around a table at the Café de Flore in Paris. These were never communal undertakings: here nothing mingled and became one. Their talks had the feel of oral essays, of recitations and quotable repartee. I can remember whole chunks of these talks: Barthes on the new Drugstore that had opened on the rue de Rennes, and on the lamented removal of the Paris pissotières; Sarduy on Manuel Puig’s belief that Julia Kristeva was a pseudonym for Julie Christie; Wahl on the metamorphosis of the magazine Tel Quel into Change (“plus ça change, plus ça reste tel quel”). Brilliant as the talk was, it was not a conversation, rather what Rebecca West, quoted by Stephen Miller in his new book, Conversation, called “intersecting monologues”. On the other hand, I would find it impossible to recapture the conversations at Bioy’s flat, except for a few words here and there which I probably read later in an interview or an essay. Perhaps proof of the success of a conversation is the very fact that it cannot be reproduced. A conversation at its best exists solely as it happens, in the moment in which it is spoken.
Miller sets out to chronicle the history of this ungraspable thing, no doubt as old as language itself, which began around a campfire some 50,000 years ago. He suggests that, in the beginning, conversation must have been slow. Our Palaeolithic ancestors, busy with hunting and gathering, had little time to lounge around and talk, and it wasn’t until they began to sow and reap that they found enough leisure for the pleasures of conversation. His point is not convincing: farmers are not known to be more gregarious than hunters, and both types would stop their business at night when the common activities of cooking and eating would lead to chit-chat about the scarcity of mammoths or the length of the Ice Age. This hardly matters, however, because it wasn’t until the creation of the first Sumerian city-states that the art of conversation came into its own. Miller notes that one of the oldest Sumerian poems, the Babylonian Theodicy, is in the form of a conversation in which the various speakers discuss “why bad things happen to good people”, anticipating the arguments of Job and his friends.
Miller recounts that “In the civilizations of Mesopotamia and ancient Greece people were more interested in prophecy and divination than in conversation”. Can this assertion be justified? Certainly, divination was an important part of everyday life in the Ancient World (and even the not so Ancient: every other page of Ammianus Marcellinus’ history of the Later Roman Empire, for instance, has a reference to some kind of fortune-telling) but this doesn’t mean that people were less fond of conversing. Miller himself brings literary examples to bear on the constancy of conversation, notably Plato’s Dialogues, in which conversing becomes synonymous with thinking. In Augustus’ Rome, conversation was seen as a means of keeping the body politic well balanced. Cicero, Miller rightly points out, was “the first writer to make a case that liberty might lead to violent civil discord if the educated classes lacked the art of conversation”; though the sophisticated talk that blossomed centuries later, in the Paris salons before the French Revolution, and in the soirées of St Petersburg before the October uprising, does not perhaps support Cicero’s forecast.
“Did conversation suffer during the Middle Ages?” Miller asks, and replies: “It is impossible to answer this question”. But is it? From the dialogues in the sagas and narrative poetry of the early centuries, to the lengthy conversations in works such as Celestina and Évangiles des quenouilles of the later ones, examples of medieval conversations abound, and it would be surprising if the literary models did not reflect, to some extent, a common social custom. And yet, as Miller notes, conversation as an art began to flourish only in the sixteenth century, reaching its prime in the eighteenth, “the Age of Conversation”. Early manuals of civility, such as Castiglione’s Libro del cortegiano (1528) and Giovanni della Casa’s Galateo (1558) offer basic advice to the prospective conversationalist. “You should pay attention to someone who is speaking”, instructs the latter, “so that you will not have to say, again and again: ‘Eh?’ or ‘What?’” More than fifty manuals were published in the first half of the eighteenth century on the art Fielding called “this grand Business of our Lives, the Foundation of every Thing, either useful or pleasant”. Not surprisingly, a good third of Miller’s book is devoted to the masters: Swift, Addison, Pope, Boswell and Johnson, all of whom shared Johnson’s view that “There is in this world no real delight (excepting those of sensuality), but exchange of ideas in conversation”. Miller also explores the shadow realm of those who shun what Hume called “the conversible world”. There were those who mocked learned society, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Pope’s sworn enemy, who kept his books, together with those of Swift and Bolingbroke, in her commode, to enjoy (she said) “the satisfaction of shitting on them every day”. There were those who despised polite conversation, like Rousseau, who felt that he had “never been truly fitted for social life”. And finally there were those who simply hated talking, like the “anti-conversationalist” Thomas Gray, whose only notion of a pleasant chat was reading a classic author or, as he called it, “conversing with the dead”. Accordingly, Walpole thought Gray “the worst company in the world”. Pace Walpole, a friendly conversation can consist mainly of silences. Borges, in one of his stories, speaks of “one of those English friendships that begin by excluding confidences and very soon omit dialogue”. With Wortley Montagu and Gray begins what Miller sees as conversation’s decline: talk that does not engage with others, speech for the sake of self-profit, misanthropy disguised as melancholy. Emerson described Thoreau’s “conversation” as follows: he “goes to a house to say with little preface what he has just read or observed, delivers it in a lump, is quite inattentive to any comment or thought which any of the company offer on the matter, nay, is merely interrupted by it, & when he has finished his report, departs with precipitation”. I would add to Miller’s argument that perhaps, even more than lecturing disguised as exchange, a number of lesser elements may even more effectively wither a conversation. Max Beerbohm, trying to explain why Dr Johnson might have snapped at an unnamed curate during a perfectly convivial dinner (an episode mentioned in Boswell’s Life), suggests that the culprit was the curate’s high-pitched voice rattling the good doctor’s nerves. Tone as much as pitch can be obnoxious. The long-winded drone, the story interrupted by cackles of self-amusement, the muffled voice that gives the listener the impression of being deaf, the followers of the Bellman’s rule in “The Hunting of the Snark”, “What I tell you three times is true”: all these are fatal to a good conversation.
Miller is at his best in analysing the decline announced in the subtitle of his book. He sees Dale Carnegie’s famous How To Make Friends and Influence People (first published in 1936) as essentially different from the works of his eighteenth-century predecessors in that Carnegie thinks of conversation as instrumental, not as a means of winning friends but merely of influencing people, and conversation, Miller rightly says, “is not a means towards an end”. He finds that the growing anger in the United States of America makes conversation impossible, and leads to the social forum being, instead of a theatre of exchange, a place of monologues, of individuals walking about seemingly talking to themselves, attached to a mobile or plugged to an earphone. Montaigne, Miller reminds us, approved of conversation with oneself but only as “an occasional thing – a temporary retreat from the conversible world”, not as “a way of life”. Neither is television a place for conversation, since all it offers are “semiscripted performances that are concerned with winning and influencing viewers and boosting audience ratings”, in which the hosts provide both the questions and the answers. To these realms devoid of conversation, I would add political panels and university symposia in which each participant puts forward his own view, blind to the arguments of his peers. In the end, Miller ascribes the success of a good conversation to politeness, and its decline to a loss of good manners. “Conversation avoidance devices”, he writes, “are enemies of politeness insofar as they make it difficult for people to be attentive listeners.” And of course, Miller reflects on the world of virtual conversation in which, by and large, the semblance of exchange replaces true exchange. He confesses to checking his email six times a day, reading the New York Times online morning and afternoon, and frequently Googling people he has only met or read about – “simply out of idle curiosity”. He quotes a 2005 study according to which (in the USA at least) children pack “roughly eight and a half hours of media exposure into six and a half hours each day, seven days a week. (They often have several media going at the same time)”. A children’s party in which nine-year-olds were asked to bring a computer so that they could play video games is mentioned. In such a world, the engagement with the other is merely formal: the screen allows us to avoid commitment. At the same time, Miller admits the obvious benefits that certain kinds of conversation can draw from the electronic technology, especially in countries where talk is censored: email exchanges in China (in spite of Microsoft’s betrayal of its internauts), SMS messaging during the Ukraine Orange Revolution.
Technology set in opposition to social intercourse is not a new idea. Van Wyck Brooks suggested that Jefferson’s improvement of the argand lamp had dampened the brilliance of conversation in early nineteenth-century Boston, because “those who had excelled in talking took to their books and writing-desks”. Orwell (as Stephen Miller reminds us) thought that the radio undermined conversation, preventing it from becoming serious or even coherent. Today, the person sitting in a café with a mobile in his right hand, a laptop at his left, a television screen flashing in front of him and music blaring from a loudspeaker behind him, is not likely to engage in any rich conversation. In the developed world at least, we have forgotten how to listen to our thoughts and to those of others, and how to weave our ideas into a common strand. One of the original meanings of the Latin conversari was “to live together”. That too, we have forgotten.