Sharing: Hooman Majd

Posted on October 29, 2008

Laat, like many other Persian words, can be translated in different ways and some dictionaries use the English “hooligan” as the definition, although it is in fact wildly inaccurate. The laat holds special places in Iranian culture: a place that at times can be compared to the popular position of a Mafioso in American culture, albeit without the extreme violence associated with him—and at other times a place of respect and admiration for the working-class code he lives by. Hooligans are anarchic; laats fight only when necessary and to establish their authority.

Iran’s cultural history of the twentieth century prominently featured the laat and with perhaps more affection the jahel, the onetime laat who had elevated himself to a grand position of authority and respect in a given urban neighborhood. The jahel, a sort of street “boss,” occupied himself with many different illegal and quasi-legal activities but, unlike gang leaders in America, rarely found himself the target of police investigations—partly because the police were often from his social class, partly because the police were doled out many favors by him, and partly because the governments under the Shah were loathe to disrupt or antagonize a class of society that could be relied upon for support, should it become necessary to buy it.

The last Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, when forced to flee the country in 1953, found great use in the jahels and laats of South Tehran when the coup organizers intent on restoring him to power (financed and organized by the CIA) hired a prominent and formerly pro-Mossadeq laat, Shaban Jafari, better known as Shaban Bimokh (Shaban the Brainless), to successfully lead a counter-uprising in the streets of Tehran, and mercilessly beat any anti-Shah demonstrators they came across. Using street savvy toughs rather than military gave the Shah the cover of populist sentiment in his favor, not to mention the convenience of violent reprisal perpetuated in his name, rather than directly by him and his forces.

The laats and jahels came from the lower and therefore deeply religious strata of Iranian society and were strong believers in Islam themselves. But they were notorious drinkers and womanizers, not to mention involved in prostitution and drugs. The jahel code, at least they themselves believed, was one of ethics and justice. Shia ethics and the occasional sin would be repented for later, as is possible in Shia Islam. The code extended to their dress: black suits, white tieless shirts, and narrow-brimmed black fedoras perched at an angle on their heads. A cotton handkerchief was usually to be found in their hands as a sort of fetish, and the famous jahel dance in the cafes of working-class Tehran involved slow spinning movements with the handkerchief prominently waved in the air. Read more

Sharing: Thomas Friedman

Posted on October 5, 2008

The city of Tianjin, China, is home to many of China’s big automakers, and in September 2007, I was invited to speak at the China Green Car Congress there. Yes, China, which has been steadily improving its own auto mileage and pollution standards now holds a conference to talk about the latest in green-car technologies. Who knew? The venue was the Marriott in Tianjin and the audience was mostly Chinese auto industry executives—some pretty tough-looking car guys—who listened to my remarks, via translation on headphones. I thought hard and long beforehand about what to say to this group that might stimulate their thinking and give them a perspective they hadn’t heard before. In the end, I decided to go for the jugular. The basic thrust of my talk is as follows:

“Every year I come to China and young Chinese tell me, ‘Mr. Friedman, you Americans got to grow dirty for 150 years, you got to have your Industrial Revolution based on coal and oil, now it is our turn.’ Well, on behalf of all Americans, I am here today to tell you that you’re right. It’s your turn. Please, take your time, grow as dirty as you like for as long as you like. Take your time! Please! Because I think my country needs only five years to invent all the clean power and energy efficiency tools that you, China, will need to avoid choking on pollution and then we are going to come over and sell them all to you. We will get at least a five-year jump on you in the next great global industry: clean power and energy efficiency. We will totally dominate you in those industries. So please, don’t rush, grow as dirty as you like for as long as you want. If you want to do it for five more years, that’s great. If you want to give us a ten-year lead on the next great global industry, that would be even better. Please, take your time.”

At first, I could see a lot of these grizzled Chinese car guys adjusting their earpieces to make sure that they were hearing me right: “What the hell did he just say? America is going to clean our clock in the next great global industry? What industry is that?” But as I went on, I could also see some heads nodding and some wry smiles of recognition from those who got my point: Clean power is going to be the global standard over the next decade, and clean power tools are going to be the next great global industry, and the countries who make more of them, and sell more of them, will have a competitive advantage. Those countries will have both the cleanest air and the fastest-growing business—not a bad combination.

That is the point I was trying to drive home in Tianjin, by making it into a competitive issue: The longer China focuses on getting its share from a world that no longer exists—a world in which people could use dirty fuels with impunity—and the longer it postpones imposing the policies, prices, and regulations on itself that will stimulate a clean power industry at scale, the happier I am as an American. Read more

Sharing: David Foster Wallace

Posted on September 14, 2008

I don’t think it’s an accident that luxury cruises appeal mostly to older people. I don’t mean decrepitly old, but like fiftyish people for whom their own mortality is something more than an abstraction. Most of the exposed bodies to be seen all over the ship were in various stages of disintegration. And the ocean itself turns out to be one enormous engine of decay. Seawater corrodes vessels with amazing speed—rusts them, exfoliates paint, strips varnish, dulls shine, coats ships’ hulls with barnacles and kelp and a vague and ubiquitous nautical snot that seems like death incarnate. We saw some real horrors in port, local boats that looked as if they had been dipped in a mixture of acid and shit, scabbed with rust and goo, ravaged by what they float in.

Not so the megalines. It’s no accident they’re so white and clean, for they’re clearly meant to represent the Calvinist triumph of capital and industry over the primal decayaction of the sea. Our ship, The Nadir, seemed to have a whole battalion of wiry little third world guys who went around the ship in navy-blue jumpsuits scanning for decay to overcome. Eventually, toward the end of the trip, I found a capstan, a type of nautical hoist (like a pulley on steroids!) with a half-dollar-sized patch of rust on the side facing the sea. My delight in this tiny flaw was interrupted by the arrival, even as I stood there, of a crewman with a roller and a bucket of white paint. I watched as he gave the entire capstan a fresh coat and walked away with a nod.

Here’s the thing: A vacation is a respite from unpleasantness, and since consciousness of death and decay are unpleasant, it may seem weird that the ultimate American fantasy vacation involves being plunked down in an enormous primordial stew of death and decay. But on a luxury cruise, we are skillfully enabled in the construction of various fantasies of triumph over just this death and decay. One way to “triumph” is via the rigors of self-improvement (diet, exercise, cosmetic surgery, Franklin Quest time-management seminars), to which the crew’s amphetaminic upkeep of the Nadir is an unsubtle analogue.

But there’s another way out, too: not titivation but titillation; not hard work but hard play. See in this regard the ship’s constant activities, festivities, gaiety, song; the adrenaline, the stimulation. It makes you feel vibrant, alive. It makes your existence seem non-contingent. The hard-play option promises not a transcendence of death-dread so much as just drowning it out. Read more

Sharing: David Sedaris

Posted on August 8, 2008

At the age of fourteen I accompanied a classmate to a Raleigh park. There we met with some friends of his and smoked a joint by the light of the moon. I don’t recall being high, but I do recall pretending to be high. My behavior was modeled on the whacked-out hippies I’d seen in movies and on tv, so basically I just laughed a lot, regardless of whether anything was funny. When I got home I woke my sisters and had them sniff my fingers. “Smell that?” I said. “It’s marijuana, or ‘grass’ as we sometimes call it.”

I was proud to be the first in my family to smoke a joint, but once I had claimed the title, I became vehemently anti-drug and remained that way until my freshman year in college. Throughout first semester, I railed against my dorm mates: Pot was for losers. It pickled your brain and forced you into crummy state universities like this one.

I’d later think of how satisfying it must have been to them—how biblical, almost—to witness my complete turnaround. The reverent mother becomes the town slut, the prohibitionist a drunkard, and me a total pothead, and so quickly! It was just like you’d see in a made-for-tv movie:

Friendly fellow from down the hall: Oh, come on. One puff’s not going to hurt you.

Me: The heck it won’t! I’ve got some studying to do.

Handsome roommate of friendly fellow: Let me give you a shotgun.

Me: A shotgun? What’s that?

Again, the handsome roommate: You lie back while I blow smoke into your mouth.

Me: Where do you want me to lie?

I remember returning to my room that night and covering my lamp with a silk scarf. The desk, the bed, the heavy misshapen pottery projects: nothing was new, but everything was different; fresh somehow and worthy of interest. Grant a blind person the ability to see, and he might have behaved the way I did, slowly advancing across the room and marveling at everything before me: a folded shirt, a stack of books, a piece of corn bread wrapped in foil. “Amazing.” The tour ended with the mirror, and me standing in front of it with a turban on my head. Well, hello there, you, I thought. Read more

Sharing: Matt Taibbi

Posted on July 23, 2008

To be perfectly honest, I knew all about Pastor John Hagee. His Cornerstone Church was one of the reasons I’d come to San Antonio in the first place. Hagee was one of the most influential evangelical preachers in the country, not because his ministry was so very large, but because of his near-absolute conquest of a very trendy niche in the market: Christian Zionism. Not exactly a new idea, Christian Zionism in simplest terms describes Christians who believe in supporting, politically or otherwise, the state of Israel. It has risen as a force in international politics primarily because of two factors. The first is a rise in America in belief in dispensationalist Christianity—i.e. end of times prophecies; the belief that Armageddon is coming and that with it, the true believers will be whisked up to heaven by God, while the nonbelievers stay on earth and generally suffer various tortures.

The enormous success of the Left Behind books and movies (which depict the earth during Armageddon as a delicious chaos with airplanes suddenly stripped of their believer pilots, busses flying off highways, blood-soaked atheists realizing their tragic mistake far too late) helped spread these beliefs, so much so that dispensationalism is now more or less the default doctrine of most Southern Baptists. If you enter a megachurch practically anywhere in America these days, you can expect that much of the congregation will be actively awaiting the end of the world.

But you can’t have Armageddon without certain preconditions, and most important among those is a final battle that the prophet Ezekiel predicted will take place between a satanic army (in most interpretations, a force of Arabs led by Russia) and God’s chosen people, Israel. Most end timers believe the key alliance here will be between Russia and Iran and that only following a savage military confrontation between those states and Israel, probably of a catastrophic nuclear nature, will Christ reappear and begin his glorious second reign.

Thus the whole idea behind Christian Zionism is to align America with the nation of Israel so as to “hurry God up” in his efforts to bring about this key showdown.

Practically speaking, this manifests itself in the form of American evangelical Christians endorsing pro-Israel policies. Support that Israel has been happy to receive despite the fact that church doctrine also envisions the mass conversion of all Jews to Christianity after the final battle—with dire consequences for those who don’t. I wonder exactly how most Israelis would feel about the sudden warmth being shown to them by American evangelicals if they knew for instance that ardent end timer Hal Lindsey had predicted the “mother of all holocausts” for those Jews who refused to convert at the second coming. Read more

Sharing: Cornel West

Posted on July 3, 2008

In past moments of national division, young people have played a disproportionate role in deepening the American democratic experiment. The black freedom struggle and the anti-war movement of the 1960s were largely sustained owing to their vision and courage. As older folk become jaded, disillusioned, and weary, the lively moral energy of reflective and compassionate young people can play a vital role in pushing democratic momentum. Yet one of the most effective strategies of corporate marketeers has been to target the youth market with distractive amusement and saturate them with pleasurable sedatives that steer them away from engagement with issues of peace and justice.

The incessant media bombardment of images (of salacious bodies and mindless violence) on TV and in movies and music convinces many young people that the culture of gratification—a quest for insatiable pleasure, endless titillation, and sexual stimulation—is the only way of being human. Hedonistic values and narcissistic identities produce emotionally stunted young people unable to grow up and unwilling to be responsible democratic citizens. The market-driven media lead many young people to think that life is basically about material toys and social status. Democratic ideas of making the world more just, or striving to be a decent and compassionate person, are easily lost or overlooked.

This media bombardment not only robs young people of their right to struggle for maturity—by glamorizing possessive individualism at the expense of democratic individuality—but also leaves them ill equipped to deal with the spiritual malnutrition that awaits them after their endless pursuit of pleasure. This sense of emptiness of the soul holds for wealthy kids in vanilla suburbs and poor kids in chocolate cities. Neither the possession of commodities nor the fetishizing of commodities satisfies people’s need for love and self-confidence. Instead, we witness personal depression, psychic pain, and individual loneliness fueling media-influenced modes of escapism. These include the high use of drugs like cocaine and ecstasy; the growing popularity of performing sex acts at incredibly young ages; and the way so many kids have become addicted to going online. This disgraceful numbing of the senses, dulling of the mind, and confining of life to an eternal present—with a lack of connection to the past and no vision for a different future—is an insidious form of soul murder. And we wonder why depression escalates and suicides increase among our precious children. Read more

Sharing: Jonathan Franzen

Posted on May 2, 2008

A few months ago, I gave away my television set. It was a massive old Sony Trinitron, the gift of a friend whose girlfriend couldn’t stand the penetrating whistle the picture tube emitted. Its wood-look veneer recalled an era when TV sets were trying, however feebly, to pass as furniture—an era when their designers could still imagine them in a state of not being turned on. I kept it in inaccessible places, like the floor of a closet, and I could get a good picture only by sitting cross-legged directly in front of it and touching the antenna. It’s hard to make TV viewing more unpleasant than I did. Still, I felt the Trinitron had to go, because as long as it was in the house, reachable by some combination of extension cords, I wasn’t reading books. 

I was born in 1959, on the cusp of a great generational divide, and for me it’s a toss-up which is scarier: Living without electronic access to my country’s culture, or trying to survive in that culture without the self-definition I get from regular immersion in literature. I understand my life in the context of Raskolnikov and Quentin Compson, not David Letterman or Jerry Seinfeld. But the life I understand by way of books feels increasingly lonely. It has little to do with the mediascape that constitutes so many other people’s present.

For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing the final tipping of a balance. For critics inclined to alarmism, the shift from a culture based on the printed word to a culture based on virtual images—a shift that began with television and is now being completed with computers—feels apocalyptic.

Novels are by no means dead, of course—just ask Annie Proulx or Cormac McCarthy. But the novel, as a seat of cultural authority, is teetering on the brink.

In The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts registers his surprise and dismay that its decline has not been more widely mourned. Not even professional book critics, who ought to be the front line of the novel’s defenders, have raised the alarm, and Birkerts, who is a critic himself, sounds like a loyal soldier deserted by his regiment. The tone of his elegies is brave but plaintive. Birkerts begins his defense of the novel by recounting how while growing up in an immigrant household, he came to understand himself by reading Jack Kerouac, J.D. Salinger and Herman Hesse. The authors, as well as the alienated romantic heroes of their books, became models for emulation and comparison. Later, on the desolate emotional beach on which the wave of sixties idealism seems to have deposited so many people, Birkerts weathered years of depression by reading, by working in bookstores, and finally by becoming a reviewer. Read more

Sharing: Shel Silverstein

Posted on April 6, 2008

Now in the laid-back California town of sunny San Rafael
Lived a girl named Pearly Sweetcake - you probably knew her well.
She was stoned 15 of her 18 years, and her story was widely told
That she could smoke ‘em faster than anyone could roll.

Well, her legend finally reached New York, that Grove Street walk-up flat
Where dwelt the Calistoga Kid, a beatnik from the past.
He’d been rollin’ dope since time began, now he took a cultured toke
And said “Jim, I can roll ‘em faster than any chick can smoke.”

So a note gets sent to San Rafael for the championship of the world.
The Kid demands a smoke-off; “Well, bring him on!” says Pearl.
“I’ll grind his fingers off his hands! He’ll roll until he drops!”
Says Calistog, “I’ll smoke that chick till she blows up and pops.”

So they rent out Yankee Stadium, and the word is quickly spread
Come one, come all, who walk or crawl, tickets just two lids a head.
And from every town and hamlet, over land and sea they speed
The world’s greatest dopers, with the world’s greatest weed.

Hashishers from Morocco, hemp smokers from Peru
And the Shashniks from Bagun (who smoke the deadly Pu-ga-ru)
And those who call it “light of life”
And those that call it “boo”

See the dealers and their ladies, wearing turquoise, lace and leather.
See the narcos and the closet smokers, puffing all together.
From the teenies who smoke legal, to the ones who’ve done some time
To the old man who smoked “reefer” back before it was a crime.

And the grand old House That Ruth Built is filled with the smoke and cries
Of fifty thousand screaming heads, all stoned out of their minds.
And they play the national anthem, and the crowd lets out a roar
As the spotlight hits the Kid and Pearl, ready for their smoking war.

At a table piled high with grass, as high as a mountain peak.
Just tops and buds of the rarest flowers - not one stem, branch or seed.
I mean, Maui Wowie, Panama Red, Acapulco Gold
Kif from East Afghanistan, and that rare Alaska Cold.

And there’s sticks from Thailand, ganj from the island,
And Bangkok’s blooming best
(And some of that wet imported shit
That capsized off Key West.) Read more

Sharing: Benazir Bhutto

Posted on March 29, 2008

As I stepped down onto the tarmac at Quaid-e-Azan International Airport in Karachi on October 18, 2007, I was overcome with emotion. Like most women in politics, I am especially sensitive to maintaining my composure, to never show my feelings. A display of emotion by a woman in politics or government can be misconstrued as a manifestation of weakness, reinforcing stereotypes and caricatures. But as my foot touched the ground of my beloved Pakistan for the first time after eight lonely and difficult years of exile, I could not stop the tears from pouring from my eyes and I lifted my hands in reverence, in thanks, and in prayer. I stood on the soil of Pakistan in awe. I felt that a huge burden, a terrible weight, had been lifted from my shoulders. It was a sense of liberation. I was home at long last. I knew why. I knew what I had to do.

Long ago I had made my choice. The people of Pakistan have always come first. The people of Pakistan will always come first. My children understood it and not only accepted it but encouraged me. As we said good-bye, I turned to the group of assembled supporters and press and said what was in my heart: “This is the beginning of a long journey for Pakistan back to democracy, and I hope my going back is a catalyst for change. We must believe that miracles can happen.”

The stakes could not be higher. Within the Muslim world there has been and continues to be an internal rift, an often violent confrontation among sects, ideologies and interpretations of the message of Islam. This destructive tension has set brother against brother, a deadly fratricide that has tortured intra-Islamic relations for 1,300 years. The sectarian conflict stifled the brilliance of the Muslim renaissance that took place during the Dark Ages of Europe, when the great universities, scientists, doctors and artists were all Muslim. Today that intra-Muslim sectarian violence is most visibly manifest in a senseless, self-defeating sectarian civil war that is tearing modern Iraq apart at its fragile seams and exercising its brutality in other parts of the world, especially in parts of Pakistan.

And while the Muslim world—where sectarianism is rampant—simmers internally, extremists have manipulated Islamic dogma to justify and rationalize a so-called jihad against the West. The attacks on September 11, 2001, heralded the vanguard of the caliphate-inspired dream of bloody confrontation; the Crusades in reverse. And as images of the twin towers burning and then imploding were on every television set in the world, the attack was received in two disparate ways in the Muslim world. Much, if not most, of the Muslim world reacted with horror, embarrassment, and shame when it became clear that this greatest attack in history had been carried out by Muslims in the name of Allah and jihad. Yet there was also another reaction, a troubling and disquieting one: Some people danced in the streets of Palestine. Sweets were exchanged by others in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Condemnations were few in the world’s largest Muslim nation, Indonesia. The hijackers of September 11 seemed to touch a nerve of Muslim impotence. The burning and then collapsing towers represented, to some, resurgent Muslim power, a perverse Muslim payback for the domination of the West.

To others it was a religious epiphany. And to still others it combined political, cultural and religious assertiveness. A Pew comparative study of Muslim’s attitudes after the attacks found that people in many Muslim countries “think it is good that Americans now know what it is like to be vulnerable.” Read more

Sharing: Muhammad Yunus

Posted on March 12, 2008

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, free markets have swept the globe. Free-market economics has taken root in China, Southeast Asia, much of South America, Eastern Europe, and even the former Soviet Union. There are many things that free markets do extraordinarily well. When we look at countries with long histories under capitalist systems—in Western Europe and North America—we see evidence of great wealth. We also see remarkable technological innovation, scientific discovery, and educational and social progress. The emergence of modern capitalism three hundred years ago made possible material progress of a kind never before seen. Today, however—almost a generation after the Soviet Union fell—a sense of disillusionment is setting in. 

To be sure, capitalism is thriving. Businesses continue to grow, global trade is booming, multinational corporations are spreading into markets in the developing world, and technological advancements continue to multiply.

But not everyone is benefiting. Global income distribution tells the story: Ninety-four percent of world income goes to 40 percent of the people, while the other 60 percent live on only 6 percent of the world income. Half of the world lives on two dollars a day or less, while almost a billion people live on less than one dollar a day.

Poverty is not distributed evenly around the world; specific regions suffer its worst effects. In sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, hundreds of millions of poor people struggle for survival. Periodic disasters, such as the 2004 tsunami that devastated regions on the Indian Ocean, continue to kill hundreds of thousands of poor and vulnerable people.

The divide between the global North and South—between the world’s richest and the rest—has widened.

Even in the United States, with its reputation as the richest country on earth, social progress has been disappointing. After two decades of slow progress, the number of people living in poverty has increased in recent years. Some forty-seven million people, nearly a sixth of the population, have no health insurance and have trouble getting basic medical care. After the end of the Cold War, many hoped for a “peace dividend.” Defense spending could decline, and social programs for education and medical care would increase. But today the U.S. government has focused on military action and security measures, ignoring the poor. Read more

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