The New York Review of Books

Light on the Dark Side

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:00:00 -0800

By Paula Fox

A Meaningful Life
by L.J. Davis, with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem

One Manhattan mid-morning in the spring of 1967, I heard the crack of a gun going off below, along the broad reach of Central Park West. I jumped up from the table where I was working on my second novel and looked down five stories to the street, on the other side of which breathed the quiet greenery of Central Park. What I saw was a man lying in the middle of the street attempting to raise himself up from the waist, like a seal, collapsing, trying again, then falling flat.

Israel & Palestine: Can They Start Over?

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:00:00 -0800

By Robert Malley

The idea of Israeli-Palestinian partition, of a two-state solution, has a singular pedigree. It has been proposed for at least eight decades. Jews first accepted it as Palestinians recoiled; by the time Palestinians warmed to the notion in the late 1980s, Israelis had turned their backs. Still, its proponents manage to portray it as fresh, new, and capable of leading to peace. International consensus on a two-state agreement is, today, stronger than ever. Meanwhile, interest among the two parties most directly concerned wanes and prospects for achieving it diminish.

With Berlusconi in the Soup

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:00:00 -0800

By Ingrid D. Rowland

It is a measure of the ineptitude--or is it a death wish?--of Italy's major opposition party, the Partito Democratico (Democratic Party), that it has spent the entire season of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's discontent wrangling over the election of its own party secretary--only to be caught, on the eve of the October 25 vote (its winner was Pier Luigi Bersani, a sensible former minister in several left-wing administrations), by a veritable Vesuvius of erupting bimbos. The day before, Piero Marrazzo, the Democratic governor of the region of Lazio (approximately equivalent to a state in the US, and the region that contains Rome), confessed to having been blackmailed by a gang of four corrupt carabinieri who had tracked his wild times with transgendered Brazilian prostitutes (filming an encounter with a certain 'Natalie'). His sexual tastes were of no juridical importance, but the same could not be said about his use of an official car for these appointments, or his payment of outrageous sums of money (whose?) for ministrations laced with cocaine and silicone curves. He resigned on October 27.

In Evin Prison

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:00:00 -0800

By Claire Messud

My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran
by Haleh Esfandiari

Extraordinary events in Iran over the past six months have brought us images, voices, and narratives until recently unimaginable; they reveal, among other things, how little we understand about quotidian life in that country since the revolution. In the United States, we are nevertheless aware, with a dark tremor, of Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, the black hole of the hard-liners' repressive system. Emblematic of the regime, it is a site of torture and interrogation, of isolation, and of emotional as well as physical violence. It is a prison for the breaking of souls.

Velvet Revolution: The Prospects

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:00:00 -0800

By Timothy Garton Ash

In the autumn of 1989, the term 'velvet revolution' was coined to describe a peaceful, theatrical, negotiated regime change in a small Central European state that no longer exists. So far as I have been able to establish, the phrase was first used by Western journalists and subsequently taken up by Václav Havel and other Czech and Slovak opposition leaders. This seductive label was then applied retrospectively, by writers including myself, to the cumulatively epochal events that had unfolded in Poland, Hungary, and East Germany, as in 'the velvet revolutions of 1989.'

Who Are the Blue Dogs?

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:00:00 -0800

By Michael Tomasky

A crucial fact about today's Congress, and one that even many politically astute observers may not fully appreciate, rests in the vast ideological differences between the two congressional parties. I don't mean by this that the Democrats have become uniformly liberal and the Republicans uniformly conservative, which is the standard grievance issued by the press, but rather that only the latter has happened--and that it has happened with surprising speed.

A One-Term President?: The Choice

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:00:00 -0800

By Garry Wills

I am told by people I respect that Barack Obama cannot pull out of both Iraq and Afghanistan without becoming a one-term president. I think that may be true. The charges from various quarters would be toxic--that he was weak, unpatriotic, sacrificing the sacrifices that have been made, betraying our dead, throwing away all former investments in lives and treasure. All that would indeed be brought against him, and he could have little defense in the quarters where such charges would originate.

Axler's Theater

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:00:00 -0800

By Elaine Blair

The Humbling
by Philip Roth

One of the rare funny moments in Philip Roth's recent novel Everyman (2006) takes place when the unnamed hero visits his parents' graves in Newark. His health has been poor, his colleagues and friends have been dying, and though he has no reason to think that his own death is imminent, he can no longer pretend to himself that he will never die. In this frame of mind, he finds himself talking to the buried bones of his parents. 'I'm seventy-one, your boy is seventy-one,' he tells them. In his mind, he hears his mother reply: 'Good. You lived.'

Homeless on the Home Front

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 05:30:00 -0800

Charles Simic

Eddie Collmar pulling his belongings across Lafayette Park, Washington, D.C., 1983; the US Treasury Department is in the background. Later, Collmar and two others built a makeshift shelter outside the Department of Veterans Affairs. (Marcy Nighswander/AP Images)

“Drop a nickel in his hat
Like a rich aristocrat.”
—Organ Grinder’s Swing

Sometime in the fall of 1958, an old fellow came up to me late one night on MacDougal Street and said, “Mister, I’m writing the book of my life and I need a dime to complete it.” I gave him my last dollar and went off happy. This kind of inspired, seemingly spontaneous panhandling differs from what professional beggars do. They employ props: crutches, head-bandages, wooden legs, or have a skinny, sad-eyed dog accompanying them. They stage a theatrical performance for your benefit and hope for the best.

I saw a gypsy woman outside Saks Fifth Avenue carrying a dying child in her arms. The mother’s face was contorted with pain as she threw pleading, tearful glances at people rushing by. She must have been a recent arrival to these shores with not enough English and money to set up a storefront with a sign saying: If you are in love, or have money problems, your future is like an open book to me. Her little scam with the child may have worked outside some holy shrine famous for its miraculous cures in Europe, but it had no effect here. The boy was about four years old. The only thing he seemed to be suffering from was the boredom from having to fake illness on a beautiful spring afternoon.

In the meantime, the mother had noticed me laughing and was starting to give me dirty looks when I drew closer to her and yelled something in Serbian. She almost dropped the child in astonishment. He opened his eyes and shifted in her arms to look at me. “You go fuck yourself, too,” she shouted back at me in our native lingo and hurried away in the crowd.

However, the shock of finding a homeless, dying man on the sidewalk, as I did the other morning, or a veteran of the Iraq war one cold autumn night with a cardboard sign explaining his predicament, is no laughing matter. I read in The Times that on any given night, the government estimates there are 131,000 former soldiers bedding down wherever they can.

An improvised underground apartment where a veteran is living, Minnesota, 2009; photograph by Cathy ten Broeke from the traveling exhibition ‘Portraits of Home 2: Veterans in Search of Stable Housing,’ on view in different parts of Minnesota through July 2010. (Greater Minnesota Housing Fund)

They are not alone. Walking around late at night one catches glimpse of many heavily bundled men and women in dark corners of the city. Last fall, I saw a gray-haired woman standing in a doorway of an office building on Madison Avenue with her hand outstretched. I gave her a five-dollar bill and she surprised me by asking: “How much change would you like back, Sir?” She had the proper manners of an old-time governess, a schoolteacher or a small town librarian. It was astonishing she should be without a roof over her head.

The couple of times in my life I found myself short of money for a subway fare, I got a taste of what being homeless meant. One winter night it was so cold, I had no choice but to start stopping people and asking them for spare change. The two well-dressed men, one young and one old, I summoned courage to approach, turned their heads and hurried away from me. Finally, an elderly black woman came my way and I asked again. She took her time opening her purse, searching inside it, and then, after looking me over carefully once more, she slowly took out a quarter. I thanked her and ran off to catch the subway downtown.

Georgia's Shrunken Hopes

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:50:00 -0800

Michael Greenberg

A refugee camp in Gori, Georgia, 2009; photographs by Alex Majoli from Georgian Spring, to be published by Magnum Photos and Chris Boot in December

More than fifteen months have passed since war broke out between Georgia and Russia. The war lasted five days, the amount of time it took for the Russian army to rout Georgia’s tiny, American-trained defense forces. It was the most serious military conflict in Europe since the Balkans. And yet, although tens of thousands of people are still displaced, and Russia is posing an increasing threat to Georgia’s oil pipelines, both the EU and the US may be powerless to prevent further threats to the country.

At home, the war has played well for Russian President Dimitry Medvedev. It marks Russia’s first unequivocal military victory since World War II. Russian troops have seized control of the disputed provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, assigning them the status of breakaway independent republics. (For the Abkhazians, long suspicious of the Georgian government, this has not been entirely unwelcome.) Russia has asserted its control over what Medvedev has called its “zone of privileged interest.” The most pro-West state on its border has been humbled, sending a message to the Ukraine and other West-leaning former Soviet Republics that Russian hard power is once again to be feared. More important, the war has demonstrated that neither the European Union nor the United States will risk seriously damaging relations with Russia in order to protect a state in Russia’s backyard, no matter how liberal and democratic that state claims to be.

Georgia, for its part, which was at the time of the war half the size of North Carolina with a population of 4.7 million, has seen its territory shrink by twenty percent. President Mikheil Saakashvili’s hope of joining NATO has receded into the remote distance, a development that, in any event, Russia would never have abided.

An international aid official in Tbilisi, with whom I talk frequently, reports a general feeling of pessimism in the capital. A completely deregulated, free-market ethos continues to hold sway, but with the ending both of the war and the global economic expansion, Tbilisi is dotted with half-finished high-rises, empty nightclubs, and stalled development projects. Yet paradoxically, Saakashvili faces less popular opposition than before the war. His most prominent challenger is the moderate former UN Ambassador Irakli Alasania, who is almost certain to run for president when Saakashvili’s term ends in 2013. On November 7, the opposition staged a demonstration to mark the anniversary of a government crackdown in 2007, when opposition leaders were arrested and media outlets shut down. Tbilisians were warned it might become violent, but the turnout was modest, barely disrupting traffic.

The European’s Union’s report on the cause of the war was finally made public in September after a series of delays to accommodate a bombardment of putative “proof” about what really happened from both sides. The report takes Georgia to task for throwing the first punch, and reproves Moscow for using “disproportionate force” in responding to the provocation. It is hard to imagine what Saakashvili was expecting to gain when he ordered the shelling of Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, on August 7, 2008.

The most plausible explanation is that he misunderstood the limits of the Bush administration’s support for his anti-Russian stance. After 9/11 Bush promoted Georgia to the status of a crucial American ally, a steadfast member of “the coalition of the willing” in the US’s “war on terror,” and promised to press for Georgia’s membership in NATO. Emblems of the importance to Georgia of its alliance with the US are everywhere. The major road from the international airport to Tbilisi, for instance, is called “George W. Bush Street.”

A woman waiting to receive supplies from the International Committee of the Red Cross, Znaur, South Ossetia, 2009; from Georgian Spring

Bush’s rhetoric, combined with generous amounts of US military and economic aid, seems to have imbued Saakashvili with an unrealistic sense of Georgia’s strategic importance. In expecting Washington to intervene militarily in support of a border war that he himself provoked, Saakashvili appears to have overlooked the fact that the US needs Russia’s cooperation to help carry out its larger strategies in Afghanistan and Iran.

France and Germany, for their part, are too dependent on Russian energy to risk straining relations with Moscow. The giant Russian company Gazprom supplies Europe with 28 percent of its natural gas. In a joint venture with Germany, Gazprom is in the process of building the $10.7 billion Nord Stream pipeline, which would run 750 miles under the Baltic Sea, directly from Russian to Germany, bypassing existing routes through Ukraine and other parts of East Europe for the first time. With the new pipeline Russia will be able to shut off energy supplies to the Ukraine for instance, without interrupting flow to its customers in the West.

Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroder brokered the deal for the pipeline, later becoming chairman of Nord Stream. The German government guaranteed $1.46 billion for the project shortly before Schroder lost his bid for reelection in 2005. Wary of losing out to the Germans, Gaz de France is now seeking to join the consortium. Under the circumstances, one can expect Western Europe to become even more muted in its criticism of Russia’s actions in its so-called privileged zone.

Georgia, in the meantime, becomes increasingly irrelevant. It is in the unenviable position of having no valuable natural resource to leverage other than the oil and gas pipelines that pass through its territory from the Caspian basin, supplying Western Europe with its only alternative to Russian energy. In the future, Nord Stream will weaken the importance of those pipelines. To make matters worse, having gained control of South Ossetia and Abhkazia, the Russian army is within easy striking distance of the Caspian pipelines should it decide to disable them.

Saakashvili himself often seems to behave more like a CEO than a head of state—drumming up foreign investment in an attempt to make up for the country’s steep losses. Since the end of the war Georgia has received $4.5 billion in international aid, an enormous amount for a country of its size. Recently, Saakashvili has sent troops to Afghanistan, and the US (Vice President Biden, for one, is an enthusiastic supporter) is actively helping Georgia rebuild its defense forces.

The unequivocal losers are the ethnic Georgians that formerly lived in the breakaway provinces. About 850 people died in the war, including 132 South Ossetians, quite a different number from the 1,500–2,000 victims the Russians originally claimed. But 138,000 people fled the occupied provinces, many of them into Georgia, and about 30,000 ethnic Georgians have failed to return.

South Ossetia, with forty percent of its capital destroyed, seems condemned to a future of poverty and civil unrest; and Abkhazia faces the certainty of a second invasion in the form of rich Russians buying up its coastland to build resorts and second homes. The legal status of the provinces remains ambiguous, providing a ready-made pretext for another war, one that neither the United States nor Western Europe would seem to have the will or political interest to prevent.

Alex Majoli’s photographs appear in the new book Georgian Spring, a travel journal by ten Magnum photographers who visited Georgia during the spring of 2009 at the invitation of Georgia’s Ministry of Culture. The book features work by Antoine D’Agata, Jonas Bendiksen, Thomas Dworzak, Martine Franck, Majoli, Gueorgui Pinkhassov, Martin Parr, Paolo Pellegrin, Mark Power, and Alec Soth. It also includes archive photographs by Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, an essay by Wendell Steavenson, and a foreword by Dworzak. It will be published by Magnum Photos and Chris Boot in December. Further photographs and multimedia projects related to the book are available here.

Glorious Ghosts

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:08:00 -0800

Colm Tóibín

The three gossips from The Ghosts of Versailles at the Wexford Opera Festival, Ireland, 2009 (wexfordopera.com)

Wexford is a small town on the sea in the south-east of Ireland and an unlikely place to host an opera festival. Yet since 1951 in late October the town has organized what has become for many opera-lovers an essential date in the calendar. The reason why it has remained important is not merely the intimacy of the setting, the general air of welcome and the strange sea-washed beauty of the old town, but the policy since the early 1970s to program three operas that have fallen beneath the radar, that are seldom or never performed.

Thus if you wanted to see Cornelius’s Der Barbier von Bagdad, you had to come to Wexford in 1974; so too with Tiefland by d’Albert (1978) or Edgar by Puccini (1980) or Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame by Massenet (1984). The opera house, down a side street, was old and uncomfortable, but that seemed only to add to the general specialness of the occasion. Last year however, a brand new opera house, built on the same site, was opened. The seats are more comfortable, the acoustics are wonderful, and the building itself has managed to lose nothing of the old intimacy.

Usually, there is much debate about the quality of the operas. Since many people from the town work as volunteers and extras who are involved in rehearsals, rumors spread each year that one of the three productions is way ahead of all the others, a lost jewel perhaps, or a production with a great young singer. This year, while there was much talk about some of the beautiful moments in Donizetti’s Maria Padilla, the view in the town was that there was something very special coming on the opening night, that an opera was about to performed which would be remembered for many years. This proved to be true. It was The Ghosts of Versailles by the contemporary American composer John Corigliano, which was first performed at the Met in New York in 1991, put on in Wexford in a new scaled-down version suitable for a smaller stage.

The plot, which centers on the relationship between Beaumarchais and Marie Antoinette, is ingenious and intricate and would have pleased John Barth and Pirandello. The libretto by William Hoffman is brilliant and clever, but does not show off to the detriment of the music; there is a beautiful way in which it allows scenes their full dramatic import, without cutting across them with too much knowing interjection. While the libretto is full of knowingness, there is a lightness about how this is presented. The opera allows the audience, aware of the games between played on the stage between fantasy and reality, between real figures from history and figures from opera, to do the knowing rather than being distracted by being told that it is coming soon.

The music includes references to earlier music from grand opera to opera buffa, but these references are haunting or funny rather than mere pieces of pastiche. Some of the music is unashamedly beautiful, but there is also a thrilling contemporary edge to some of the singing and orchestration, and there was something wonderful, even novel, about the arrival of moments of percussive, exquisite atonality in a small Irish town. (I went to high school in Wexford and don’t remember atonality being a regular part of the fare.)

It was clear to the audience on the opening night in Wexford that this opera belongs in a central position in any repertoire. The self-consciousness in the scoring works wonders against a sort of musical innocence in the piece, and then that very innocence is constantly wrong-footed and usurped. This made us all sit there amused and amazed that a work from the past twenty years could have a sense of classic completion while never allowing us relax or get lazy as we listened. It was the great revelation at the Wexford Opera Festival this year.

China: The Fragile Superpower

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:12:00 -0800

Christian Caryl

Obama as Chairman Mao

Some China watchers believe that China’s dramatically rising prosperity will inevitably make the country more open and democratic. President Barack Obama’s highly-scripted trip this week provided little to support that claim. As The Washington Post noted, in contrast to 1998, when Bill Clinton, standing in the Great Hall of the People, criticized the Tiananmen Square crackdown and “traded spirited jibes with President Jiang Zemin,” Obama and Hu Jintao held a “Chinese-style news conference of read statements, stares, and no questions.” Nor did the Chinese government make any concessions on the major issues—the valuation of China’s currency, pressure on Iran, action on climate change—that the White House was hoping to see addressed.

Most onlookers attribute the new Chinese intransigence to the comparative shift in the two countries’ positions. China today holds some $1 trillion of U.S. public debt, and American consumers are hooked on cheap Chinese goods. China, meanwhile, has continued to post impressive growth statistics despite the Great Recession.

But it’s a bit more complicated than that. If the Communist Party feels that it’s now attained a position of dominance, why would it prevent ordinary Chinese from watching Obama’s town hall session—something that earlier Chinese leaders were secure enough to allow? If the Chinese are confident in their own economic success, why would they go to such enormous lengths to stage-manage Obama’s visit?

What strikes me about the visit is precisely the lack of any overtly triumphalist note on China’s part. Sure, the Chinese have been rebuffing US calls for a more realistic evaluation of the renminbi, and lecturing the Americans on getting their own financial house in order. But they haven’t been trumpeting the advantages of the Chinese system. One commentary from the state-run Xinhua news agency, for example, gave a remarkably positive gloss on Obama’s visit, praising the Americans for taking care to manage the important relationship between the two countries. And then this quote:

Many westerners do not realize China’s gigantic internal gap in wealth, regional development and public utilities. Some take Shanghai and Beijing for what the whole China is like, others think the Chinese only refer to the Han nationality.

Or take this piece from The People’s Daily, highlighting premier Wen Jiabao’s statement in his meeting with Obama that China doesn’t subscribe to the talk of a “G2”:

China is still a developing country with a huge population and has a long way to go before it becomes modernized, Wen said, stressing “We must always keep sober-minded over it.”

This could be window-dressing, of course. But I think it’s for real: it’s increasingly clear that China’s leaders are perfectly aware of the fragility of their own nation-building exercise. Little acknowledged, is that, as The Financial Times recently pointed out, China’s economy is still “less than a third of the size of the US” and its GDP per capita is “roughly the same as Angola’s.” If you were to ask me what the Chinese fear most, it’s the asset bubble now building in the Chinese real estate and stock markets that are being buoyed up by low interest rates and the artificially low renminbi. Hu Jintao and most of the people beneath him are aware that this bubble could pop just as disastrously as the one that did here—and the result would be profound, destabilizing social unrest.

To be sure, China’s leaders are proud of what their country has achieved. But they’re not idiots. It will take years before lasting status as a Great Power is more or less assured, and they know it.

Podcast: Joost Hiltermann on Iraq on the Edge

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:34:58 -0800

Joost Hiltermann speaks with Nathan Thrall about the political crisis facing Iraq as it prepares for parliamentary elections in 2010 and the departure of American troops the following year. To read Hiltermann's article, "Iraq on the Edge," please visit nybooks.com, or read his latest blog post on Iraqi politics at blogs.nybooks.com

Rome: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Game

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:26:00 -0800

Stephen Greenblatt

Oliver amazed at the Dodger’s mode of ‘going to work’; etching by George Cruikshank from Oliver Twist

An American archaeologist friend here in Rome, where I’m spending my sabbatical, was working for a time in Salerno, in the south of Italy, and found himself annoyed by the thugs who lounged near the main square and approached him, when he intended to park there, offering, for a small fee, to “protect” the car from anyone who might wish to damage it. It was bad enough when he thought it was only he, a foreigner, who was treated to this shake-down, but, as he idly watched one day, my friend realized that the louts were equal-opportunity predators: they made the same offer to local businessmen, little old ladies, factory workers. And worse still, they went about their business within sight of the uniformed carabinieri who stood chatting with each other in front of the police station. My friend expressed his outrage to a Salernitano acquaintance: the nuisance was not an unfamiliar one in America, he complained, but it seemed unaccountable to have it take place under the gaze of the authorities. Look, the acquaintance said to him, with the resignation of a native, everyone has to make a living.

The remark came to mind a few weeks ago when I was pickpocketed. The thieves got some money—not as much as they would have had the small restaurant where I had just eaten accepted a credit card. (As is quite typical here of a whole range of transactions I had had to pay cash.) Along with the wallet itself, the pickpockets got my credit cards too, of course, which I quickly cancelled, and an old 1000 lira note, from the days before Italy changed its currency to the Euro. For years I had carried this note—worth little then, when it first chanced into my hands, and nothing now—folded up and tucked away as a kind of good luck charm. Some Italians used to have the appealing custom of scribbling messages—to no one in particular—on the blank part of those notes. (It is not for nothing that graffiti is an Italian word—Italians love to write on blank surfaces of any kind and have done so, to the despair of the orderly, since the days of the Roman Empire.) On my 1000 lira note someone had written, in Neapolitan dialect, “Ogni scarifaggio e bell’ a mama soja”—Every dung beetle looks beautiful to its own mother.

Roman graffiti showing a victorious gladiator with the words “O Campani, you perished together with the Nucerians in that victory,” referring to the deadly riot in the amphitheater of Pompeii in 59 AD (VRoma Archive)

I do not know if the thieves who pinched my wallet are now carrying around this talisman for themselves or threw it away as worthless. What I do know is that they were good at their work. I was on the bus, with my wife and my little boy, on the way to Rome’s Olympic Stadium for the Rome-Florence soccer game, and, though I am on occasion clueless, I am well aware that crowded buses are prime targets for pickpockets. I was carrying my wallet not in the back pocket of my jeans but in the front pocket where I was absolutely confident I would feel any prying hands. But I had not reckoned on just how crowded the bus would be or on how entirely I would be focused in the mad press to hold onto my boy. In retrospect, I realize that the thief was working with an associate: together they cunningly let my boy get past but then made it extremely difficult for me, so that, though I was still holding onto his hand, I had to press my way through them, with profuse apologies. The wallet was probably gone in a second, the thieves quickly vanished at the next exit, and I was left with annoyance, embarrassment at my own stupidity, and relief that my wife was carrying the tickets.

When we reached the stadium, I was supposed to show some identification but, of course, that was gone with my wallet. I explained to the ticket taker what had happened, and we both laughed, I more ruefully than he, as, with a genial shrug, he waved me through. The A. S. Roma soccer team has not been having a very successful season, but they won handily that night, three goals to one. The crowd was joyous, and at least, as we made our way home, I did not have to worry about getting pickpocketed.

Should I conclude—as the ticket taker’s shrug implied— that everyone has to make a living? No: though I have a grudging admiration for the skill with which my wallet was fingered, I regard the thieves as dung beetles. But, even in the midst of my anger, I recognize something at once remarkable and functional in the widespread acceptance in this country of disorder, disruption, and inconvenience. The acceptance is at once cynical and philosophical—and it is perhaps worth recalling that cynicism has an ancient philosophical ancestry. It is, in its way, a life skill, a way to cope with drastically lowered expectations. The great cynic of the fourth century BCE, Diogenes, lived in a wooden tub: he would have had no fear of pickpockets. The stories that circulated about him suggest an unusual, if acidic, sense of humor. When Plato repeated Socrates’ celebrated definition of man as a “featherless biped,” Diogenes plucked a chicken and, presenting it to Plato’s Academy, declared “Behold, I bring you a man.” (Plato had to add “with flat nails” to the definition.) Alexander the Great is said to have gone to meet the cynic and asked him if there was any favor he could do for him; Diogenes replied, “Yes. Stand out of my sunlight.”

Recently, we drove from Rome to Naples for the weekend: we would never have chosen to do such a thing, since the train is exceptionally fast, but a train strike had been called on the day we were scheduled to leave. The drive normally takes 2.5 hours, and at first all was going well. But about an hour en route, a large electronic sign above the toll road said ominously that there was a manifestazione ahead and that we should expect a slow-down. A mile or two later, all movement on the three-lane highway had come to a complete halt—and we then sat, without any possibility of exiting or turning around, for over four hours.

The blockade itself was somewhere far ahead of us. We were in the midst of an enormous, seemingly endless queue, stretching in both directions, of freight vans, trucks, buses, passenger cars. Only the motorcycles, weaving through the lanes, were moving, along with a very occasional ambulance inching along the side with, I suppose, someone dying or being born. Four hours is a very long time, and I expected honking, rage, menace, the sounds of helicopters overhead. But there was nothing of the kind. The drivers, most of them men, got out and milled around, smoking, exchanging jokes, recalling other, similar inconveniences, and peeing by the railings. It was a spectacle of civility under pressure.

I reassured my son that we would begin to move eventually and that we would read all about this on the front page of the newspapers the next day. Sure enough, at first slowly and then with a rush, the road reopened, and we limped into Naples close to midnight, some seven hours after we had left Rome. But the papers the next day were virtually silent. Only after the most careful search did I find buried far back in one of the local dailies a brief report that some seven hundred workers, laid off by the corporate giant Videocon, had blocked the main autostrada from Rome to Naples. That was it, as far as I could tell: no investigations, no army units, no eruptions of violence. Only the almost fathomless patience, good humor, and cynicism of thousands of random travelers.

Israel Without Illusions: What Goldstone Got Right

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:30:00 -0800

David Shulman

Detained Palestinians near an IDF post in Hebron, photographed by an Israeli soldier (Shovrim Shtika)

Questions of human rights abuses in Israel and the charges of war crimes put forward by the UN’s Goldstone report have produced little more than the usual disingenuous accusations of anti-Semitism. Even Moshe Halbertal, an unusually cogent Israeli participant-observer, takes the Goldstone commission to task in The New Republic for trying to link the Gaza campaign to the wider setting of the occupation and Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. “Why,” he asks, “should a committee with a mandate to inquire into the operation in Gaza deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at large?”

There are, in my view, problems, distortions, and lacunae in the Goldstone report—some of them resulting from the fact that the Israeli government refused to cooperate with the UN commission. At the very least, Israeli testimony, both by ordinary soldiers and higher-ranking officers, might have modulated the sweeping conclusions in three of the most damning chapters of the report: “Chapter X. Indiscriminate Attacks by Israeli Armed Forces Resulting in the Loss of Life and Injury to Civilians”; “Chapter XI. Deliberate Attacks Against the Civilian Population”; and “Chapter XIII. Attacks on the Foundations of Civilian Life in Gaza.”

I also agree with Halbertal that Hamas benefits from an almost eerily neutral tone in the report.

But the report’s attempt to link whatever happened in Gaza with what has been going on in the West Bank for the last forty-two years is wholly justified. The political background to the report is, before all else, a cultural and moral one. I do not believe that a society can disenfranchise, dispossess, and effectively dehumanize large numbers of people living between Jenin and Hebron without this process influencing the way it conducts a war in Gaza. No one who regularly visits the Palestinian territories controlled by Israel has to speculate about whether or not Israel is engaged in the routine abuse of human rights.

Such abuse is the very stuff of the occupation—a daily reality exacerbated above all by the endless hunger for more land and the ever-expanding settlement project. That reality has been amply documented by Israeli human rights organizations such as B’Tselem and, more recently, Yesh Din (which offers legal aid to Palestinians), as well as by a large corpus of writings produced by firsthand witnesses, including those discussed in my 2007 book Dark Hope.

Since then, the situation on the ground has markedly deteriorated. Here is one relatively minor example: the imposition of Closed Military Zones by local Israeli commanders in the territories has had the effect—and, quite likely, the intention—of keeping Palestinian villagers and Israeli peace activists away from Palestinian fields. Establishing these zones has become standard practice; we encounter them nearly every week in the south Hebron hills. Palestinian lands that are not cultivated for three years automatically revert to state ownership; Palestinian farmers and shepherds are frequently chased off their lands at gunpoint by Israeli settlers and sometimes gain access to these fields or grazing grounds only when accompanied by Israeli activists.

The Israel Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that it is illegal for the army to declare Closed Military Zones as a routine practice, especially if this means distancing Palestinian farmers from their lands. But the court’s writ, backed up by a directive issued by the army’s own legal adviser for the territories, doesn’t have much practical effect. Just four weeks ago, I spent a day in detention at the Qiryat Arba’ police station together with seven other activists precisely because we protested when a local commander declared the fields of the village of Samu’a, which border on the “illegal outpost” of Asahel, a Closed Military Zone.

Israeli peace groups and human rights activists often challenge the actions of the Israeli army, the border police, the Civil Administration, and other government authorities in court or in nonviolent protests in situ, with occasional successes; mostly, however, we fail, as we did recently in East Jerusalem, where large-scale settlement projects, including the expulsion of Palestinian families from their homes, are now in progress. There is, no doubt, something to be said for the fact that these matters are at least freely discussed in the Israeli press and are adjudicated by a still functional legal system—although the record of Israeli courts in matters relating to the occupation and, above all, the settlements is, in my view, a dismal one.

For decades now, the courts have allowed the settlement enterprise to proceed unimpeded by significant legal constraints, despite its evident criminal nature under international law. The courts have failed to stop the large-scale expropriation of private (also communally owned) Palestinian lands. They have let rampant violence by settlers throughout the territories, and very conspicuously in the city of Hebron, go largely unpunished. They have sanctioned the fencing off of Palestinian villages into tiny, discontinuous enclaves cut off from markets, schools, hospitals, and workplaces. The list of such failures by the courts could easily go on and on.

To be fair, as mentioned earlier, there is often a wide gap between the rulings of the courts, including the Supreme Court, and the reality of how those rulings are implemented, especially within the military system that enforces the occupation, which has been thoroughly penetrated by settlers. But at heart the problem is not, after all, a legal one: rather, it reflects our deeper vision of ourselves in the world and our ability to see, to imagine, and to acknowledge the suffering of other human beings, including those aspects of their suffering for which we are directly responsible. It is also important to note that the public debate itself has its limits, as you can see by the recent attempts to silence Dr. Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University or the no less invidious government campaign to dry up international funding for Shovrim Shtika (“Breaking the Silence”), the remarkably courageous group of ex-soldiers who have exposed recurrent acts of army violence against Palestinian civilians that they witnessed in Hebron and elsewhere in the territories. Shovrim Shtika has also meticulously collected soldiers’ testimony about what they saw or did during the Gaza campaign last December and January.

So does it help me, as an Israeli, to be told—by Robert Bernstein in a New York Times Op-Ed—that, so far as human rights abuses are concerned, Israel’s record is considerably better than that of various neighboring “authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records”? It does not. As an Israeli, I would like to know, to take only one example selected at random, if Israeli soldiers did or did not deliberately shoot a handcuffed, unarmed Palestinian named Iyad al-Samouni in the legs on January 5, 2009, and then prevent members of his family from helping him, with the result that Iyad bled to death—as reported in the Goldstone report, paragraphs 736-744. Either the report of the circumstances of Iyad’s death is true, or it is not. If it is false, then we would like to know about this.

If it is true—and the Goldstone committee found the Palestinian testimony credible—then as an Israeli I have a stake in seeing the guilty soldiers brought to justice; and if they were only “following orders,” a line of defense no Israeli should ever want to adopt, then I would want whoever issued the order to be held responsible, even if (especially if) it were the Minister of Defense himself. This case is one of many and is also part of the wider setting mentioned earlier. Israel’s steadfast refusal to investigate such cases by an official, high-level commission of inquiry or its equivalent—combined with its refusal to cooperate with UN investigators—looks alarmingly like an admission of guilt.

As prophesied long ago by the late philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz and others, the occupation—and above all the settlement project—have profoundly eroded the moral fiber of Israel, corroded central institutions of the society, and undermined our integrity as a political community. None of this happened in a vacuum; the “other side” has much to atone for as well. But even I can remember a time when charges of war crimes were not simply sloughed off by Israel’s leaders, when military mistakes that cost innocent civilian lives were acknowledged as such and elicited expressions of sorrow, and when Israeli courts clearly articulated the principle that a soldier has not only the right but indeed the duty not to carry out an order that is at odds with his conscience as a human being or with basic human values.

I remember vividly an eloquent apology offered on national television by then Chief of Staff Mota Gur for accidental civilian casualties caused by shelling during Operation Litani in Lebanon in the spring of 1978. One might also recall the time in late 1982 when some 300,000 ordinary Israelis came out to demonstrate in Tel Aviv because of Israel’s indirect responsibility, as occupying power, for the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut. Times have changed.

Copenhagen Crisis: Why the US Needs Cap and Trade

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:58:00 -0800

Tim Flannery

Caribou migration, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 2002;
photograph by Subhankar Banerjee from his series ‘Oil and the Caribou’

It is often argued that cap and trade legislation requires too many compromises with—and give-aways to—polluting corporations to pass the House and Senate, and that consequently it is ineffective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. While environmentalists are failing to support cap and trade, those opposing action on climate change are fiercely attacking it. Yet such a system is essential when it comes to getting global action on climate change—not least at the increasingly imperilled climate summit in Copenhagen in December—for it delivers a transparent benchmark by which nations can judge each other’s commitment.

To state the obvious, cap and trade—by putting caps on the emissions of the principal polluting industries across the economy while letting carbon emitters buy and sell carbon permits among themselves—mandates an overall cap on a nation’s emissions. The Waxman-Markey bill, for example—which passed in the House in June but must now be reconciled with the bill now being debated in the Senate—seeks to limit US emissions, by 2020, to between 14 and 17 percent below what they were in 2005. This means that overall US emissions would, after two centuries of growth, peak around 2015–2016, and then begin a slow decline. And this would occur despite all the give-aways and concessions included in the legislation, such as the free allocation of permits (rather than their purchase) to polluting industries.

The Waxman-Markey bill won the support of major electricity generators and major polluters alike, and these industries continue to support Senate legislation such as the Kerry-Boxer bill. The main opposition is now coming from small and middle-sized manufacturers and other businesses, which fear declining competitiveness due to energy price rises. (Through the Chambers of Commerce in each state, these interests are now lobbying Senators to oppose the legislation, and this trenchant opposition—including from some Democrats—along with the time required for a bill to pass through the Senate process, means that the US will go to the global climate talks in Copenhagen with no domestic cap and trade system in place.

It’s sometimes argued that the European experience with cap and trade shows that it doesn’t work. But this is simply untrue: the European legislation is on target to deliver the full 8 percent of reductions below 1990 levels promised by 2012, and furthermore it has left Europe with an appetite for even steeper reductions in future. Europeans have unilaterally decided to reduce emissions by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and have offered to increase that to a 30 percent reduction if the rest of the world agrees to take action. Cap and trade clearly works, which is why the lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry are resisting it so fiercely.

If the US arrives at the global climate talks in Copenhagen without the prospect of getting a cap and trade bill through Congress, this will destroy the possibility of a new climate treaty, for without a clear signal from the US, nations such as Canada and Australia, which have signed the Kyoto Protocol, are likely to back away from national caps as well, leaving any new agreement even more toothless than Kyoto.

The question then arises as to how such countries might enter into any global agreement. For the US, the most likely mechanism is regulation of greenhouse gas emission by the Environmental Protection Agency in a variety of ways, including setting fuel efficiency standards for coal-fired power plants. This might well reduce emissions, but it’s impossible to establish a national cap using such regulation. Likewise, a carbon tax might help, but it won’t lead to a national cap, and without such a cap it’s unclear just what the US is bringing to the table in terms of an overall goal to reduce the global burden of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Unless a treaty based on cap and trade gains the support of the US and other advanced countries, it’s hard to see how a cap on the emissions of developed countries will be achieved, and without such a cap, it’s just not clear how overall greenhouse gas emissions will be controlled.

Subhankar Banerjee’s photographs addressing the effects of climate change and industrial development on the Alaskan Arctic, and a video narrated by Gwich’in elder Sarah James, will be featured in the exhibition ‘(Re-) Cycles of Paradise,’ at the UN Climate Change Conference, Copenhagen, December 7–18, 2009. The exhibition is organized by ARTPORT making waves and commissioned by the Global Gender and Climate Alliance. To see more of Banerjee’s photographs, readers can visit subhankarbanerjee.org.

The Tender Art of David Park

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:22:00 -0800

Sanford Schwartz

David Park: Boston Street Scene, 1954; paintings from Helen Park Bigelow’s David Park, Painter: Nothing Held Back, just published by Hudson Hills Press

David Park (1911–1960) is one of those artists who isn’t widely known but whose work inspires a special loyalty and warmth of feeling among his admirers. The partisan flavor his very name can arouse is partly dependent, of course, on his not being a household name to begin with. But Park, who was based in Berkeley, California, and was, along with Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff, one of the leading lights of what has been called “Bay Area” painting in the 1950s, makes some of us always eager to see more of his work and learn more about him because his best pictures have a particular tenderness and sense of gravity—a note that sets him apart from near-contemporaries of his such as Alice Neel, Fairfield Porter, or Alex Katz.

Not that there is anything sentimental or literary—or modest in scope—about Park’s painting. In his pictures of, say, people at a dining-room table, young men walking, musicians at work, or in his portraits, he doesn’t spell out specific expressions. Most of his energy has gone into his feeling for the shifts in the inner space of an image and for the creation of light, which he can make sizzlingly bright or glowingly soft. A person’s eyes, in a Park, might be no more than dots. Yet the magic of his brushy and muscular paintings, often marked by hot reds, yellows, and oranges, is that the people in them have psychologically full presences, and we are pulled into the reflective spirit of the images.

It is not surprising that Park has long been written about with fervor and affection. Also unsurprising is that most of the commentary is to be found in gallery catalogs which, like that for the Whitney Museum’s 1988 Park retrospective, are out of print. There has never been a full-fledged biography or conventional big picture book. Helen Park Bigelow’s David Park, Painter: Nothing Held Back is thus long overdue. This account by the artist’s younger daughter provides the first intimate look we have had of him, and the volume itself, while not especially extravagant, can be called the first coffee-table book on David Park.

Given that there probably won’t be any publications like it any time soon, however, it is unfortunate that Bigelow includes so many of Park’s early, somewhat styleless pictures, done when he was finding his themes, and also so many of his paintings from 1958 and 1959 of vaguely everymanish heads and nude figures. They can be wooden and portentous. And this selection sorely needs more of what, I believe, makes Park most distinctive: his pictures of people, anchored in specific, everyday situations, done through the first two thirds of the 1950s.

In paintings such as the 1950 Kids on Bikes, for example, Park brought to American art a note of informality—a feeling for the relaxed clothes people actually wore and for fleeting unannounced moods and moments—that was in its way as new and as expansive in spirit as what Jackson Pollock was doing at the same time. (Works on this order that I miss in Bigelow’s volume include Bus Stop, Jazz Band, Kids on Bikes No. 2, Blue Lydia, Flower Market, Boy and Car, Tournament, and his portraits of children.)

David Park: Kids on Bikes, 1950–51

Bigelow’s text has a drawback, too. It won’t satisfy readers looking to understand the ins and outs of Park’s career or where he stands in relation to American art in general, let alone world art. But her gentle and gracefully written portrait does feed our need to know more about the person her father was. A little like Musa Mayer in Night Studio, Mayer’s memoir of her father Philip Guston, Bigelow engagingly describes the experience of growing up with a parent who was a driven artist. Her best passages have something of the unaccountably emotional texture of her father’s art. In one of them, describing a moment in 1945 when she was twelve and her father’s two brothers were visiting, the family is playing charades, and she finds herself and her teammates, who turn out to be her father and his brothers, in a small closet, looking for props. At the moment, she is flooded with happiness in having this sudden, singular intimacy, a feeling that becomes only enhanced when she realizes that her father is smiling at her, and “I saw that he knew exactly how I felt.”

The David Park who emerges in his daughter’s book is much the same elusive, sweet-natured, and tense, or complex, man we might have expected. A high-school dropout from a Boston family whose father was a Yale-educated Unitarian minister (and whose grandfather and great-grandfather were ministers), Park had a continual need to face the world as a regular guy. He was always on guard against self-importance, in himself or anyone else; yet, as Bigelow makes clear in a telling anecdote, he was fiercely ambitious. His pictures, in turn, are unusual in the way they so often show people coming together, whether to play music or eat or walk through the woods or simply to stand by one another; yet few American artists have so powerfully captured the state of being isolated in one’s thoughts.

David Park, Painter: Nothing Held Back by Helen Park Bigelow. Hudson Hills Press, $60.00

Loans to the Poorest: Where Does the Money Really Go?

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:26:00 -0800

Sue Halpern and Nicholas Kristof

A marketing image from the microfinace organization Kiva, featuring Truphena Anyango, 29, in her pharmacy, Mikindani, Kenya, 2009 (kiva.org)

Sue Halpern and Nicholas Kristof have been engaged in an exchange about microfinance, following her recent NYR review of his new book (co-authored with Sheryl WuDunn), Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. The first part of their conversation can be found here. The next installment appears below.

Sue Halpern: As you know, the controversy over the way the microfinance website Kiva.org presents its work was the subject of a Times piece early this week—a piece that, in fact, cited you. For those who may not be familiar with the controversy, the San Francisco-based Kiva is a wildly successful organization (they’ve distributed about $100 million in loans since 2005) that, through its website, appears to connect individual micro-lenders, people like you and me, for instance, with particular individuals in need of a small loan to get a business off the ground: a soft-drinks vendor in Thailand, for example, or a woman who makes and sells baskets in Africa. The Kiva website is a catalog of these folks, and the lender is able to read each person’s story and choose the one to support that speaks most forcefully to her or him. But as the Times article, which picks up on a blog post from David Roodman at the Center for Global Development observes—and, as I may add, I pointed out in my review of your book—this is actually not how the money gets allocated at all: when you donate to Kiva, your money doesn’t go to any particular person, it goes to one of many microcredit organizations, like the Grameen Bank, or Accion, that in turn supports people like the soft-drinks vendor and the basket-maker.

As you and Sheryl point out in your book, people connect to stories, not to statistics, so from that standpoint, Kiva figured out a very effective way of getting across the larger microcredit story by offering vivid narratives about individuals in need, and in this way pulling in millions of dollars in donations, mostly in small increments. Do you think it matters that the money isn’t actually going to the person donors believe they are supporting? The Times article quotes one of your columns from 2007, in which you wrote that you lent $25 each to a baker in Afghanistan, a TV repairman there, and a single mother running a clothing shop in the Dominican Republic, which suggests that you, too, bought into the illusion. How do you feel about that now?

Nicholas Kristof: I remain a fan of Kiva, partly because it has done such good work in popularizing microfinance. It’s true that I, along with most other donors, didn’t appreciate the degree to which the people we were supposedly lending to were really symbols more than actual partners. But Kiva’s CEO and co-founder, Matt Flannery, was so non-defensive in acknowledging this—an example for all bankers!—that I found his responses disarming and ultimately decided that Kiva’s approach was more a matter of marketing than deceit.

This kind of issue arises all the time in development. For example, I’m a fan of Plan USA, a child sponsorship organization, and most sponsors probably think that they are helping a particular child. But in fact, most of the funds go to the community, not that particular child, because that’s more effective. The child sponsorship is a bit of a gimmick, but it works in building connections and getting people to support development. As a result, I’m a big supporter of Plan, and I’ve seen the great work it does in communities with the support of those sponsors.

Likewise, I think development organizations need to do more to slice and dice assistance, so that donors can pay for a girl’s schoolbooks for a year, or pay for a “safe birthing kit,” or a teacher’s salary for a month, and so on. Now of course, it’s always more complicated than that. The schoolbooks won’t do any good if there isn’t someone making sure that the teacher shows up at the school. And the safe birthing kit is fine, but what happens if the woman needs a C-section? And the teacher’s salary is crucial, but what about teacher training—or monitoring the teacher so that he doesn’t trade grades for sex? Helping people is always a complex, comprehensive process, but that’s what bores donors—and so organizations struggle to find ways to get them to pay for a particular person to do a particular thing. It’s a fine line between creating marketing and false advertising. In Kiva’s case, it was both somewhat misleading and blindingly effective; as a Kiva lender my main aim is to help people—and in that respect, I’m convinced I more than got my money’s worth.

Why Health Care Reform is Going to the Dogs

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:01:00 -0800

Michael Tomasky

Canine checkup (independent.com)

So what did the House Blue Dogs do on the health care vote last Saturday? They were more supportive than one might think: Of the fifty-two-member coalition, twenty-eight voted yea and twenty-four nay. Jim Cooper of Tennessee, the Blue Dog whom I identified in my piece in The New York Review as being among the most knowledgeable legislators in the House on the issue, told The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein: “This was one of the best votes I ever cast.”

That majority-level of support from these moderates came, however, with an asterisk. It seems fair to say that many of them were made more comfortable with the overall bill because of the stringent anti-abortion amendment approved earlier Saturday evening and sponsored by Blue Dog Democrat Bart Stupak of Michigan. That amendment would bar women from receiving coverage for abortion services even if they have private insurance, if that insurance has been obtained with the help of federal subsidies. Under both House and Senate bills, people are required to buy insurance, and the government would subsidize those with incomes up to four times the federal poverty level to help them make the purchase. These women—with household incomes up to $88,000 for a family of four—would be affected.

Concerns about the implications of health care reform on federal abortion funding have simmered (and sometimes boiled) for months. As I wrote in the piece, an amendment by Lois Capps of California seemed at one point to satisfy most Democrats. But Stupak wasn’t among them. The Capps amendment was, to my eye (conservatives disputed this), in line with existing federal law: The Hyde amendment, which bars direct federal funding of abortion services. But Stupak, working with the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, whose members seemed to be deeply involved in negotiating eleventh-hour details, according to Politico, pushed for language that goes beyond Hyde and prohibits even indirect federal funding of abortion. It passed 240-194.

Fifteen of the twenty-eight Blue Dogs who backed the House bill also voted for the Stupak amendment. We don’t know how many would have voted for final passage without Stupak, so we’re a bit in the realm of speculation here. But we do know that the bill barely passed, by 220-215. And Cooper told Ezra Klein that Nancy Pelosi and the House leadership were sweating the margin virtually until the last minute: “I think the actual number [of solid yea votes] was closer to 210. The leadership had to move heaven and earth to get to 220. The achievement of the leadership was to corral the votes at the last minute, and that is a great achievement that should not be diminished, and they did that by making major concessions they didn’t want to make.” In other words, it seems reasonable to say that without Stupak, moderate Democrats would have denied the bill enough votes for passage.

So, in essence, the Blue Dogs won another round. They’d already won on the public option, which was weakened in the final House bill to a point Pelosi had spent months saying she would not permit: She wanted a public option with reimbursement rates pegged to current Medicare rates plus 5 percent, which would likely have enabled the new federal insurer to offer prospective customers better coverage plans, but she got one in which rates have to be negotiated with insurers. And now, most Blue Dogs (thirty-six of them voted for Stupak) and a coalition of other members who are mostly liberal but moderate on abortion for religious or constituent-based reasons, have made the bill more conservative still. Liberal pro-choice Democrats in the House and Senate such as California Senator Barbara Boxer and Florida Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz vow to remove the Stupak language as the bill proceeds along, and President Obama said he hoped the language could be re-jiggered.

The bottom line, though, is this: Liberals threaten to drop their support for the bill if the Stupak language is included, while moderates threaten to drop their support if the language is excluded. Which side’s threats are Democratic leaders likely to take more seriously? The dogs. As long as that is the case, they will retain more leverage over the final product.

Midway: Message from the Gyre

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:29:57 -0800

Chris Jordan

An albatross chick on Midway Atoll, raised on plastic that its parents mistook for food from the polluted Pacific Ocean, September 2009; photographs by Chris Jordan

These photographs of albatross chicks, the first of which appeared in a recent New York Review article by Tim Flannery, were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific that was the site of the Battle of Midway in World War II and is now one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries.

The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar over the vast ocean polluted by plastic debris and other waste collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds more than two thousand miles from the nearest continent.

Chris Jordan discusses his work on Midway Atoll in a New York Review podcast. To see more of his photographs from Midway, readers can visit chrisjordan.com. A collection of his large-scale conceptual photographs, Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait, was published earlier this year by Prestel.

Podcast: Chris Jordan on Midway Atoll and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:42:15 -0800

Photographer and activist Chris Jordan speaks with Eve Bowen about his recent photographs, taken at one of the world's most remote marine wildlife sanctuaries, of albatross chicks killed by plastic waste that their parents have mistaken for food. To read more and see Jordan's images of the chicks, please visit http://blogs.nybooks.com

The Micro Miracle?

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:00:00 -0800

Sue Halpern and Nicholas Kristof

A group of women who have received microfinance loans, showing their loan cards, Kolkata, India, 2006 (Shamik Banerjee/The India Today Group/Getty Images)

In the November 19 issue of The New York Review, Sue Halpern wrote about Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s new book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. Her piece describes the systematic abuse of women documented by Kristof and WuDunn throughout the world, and the considerable success of microfinance programs—pioneered by the Nobel-prize winning economist Muhammad Yunus, whose book is also included in Halpern’s review—in countering this problem by helping poor women gain economic power. Following is an exchange between Halpern and Kristof about the spread of microfinance and some of the criticisms that have emerged about it.

Sue Halpern: In my piece, and in your book, we write about Mohammed Yunus, the Grameen Bank, and using microcredit schemes to alleviate poverty. A number of the success stories you tell in the book involve a small, entrepreneurial loan. Recently there have been a number of compelling critiques of microfinance—that it keeps poor people in debt, that its high interest rates benefit traditional lenders and exploit the poor, that it does nothing to foster systemic economic development. How do you address these, and other complaints about microcredit?

Nicholas Kristof: Microfinance is no more a silver bullet in the poor world than macrofinance is in the rich world. We’ve seen over the last couple of years that banks can make quite a mess of it in our own country, and yet for all that we wouldn’t want to do without banks. I think the criticisms of microfinance have some validity—it’s certainly true that if a borrower can’t invest productively enough to generate a high rate of return, he or she will be more indebted and worse off than before. And it’s equally true that microfinance hasn’t worked as well in Africa as it did in South Asia.

But Sheryl and I have also seen lots of families, in Africa as well as Asia, that benefited enormously because for the first time they got access to credit—as well as the counseling and peer support that comes with most microfinance programs. In Half the Sky, we talk about a woman in Burundi who turned her life around with a $2 loan from CARE, which she used to buy fertilizer. It doesn’t always work so neatly, but it does surprisingly often, and giving women ways to earn incomes hugely elevates their status. One of the market failures in poor countries is that there is little access to credit, and another is that women are underutilized, and microfinance programs tend to address both those problems. So the failures are real, but my take is that the successes far outnumber them.

I should add that the biggest need in microfinance isn’t microlending but microsavings. Poor families often have no way to save. They get income once or twice a year, after the harvest, and then they have no bank account to put it into. So they can keep money in a coffee can under the bed, in a hut that can’t be locked. Or they can deposit it with a money-changer, who will charge interest on deposits—in West Africa, an 80 percent annualized interest charge on deposits is common. So naturally, people don’t save as much as is optimal, and then when a child needs a school uniform there’s no money in the house. Or when a woman is in obstructed labor, she dies for want of $100 in savings to pay for a C-section. I’d love to see microfinance organizations work more on this savings end of the equation. Perhaps half of families have the savvy to benefit from loans, but every family in the poor world can benefit from a pad of savings.

SH: I take your point on micro-banking, and I’m aware that this was the topic of a recent conference convened by Mercy Corps, which is very active and creative in microfinance. But I want to return to my original question about microcredit trapping the poor in a cycle of debt. This seems like a powerful critique, and one that’s leveled quite frequently at the microcredit movement. I understand that individuals are able to take a very small amount of money and use it to catapult themselves from destitution to someplace better, but what about the poorest of the poor as a class. Does microcredit ensnare them in this way, or is this critique baseless? You mention that microcredit has worked better in South Asia than in Africa, yet a number of the critiques I’ve read that make this point focus, specifically, on Bangladesh and its neighbors.

NK: I have seen some cases of very poor people being trapped in debts by microfinance, but in my experience those are the exceptions—particularly where a microfinance organization has a good model. The success of microfinance has led to a rush of new entrants, some of whom aren’t so good at tweaking their models, and those new imitators probably have much higher failure rates.

In the good models, though, there is an emphasis on screening people to see that they have good investment plans that should bring in more income. The initial loans are also small, to give people experience, and they get counselling on how to run their businesses. So in my experience the well-run microfinance institutions lend for projects that are actually viable and do generate cash to pay off the loan and usually leave people better off.

Granted, there are problems: a husband confiscates the cash and uses it to buy a bottle of homebrew, a woman buys a goat that then dies, a borrower uses a loan not to invest but to pay for a doctor’s visit for a child, and so on. In those cases, the borrower’s family is indeed worse off, but I think those are unusual. Records kept by lenders like Kashf in Pakistan also seem to support the notion that most borrowers benefit significantly—although one definitely should be skeptical of in-house monitoring and record-keeping.

Editor’s Note: The exchange between Sue Halpern and Nicholas Kristof continues here.

Presidential Appointments

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:00:00 -0800

Martin Filler

Jacqueline Kennedy during the filming of her White House tour, 1962 (from Dream House: The White House as an American Home, Acanthus Press)

Presidents of the United States have enough to worry about, but an ill-timed makeover of the White House can readily become a political liability. After the Panic of 1837, an opposition-party Congressman accused President Martin van Buren of transforming his official home into “a PALACE as splendid as that of the Caesars,” and thereby doomed the incumbent’s re-election. A century and a half later, while the Reagan administration slashed school-lunch subsidies and declared ketchup a vegetable, Nancy Reagan provoked outrage when she bought a $209,000 china service embellished in gold and ketchup red.

Although the White House has been redecorated more often than any other American dwelling, those changes were prompted less by personal whim than by heavy wear inflicted on this most publicly accessible of all rulers’ residences. The electorate’s insatiable curiosity and proprietary notions about the White House caused the Executive Mansion to be photographed often, as illustrated in Dream House: The White House as an American Home, a handsomely produced but unconvincingly argued polemic by Ulysses Grant Dietz, senior curator of decorative arts at the Newark Museum (and namesake of his presidential forebear), and Sam Watters, a specialist in American design.

Dietz and Watters inflect the standard White House chronology by proposing six distinct stages in its development, which they call Country House, Villa, Mansion, Palace, Suburban Home, and Shrine. But their organizing rubrics do not always apply, and this Kuebler-Rossian sequence forces the typically circuitous and fitful evolution of style and taste—from which not even presidents are exempt—into a simplistic linear progression.

The authors reserve some of their harshest criticism for Jacqueline Kennedy, who did more than anyone else to bring a sense of historical continuity back to the White House at a time when it displayed scant evidence of its rich heritage. For example, she reunited the suite of furniture James Monroe ordered from Paris for the Blue Room in 1818, and installed Dolley Madison’s Empire sofa in the Red Room along with the inkwell Thomas Jefferson used during his presidency. The sensation set off by her 1962 television program, A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy, was merely hinted at in clips woven into an episode of the cult AMC drama Mad Men last season. Yet as Dietz and Watters assert with considerable overstatement and a touch of malice, “[T]he White House, for all its changes, remains a shrine to the taste of Jacqueline Kennedy.”

Their accusation echoes the revisionist misperception voiced in The New York Times the day after Barack Obama’s inauguration. In an Op-Ed piece titled “Free the Blue Room,” Deborah Needleman, chief editor of the now-defunct shelter magazine Domino, claimed that “Mrs. Kennedy…shrouded her schemes in a welter of bureaucracy that now makes it difficult for any successor to again enliven the decor of the executive mansion.”

Quite the contrary: Jacqueline Kennedy harbored no illusions about the essentially ephemeral nature of all decorating. Although she was clearly eager to memorialize her considerable undertaking when she gave me a rare interview and behind-the-scenes help for a 1980 New York Times Magazine article on changes in White House decor since her brief time there, the former first lady coolly predicted, “In another hundred years it will be just one more chapter in the history of the White House.” But any “welter of bureaucracy” was more attributable to Lyndon Johnson, who in 1964 created the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, the oversight panel that instituted professional practices and upheld curatorial standards recognized by the American Association of Museums when it accredited the White House as a museum in 1988.

Jacqueline Kennedy’s real mistake was to disingenuously call her celebrated project a “restoration,” because she thought the word “redecoration” sounded frivolous and faddish. Though Dietz and Watters are technically correct when they note that “Even though documentary evidence survives to restore any one of the state rooms to a specific historic period, they bear little resemblance, in their artifacts or their decoration, to their appearance at any given moment in history,” they fail to acknowledge that all restorations, no matter how accurate, inevitably bear telltale signs of the times that produced them and thus can never be wholly “authentic.”

Whatever constraints are imposed downstairs at the White House, Presidential families are free to decorate however they please on the mansion’s top two floors. Though the Obamas thus far have made no changes to the main public rooms, they have hired the Los Angeles-based designer Michael Smith to do up their personal quarters, and let it be known they would patronize Pottery Barn, the good-taste-on-a-budget home furnishings chain akin to J. Crew, one of Michelle Obama’s favorites for fashionable but moderately priced clothing.

The foremost authority on White House architecture and decoration remains William Seale, whose two-volume study The President’s House: A History, originally published in 1986, was reissued last year in a revised and expanded edition. This tellingly detailed narrative is rooted in design scholarship but animated by Seale’s anecdotal flair and social acuity.

In one of his most affecting passages, Seale captures the transitory nature of private life in the White House, describing the sudden end of the half-finished 1881 refurbishment when word came that President James A. Garfield had died from an assassin’s bullet after only six months in office. Stunned workmen laid down their wallpaper rolls, paint cans, and brushes, then fled as if from some latter-day Pompeii. The abandoned materials had to be hurriedly removed before the President’s body was brought home, to spare the grieving Garfields this additional evidence of a life cut short and a family circle shattered.

Ulysses Grant Dietz and Sam Watters, Dream House: The White House as an American Home (Acanthus Press, 2009)

William Seale, The President’s House: A History, 2nd edition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)

A Public Bailout for News?

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:09:00 -0800

Michael Massing

Félix Vallotton: The Age of Paper, 1898

It was with much curiosity that I opened The Reconstruction of American Journalism, the latest entrant in the great race to save the news in America. Commissioned by Nicholas Lemann, the dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, the report was written by Leonard Downie Jr., the highly respected former executive editor of The Washington Post, and Michael Schudson, a leading historian of American journalism who is also at the Columbia J-School. The two spent months crisscrossing the country and interviewing scores of editors, reporters, bloggers, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, and citizens. In the end, the 21,000 words they produced can be boiled down to this: Columbia, the leading journalism school in the country, has placed its imprimatur on the idea of government funding of the news. What sort of impact might that have?

Informative and crisply-written, The Reconstruction of American Journalism is mercifully free of the grandiloquence and throat-clearing typical of such studies. As Downie and Schudson see it, what needs reconstructing is not advocacy journalism, which they found to be thriving, but “accountability journalism”—independent reporting that provides information, investigation, analysis, and coverage of the community.

The authors offer a survey of the changing ways in which news is being gathered and published. At great length they describe the florescence of local Web sites like Voice of San Diego and MinnPost, the rise of online investigative units like ProPublica and the Watchdog Institute, the proliferation of university-based journalism programs (Columbia’s Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, Arizona State University’s Cronkite News Service), and the ballooning of the blogosphere (Talking Points Memo, Tehran Bureau).

To many informed citizens, including readers of my two recent articles in The New York Review (“The News About the Internet” and “A New Horizon for the News”), much of this will seem familiar. Disappointingly, the report makes no effort to distinguish between those start-ups that seem promising and those that do not. Nor does it take a position on the pressing—and increasingly contentious—matter of whether newspapers should charge for access to their Web sites. “We believe the marketplace will determine whether any of the many experiments will ultimately be successful,” Downie and Schudson write, not very helpfully.

Their concerns are more Olympian. With the erosion of the long-time economic base of quality journalism, they state,

American society must now take some collective responsibility for supporting independent news reporting in this new environment—as society has, at much greater expense, for public needs like education, health care, scientific advancement, and cultural preservation—through varying combinations of philanthropy, subsidy, and government policy.

Of the six proposals Downie and Schudson advance for fulfilling that responsibility, five seem as worthy as they are unobjectionable. The IRS or Congress should authorize news organizations that derive much of their income from advertising or circulation to operate as nonprofits. Philanthropists and foundations of which there are more than 700 nationwide should increase their support for quality news gathering. Universities should not just teach journalism but set up their own news services. Public radio and television should provide more local news, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting should sharply increase its support for such reporting. Public information collected by the government should be made more accessible.

It’s their remaining recommendation that has attracted the most attention. Downie and Schudson call for the creation of a national Fund for Local News supported by a portion of more than $7 billion that the FCC takes in every year from a surcharge on telephone bills. This fund would make grants to state Local News Fund Councils, which in turn would dole them out to news organizations “that propose worthy initiatives in local news reporting.” Modeled on the state humanities councils that have been operating since the 1970s, these councils would include journalists, educators, and community leaders. A national review board would monitor the grants made by these state councils to ensure the quality of the news produced.

Despite such efforts to insure political neutrality and independence, this idea has provoked opposition from First Amendment purists like James Poniewozik at Time who fear that any government support for news organizations would inevitably compromise them. That worry seems exaggerated. For decades, newspapers have had to contend with pressures from car dealers, department stores, corporations, and many others who advertise in them. A case can be made that pressure from the government would actually be less dangerous, for any attempt by officials to control the news would itself make news. Remember the furor kicked up by the Bush administration’s heavy-handed attempts to combat the “liberal bias” at PBS?

The practical obstacles seem more formidable. Creating fifty state local news funds plus a national review board to monitor them seems a highly cumbersome undertaking, especially given the pace of change and innovation on the Internet. Political realities pose another concern. Is the America of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, George Will, tea parties, and the NRA ready to support a government bailout of the news business? Maybe not, but who a year ago could have imagined Washington spending tens of billions of dollars to save Detroit?

In fact, The Reconstruction of American Journalism might itself affect the political climate. On October 28—just eight days after the report’s release—FCC chairman Jules Genachowski announced that he had asked Steven Waldman, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the interfaith Web site Beliefnet, to lead a study “to assess the state of media in these challenging times and make recommendations designed to ensure a vibrant media landscape.”

Genachowski specifically mentioned the Columbia report, as well as recent studies by the Knight Commission and the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. Thanks in part to the Columbia report, the idea of government funding of the news business has moved one step closer to reality.

Even as the FCC study proceeds, of course, the newspaper business will continue to shed jobs. Government funding could provide some balm over the long term, but what about the short? There’s another potential money pot out there that The Reconstruction of American Journalism doesn’t mention—one that could offer an important lifeline during this painful transition. I’ll discuss it in a subsequent post.

From Egypt to Paris: An Artist Prized for His Travel Sketches

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:41:00 -0800

Peter Brooks

Dominique-Vivant Denon, the subject of my piece in the November 19, 2009 issue of the New York Review of Books, is known above all as the first Director of the Louvre—which, under his guidance, became the first encyclopedic public museum. But he was also an artist prized for his travel sketches and engravings. Since I could only touch on this aspect of his career briefly in my piece, I offer here some further notes and selections from his work.

Denon sketching the ruins of Hierakonpolis (British Museum, London)

Denon settled in Venice on the eve of the French Revolution, with the intention of creating his own engraving studio, and marrying his adored mistress, Isabella Teotochi. The Revolution changed all that. He had to return to France, during the Reign of Terror (under the protection of the painter Jacques-Louis David, associate of the Jacobins), to prevent the expropriation of his property. Then he was enrolled in General Bonaparte’s Egyptian Campaign in 1798, as one of its “savants.”

The Egyptian expedition offered an opportunity to feed the cultivated public’s insatiable curiosity for visual travelogue (photography was still some thirty years in the future). Denon became a first-rate sketcher of Egyptian ruins (his work recalls Piranesi’s views of Roman ruins, from a few decades earlier) and antiquities. The sketches were done on the spot, in haste, by the artist as he arrived on horseback with the army—the contemporary equivalent of the hand-held camera, if you will. In one of these sketches (shown above), Denon includes himself, sketching the ruins of Hierakonpolis.

There is a fluid charm and grace to the drawing, which represents Denon in what he calls his “ruined” clothing, next to his horse, with the ruins in the distance—and that somewhat startlingly large camel to the right. One wonders how many European representations of the camel there had been before this?

These sketches were engraved, to figure in Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute-Egypte pendant les campagnes du général Bonaparte, the magnificent and thorough account that Denon both wrote and illustrated, published in two large volumes in 1802, to great acclaim.

From earlier, no doubt, is his Le Roman universel (“The Universal Novel”—or in a more apt translation, “The Same Old Story”), which with some of the worldliness of his masterful erotic novella No Tomorrow (Point de Lendemain) gives us, in a kind of comic strip (read it from left to right), the story of a liaison, from meeting to separation, with clear but gracefully rendered scenes of lovemaking in the middle.

The Universal Novel (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris)

We may be reminded of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, and Max Ophuls’ film adaptation—though Denon’s version seems somewhat less world-weary. For all his sophistication, he is not, one feels, a cynic.

It’s a sign of the tumult of the period Denon lived through that the mood of the next image should be so strikingly different. This pen-and-ink drawing irresistibly evokes David’s famous sketch of Marie-Antoinette, her hands tied behind her back, seated in a tumbrel on her way to the guillotine.

Condemned members of the Red Cap Section of the Revolutionary Committee (Musée Denon, Chalon-sur-Saône)

These members of the Revolutionary Committee of the “section” named Bonnet-Rouge (all Paris was for a time divided into revolutionary “sections”) have also been sentenced—but probably not to the guillotine. The drawing dates from November or December 1794, after Thermidor, the turning point in the French Revolution that put an end to the Reign of Terror. The guillotine had fallen out of favor for common crimes: the committee members seem to have been found guilty of corruption. It’s likely that these sometime revolutionaries are undergoing a shaming punishment, mounted on a platform under signs proclaiming their misdeeds—and shivering: the final weeks of 1794 were notoriously frigid. I sense a kind of dispassionate historical gaze in Denon’s work here—surely one of his most accomplished historical evocations.

Self-portrait of Denon sketching (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris)

It is something of a retreat, in time and in style, to look at one of Denon’s self-portraits done, as he put it, “in the Flemish manner.”

It probably comes from his pre-Revolutionary time in Venice, and he self-consciously evokes an archaic style, setting himself, amidst old vases and busts and books, in a kind of Ruysdael-like decor. It may most of all point to the enormous prestige of Rembrandt, especially in portraiture. Like most self-portraits, it’s done in a mirror—Denon was right-handed.

Finally, I find myself circling back to the Egyptian Campaign, and Denon’s remarkable visual (as well as his written) travelogue. “Remember that from the height of these pyramids forty centuries are looking down at you!” Napoleon supposedly told his troops on the eve of the Battle of the Pyramids. Denon found the pyramids a largely depressing monument to a despotic and priest-ridden society (he was a man of the Enlightenment). But the Egyptian temples grabbed his historical imagination.

View of Karnak (British Museum, London)

He found Karnak “sumptuous,” though lacking in finesse and artistically “barbarian.” Nonetheless, he judged the ancient Egyptians to be “giants”—and at moments, as in the outer gates of Karnak, “geniuses” as well. Denon’s transmission of Egyptian scenes would provoke a wave of Egyptomania in French decorative style—including a sumptuous set of dinnerware executed, under Denon’s direction, for the Emperor Napoleon at the Imperial Manufactory at Sèvres.

Dairy Queen and Barbed Wire: The New Reality of US Occupation

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:32:00 -0800

Charles Simic

US soldiers at an ice cream shop, Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, October 1, 2009 (Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

Back in September, I read an article in The New York Times about an American base in Iraq that I haven’t been able to get out of my mind. It describes a U.S. military installation in the Sunni Triangle north of Baghdad that houses 28,000 American troops and has a busy airport, two power plants, two sewage plants, and two water treatment plants that can purify 1.9 million gallons of water a day for showers, swimming pools and golf courses, and eighty to hundred buses any given moment crisscrossing the area on fifteen bus routes.

Joint Base Balad, as the place is called, is surrounded by towns and villages that lack working electricity, proper sanitation, and transportation. The Iraqis who live in them are not permitted to enter the base for security reasons, except in one designated area enclosed by barbed wire and blast walls, where they are free to sell pirated movies, discounted cigarettes, and electronics.

The fast food joints, the various stores, and three massage parlors are staffed by workers brought over from Uganda, Philippines, Bangladesh, India, and Kyrgyzstan, who are employed by private American security agencies. They live off base and are escorted to and back from work under guard. These neo-colonial, ethnically segregated little cities rose up all over Iraq while we supposedly sought to “win hearts and minds” of the local population. Their folly and their huge expense go unquestioned like so many other things about these wars; now we are building similar military cities in southern Afghanistan to house the thousands of new troops being sent there.

I know a bit about army bases having been stationed at one in Germany, and then in in Eastern France, almost fifty years ago. Except for the PX, with its inexpensive cigarettes and other American goodies which the locals craved, our living conditions were pretty modest. The Germans and the French, who worked on these bases, both as manual and office workers, could see for themselves how broke we usually were. Despite our open policy, the population in surrounding communities was not overly friendly. They at best tolerated us, because even former allies don’t like to see armed foreign soldiers on their soil.

Everybody on earth seems to understand that but us, convinced of our moral superiority and good intentions. Only such blindness could explain these bases in Iraq and now Afghanistan, which most certainly deeply antagonize the local populations. Can one imagine what it’s like for an ordinary Pashtun or Iraqi to pass by one of these monuments to our wealth and our arrogance? Even if we didn’t bomb, mistreat, arrest, or shoot anyone dear to them, I cannot imagine that they wish us well.

Podcast: Jerome Groopman on the Changing Medical Profession

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:50:41 -0800

Jerome Groopman speaks with Andrew Martin about how regulation of shift length, the struggle to control costs, and the rise of "evidence-based" medicine have changed the way doctors learn and practice. To read Dr. Groopman's article, "Diagnosis: What Doctors are Missing," please visit nybooks.com

Al-Qaeda: The Uzbek Branch in Pakistan

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:34:00 -0800

Christian Caryl

A poster created by the US military for Tahir Yuldashev, leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, who was killed in a US drone strike in Pakistan on August 27, 2009

Most of the reports about the Pakistani Army’s offensive in Waziristan have mentioned the Islamist extremists from Uzbekistan hiding out there—but they’ve often done so without really explaining what’s up. If you follow the coverage closely enough, you might learn that the Uzbek militants are tough fighters much feared by the Pakistani military, that they’re loyal auxiliaries of al-Qaeda who have displayed little inclination to negotiate, and that they’re being targeted by both the US and the government in Islamabad for these same reasons. The Uzbek Islamist leader, Tahir Yuldashev, was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Waziristan in August of this year—which says a lot about how seriously the Uzbeks are taken both by the US and the Pakistanis (who probably supplied the CIA with the information needed for the hit).

But how did they get there in the first place? It’s not an insignificant question: From Tashkent (Uzbekistan) to the Pakistani capital of Islamabad is roughly 700 miles—comparable to the distance from New York to Chicago.

The story begins in the Ferghana Valley, a remote but thickly populated part of Central Asia where three ex-Soviet republics (Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan) overlap. I first ran across the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) during a reporting trip to Ferghana back in 1998. I was interviewing the families of Islamic activists whose sons and husbands had been rounded up by the government in response to a series of mysterious killings of local security officials. Credit for the attacks had been assumed by the IMU, a group claiming to be a new regional Islamist guerilla movement—apparently including some of the very same radicals who had openly defied Uzbekistan’s brutally secular dictator, the ironically named Islam Karimov, in public demonstrations in the Ferghana in the early 1990s.

These radicals had tried to establish sharia law in several Ferghana towns before being ousted by the Uzbek government. Some were arrested and sent to Uzbekistan’s concentration camps (set up to stamp out political opposition in the 1990s), but the ones who escaped soon found a new cause in neighboring Tajikistan, where they joined the country’s homegrown Islamists in a savage civil war against neo-communists (1992-1997). Then, in 1999 and 2000, the IMU made headlines by staging raids into Kyrgyzstan through the Tien Shan Mountains. They also took hostages—a group of Japanese geologists in 1999 and American tourists in 2000. At the time, the group’s military leader was a ruthless ex-paratrooper who found religion during his years fighting in the Red Army in Afghanistan. His nom de guerre was Juma Namangani.

In the meantime the IMU had also been casting its gaze farther afield. One of its major sources of income involved its control of some of the heroin-smuggling routes leading into Central Asia from Afghanistan. At some point the Pakistani military intelligence service, the notorious ISI, got wind of the IMU’s activities and realized that here was an ideal proxy in the region for Pakistan, which was at the time aligned with the newly-ascendant Taliban. By the late 1990s the Afghan warlord Ahmed Shah Massoud was barely hanging on in his struggle against the Taliban, and sponsoring the IMU provided a way for the ISI to put additional pressure on him from the north. By the beginning of this century some Uzbek militants had joined up with al-Qaeda in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where they gained a reputation as particularly fierce fighters.

In the period right after the September 11 attacks, many Uzbek guerillas in Afghanistan—including Namangani, who was killed in November 2001—were shredded by U.S. air attacks, and some ended up at Guantanamo. But others survived for years—including the IMU’s spiritual leader Tahir Yuldashev. Along with other remnants of the Qaeda coalitions, these fighters migrated into the tribal areas of Pakistan, where they remain today, notwithstanding the killing of Yuldadshev. (Interestingly, the Uzbeks do not have any particular ethnic connection to Pashtuns, the dominant group in the Taliban areas of southern Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. It’s more an ideological affinity: the Uzbek Islamists have been brutalized and hardened by their war with Karimov’s dictatorship, and that tends to make them favor a radical takfiri Islamist line, much like the jihadis in Pakistan and elsewhere.)

According to Ahmed Rashid, the number of Uzbek fighters in Pakistan has actually grown in the intervening years. He thinks they may now number in the low thousands, as more and more disaffected youths flee the poverty and religious persecution of the Central Asian republics for the dream of an Islamist oasis in Waziristan. In recent months there have also been ominous reports of scattered guerilla attacks across Central Asia that some observers have attributed to the IMU. The evidence of a comeback outside of Pakistan is still inconclusive. But if the Pakistanis asked the Americans to target Yuldashev for assassination in August, that suggests that the IMU is being taken quite seriously by the army leadership in Islamabad. We still don’t know how many Uzbeks are in Waziristan, how determined they are, or how well they fight. But we could soon find out.

Paris Ballet Follies

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:30:00 -0800

Robert Gottlieb

A scene from La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet (Zipporah Films)

Your take on Frederick Wiseman’s La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet—a two-and-a-half hour documentary opening on November 4th at New York’s Film Forum—will depend on your feelings about ballet, about Wiseman, and about the Paris Opera Ballet itself.

I start at a disadvantage. The more I see of the company over the years, the less I like it. These are meticulously trained dancers—strong, focused, assertive, implacably correct—but to me they’re almost uniformly inexpressive. They show us how redoubtable their technique is, but they tell us almost nothing about the music, the choreography, or themselves. It’s an approach to dance that must begin in the Opera school, and it’s very evident in the classes and rehearsals the film presents: response to the music, what we call phrasing, is almost never questioned or considered. Correctness is all.

And then there’s the matter of repertory. Paris hasn’t had a master choreographer in modern times, unless you consider Serge Lifar a master (I don’t), and his ballets are dead as dodos—or doornails, if you prefer. Nureyev revitalized the company’s dancing, but he was not a talented dance-maker, and none of the other post-Lifar artistic directors have had even his pretentions in this area.

Without a vital creative tradition, then, and with that distressing compulsion of the French to be trendy (which in ballet today almost inevitably means trashy), the repertory is dismal. Wiseman shows us extended sequences from seven ballets. One is Nureyev’s unfortunate version of The Nutcracker. One is Pierre Lacotte’s reconstruction of Paquita. The rest is contempo-European: Mats Ek’s House of Bernarda Alba; Wayne McGregor’s Genus; Sasha Waltz’s Romeo and Juliet; Angelin Preljocaj’s Medea; a snatch of Pina Bausch’s Orpheus and Eurydice. Everyone rolls around on the floor in either sexual overload or sexual frustration. Or is violent. Preljocaj’s Medea hauls a tin bucket of “blood” onto the stage and smears her children and herself with it. (Why didn’t Euripedes think of that?)

Wiseman, at least to my eyes, doesn’t seem very interested in ballet itself. He’s interested in showing how an artistic institution functions. He’s also interested in beautiful but distracting arty photography. For instance, half a dozen panoramic shots of Paris taken at different time of the day and night and taken from the top of the Garnier opera house don’t add to our understanding of dance and dancers; they just get in the way. Wiseman in his travelogue mode—we got even more of it fifteen years ago in his very similar film Ballet, about A.B.T (the moon over the Acropolis, roller-coasters in Copenhagen’s Tivoli gardens, the New York skyline)—is a direct throwback to the travelogue shorts that turned up on double-bills together with the newsreel and the cartoon back in the 30s and 40s. (Those were boring too.) And wasn’t there anyone to tell him that material like this can’t maintain our interest for more than two and a half hours? Has he forgotten that his first and, arguably, most famous film—Titicut Follies (1967)—lasted less than ninety minutes?

Nor can I see what people eager to learn about a dance company are going to get from countless walks down corridors or workmen freshening up the paint or the old bee-keeper on the roof working his apiary. (It’s in Ballet that we get to see a young dancer drinking from a water fountain.)

A more fundamental problem stems from Wiseman’s pretentious decision not to name anything or explain anything. Perhaps if you’re new to ballet you don’t care what ballet you’re looking at or which dancers you’re seeing (although I don’t really believe that), but if you’re relatively knowledgeable, it’s maddening. I guess Wiseman is reaching for universality, and indeed, A.B.T. in the older film and the Paris Opera in this one turn out to be practically interchangeable, except that the American dancers seem younger, less businesslike, freer.

If you’ve never watched ballet classes or rehearsals—if you’ve never been backstage or in a studio—either of the Wiseman dance films may be a welcome if over-long revelation. For the rest of us, the revelations lie more in the fascinating dynamics between management and dancer, and in Paris, among management, unions, and government. We get to see Brigitte Lefevre dealing on a one-to-one basis with an experienced dancer voicing her concerns—it’s like watching two hard-headed French businesswomen negotiating a deal. (I guess that’s what it actually is.) And we see the company gathered together to discuss pension plans. First things first at the Paris Opera.

La Danse has the virtues of inclusivity, tact, and curiosity, and it testifies to the very rigorous and unglamorous way that dancers and coaches and choreographers and rehearsal pianists (and stage hands, and electricians, and wig-makers, and administrators) go about their business. And Wiseman’s fluent camera and pictorial eye make for a very pretty film. But it’s also highly self-indulgent, which means that it’s also something of a drag—and that’s something ballet should never be.

One-Term President?

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

Garry Wills

Barack Obama paying his respects as the bodies of eighteen American soldiers killed in Afghanistan were returned to the United States, Dover Air Force Base, October 29, 2009 (Doug Mills/The New York Times/Redux)

I am told by people I respect that Barack Obama cannot pull out of both Iraq and Afghanistan without becoming a one-term president. I think that may be true. The charges from various quarters would be toxic—that he was weak, unpatriotic, sacrificing the sacrifices that have been made, betraying our dead, throwing away all former investments in lives and treasure. All that would indeed be brought against him, and he could have little defense in the quarters where such charges would originate.

These are the arguments that have kept us in losing efforts before. They are the ones that made presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon pass on to their successors in the presidency the draining and self-lacerating Vietnam War. They are the arguments that made President George W. Bush pass on two wars to his successor.

One of the strongest arguments for continued firing up of these wars is that none of these presidents wanted to serve only one term (even Lyndon Johnson, who chose not to run for a second full term). But what justification is there for buying a second presidential term with the lives of hundreds or thousands of young American men and women in the military?

I have great hopes for the Obama presidency, even in his first term, and especially if he could have two terms to realize the exciting new things he aspires to do in the White House. But I would rather see him a one-term president than have him pass on another unwinnable war to the person who will follow him in office.

I know how difficult it will be to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan. We go into these places, now, trailing baggage of a deadly sort. There are more hired American contractors in both nations than there are military personnel. What to do with these unaccountable and corrupt bands? We have farmed out so many of our national duties that the contractors, like our banks, have grown too big to be dealt with. Who is to guard our soldiers if not our mercenary bodyguards?

But we had a thousand soldiers wounded in the last three months—a quarter the number of wounded since 2001. These include many lives shattered forever. We sink deeper into blood, with no foreseeable end in sight. Qualified reporters and military officials foresee another ten years in Afghanistan—and their projections usually err on the short side.

The American people now oppose the war, and it is folly to keep up a war without support back home. We will hear predictions of dire consequences if we don’t carry out a commitment, and don’t yield to demands of the military to expand forces. We heard that for years about Vietnam. But when we did withdraw, the consequences were not as fatal as those we incurred during the years that saw the deaths of over 50,000 of our soldiers and many more Vietnamese. Some leader has to break the spell before costs mount further while our wars are passed from president to president. Among other things, this will give our military a needed chance to repair the wear and tear on men and equipment that the overstretched regular services and the National Guard have suffered, and to make them ready for other challenges.

It is unlikely that we will soon have another president with the moral and rhetorical force to talk us out of a foolish commitment that cannot be sustained without shame and defeat. If it costs him his presidency, what other achievement can match it?

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama said he would rather be a one-term president than give up on his goals. Here is a goal no other president we can imagine would have a possibility of reaching. Presidents who just kick the can down the road are easy to come by. Lost lives and limbs are not.

How to Find the Best of Lange

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:22:00 -0800

Jonathan Raban

Hopi man, 1920s; photograph by Dorothea Lange (Oakland Museum of California)

Some visual footnotes to my piece on Dorothea Lange in the new issue of The New York Review. I wrote about her work for the Farm Security Administration and her famous photograph Migrant Mother, and also discussed other areas of her work that may be less well known to readers, including this portrait of a Hopi man, which appears in Linda Gordon’s new biography of Lange.

Two earlier stages of this striking death-mask-like portrait—which might as well have borne the title The Last of His Race, or, as Edward S. Curtis called one of his best-known photographs, The Vanishing Race—can be seen in the comprehensive online archive of Lange’s photographs at the Oakland Museum of California. A warning about the archive: each picture is a black-and-white transparency made by setting the original negative against a light source. To call the results of this process “low-def” is to flatter them, and anyone who explores the archive will find that a lot of patience is required to navigate from one image to the next.

That said, here are the different stages of the portrait: first, the head-and-shoulders version, showing a merry, necklaced fellow with whom Lange had evidently established some rapport; then a close-up of his face, heavily shadowed, but still full of expression; then the final print, pictured above.

Since half of twentieth-century photography seems to have consisted of men objectifying young women as sex symbols, it’s tempting to see this portrait as a counterexample: a female photographer objectifying a male subject as a race symbol, which is surely what the Hopi man has become.

In my essay, I also discussed Lange’s photographs of her Irish pastoral idyll, which she made on assignment for Life magazine in 1954. I relied on the Oakland Museum’s collection of nearly 2,500 images from that trip.

The photographs were published in the March 21, 1955, issue of Life, which has been digitized by Google Books. Lange’s photo-essay (note the scant acknowledgment of her role at the bottom of the first page) starts on page 135. One can skip directly to her piece by entering 135 in the page box and clicking Enter, though to scroll one’s way slowly through the magazine is to visit an enchanted world, where, among many other marvels, advertising revenue grows on trees.

Nearly four thousand of Lange’s photographs for the FSA, including Migrant Mother, are at the Library of Congress, whose archive can be searched here. See also Errol Morris’s recent discussion of Migrant Mother and other FSA photographs on his New York Times blog.

Podcast: James Bamford on the National Security Agency

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:02:28 -0700

James Bamford talks to Nathan Thrall about the politics behind the Bush administration's evasion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the technology and scope of the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program. To read Bamford's article on the NSA in the November 5 issue of the Review, please visit nybooks.com

Podcast: Frederick Seidel Reads Selected Poems

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:20:37 -0700

Frederick Seidel reads selections from his work, drawing on poems originally published in the New York Review and those collected in his recent volume, Poems 1959-2009. To read more of his poetry, as well as a piece by Dan Chiasson about Seidel's work, please visit nybooks.com. For a blog post by Charles Simic about the challenges Seidel's work poses for critics and readers, go to the NYR Blog at blogs.nybooks.com