Living the Chinese Curse

The Chinese have a unique imprecation: "May you live in interesting times." One cannot fully understand the meaning of the curse till one has enjoyed interesting times. When my odd roommate moved back East, I replaced her with a common- or garden-variety male roommate, an Intel engineer of Indian origin, no less and I knew that the vicarious excitement that Allison provided would be only a fond memory. For as I well know, you can search for a week of blue moons without finding anything quite as boring. And in some distant corner of my mind I must have whispered a wish for some excitement. Beware of what you wish for! Over this last week I have moved from near catatonic stupor to something almost resembling life.

I have my sometimes landscaper and full-time hustler to thank. This gentleman, who I shall call Dave (mostly because that's his name and "Dave" is shorter to write than "David") initially showed up on my doorstep about six months ago with an offer to do some yard work. He has a face that does not inspire overwhelming confidence. I don't want to judge a book by its cover, but let me put it this way: if he offered to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge, I would hesitate to hand over more than half his asking price before taking possession of the structure. So naturally, with Allie's encouragement, I agreed to his terms for the yard work sans negotiations. Having a solid stone, or possibly a cash-register in place of a heart, I was not as affected as my sympathetic roommate by his stories about his plans to attend evening college classes and cared even less about his daughter and nasty ex-wife. But I was drawn to the idea of someone else doing the yard work while I lolled productively in front of my TV with a beer.
Dave completed the work in due course, managing to squander Allie's sympathy and finish my beer along the way and withdrew from the scene, leaving the job of proving excitement in my life in Allie's very capable hands. I could elaborate on some of his minor scams and attempted scams, but they were barely worth mention; one might say they were the teasers to the main show In the next few months, Dave reappeared a few times, sometimes to ask after more garden work and once to encourage me to support the Democratic Party. I suppose given his socialist beliefs that my wealth should be shared with him, his political leanings should have been obvious, though with his strong commitment to borderline criminal entrepreneurship, one could also expect him to be a backer of the GOP. But that is beside the point.

Last week, he hove into view with his usual gap-toothed smile and an offer to clean the weeds in my front desert-scape and trim my back lawn. Sloth was heavy upon me, while my yard was more weeds than lawn and I agreed to his offer to make my yard look wonderful in return for $50. In a fit of environmental activism I had bought a reel mower rather than a power mower, so Dave had to bring his own power tools in. My previous roommate Allie had once stayed with a Chinese girl who believed strongly in feng shui. I have never embraced the concept, but now my agnostic certainty is shaken, for no sooner did Dave begin work on my lawn than he was plagued by all manner of problems. First he had cash flow problems, largely because having cash is a prerequisite for flow; the $20 I paid as advance was still too viscous and it took the addition of another $20 to remedy the problem. Alas! When evening rolled around, we discovered that the fading light affected the money adversely – what had appeared adequate in the bright light of day was found wanting in the twilight and must needs be augmented with another $20. Other mishaps occasioned by the evil spirit of my yard included a mysterious breakdown in the edge trimmer (another $20 to propitiate the spirits) and an inexplicable blunting of the mower blades (do I even need to mention, another $20). Till I met Dave I had never quite understood the amazing power of twenty dollar bills. Neither had I realized that to get rid of the weeds, one just has to rip the lawn apart.

But who am I to grudge a man his unearned money, when he assured me solemnly that they were strictly for his daughter who was celebrating her birthday with him that day. I can certainly vouch that he had no intention of instantly spending the money on alcohol – he assured me that I and my neighbor, Robert, would satiate his beer longings. As dusk drew her kind veil across Tempe's rundown and dilapidated houses, Dave took his leave to celebrate his daughter's birthday with promises to be back to finish the work on the morrow. He left his mower and tools behind as guarantee of his return and consequently gave me a restless night, filled with dark forebodings that someone would steal his things and I would have the enviable task of making good the loss.
I did not realize then that I am in fact clairvoyant. This is not to say that I woke up in the morning to find my yard stripped bare. Part of the problem with clairvoyance is the difficulty in understanding the timelines and allegories. In my case, I awoke to a glorious Monday morning to the sounds of Dave already at work on my yard and I left the house with a song in my heart and on the radio (not quite the same song however, which spoiled the harmony) and a feeling that agnostic or not, I could not really deny that God was in Her Heaven and all appeared to be right with the world, barring those places less endearing to God, like Dafur, Iraq and Alabama.

I returned home that evening after my usual four hour nap before and after lunch, and found that Dave had left his tools behind again, having apparently not quite finished as yet. Buoyed by the lack of criminal activity in my yard the night before, I slept soundly that night, and when leaving the next morning, I left the yard gate unlocked for Dave to get in and finish his work. And so I continued the next day, which was a very busy day and left me little time to think about such things as lack of progress on my yard work. It was only when I returned from the bar at midnight after our first loss of the spring soccer season that the Dave question intruded forcefully on my tranquil life. Stuck in my door was a note that read, in part "I have something that I think is yours. Give me a call"
This was worse than all the cheap gangster movies. Had Dave discovered the buried body in the backyard? Or my field of Afghan poppies? Or the intercontinental ballistic missile I was building in my spare time to take on China?

In a sad anti-climax, I got no response the next day at the number on the note. Luckily my suspense was not too long drawn, for Friday morning brought Dave to my door at 7 am, all bright-eyed and hung-over, towing a bicycle behind him. Now like all good couch potatoes, I have never set rump on a cycle, but my new roommate is one of those odd people who will drive 50 miles to then bike a couple of miles before attaching the bike back to their car and driving home. Dave explained that he had been passing by on Monday night when he saw a man come out of my yard wheeling this same bike. Thinking swiftly, Dave followed the blackguard to his lair and confronted him. An altercation ensued that followed a predictable script of accusation and denial, and the villain while claiming that the bicycle as his own, equally steadfastly refused to provide proof of ownership. Sensing the futility of argument and his inability to force a total stranger to produce receipts of sale, Dave in an act of great bravery called the police to the scene. The story is a bit vague at this point, but it appears that Tempe's finest did not see the honesty shining in Dave's eyes and in an act that will live on forever in infamy, ran his name through their computers, and then hauled him off to prison for an unpaid DUI fine. This selfless soul spent the next 48 hours in gaol before his mother bailed him out for the massive amount of $40 – whoever said a man's best friend is his mother must have been in jail with a DUI at some point – and that very night, Dave came by to stick his cryptic note on my door. And somehow through all this, my honest friend Dave had held on to that bike that started the whole matter. Precisely how he got it back from the thief, why the police gave it to him, what happened to the alleged thief and why they never contacted me is one of those mysteries that, like the Stonehenge, we may never totally understand.

The idea of being robbed is not so much scary, since the whole robbery barely disturbed my torpid existence, as highly aggravating. I drive to my office everyday and sleep there for eight hours, sometimes more, week in and week out, to earn the money to squander on wine, women and song. It is an insult that someone should hop over my back fence and help himself to my roommates' bike while I'm hard at sleep on the other side of town. One would hope that he would have just a little bit more respect for the effort I put into finding a roommate with things to rob. And realize that I got this roommate that I might borrow his stuff conveniently, not for the criminal pleasure of the wider public. There is no honor amongst thieves.

The One Way Date

Let me start off with the one-way date. Now every guy out there has had bad dates, not-so-good dates and the plain Godawful, wish-I-could-erase-it-from-memory dates. But what about the date that seems to be going so good, where things are just looking great and the main thought on your mind is whether you gonna get to second base or all the way home. And then out of the blue comes some remark so unexpected, that catches you so unawares that's its a few minutes before you even close your mouth and gradually it dawns on you  - you are on a one way date.
The basic concept of the one-way date is that one party thinks its a date while the other doesn't. I was introduced to the concept just recently firsthand. It all began when I set up a dinner date with this girl I've been trying to date for a while. I should have suspected that it was not quite the date I expected when she asked me if she could bring her friend along. Not usual on a date I thought, but I put it down to her merely wanting to go slow.
And when she came without the friend that evening, I was sure it meant that things were moving nicely along. Now she and I share a lot in common and conversation is never lagging between us. It was in the midst of this animated conversation that she dropped her bombshell. We were talking about the friends she rooms with and exchanging notes on roommates, past and present. Then she mentioned how she hates one of the guys who shares the house she lives in, but the second tenant is a nice guy. Now each of the two tenants rents a room and I know the house belongs to a third guy, her old friend of more than ten years, and I began to wonder just how big the house is. So I asked her casually. She didn't know the area, but she remarks, matter-of-factly, that its a THREE BEDROOM house!!!
Do the math. Three guys and a girl, the guys don't share rooms! Talk about deflated expectations.
Hope springs eternal in the human heart and I still clung to the faint hope that she camped in the garage or something. But my next carefully crafted question brought my castles in the air crashing down. Asked about her old friend and the house owner, she responded (and I quote) "Its complicated! I've known him for about 12 years. We were friends first, then we dated for a while [I kind of expected that part] then we didn't date for a while [hope raises its head } now we are dating again kind off [hope, crushed once and for all, slinks away ]!"

Yeah, I just discovered the one way date!!! I wonder if I can have it named after me

In support of Ayaan Hirsi Ali

In defence of who??!!That was my first reaction when I read about Ayaan on Christopher Hitchen's Fighting Words column in Slate.com. I usually disagree with Hitchens, except when he's up on the soapbox pleading for freedom. This was one of those times, when the story he highligted was so arresting that I just had to discuss it here.
(The story link: http://www.slate.com/id/2141276/?nav=fo)
Ayaan fled Somalia, settled in Holland and has campaigned for the liberation and freedom of women trapped in Muslim societies. She wrote the script for the movie "Submission", directed by Theo van Gogh; an Islamic fanatic murdered van Gogh. There were also threats against Ayaan, forcing her into police protection and greatly curtailing her freedom.
I read a few of her interviews and its impossible not to agree with her views. Nor to watch the scene unfolding in Europe with anything but alarm. These days as the US has steadily swung towards the Christian right, it was Europe that remained the bastion of liberal and secular thought. But they have fallen prey to their own liberal beliefs, bending over backward to avoid insulting Muslims, even as the radical Mulims abuse their freedom and deny those freedoms to their own people trapped in the ghettos of Europe. To be fair, some of the problems, like honor killings, female genital mutilation and forced marriages ae less Islamic than tribal. But those who would control the immigrant masses have found that involing Islam works wonders - it stifles questioning from within and deflects criticism from without. Liberals are so scared of offending the religous sensibilities of the immigrants that they are bending over backwards, to the point of justifying violence and even murder. The recent surrender over the Mohammed cartoons is a typical case, as Ayaan mentioned in her interview with Der Spiegel. And her warning rings true, that Europe is handing over her freedom to a group of men (exclusively men, I'll wager) who hate freedom for anyone but themselves, despise liberal thought and secularism and will never speak the language of compromise.
I'm not advocating pogroms against the Muslims or any form of discrimnation. Rather I'm asking that the law apply uniformly to all, that religion not be used as a screen. We would not allow a Christian or secular kid to be forced into marriage or threatened with violence for daring to live their own life - its time to extend that freedom to everyone. If a man or woman at the age of reason and consent decides to give up their freedom and submit to religous authority, that is their business. But first, they have to follow the laws of the State that they reside in. And according society at large the same respect you ask for would be a nice thing.

“O, Oysters, come and walk with us!”

The time has come, the Walrus said, To talk of many things:

Of shoes-and ships-and sealing wax-of cabbages-and kings,
And why the sea is boiling hot-And whether pigs have wings.   
from Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)

My friend accused me the other day of somehow attracting wierdness. Now I don't deny that I personify all that is wierd, but I'm hardly responsible for the myriad strange things that happen around me. I agree that I seem to be witness to more than my share of the strange, but I submit that its just that I'm more sensitive to the bizarre. Or maybe my life is so serenely calm most of the time, approaching mind-numbingly boring, that I tend to find strains of the unusual in even seemingly normal and commonplace situations.
Like just a few weeks ago when an acquaintance of mine invited all her wellwishers to join her on Thursday for a TGIF drink (as in Thank God the divorce is final). I'm never one to pass an opportunity to support someone, no matter how little I know them, especially when there's drinking at an Irish bar involved. So come Thursday, I toddle around to the Rula Bula to lift my elbow in moral and spiritual support. The first thing I perceive is my friend at a table with an engineer I know from other forums and two other guys I didn't know from Adam. not for long!
My friend, Jane Doe (for want of a better alias) intoduces one of the strangers as her ex-husband! It lucky that no one was swinging a feather around my person at that moment, for it would assuredly have floored me. I've heard of amicable divorces before, but somehow I never pictured the divorcees sitting around toasting the end of their union. And what a toast - the rule was that each newcomer add a line to the toast. As best as I recall it went "To old endings! Building bridges! (That should've been my contribution, but someone end snaffled it so I played yin to the existing yang with) New Beginnings! (yeah, I'm brilliant! It continued with) To seek new life and new civilisations and to boldly go where no Jane has gone before! Prost! The worst that could happen is that you emerge charred but enlightened (I think that was it...and then when someone suffered mind block I gave him my other suggestion) Mazel tov!"
The other guy who was there when I arrived was the old college roommate of the ex-husband. This guy was interesting, dressed in a flashy style, with his shirt unbuttoned halfway to his belt and a eye-searing (faux?)gold chain. Sometimes guys like that think they are God's gift to women, but this guy was not like that at all - I suspect that he may have seen himself as God's gift to men, though, if his conversation was any indication!
When we had been there an hour or so, a newcomer showed up and unlike the others came and planted himself between Jane Doe and myself. Now I know that this was not the best man from Jane's wedding since he was on the other side of table. The best man refused to add to the toast on the very logical arguement that he had made a pretty good toast at the wedding years ago and he hadn't bargined with having to drink to its dissolution. But back to the guy beside Jane. As a staunch elitist, I was immediately prejudiced against him for the simple fact that he was wearing a Kevin Federline like wifebeater tee and no shirt. The fact that he could not think of anything to add to the toast did not improve my opinion of him, but I was kind of unaware of him, until a chance remark revealed him to be Jane's current boyfriend and completed my journey into Wonderland.
Now I plead guilty to having driven several women clearacross the continent, simply by asking them out for dinner - once! - (the last one but recently ) and I agree that I have adopted a plethora of strange handles, including Mad Hatter, Slackator and J Lo - but surely anyone would agree that in the strange stuff that I've outlined above, I'm nothing but an interested spectator.
We also enjoy, who stand and sardonically watch!

Immigrants Behaving Badly

This article in the Washington Post yesterday illustrated a very interesting aspect of Hispanic immigrants and explodes several negative myths about their role in US society. Distilled down to the essentials, the various studies show that Hispanic immigrants don't act according to stereotype.
I know a little bit about immigrants who don't fit stereotypes. Immigrants are supposed to stick with others from their ethnic group, they are supposed to speak the language of their home country rather than English, they are supposed to go mostly to their particular ethnic restaurants and celebrate their own particular religious and secular days. I can testify that every morning I see a would-be immigrant who doesn't fit the mold. Sure, he looks like typical immigrant and judging from the reaction of others, sounds unlike the average American. But it just goes to show that appearances can be deceiving. Or rather that stereotypes are, more often than not, totally wrong.
Returning to the article, studies show that as generally perceived, a majority of first generation Hispanic immigrants do fall below the poverty line and also tend to earn significantly lower wages than Americans in the same job. However, the wage gap between immigrants and natives tends to close quickly. Far more interesting however is the revelation that these immigrants do not think of themselves as poverty-stricken, nor do they behave as such. It seems like someone forgot to tell these immigrants that they are supposed to be different, that they are supposed to drag down US society. Instead, in their ignorance they react positively, in much the same way as every other immigrant community that ever called America home.
These are people who earn less than the $20000 annual salary that the US government defines as dividing the poor from the rest. And, these poverty level salaries are typically earned in urban (and expensive areas). While many settled natives might think that it is impossible to live on around $11500 a year (or barely $225 a week), these people beg to differ. They manage and their attitude is that of the middle class - they manage the best they can in education for their children, manage to save a little (!) and nearly always manage to send some money back to their families and relatives in their native country. Imagine that – they are supporting not just themselves, but also large extended families. Several economies south of the border are heavily dependent of these remittances. And since this money comes without IMF-mandated conditions or high interest rates and repayment timetables, every last penny goes into improving the lives of the recipients. These immigrants have discovered so many truths - you don't need a 52-in plasma TV or a TV in every room, or a night out on the town every night, you don't need to drive the latest model car or have the newest computer or I-pod, there is life without a Playstation or Xbox. And they are living out the economic theory that just won the Nobel Peace Prize, creating economic and social development from the grassroots, and actually alleviating the conditions that force so many to immigrate to America in first place.
According to the article, a majority of immigrants own or plan to own their own homes and businesses. They are working hard to improve their living conditions and provide a brighter future for their children, and they expect fewer governments than many natives (think about the corn farmers or oil companies.). Sounds familiar? It should. It could describe any previous immigrant community. It could describe the American Dream.
This study was focused on Hispanic immigrants, who are right now the target of most negative myths and stereotype, but I'm willing to wager that other prominent immigrant communities are similar. In fact, I'm so sure of this that like Oliver Twist's interest acquaintance, Mr. Grimwig, I'll eat my own head!

Veil and Wail

The debate in the UK over muslims women's veils and the integration of muslims into British society is long overdue and in the end can only be a good thing, despite the stupidity of some of the people involved. But the comments of Yvonne Ridley, in a column in (you guessed it) the Washington Post was interesting for its obtuseness.
Ms. Ridley is famous for her capture by the Taliban when she was covering Afghanistan just after the terror attacks on the World Trade Center; she is also famous for having been very impressed by her captors, who she reports treated her with the utmost respect and thus convinced her to study Islam. Those studies led her to convert, and she now enters the debate as a fierce supporter of the veil.
Now she is the best judge regarding the treatment she received at the hands of the Taliban. But all I can say is that they apparently showed a chivalry that they did not extend to their own people. I'll return to that, but first I'd like to draw attention to some of Ms. Ridley's other comments, especially her statements that "just about everything that Western feminists fought for in the 1970s was available to Muslim women 1,400 years ago. Women in Islam are considered equal to men in spirituality, education and worth, and a woman's gift for childbirth and child-rearing is regarded as a positive attribute." Once again, I do not debate the fundamental aspects of Islam, but practice is another matter entirely. Does she believes that muslim women in the Taliban's Afghanistan or in Saudi Arabia or in Kohemini's Iran or Basra today are as free as their counterparts in the west? Is she aware that in Pakistan after their late dictator Zia ul-Haq introduced Sharia law, a woman's evidence carried only half the weight of a man's word? A woman who charged a man with rape needed to have two eyewitnesses to back her claim or else not only would her raper go free, but she would be held guilty of adultery by her own word and stoned. Equality and and respect? I think not!
Ms. Ridley goes on to state that the niqab and/or burqa are necessary to protect her from leering men and offer the wearer freedom from pressure about her looks. I salute the person who would cover themselves from head to foot merely to avoid having to wear cosmetics, because of course there are culture police patrolling the western cities, waiting to punish women seen without cosmetics or wearing dresses that extend past the knee. But Ms. Ridley might want to ponder one point: the burqa protects the wearer from unwanted attention from men, but most of us believe that a woman wearing a miniskirt and skimpy top (may their tribe increase!) has that right already. We beleive that when a woman says no, it means no and that she does not need to make herself indistinguishable from the rest to be safe.
Also, the idea that Islam offers women so much freedom and protection flies in the face of the fact that most muslim men beleive that women must be forced to cover up for the protection of men, because women are inherently impure and tempt "pure" men. Perhaps the Prophet meant the burqa as protection for women from the rapacious men of a pre-Islamic society where women has no status at all, but over time any such meaning has been subverted. That is why the religous police of the Taliban and Saudi Arabia use violence and intimidation to force the women of their societies to hide behind the veil.
Ms. Ridley and all other apologists for conservative Islam should remember that women in Europe have the freedom to wear their veils and the debate about the veils is just that, a debate; in conservative Islamic societies, womn have no choice in the matter - they shroud themselves from head to foot or risk the visible parts being disfigured or cut-off. That's the respect they have for women's freedom.

Finally, I have one last question for any supporter of the veil for women (not that I expect them to be reading this in droves, so its mostly a rhetorical gesture): if the burqa is so good, if it offers the wearer so much freedom, if it is such a sign of high respect by Society, why don't all the men wear it too?

O, Babylon!

Reading Slate Magazine at work isn't exactly encouraged by my managers, but there are times when it beats such mundane matters as work, and when the articles on offer include two extremely interesting articles on fundamentalist Islam, it doesn't take a very hardworking devil to have me push my assignments aside. It's not that I don't enjoy designing architectural signs for the New Mexico DOT, but studying the biggest threat facing our world for the foreseeable future generally trumps talking to a sales representative in the backwoods of Pennsylvania about how to make plywood look like Roman stone.

One article by Akbar Ahmed described the critical differences between Washington's view of the Islamic world and the view of that same world from the inside. The gaping chasm in viewpoints is reminiscent of the six blind men and the elephant. And the author makes a strong case for us to try and recognize the complexity of the Islamic world and understand that they do have major fears, even if we do not agree with them. Given our attempts to shoehorn the world into just two categories, good or bad, moderate or extremist, friend or enemy, this appeal to see the world in all its glorious shades of gray comes not a moment too soon. Yet, given our obsession with quick and succinct sound bites it is unlikely to produce a change in attitude. We made the same mistake back in the Sixties with Communism; it took the deviousness of the Great Deceiver and his Machiavellian right hand man to recognize that all communists are not the same, nor animated by the same lofty aims.
But far more interesting was the article by Mansour al-Nogaidan, one of the rarest of people, a man who initially embraced the jihadist agenda before becoming disillusioned with the whole scene. His journey of discovery involved bombing a store to destroy the evil influence of the West and a stint in jail; unlike so many others he used his time in jail to think and emerged at peace with himself and the world. The crucial question is whether he is an exceptional man. Certainly the latter part of his journey sets him apart from the vast majority of minor terrorists who become even more extreme over their period of incarceration. Yet, I find myself feeling that he began his journey into the shadowy world of Islamic terror in a way common to thousands of other young men. Trapped in the moribund ways of millennia ago and confused when that world collided with the powerful opposing forces of the modern world, he attempted to bury the doubts that beset him by regressing into an even older, hopefully purer way of life.
In a very oblique way I can relate to his actions, since I attempted to bury my own doubts about my faith by attending mass daily, trying to convince myself that I did in fact believe in the tenets of Catholicism. Fortunately the Church of this era does not require me to kill people or quash other's rights as a rite of faith, nor give up all life's luxuries in favor of living in a mud hut, dressed in handspun robes. I could have tried for longer, I suppose but after essentially the worst, most boring three days of my life, I realized that I was never going to be a Christian and set of down the road to Epicureanism. But I understand the feelings of guilt that drive a young man who does not share the blind faith of his moderately religious family. Unfortunately, for young Muslims, the attempt to immerse oneself in the pure ways of their faith all too often leads them down a road to Salafism and extremism.
al-Nogaidan eventually found his way out of the morass and found a way to reconcile his faith with modern reality. Few who walk that path have as much fortitude. Or luck. Their journey usually ends at the business end of a missile or rotting away in some forgotten prison in places and conditions we would rather not know existed. Yet, the religious leaders who purport to understand Islam continue to push a ridiculous and anachronistic version of religion. And that got me wondering: do these extremists, especially the leaders, believe in their religion or are they actually terrified that they are trapped in an empty dream?
A line that I adopted as my own states: There is nothing so strong as gentleness and nothing so gentle as real strength. DeSales had it absolutely right - strong, confident people (or religions) do not need to demonstrate their strength. Islam emphasizes submission to the will of god (that is the literal translation of the Arabic word, in fact), yet today, that has changed from voluntary submission to violently enforcing obedience to the dictates of men, usually men with long beards, stuck a millennium in the past. These men claim that their god is all-powerful, ruler of the universe and a bunch of other testaments of power, yet this god is unable to punish blasphemers himself and must depend on human agents to salvage his honor. If in fact, this life is a short prelude to a far more important and eternal life, why do those fanatics need to kill people who oppose their vision of the divine? Why can't they let their God judge those people in his own time? They argue that women must be covered and hidden from sight so that no man may be tempted to sin? Besides the obvious (it is a sin only in their twisted world) why should women be the only ones subjected to these restrictions? Shouldn't the men follow the same rules and cover themselves and lock themselves away from all women, lest the inflame the passions of those women and tempt them? (Admittedly, it's hard to see their hirsute visages awakening passions, and maybe that is why they keep those untidy beards, but love is blind after all, and we should take no chances.) Furthermore, since they fear homosexuality even more than they fear the hetero version, shouldn't those men lock themselves in isolation from all other men? After all, they may be awakening passions within the breasts of other men!
But of course, they would much rather not face these questions, for even to allow their followers to think might forever loose the chains of blindness and ignorance in which they keep those poor fools bound. That is why they oppose any modern education and instead attempt to brainwash their youth in Islamic schools where learning the Koran by heart (often in a language alien to them) replaces the development of cognitive faculties. It is ironic that they are shunning the very sciences that flourished in Arabia when Europe was trapped in the Dark Ages of religious fundamentalism and it was Asia that preserved the knowledge of the world. Of course, that was an Islamic world that was not torn apart by self-doubt and defeat - it appears that as the political influence of the Islamic world waned in the face of rising European technology and power, the doubts arose regarding the very nature of their faith. Perhaps those doubts always existed, just as they existed in Christians or others. But when Islam was on the ascendant, it could afford those doubts, confident in its own power. It is noteworthy that the Ottoman Empire was not fanatical about converting every Christian who fell within their boundaries while they were expanding their empire, but after Europe reversed their conquering drive, they became a lot less tolerant and eventually increasingly fundamentalist. Trapped in a system that had no way to reform, the Islamic world has lost its way. Today they desperately need a Martin Luther; instead they have their Khomeinis and bin Ladens. And should a Luther appear, he would be stoned to death for apostasy. That is their tragedy, that is why they will continue to suffer; our tragedy is that we are too closely tied together to be unaffected.

Requiem for a Tyrant

This is dated, of course, but it's been on my mind to blog about Saddam's execution since even before the trapdoor dropped; it’s just that the siren song of World of Warcraft proves more alluring than ranting about the mess in the Middle East.
Saddam died as he lived, in violence and inequity. Though I generally oppose the death penalty, Saddam was one of a handful of people whose execution I would not oppose in principle. He was a tyrant and mass-murderer and never really expressed any remorse for his actions. Instead in the grand tradition of James I or Louis XV (or XIV or XVI) he believed in his absolute rights as leader, even to kill his own countrymen; a view that was not only echoed by Ramsay Clark but even expanded into a duty! The world was better off with him out of power and his execution for millions of deaths caused by his suppressive internal actions and aggressive wars would serve eventually as closure for the survivors and relatives of his victims.
But on a practical level, this execution was the saddest mistake we made in a war filled with horrendous blunders. Let’s start with the biggest, most obvious result: now that Saddam and his closest cohorts are dead, they are no longer defendants in the other trials into even larger crimes. Not to demean the victims of Dujail, but the Anfal campaign killed tens of thousands and involved chemical weapons; the suppression of the Shiites in 1991 also killed and displaced thousands; the casualty lists for the war with Iran run to the millions; the suppression of the Marsh Arabs involved calculated destruction of an environment. Now none of these will be examined I detail - Saddam is guilty, period! He’s not around to mount a defense, and the lesser figures who may face trial still will simply claim that they were following his orders. Not a great defense, but effective enough I’d imagine.
We don’t need to even go into the drawbacks of the Dujail trial. Human Rights Watch and others have laid out the many deficiencies more than adequately. And I do believe that even had the trial been conducted as it should have been, the outcome would have been largely the same. But the way appeals process was handled was appalling; worse it raised extremely uncomfortable questions. Not only did the Iraqi government make it clear that they were going to execute Saddam, they also made it clear that it would be done as soon as they could, with absolutely no interest in making him face the rest of the trials. What was the extreme rush? Surely Premier al-Maliki did not believe that executing Saddam was going to end the insurgency, much less endear him to the Sunnis? And if he had any such illusions, the manner of the execution and the leaked video put paid to them. Perhaps al-Maliki really allowed his hatred for Saddam to overcome his common sense and perception of reality. Perhaps Saddam was , as he suggested in a different sense, a sacrifice, to Moqtada al-Sadr and Abdul al-Hakim who lost close relatives to Saddam’s secret police.
But let us leave the follies of the Iraqis aside for the nonce; after all, I have never bought the claim that this war was ever about the Iraqis themselves. It was, from the start, about us - our fear of Iraq’s imaginary non-conventional weapons, our fear of the mythical link to al-Qaida so skillfully played up by proponents of the war, our desire to see a pro-western government countering Iran and breaking up the anti-Israel coalition further, our wish to secure the world’s second largest reserves of oil. So where were we when this parody of justice played out?
Our men on the ground waited till after the execution and then tried some damage control, with muttered comments about how they would have done it differently. Really? Let’s stop pretending: we had every chance to change the course of events and chose not to lift a finger. From the day after the initial verdict, the message from the Iraqi government was clear: they wanted to execute Saddam post-haste. First peripheral voices were heard; when we said and did nothing to oppose it, the more central figures of authority joined the chorus. By Christmas, Saddam was dead, but for the hanging, and still we continued our deafening silence. We may try to hide behind the fig leaf of Iraqi sovereignty, but that’s a sad joke. If the Iraqi government was really conducting this, Saddam would not have been in an American prison camp - he would never have had even the sorry excuse of a trial that he did get; he would have been hung long ago. We overthrew Saddam, we captured him and we were holding him - if we had any interest in delaying his execution we could have done it. We didn’t even have to do it publicly. A few words in the ears of al-Maliki or President Talabani early on would have resulted in a policy of delaying execution till all the trials were done.
And therein lies the question: did we want Saddam to be executed quickly (I’ll lay odds that we did not expect a “Moqtada” chant during the hanging, though) and take many unpleasant truths to the grave with him. The war crimes trials are supposedly to expose the truth about the many crimes and criminals and in this case, the list of criminals include France, Germany, Britain, China, Russia and last and certainly not least, the United States. The Sunni Arab states of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the gulf Emirates are all complicit in the Iranian war.
Many questions will now remain unanswered. One example is this controversy over whether Iraq actually used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians. This book discussion explains why the most widely publicized attack was probably committed by Iran - the Tribunal could have cleared the question, but did anyone, including the Kurdish leaders want a contrary truth revealed? Mind you, the Anfal campaign was a huge crime against humanity in itself and very likely did involve some use of chemical weapons. But we and the world media had also convicted Iraq especially based on pictures from Hallabjah. To find that those searing images were not the work of the Butcher of Baghdad may have been more than we were ready to accept. Above all, none of Saddam’s erstwhile backers want their roles exposed to the light. Not the countries that provided the chemical agents and certainly not the men who shook his hand. Another question that should have faced scrutiny was Saddam’s decision to invade Kuwait: did he in fact think he had US backing for that move, based on his conversation with Ambassador April Gillespie. Did we give him tacit approval only to change our mind for various reasons? Or lets turn to the Kurds who have suffered enormously under Saddam, but also under Iran and Turkey and today proudly wear the badge of past suffering under Saddam: despite Anfal and Hallabjah, when civil war erupted between the KDP of Massoud Barzani and Talabani’s PUK, Barzani had no problem in asking Saddam to send his army in to crush the PUK. Did the Kurdish leaders want this to be aired in public again and before a wider audience? Did we want the world to hear the details of how we were helping armed militias of the Iraqi National Congress to attack the Iraqi army from bases in our safe zone in the Kurdish north? Through the 90’s we’d hear about how Saddam was violating the safe zone and we’d drop a few bombs on him to stop his actions - but no one talked about how we were provoking him. Did we want to learn about how our claims about the al-Qaida affiliated group were wholly misleading, that we blamed Saddam of harboring terrorist who were actually in our protected zone? Did we or the Kurds want the world to know that the terror group we talked about was actually Kurdish?
So many questions and now we will never know the real truth. The whole world, except maybe Burkina Faso, carries some guilt in the war crimes of Saddam Hussein. But rather than let the tribunal establish and proportion the guilt, we have opted to wash our hands in the blood of a tyrant and let him carry the weight of our sins as well as his own. Somehow, I never imagined that Saddam would end up serving the world in this way. Probably he never did either. But such is the irony of life and somewhere in the lowermost Circle of Hell, Saddam’s sole pleasure will be the certainty that his death did not absolve us.

Dancing in the Dark

Earlier today I ran across an article on Slate.com about the demise of the American honeybee. Now in itself this is not such a surprise, when we know that we are destroying hundreds of life forms each year. This particular case hit home only because there was a fear that it may disrupt the California fruit crops, since even now, with all our technology, we can’t really pollinate plants ourselves; we need the bees. However with our typical ingenuity we had solutions, in this case captive bred hives that are taken around the country by truck to perform the service that their wild peers would have done but for their unfortunate demise. Interestingly the demise of the honeybee is not directly attributed to foolish shortsighted decisions made by man; rather we are merely the facilitators who allowed a parasite from beyond these shores to invade the world of the American honeybee.

This unfortunate pattern has repeated itself time and time again, sometimes accelerated by human action, as in the introduction of rabbits and then foxes into Australia. But in a shrinking world, more and more species are migrating, invading new territories and attacking the native inhabitants, wiping them out with an efficiency that makes our own efforts in that direction positively amateurish. This appears to be a phenomenon that is not exactly new or even quite as unnatural as we may have initially assumed. After all, migration of species is something that is as old as life itself, and it follows that every time a species moves into an area inhabited by other life forms, some adjustment is necessary, and often enough that adjustment will be the partial or whole destruction of the native by the invader. Even man, the most recent and most advanced of parasites, spread gradually across the world.
In a natural cycle of things, then, we may expect that Nature will find a way to balance the invasions. The native species will evolve defenses or perish (an argument in favor of evolution, since an intelligent designer would have precluded such dramatic changes). Unfortunately, we cannot be certain that the new systems will be beneficial to us. Why should they, when the developed in response to stimuli wholly independent of us? Harking back to the case of the honeybee, our attempts to preserve them in the face of natural selection was an utter failure. Concerned “experts” sought to treat hives with chemicals targeting the parasites, we transported artificially bred hives around the country to replace the devastated wild populations. Yet all our intervention only resulted in a different form of eventual destruction, one against which the bees could not hope to ever evolve in time to survive.
My point, at the end of this long-winded discourse, is that the world does change constantly. It always has and much as we might like to freeze frame the status we like, that’s just not going to happen. Every single action we take has consequences along the entire spectrum of life. Be it the explosive growth in certain parasitic algae and water plants (fueled by vast amounts of nutrients in the farm runoff) that choke other life or the disappearance of birds from farm as rail fences replaced hedge (a disappearance that left insects free to attack our crops without any control by natural predators) our actions have always reverberated through the food chain.  As I said earlier, the one thing we never know is precisely how our actions will affect the rest of Nature. But if there is one thing experience should teach us it is that attempting to rectify one mistake by proactive action usually results in still more unintended consequences and those consequences will usually be no better than the problems they replace.

In practical terms then, this does lead to two very important conclusions. First and foremost, we have to accept that the world is changing around us, and that this is neither a good thing nor a bad thing: it is just a fact of life. This is not a repudiation of the dangers of change, nor is it a blind acceptance of those who cry “the sky is falling!” We have to remember that we are by far the youngest species on this planet and still evolving. In just the last few thousand years (a blink of an eye compared to sharks, for example, that evolved 400 million years ago) our life spans close to tripled or quadrupled, our population has increased several times over. In the last few hundred years alone we have spread to areas of the world that were free of our destructive tendencies. There is feeling in some circles that destruction of the environment is a modern trait; in fact we’ve always changed the environment around us to achieve our ends. From the first crop we planted by clearing an area of its existing flora, we began to destroy the natural world around us. All that’s changed over time is the scale and efficiency of destruction. What’s interesting is that humans are not the only ones who modify their environment - there are plants that release chemicals that inhibit the growth of other plants in their vicinity.
But while the changes we wreak are not quite as unique as tree huggers may imagine, it’s equally important to note that we are making those changes at a rapidly accelerating rate. And every change we make has consequences beyond the obvious. When we destroy forests for farmland, the changes range from possible destruction of certain species (and the possible destruction of several other species closely linked to them) to loss of links in the carbon cycle to build up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to overall increases in ambient temperature. Five thousand years ago, those changes were so small in scale and so gradual that Nature could react to our actions and create a new equilibrium. But over the last two or three centuries, we have made changes at a rate that Nature simply cannot match. And just as our changes affect the world around us, that changed world will in turn affect us down the line.
Obviously, from the simplistic tone of my essay, I’m no expert in environmental science, certainly less expert than the guys at American Enterprise Institute who believe that global warming is not a threat. But it seems a fairly simple and logical conclusion that while we do not know that our industrialization over the last few centuries have destroyed the world beyond repair, it’s almost beyond doubt that we have destroyed and exterminated countless forms of plant and animal life and we still do not know quite how those losses will affect us over the years ahead. It doesn’t seem to be asking overmuch that we tread extremely carefully in future and seek to stabilize the environment about us. And that we treat all “silver bullets” with extreme skepticism, be it hybrid cars (my Prius for instance saves gas consumption but contains more toxic materials than non-hybrids), genetically modified crops (higher yield but the risk that they may invade and destroy natural environments and be near invulnerable to Nature’s control) or my favorite good-idea-gone-bad, artificial reefs made of old tires (a perfect way to dispose of scrap tires, till the “reefs” came apart and began to smash into and destroy the real coral reefs, wash ashore in the thousands and overall prove a massive environmental catastrophe). All we need to do is feel our way very carefully forward, as we wait for Nature to finally catch up with all the damage we have wreaked during our short time here.