Moving to New York

This post makes only a glancing reference to Lebanon, and it wasn't even written by me. My daughter emailed it to me yesterday, although she originally wrote it back in September, when I was still in Beirut. I'm putting it up here simply because I liked it....and because she gave her permission!

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Moving to New York

You: It's a blue moon tonight!

Me: No way! Just like last year.

I've shaken off the breeze when it gave me chills because somewhere in me believed it was still summer. The thrusting of fall is a reckoning. It is a dampening, it is a shrinking.

There is no spot in the swamp that my mind has left behind. My memory clings to those invasive pink weeds, delicate but steadfast. No amount of rain is enough.

The fires that burn under Beirut don't bother my father. He keeps writing away like, what could possibly happen? While next to me, the United States government stalks its prey.

You fly free on eagle wings before I had the chance to wake up. I slept through the sound of your voice on the other end of the phone.

My mother waits, wondering, trumpet blaring in the background. Her love has been poured around the world with no thought of anything in return.

Your eagle wings have carried you beyond yourself, above the Three Sisters. How did we all get so close to the sea?

The fig tree bore not one ripe fig this summer, in protest of my father's absence. As I was leaving, I wondered how I could walk out the door without a single fig to prove that summer had existed.

Nisha Adarkar

Parallel Realities

This post came out of an 'assignment' I was given as part of a Thanksgiving celebration with old friends. The theme of the evening was "Parallel Realities", and I suppose it would have been impossible for me to reflect on anything but my time in Lebanon when thinking about that topic:

We all live in parallel realities. And these parallel realities all live in us, their home is in our heads and our hearts.

Towards the end of her life, when my mom was living close by, we often went for coffee and chatted about life and family. Once it occurred to me to ask her how she would describe the narrative of her life. Her life, she said, had been tripartite: her childhood and youth in a Swiss village, her 7 years in England as a member of the RAF Women's Air Corps and her time as a mother in the US. I said: each one of those seems so unforeseeable from the vantage point of anything that came before, and she answered that if someone had come up to her in the streets of the village and told her the future she wouldn't have believed a word of it. It all would have sounded, she said, like some other reality.

My mom said something else during that conversation that stuck with me. I asked her: what were the best times? And she answered, 'don't get me wrong, being a mom was a great thing. But the absolute best moments were during the war, when every moment counted, when everything was so precious that we grabbed life with both hands because we never knew if we would wake up the next morning.'

I learned a little about that feeling during the Lebanese Civil War, back in the 70s. I had a few occasions - fortunately VERY few - when I had to do things like dodge the occasional sniper or drive very fast to avoid becoming a target. In those moments life becomes almost unbearably intense, and every other type of moment - every other reality -  pales by comparison.

Then there's the kind of parallel reality that coexists within you at the same time. For a while, you hold more than one identity in multiple worlds, where things have completely different meanings. This is where I am now, after my three month stay in Lebanon. In the first weeks after my return many things in the world had a kind of special aura. That aura came from things having more than one meaning or significance, something like two copies of the same picture held slightly out of register with each other.

The feeling is hard to pin down, but a few examples might suffice to illustrate:

Here, the newspaper sits on your table, waiting to tell you who did what, and to whom. In Lebanon, the newspaper waits to announce your fate; will what happened overnight change your life forever? Destroy hope for the future? Or announce that the inevitable destruction has been put off a bit longer.

Here, a parked car is a nuisance if you were hoping to find a spot; otherwise, it's just part of the world's furniture. In Beirut - not all the time, but far, far too often - it might be the last thing you glance at before the fireball erupts.

Here, you gingerly place your child into the car seat expressly made to keep him safe from all harm. And you only do this after many days of anxious parental worry. In Beirut you might throw that child - and his older sister - in front of you on a motorbike, add their mother behind you and set off down the freeway. Nothing, absolutely nothing, in the last decades of your country's life has given you the slightest indication that there is anything you can do one way or the other about life or death.

Here, a tent by the river or a tent city connotes sadness, broken lives, rootlessness. In Beirut, the woman in the black abaya and her two small children - the ones you just stumbled over in the darkened street - mean exactly the same thing. It's the scale that's different. In Beirut alone there are 500,000 like her. Her house is gone, her village flattened, her man is dead, even the money she collects isn't hers to keep. She and her children are literally adrift in a universe so broken that only god himself could fix it. Except, he made it like this in the first place.

With all this, why do I miss Beirut, and my own parallel reality? It comes down to people and place.

I miss, as I did when I first left 40 years ago, the mountains where I used to live. How NOT to miss a place that has a spot called 'Ain Baal' - the spring of Baal? The spring of Baal! That place and its name existed when the Hebrews, the Philistines and the Canaanites were fighting over Palestine. The FIRST time, not this time! When Baal and Yahweh duked it out in the holy land 'ain Baal was already committed, and firmly in one camp.

Old hills, old springs, old battles and ancient wars...there's something to be said for all that, when you think that every single thing in the built environment on this continent that doesn't come from the Native Americans has been brought in or created in the last five centuries or so. In our reality we have no concept of ancientness when compared to 'ain Baal, Sidon, Tyre, Nabatiyeh.

Then there's that incomparable parallel reality Lebanese language, which itself exists in parallel realities and reflects the prismatic makeup of the Lebanese psyche. Their thoughts bounce round within the mirrors in their heads, acquire sense and words and, invariably, tumble out something like this:

Wallahi, habibi, shu baarifni, dude, c'est la vie de chez nous...it's how we live. Fehmt keef? Haida al hayat, and I don't know what else to tell you. Bonne chance habibi!

But in the end it all comes down to people, and how they live in that parallel reality. How they fight to remake their optimism each day, how they live on adrenaline in the face of fear, how they live lives of pride and dignity under conditions that would seem unbearable to most of us.

Is life here better, and there...worse? Or is it the opposite? Does adversity build character, or does it stunt lives and crush dreams? It's self-evidently true that life is more easily lived here than there. And I'm happy and relieved to be back where things are easier. I feel lucky to be back in a place where the newspaper gets tossed aside unread and a parked car is just another nuisance. But, like with everything else, there's a cost. Hard to pin down, difficult to define, yet ever-present nonetheless.

Gitmo near miss - Part Two

My second story of Gitmo near-misses concerns a friend I'll call Ahmed. As in, Ahmed al Arabi, the name used throughout the Arab world to connote a generic Arab man. Kind of like 'John Doe' but with elements of both pride and defiance.

I'm not using his real name because, although his case is technically closed, I don't want to take the chance of causing him any more misery than he's already had. Enough, in this case, is already far too much. I've also obfuscated a few unessential details, for the same reason.

My friend Ahmed is, in many ways, a fairly poor example of a stereotypical Arab, and an even worse example of a potential 'security threat'. For one thing, he's Druze. Throughout the Arab world the Druze are famous - and controversial - for their aloofness from the political, social and religious causes that continually roil the region. Historically an offshoot of Ismaili - i.e. Shia' - Islam, no one can even agree whether or not they are Muslims. Least of all themselves. Doctrinally, they are at least as close to the Platonic schools of ancient Greece as they are to Islamic Sharia'. Politically, they are ferocious if directly threatened; otherwise, they tend to avoid taking sides. In Israel, for example, the Druze, although technically Palestinian Arabs, have served in the Israeli Defence Forces almost since the creation of the state of Israel. This did not prevent Lebanese Druze from allying themselves with the Palestinians against the Israelis during the various Israeli invasions of Lebanon that marked the period between 1978-2000. Thus, in a very real sense, the Druze were aligned with both sides. Or, perhaps, neither...

At any rate, the idea that a Lebanese Druze would be a good candidate for jihad in the name of the Prophet and the Shariah is, to say the very least, far-fetched. The Druze don't even observe Sharia' law themselves. That's not to say an indivdual Druze mightn't convert to Sunni Islam and become a jihadi. This could and may have happened, but the chances are probably about the same as for an observant Israeli Jew to do the same: not zero, but very, very small.

Ahmed is now a middle-aged man. But I've known him since he was 12 years old, in other words, for much of his life and a fair portion of my own. We haven't been in continual touch, but I've followed his life through members of his family pretty consistently. That he, of all people, would run afoul of the American moukhabarat and almost get locked away as a terrorist would never in a million years have crossed my mind. So improbable, in fact, was this story that if he himself hadn't recounted it to me I would have assumed the teller was either misinformed or had confused him with someone else entirely. It turns out those who were misinformed were none other than (yet once again!) the US justice system. Like most bureaucracies, these folks tend not to want to acknowledge their mistakes, even once they are laid bare for all to see. Unlike most bureaucracies, they have the power to lock you away in order to avoid their mistakes becoming public...

In some ways, what happened to Ahmed is even more egregious than what happened to Salam Zaatari, which I recounted in my previous post, 'Gitmo...Part One'. At least in Salam's case law enforcement officials had the excuse of 9-11, which had happened just a couple of months earlier. They also had a suspect that fit the profile at least somewhat more plausibly, being Sunni Muslim. Also, and very crucially, Salam hadn't spent most of his adult life in the US, raising a family and running a series of successful businesses. Ahmed, on the other hand, had done exactly that. His children were and are exactly as American as my parents' children were and are, and I'm sure their ties to Lebanon are quite similar to my and my siblings ties to that other hotbed of terrorist activity, Switzerland.

Ahmed's story takes place just a year or two ago, long after one would have thought we'd have come to our senses and become at least slightly more discriminating in our search for terrorists. Apparently, we haven't. Eric Holder and Barrack Obama may not look like John Ashcroft and George W Bush, so it's surprising to find they have matching DNA under the skin.

Before I retell the story as told to me by Ahmed, let me fill in a bit of the backstory I alluded to above. Ahmed was the little brother of one of my closest friends during my years in Lebanon in the 70s. By closest friends I mean we spent a great deal of time together, shared confidences, got to know each other's families (in the case of my family this occurred after my time in Lebanon), shared interests and even worked together to some extent. In other words, we got to know each other pretty well. As Ahmed was my friend's little brother I got to know him pretty well too; all the more so, since my friend had taken Ahmed under his wing and was essentially a father to him.

On the whole, a worse candidate for al Qa'eda membership would be difficult to find.

While still in his late teens, and with his brother's help, Ahmed decamped to the US to start a new life of freedom. By all accounts, he did quite well, and I often had news of him, his marriage, his new kids, his business ventures, his entrepreneurial skills and his general success as an immigrant. For many years, however, our paths never crossed. Until I arrived in Beirut last summer. At that point I discovered that Ahmed was once again in Lebanon, running several successful restaurants and other businesses. His family came and went between Lebanon and the US as the children's vacation schedules allowed. Why all of this was happening I had no clue until one day, as we sat around chatting, he suddenly recounted what had motivated him to leave the States and return to Beirut. And the story is quite surreal.

A few years ago, Ahmed - always on the lookout for new business opportunities - hit upon the idea of exporting used automobiles from the US to Africa. For a Lebanese businessman this is by no means far-fetched. Lebanese have a long history in West Africa, and they also have an almost equally long history importing cars from Europe to the Mideast. To this day, there are so many cars in Beirut bearing the 'CH' (Switzerland) decal that I almost felt back home in Geneva. Back in the 70s several of my friends were involved in this trade, which was quite lucrative.

So it was no great leap for Ahmed to come up with the idea of shipping used cars from the East Coast to Africa. He brought in a couple of business partners and they launched the business, which went quite well almost from the outset. That is, until his arrest on charges of abetting terrorism.

Ahmed had flown to Lebanon to see his relatives for a few weeks and was returning to the US when he was arrested upon arrival on the East Coast. At first, he thought some innocent mistake had been made and expected to be quickly released. Like a lot of Arab-Americans, his instinct was to forgive the occasional excesses of law enforcement in the fight against terrorism. After all, they're just trying to protect us all, and separating the good Arabs from the bad is hard, right?

The problem was...he wasn't released. Instead, he was held incommunicado in a cell for long hours, then transferred to another location and interrogated in a manner that showed clearly that he had already been convicted in the eyes of his interrogators of some very serious crime. What that crime might have been, no one would tell him. When he finally demanded a lawyer he was told 'you better get a good one; in fact, you better get the best if you hope to stay out of jail for the rest of your life.'

It was only after he'd found and hired a lawyer that Ahmed learned that he was charged with money laundering and support of a known terrorist organization. It later transpired that the 'known terrorist organization' was Hezb Allah, the Shia' group that largely controls Southern Lebanon. The authorities were claiming that the money laundering had been undertaken to provide untraceable funds to Hezb Allah.

Ahmed is not only a good businessman, he's also a meticulous one. When prosecutors demanded his books he was able to provide them an accounting of every penny of every one of his businesses. Once again, he assumed - naively - that the end of his troubles was nigh. After all, once they saw that he hadn't been laundering money the whole case would perforce collapse completely, right? Wrong.

Prosecutors sat on his books for weeks, with no sign that anything had changed. In the meantime, Ahmed's lawyer was able to get him released on bail over the strong protests of the prosecution. This only meant that he could sleep at home: all his time was devoted to either preparing his case or enduring endless, agressive interrogations downtown. His businesses began to suffer, his family life deteriorated, and the ever-increasing stress began to take its toll on his own health.

As Ahmed himself recounted it, this regime went on for many weeks, until one day something broke. He was sitting in the DA's office when it happened. There were a large number of people present, from the DA's office, Homeland Security, the FBI and even the CIA. By this point, the routine had become so regular that he'd been able to figure out who was who even when they refused to identify themselves.

All these people had been taking turns grilling him, threatening him with dire consequences for himself and his family, alternately cajoling and screaming at him to tell them what he knew, when he suddenly discovered he'd had as much as he could stand. As he told me:

'I suddenly found myself standing up. I pounded my fist on the desk. I said to them "you've seen my books. You know not one penny is missing. I'm innocent of whatever it is you think I did, and I will answer no more questions, make no more arguments, listen to no more of your accusations. Do with me whatever you want. I don't care anymore."'

Ahmed told me there was consternation and silence for a few moments. Then the DA stood up and said words which at that point relieved Ahmed, only to later infuriate him: "We know you're innocent. We've known for a while. You're free to go." And he and his lawyer simply stood up and walked out to the elevator and left the building.

This story has a number of codas. First of all, why was Ahmed later infuriated at the DA's words? Because he realized that he had been forced to continue to answer charges against him long after his innocence had been established. For weeks, he and his family had been put through hell despite the fact that the case against him had collapsed.

In other words, a man known to be innocent had been treated as guilty and subjected to unnecessary and unwarranted violations of his person, his property and his freedom. In the US. Within the last couple of years.

It later transpired that his continued interrogations came at the behest of the CIA, whose agents hoped that, by putting ever more pressure on him, he might reveal something of value even if it didn't pertain to him directly. This, it turned out, was because - by pure coincidence - Hezb Allah had established a money laundering network that also used the sale of automobiles in Africa to 'wash' funds. CIA knew early on that Ahmed had nothing to do with this network, but decided to continue to apply pressure in the hope he might reveal something useful to them, even if only tangentially.

Lastly, Ahmed was indeed eventually freed and cleared of all the charges against him. What they couldn't make good was the months of worry, fear and aggravation, the stress on him and his family, the cost of lost business, and all the rest. Much of which came after his innocence had already been established.

What they could have made good was the $300,000 in lawyer's fees that Ahmed incurred to defend himself against bogus charges. They could have, but they didn't. It's fortunate that Ahmed is such a good businessman; a lesser one would have been bankrupted by the legal costs of his unnecessary defense.

And, of course, it's entirely plausible that, had things gone a bit differently, Ahmed's case would have continued all the way to court; where the evidence of his innocence would have been supressed and hidden, and in its place concocted evidence of guilt would have been offered by the prosecution. Ahmed could very easily have been convicted and would now be sitting in jail, while those who knew he was innocent had their Saturdays free to bring their kids to Little League and soccer.

Ahmed, back in Beirut, doesn't seem the least bitter as he tells me this unbelievable story of bureaucracy gone wild. Still, he's in Beirut, not Boston, after a lifetime of thinking Boston was his hometown, the place where his kids also played Little League and soccer. He's not bitter, but because I've known him since he was a kid himself I can't help myself. I feel a huge, black bitterness welling up, a shame that his persecutors and I could have anything in common. And, I'm afraid, we do. I voted for the people who gave them their jobs.

Gitmo, not hard to visit...if you're an Arab! (Part One)

Note: while Gitmo hasn't been closed despite President Obama's campaign pledge to do so, the facility is no longer accepting guests. In this and the next post I use the terms 'Gitmo' and 'Guantanamo' generically, as in the Russian term 'gulag'. They stand for any place in the US prison system where, under our new anti-terrorism laws, we can dump innocent people into jails and throw away the key.

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I don't know anyone who's been in Guantanamo. However, I've got two Lebanese friends who came within a hairsbreadth of a free ticket there, and their stories are both individually interesting and instructive, with regard to how enormous miscarriages of justice can happen to the best of people. They might also carry a warning about what happens when we let fear cloud our better judgement and hand power to not-so-good people.

The first of the two is Salam Zaatari. Since his story was well-enough publicized to have ended up in Salon and the New York Times, using his real name isn't a problem.

Salam is one of the writer/performers who founded the ground-breaking TV program "Shi-N-N" on the Lebanese channel al Jadid, or 'New TV'. If you've taken a look at the Urinal Sketch I posted a couple of weeks ago, Salam is the tall guy in the middle who can't last the two minutes it takes to empty his bladder without lighting up. Like most Lebanese, this is pretty much factual, which makes the sketch as a whole just barely improbable. Salam is one of the funniest and most talented professionals working in Lebanese TV today. He's also a born democrat (small d), and a man who finds every form of religious or ideological extremism both risible and distasteful. He's exactly the guy the US should be doing everything in its power to support, coddle, and nurture. Instead, we tried our damndest to lock him up and throw away the key.

How did this happen?

The most accurate answer to that question is probably the one that starts with 9-11 and draws a straight line all the way through the Bush Administration to today's headlines about European fury at NSA spying on its citizens and even its top leaders. Looked at this way, the case of Salam Zaatari was an early warning that this process was already going off the tracks. Or, working fine, depending on whose perspective you want to adopt.

When 9-11 happened, Salam, originally from Sidon, just south of Beirut, was an art student in Pittsburgh. In the weeks after the event, his family back in Sidon began to worry about his safety as they followed news reports of attacks and harrasment against Muslims (or suspected Muslims - the attacks were often absurdly misguided) in the US. By the end of October they convinced Salam to return to Lebanon until the situation improved.

That's where things went seriously wrong, beginning with Salam's own naive belief that he was just another traveler fighting for legroom in the croweded skies. Instead of spending his last night perparing for his upcoming arrest, incarceration and interrogation, he partied with his friends. The next day, as he told me recently, things were a more than a little foggy as he threw together his bags. As a result, he made the mistake that was to seal his fate: he forgot to empty a pocket in his backpack that contained some art supplies. Among the pens, pencils and other paraphenalia was an art knife, a kind of baby brother to the box cutters that had apparently been used by the 9-11 hijackers. He also packed some news clippings about 9-11 to show his family back in Lebanon. Art knife! News clippings!

As mistakes go, Salam made one other, at least in the eyes of the law: he booked a flight with a connection in Detroit, which has a large Arab-American community. This was later to be counted against him, as if passing through Detroit airport had now become evidence of collusion in a plot of some kind, by virtue of the community living around it.

That was the extent of Salam's contributions to his fate. All the rest was provided by the criminal enforcement (sic, IOW, read it as it appears) system, from John Ashcroft on down. The stage was now set: in a new perversion of the well-known crime known as 'driving while Black', Salam Zaatari was about to be arrested for 'flying while Arab'.

With all these 'incriminating' facts in his possession, Salam showed up the next morning - somewhat hung-over - at the airport. Ironically, had the system worked just a little better, he might have avoided his fate. Unfortunately, the machines failed to detect his art cutter. Had they done so, it might have been simply confiscated and tossed in the bin. When my children were little I so often forgot to remove my Swiss Army knife from my bag that my son was given the job of reminding me as we left the house, which saved me many expensive replacements. Unfortunately, my son wasn't traveling with Salam, who was now 'in possession of a weapon' at the gate, and had, presumably, made some attempt to evade detection of his 'weapon' at security. In other words, in the eyes of John Ashcroft and the law, Salam Zaatari had essentially exhausted any legal presumption of innocence. All the more, as his name 'proved' him to be a member of a suspect population.

For a more complete account of how Salam missed his plane and two months of planes after that, how he spent those two months in jail and in fear of his life from other prisoners, who took him to be an 'Arab terrorist', how the Bush administration attempted to prevent his release at all costs, and how - had they had their way - he very likely would have ended up in Gitmo instead of on Lebanese TV....for all that I recommend this account and this one.

Twelve years on, Salam displays no rancor whatsoever about his brush with the modern American security state. He hasn't been back to the US, however, since he's understandably concerned that he might be in for a rematch, given that the Obama Administration has strengthened, rather than reined in - the power of the US moukhabarat, or secret police. The problem is, in order to get out of jail at all, Salam had to accept a plea bargain involving pleading guilty to a charge of trying to board an aircraft with a 'weapon'. The alternative, according to what his lawyers told him at the time, was to rot in a cell for an unknown amount of time, then go to court on a not-guilty plea and hope not to be found guilty by a jury already under the influence of lurid accounts of his and similar cases which depicted would-be Arab terrorists finding ever-more-clever ways of smuggling weapons onto aircraft in order to carry out mass murder.

Salam Zaatari may feel no rancor, but, personally, I feel otherwise. It seems to me that his case exemplifies everything that has led us to the insane excesses of the NSA and the rest of the security state. Not to mention the persecution of the whistleblowers who have tried to warn us what was being done in the dark corners of that apparatus. I feel rancor because I was also naive, just like Salam. The morning after Barrack Obama's election I woke up thinking: 'Finally! Things will change now.' That's naivete on a scale far beyond anything Salam Zaatari was able to muster over a few too many beers the night before his ill-fated departure for Lebanon...via - instead of Detroit - 2 months of solitary confinement.

Anthropology redux: a father-daughter conversation

A couple of weeks ago I put up a post about the problem of bringing one's values and assumptions to the encounter with another society (East meets West). The post wandered about rather more widely than I had planned, with some discussion of Orientalism, Edward Said, motorcycles, anthropology and so on.

A few days later my daughter - who lives in New York - put up a long and thoughtful comment, which raised a number of interesting points in its own right. I've been meaning to reply to her comment, but many days of travel and re-entry into the strange world of Portland - otherwise known as 'home' - delayed the process.

Finally, I've been able to sit down and put together a few thoughts. But, since my reply is both pretty long in its own right and closely tied to her original comments, I decided to promote the whole thing to a post of its own. So, here are her comments, followed by my reply:

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Nisha writes:

Lots of interesting stuff to ponder. I, too, have a lot of problems with anthropology. It means one thing in theory to study another culture and learn about it, but it is another in its practical application that (so far) goes in one direction--colonizers "studying" the colonized. It can often be used to racist ends as we all know.

This is not to say that the study of cultures is impossible, but I think it is important to acknowledge that there is a history of this kind of thing: Western (mostly American and European) anthropologists studying "natives" and trying to come to conclusions about their culture and also human nature. Rarely (I'm not aware of any instances) does a member of an oppressed or disadvantaged group write ethnographies about the oppressor/advantaged groups.

I completely agree with May's reaction to the picture and with what she/you said in response to it. The problem with anthropology for me, is that it can often pretend to exist inside some vacuum where it obviously doesn't. To study "Indian culture" (no such thing exists, way too big a category but just as an example) and say that the caste system is part of that culture is limiting not only because it's orientalist and the West has its own version, but because it ignores the fact that people in those countries actually have agency and should be allowed to speak for themselves/shape their history. Many indians oppose the caste system (and have for a LONG time) so it's limiting to think of the caste system as a part of indian culture--rather, it's a system imposed on indians by the economic structure/ruling elites. If we were to say that "American culture" means a gigantic gap between rich and poor (which would be a reasonable assertion if you study the country's history), what does that mean about the people in America who are on strike in the recent Fast Food Forward campaign for higher wages and unionization? The famous socialists and communists of the labor movement in the '30s? Culture is a product of a lot of things, like the economic system and the history of power relations. It is not the root of society's ills. Therefore, I believe it is sketchy business to study "culture" and not make assumptions about large groups of people.

Another example is when Harvard established a center to advise about Indians what to do after the horrible rape/killing that happened last year. Several Indian feminist organizations responded and rightfully called out this move as orientalist and also insanely hypocritical, as it happened right after the Stuebenville rape scandal. Is misogyny a problem in India? Absolutely. Is it a problem in the U.S.? Yep. Does Indian "culture" reinforce it? Maybe, but if that's true, then it is also true about pretty much every culture in the world. And beyond that, where does that leave all the women (and men) in India who are fighting for women's rights? Are they not part of "indian culture?" It's incredibly limiting to see entire groups of people through a scope like that and can easily breed racist/colonialist/orientalist assumptions.

This was less coherent than I had hoped but I really just wanted to make the point that I think anthropology (because of the way it is carried out in practice) can often take away agency from people of oppressed groups and stereotype them.

Michel writes:

Lots of interesting stuff in your comment, too. I've got a few responses I've wanted to put up here for a couple of weeks, but travel and re-entry kind of got in the way!

First off, I've been thinking about the historical development of anthropology and its connections to imperialism and colonialism. I'd say this connection tends to unfairly taint what is essentially an attempt at scientific study in a very difficult area of concern, which is, at its base, about the social expressions of human consciousness in historical contexts.

Anthropology, in this sense, is a product of scientific curiousity. Looked at this way, it is a particular expression of the scientific revolution which has, over a couple of centuries, transformed everything about our world and how we look at it. It's an accident of history that the progress of science took off and prospered the way it did in the West. Five or six centuries ago, an educated observer would almost certainly have predicted that the Islamic world would be more likely to see the rise of science, followed maybe by China....and with Europe in last place! That it happened in Europe probably has more to do with the weakening of the power of the Church than anything else, abetted by the growth of individual political and social rights. In that sense, it can be view as accidental.

Colonialism is simply a particular manifestation of imperialism and empire-building. These are not peculiarly Western in any sense. Every region and a wide variety of cultures have produced empires and imperial rule over subject populations, going back thousands of years. Most of the symptoms of colonialism are common to many empires that we don't usually think of in that context. Imperial Rome, for example, treated its subject provinces in much the same way as the European colonial powers: extracting raw materials and resources and reselling the products of manufacture to the subject populations. Rome also engaged in what it considered 'civilizing' activities: vast infrastructure projects that in some places are still in use today, urban planning (including piped water and sewage disposal), education, health care and much more. At the same time, any expression of dissent or rebellion was dealt with mercilessly.

I'm bringing this up because I think there's a tendency to forget that colonialism is not a specifically Western product. All of North Africa and much of the Levant and Europe was 'colonized' by Arabs during the expansion of Islam. That this episode of colonialism is almost never brought up when discussing colonialism and the Mideast has always puzzled me; the two things, after all, are very deeply related!

The enormous success of the scientific method which took over European metaphysics and affected every form of technology gave birth to the idea of applying it to manifestations of human consciousness itself. Thus, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, anthropology and so on. When I ask the question: is anthropolgy even possible? I mean that scientifically. Like any science, it stands or falls on its success in producing understanding and successful prediction of outcomes. Anthropology has specific problems that are inherent in the attempt to understand culture while having one's own culture stand in the way. The tendency towards a sense of superiority is a problem, but it's not a specifically Western problem. Most cultures think of themselves as superior. The Chinese and Japanese are familiar examples. So were the ancient Egyptians, the Inca and countless others. Any number of cultures have considered themselves as the only truly enlightened, 'civilized' people. One reason that anthropology didn't arise elsewhere is probably tied to this fact: what's the point of studying other people when you consider them beneath contempt? The obvious answer is that there is none, unless you live in a society where the appearance of science has made things interesting and worthy of study as a matter of principle. In that case, anthropology can develop - even though you still consider your subjects uncivilized savages!

This all adds up to the fact that it's important to distinguish between criticizing anthropology for the scientific issues and questions it provokes, and for the misuses it's been subjected to. The two are not the same.

A couple of other things: in my discussion of the clash universal values with cultural values I specifically didn't mention 'Indian culture', but rather 'Hindu culture'. Indian culture is such a wide and various thing it would be hard to make any universal assertion about it. Hinduism, however, is a much more definable thing. And its justifications for the caste system are deeply embedded in its world view, which is why I used it as an example.

Regarding American culture being used as an example, I agree it's a very slippery thing to attempt. American culture has a peculiarity that sets it apart from more traditional cultures: it's really up for grabs. Everyone gets to try to define it to suit themselves, which is not something that happens even in, say, France or China. As I've said before, in my view, most of what we think of as uniquely American actually came from Africa with slavery. Think of music, art, dance and just about other manifestation of culture: most of what distinguishes it from European culture came from African traditions and/or from the experiences of the slaves after their arrival in America. This has resulted in a very dynamic cultural environment. American culture is being continually reinvented and reinterpreted. In that sense, I agree with your reservations about trying to define it one way and ignoring everything else that might not fit. That said, my point didn't really depend on doing that. Not everybody agrees that America should be a hyper-capitalistic society, it's true. But it has been for a couple of hundred years and there's no sign of it changing soon, so clearly there's broad agreement at the moment about what consitututes a fair and appropriate way to enforce justice and distribute wealth. There's also strong and active dissent. But, for the moment, most people's view of American society, both from within and without, is that of a increasingly robber-baron society in which the losers have somehow been propagandized into supporting a system which guarantees that they will continue to be losers indefinitely!

Lastly, I want to mention something that I find worrisome: a tendency to put discussions about culture off the table entirely. One source of this comes from an attitude that's similar to Said's, only much less nuanced. Essentially it's this: you can't judge us because you aren't us. In other words, only those inside can truly understand. Everybody else is unqualified.

 Another approach that leads to the same conclusion is: cultures are too complicated to talk about without doing violence to their complexity. You alluded to this in your comments about India and the US.

I'd say the second argument holds water somewhat better than the first, but in the end I reject them both. The first is clearly false. Cultures have an internal dimension and an external dimension. It may be impossible to fully understand the internal dimension without being fully inside (even that is somewhat suspect, at least as a blanket statement), but the external manifestations are open and visible to all, and worth talking about. The second argument is true in the sense that it does do violence to any complex phenomenon when one tries to capture aspects of it in language. Even typing this sentence I'm doing violence to the complexity of my argument by my choice of words, which can never - in principle - exactly equal what I'm trying to say!

Does this mean we don't talk about culture? This assertion reminds me of the common opinion that we shouldn't talk about religion because the topic is too complex and too sensitive. Culture and religion - two of the most important forces in human society, and we can't talk about them? I take the opposite approach; we must talk about them. We might not always be right or fully understand, but it's only through talking about these enormous motivators of human history that we can ever get a grip on the process and hope to steer it to a better future!

Lebanon: an environmental disaster in the making

Watch out, eastern Mediterranean. Lebanon is sending this your way:

As inconceivable as it might seem, this is the view of the once pristine shore of Lebanon, just south of Beirut airport, where an entire city's raw sewage is allowed to enter the Mediterranean untreated. And, according to my friends, this is nothing compared to the situation in winter, when this sewage slick expands like something from an environmentalist's nightmare to encompass tens of kilometers of Lebanese coast.

Lebanon is a living example of an unregulated, laissez-faire, free market economy, à la Adam Smith. It's a place where, within very broad limits, one does exactly as one pleases, and the lines are only drawn when someone else squawks. If one wanted to look for the workings of the invisible hand, this is the place to carry out a search. I've been unable to spot it. If Lebanon is any indication, a completely unregulated economy is nothing but a fast trip down the road to perdition. And nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to the environment.

The beach

One thing I've come to understand in my time in Lebanon is that the lack of infrastructure is more than a personal inconvenience. It is that, of course. Endless power cuts, stuck elevators, spoiled food, dangerous water, corrosive air - all this makes life very, very complicated. Every day becomes an obstacle course to be navigated very carefully and at a tremendous cost in personal energy and efficiency.

But the consequences go much further. Lebanon - already a volatile mass of social and political contradictions - is also on the verge of polluting itself to death.

Living in Beirut it sometimes seems that every policy decision is calculated to exacerbate, rather than solve, whatever problem is at hand. And with it, to generate a host of follow-on effects, all of which are also guaranteed to be negative.

Take traffic, for example. Many cities have grappled in the last few decades with exploding traffic problems, killing smogs, and all the other effects of the internal combustion engine. 30 years ago Athens already had in place a strict system of control based on license plate numbers. During smog alerts, on alternate days, one was banned from bringing one's car into the city at all. The public transport system was rapidly improved, with new lines reaching out into the suburbs.

I use Athens as an example because it is in so many ways comparable to Beirut, geographically, socially and developmentally. Like Beirut, it has experienced rapid expansion. Like Beirut, it has limited water resources. The climate is very similar, as is the economic profile of its population. What's more: both countries share a propensity towards poor governance, corruption, favoritism, tax cheating and similar problems.

An example of what Lebanon has to deal with: in 2006 Israel
bombed large areas of Beirut's southern suburbs. The resulting
rubble was disposed of by creating a series of enourmous
mounds along the shore near the airport.

Yet Athens today, despite being in the midst of a deepening economic crisis, has quite successfully carried out a program of infrastructure improvements. The city works and seems pretty much like any other European or New Asian city. Granted, it has benefited from its integration into the European Union, especially as regards infrastructure improvements. And Beirut, a chronic war zone, has seen cyclical destruction of whatever infrastructure remained. Despite all that, the lack of vision is evident to the most casual observer. According not only to friends, but also to discussions with former government ministers, activists and prominent media personalities, there simply is no sustained effort to visualize what Lebanon is becoming, what the consequences will be, and what needs to be done to avert a looming disaster.

So, for example, what has Beirut done about its traffic problems? At first glance: nothing. Cars are literally everywhere. On the streets, on the sidewalks, choking up public spaces, parked 6 deep at corners and in pedestrian areas. In the streets, cars jockey endlessly for room to move while others block them to make drop offs or pickups because there is no more room to park. Ancient buses and broken-down mini-vans serve as the only public transport, invariably leaving clouds of acrid smoke in their wakes as they prevent everyone else from moving forward.

Worse, at some point someone decided to encourage motorcycles and scooters as an alternative to automobile transport, even going so far as to decree that motorcycles and scooters should have absolute right of way. This quite literally insane policy means that no one is safe from motorcycles anywhere in Beirut. They come from all directions, weave their way through traffic going the wrong way up one-way streets, fly down sidewalks, jump off curbs and push pedestrians off sidewalks.

The end result of all this is absolute chaos on the streets, on the sidewalks and basically anywhere reachable by car, motorcycle or scooter. Along with an ever-growing number of point sources of corrosive, dangerous pollution from badly maintained vehicles. All of which contributes to an already toxic cocktail that makes Beirut's air essentially unbreathable much of the time. A recent newspaper article pointed out that the air of Beirut is loaded with dangerous compounds and known carcinogens.

Electricity supply is another example. It has been decades since Lebanon had full-time power. Every corner of the country is plagued with continual power cuts. Some occur on a schedule of sorts, many others happen with no warning at all. The environmental and health consequences of this are enormous. In order to cope tens of thousands of private generators kick into action on balconies and in basements every time the power goes down. Since their maintenance generally goes no further than making sure these machines continue to operate, the contribution to the pollution load is enormous, especially in Beirut.

Another recent article discussed a little known problem: the illegal disposal of vast amounts of sewage directly into Lebanon's extensive and extraordinarily precious cave system. Developers building in the hills simply drill until they reach air, then pipe sewage directly down the hole, contaminating the underground water system and with it the caves through which it runs.

And while I'm talking about development I should point out that development in Lebanon is the perfect example of the unregulated free market at its worst. Illegal development abounds, unimpeded, although the line between legal and illegal seems quite fuzzy, to say the least. Development along the coast, particularly, has essentially overwhelmed the natural environment. At the same time, no effort is made to create a livable built environment at a human scale. 10 and 15 story apartment buildings by the thousands crowd the landscape, reaching up the hillsides in every direction with no usable road system, no lighting or sidewalks and no attempt to create functional neighborhoods.

Next on the list is the issue of potable water. Lebanon is essentially a country of mountains. As such, it has a relatively abundant supply of clean water, when compared to neighbors such as Syria, Israel, Egypt, or, for that matter, Greece. While in Athens one can drink water right out of the taps, in Lebanon there is no place where one can safely drink the tap water. In fact, many parts of the country have no public water supply at all. In other areas, like Beirut, chronic lack of maintenance results in tainted water contaminated with salt, volatile compounds and sewage. Once again, the consequences are enormous. Those who can afford it buy bottled water which comes from the very same sources that could be harnessed to supply a public system. Those who can't simply drink the water anyway, with the expected consequences, particularly for children and the elderly.

The lack of clean water has many follow-on consequences, as well. In food preparation, for example. Supposing you wash your lettuce and other vegetables at the tap, since washing them in bottled water is simply prohibitive. Essentially, you have compounded the problem by adding another vector of disease to the mix. I noticed very early after my arrival in Beirut that nearly everyone - despite their boasts of acquired immunity - gets food poisoning, and quite often. Frequently, this happens even at very good restaurants, who, between bad water and power cuts are simply unable to keep their raw materials safe and healthful.  Lebanon is in the process of creating an environment where it will become impossible to stay healthy.

I mentioned above the lack of urban planning. At home in Portland, I often bike or kayak in the evenings. Thanks to decades of careful planning these activities are simple to indulge in and always within reach. Granted, Portland is perhaps not a fair example. There are many places in the US that are actively hostile to these kinds of activities. Nevertheless, the need for urban planning and common spaces has taken hold all over the US and Europe in the last several decades, as well as in much of Asia.

In Beirut, with the exception of the 'Corniche', along the waterfront, jogging is simply out of the question. In most places, even walking is  difficult and occasionally dangerous. Biking is equally out of the question. Beirut is a city without parks, without walking and biking trails, without any observable, explicit, committment to human health and development. It's a city in which parenting must present extraordinary challenges, due to the lack of amenities specifically aimed at helping children grow and thrive.

In a way, this post has been as pessimistic as anything I've written. And that probably makes sense. The human costs of political and social upheaval are enormous. But the global costs of environmental degradation and destruction far outweigh them over time. Once the natural environment is contaminated and destroyed, social disagreements become almost petty by comparison.

Shi-N-N: The Urinal Sketch

Okay, so thanks to Karma and May, I had the extraordinary luck to meet and spend time with the cast and crew of the wildly popular TV program Shi-N-N (yes, Shi-N-N as in CNN, only with shi, which means 'something' in Arabic). These guys are the Lebanese version of Jon Stewart, only at much higher stakes, since they satirize the same sectarian differences that have kept Lebanon in one form of war or another since 1975. They are pointing humor where others are pointing guns.

They're also very much an ensemble effort, and their humor has more than a little Monty Python. In fact, it has a LOT of Monty Python! The sketch I'm posting below is as good, in my mind, as anything Python ever did - and I love Monty Python! Maybe it's better....

Just one word of warning: I love Monty Python. IOW, I love broad, semi-scatalogical and off-color humor. I even loved Benny Hill - sorry to those of you who found him unbearably sexist! Sorry! As we say here: hada al hayat....that's life!

Anyway, if you frown at references to excretory functions, do not click on this video!