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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

Copyright The London Review of Books

LRB | Vol. 28 No. 16 dated 17 August 2006 | Richard Lloyd Parry

ed. Leza Lowitz · Stone Bridge, 494 pp, £13.99

Foreign writers have been visiting Tokyo since the 1860s, but for such a vast, thrilling and important city it has proved barren as a place of literary exile. Among those who made Japan their home, as well as their subject, there are to be found only minor talents, chief among them the Greek-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn, whose retellings of native ghost stories have made him more famous in Japanese translation than in English. The most interesting writing has been in sketches by those who have passed by and peered in without ever achieving intimacy with the culture: Angela Carter’s essays of the early 1970s collected in Nothing Sacred; Anthony Thwaite’s delicate and tentative poetry collection, Letter from Tokyo; and John Hersey’s great work of reportage, Hiroshima. When literary celebrities have alighted in Japan, the results have usually been disastrous.

At the peak of his Manhattan success, Jay McInerney came out to study karate and produced the dismal Ransom, full of sub-Hemingway machismo and lumbering Japonaiserie (‘he picked up his katana, made by the great swordsmith Yasukuni of the Soshu Branch of the Sagami School’). The best that Clive James – a regular visitor and student of Japanese – could come up with was the smirking comedy Brrm! Brrm! Only two novelists have filtered Japanese characters into English with any conviction, and neither of them has made a home in the country: Kazuo Ishiguro, British in all but name, has not lived in Nagasaki since he was a toddler; David Mitchell left Hiroshima four years ago. There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset Maugham, a Hemingway or a Paul Bowles.

No one has had a greater yearning or been better qualified to fill this gap than Donald Richie. ‘Almost everything I do, everything that is known about me, is connected to this country,’ he wrote. ‘To be a person so intent upon describing a place not his own – isn’t this odd?’ Over sixty years in Japan, he has been a reporter, tour guide, cinema critic, film director, print-maker, novelist, travel writer, editor, teacher, subtitler, public speaker and actor. Apart from fiction, both short and long, and countless newspaper columns and reviews, he has published books about film, art, Zen, history, tattoos, gardens, temples, phallic symbols, food and bonsai. He has been a friend to famous and talented foreigners and to a cross-section of the most interesting Japanese of the second half of the 20th century. The index to The Japan Journals consists of a list of Richie’s acquaintances, followed by their professions. The first page alone includes Akihito (emperor), Akira (barboy), Tadashi Asami (tattooed man), John Ashbery (poet), Richard Avedon (photographer), Tamasaburo Bando (kabuki actor), Cecil Beaton (photographer/designer) and Truman Capote (author).

He arrived in Tokyo at a time when Mount Fuji could be seen from all over the city because the intervening buildings had recently been incinerated by American bombs; he is still going strong today, as the Japanese nervously brace themselves for their third period of postwar economic growth. Hardly a month passes in Tokyo without a public appearance by Donald, implausibly spry and dapper at 82, reading from his new book of criticism at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club or introducing a season of Ozu films at International House. Why then – outside Japan, at least – should he be so little known?

Most or many of his thirty or forty books (no one seems to know exactly how many there are) are out of print. Only his 1971 travelogue, The Inland Sea, and some of his film criticism, are read except by those with a specialist interest in Japan. ‘I wish I had an agent – I could just send it off to him or her,’ he writes in his journal in 1996, with another unpublished novel on his desk. ‘But I can’t. No agent has ever accepted me.’ A hundred pages, and seven years, later he is taking an ‘orphan manuscript’ of short stories to a vanity publisher. Both The Japan Journals and the earlier Donald Richie Reader (2001) transmit a resentment, on the part of the younger fans who have edited them, that he is not more famous and better regarded. In a self-defeating introduction to the Reader, Arturo Silva indignantly sets out the neglect suffered by his hero: ignored by ‘editors and bureaucrats’, unrecognised by the academic establishment, forced five times to rewrite a profile of Kurosawa for the New York Times magazine, only to have it spiked. ‘For all the work and decades spent on it, Richie’s view of Japan seems still to belong only to the “happy few”,’ he observes unhappily. ‘One difficulty of “placing” him is that Richie is neither an academic nor a popular writer … Indeed, Richie is doubly other: caught between two facing mirrors that no one bothers to look into.’ Wounded partisanship of this type leads one to suspect a straightforward explanation for his unsuccess: that Richie simply isn’t much of a writer. But is there more to it than this: a reflection of the times he has lived through; something inhospitable in the intellectual atmosphere of Tokyo itself?

No one has written with more concentration about the peculiar quality of exile enjoyed by the gaijin, the foreigner in Japan. Densely hierarchical, structured by invisible networks of deference, obligation and taboo, conventional Japanese society offers no formal place to the ‘outside person’. But this alienation is so absolute that it is experienced as something close to liberation, a stimulus to observation and analysis. ‘Japan has afforded him’ – the author – ‘a situation of writing,’ Roland Barthes wrote in Empire of Signs. This situation is ‘one in which a certain disturbance of the person occurs, a subversion of earlier readings, a shock of meaning lacerated, extenuated to the point of its irreplaceable void.’ Japan, to put it in drastically un-French terms, puts you on your mettle. It is an observation that Richie returns to again and again. ‘In Japan,’ he recorded in 1992, ‘I interpret, assess an action, infer a meaning.’

Every day, every hour, every minute. Life here means never taking life for granted, never not noticing. For me alone I wonder? I do not see how a foreigner can live here and construct that shroud of inattention, which in the land from whence he came is his natural right and his natural tomb … it is with this live connection that the alert foreigner here lives. The electric current is turned on during all the waking hours: he or she is always occupied in noticing, evaluating, discovering and concluding … It is the difference between just going to a movie and living it for a few hours, and going to the same film as a reviewer, taking notes, standing apart, criticising, knowing that I must make an accounting of it. The former is more comfortable; the latter is better.

This is indeed the excitement of life in Japan at its best, and it provides obvious opportunities for the writer. From a journal entry in 1998:

Smilingly excluded here in Japan, politely stigmatised, I can from my angle attempt only objectivity, since my subjective self will not fit the space I am allotted … how fortunate I am to occupy this niche with its lateral view. In America I would be denied this place. I would live on the flat surface of a plain. In Japan, from where I am sitting, the light falls just right – I can see the peaks and valleys, the crags and crevasses.

There is another lucky side effect for many expatriates: personal alienation, the inescapable sense of being different from everyone else, is cancelled out, or at least rendered invisible, by the larger, universal alienation of being a gaijin. This is the partial explanation for something else remarked on several times by Richie: as he shyly puts it, ‘the strange prevalence of people of like preferences among foreign Japanese specialists’. To be blunter, Richie and a seemingly disproportionate number of his friends and contemporaries – the formidable generation of scholars and translators of Japanese who encountered the country as young men during the US occupation – are homosexual.

‘Travellers almost by definition screw more (or want to screw more) than other people,’ Richie writes, and nowhere are they more avid in their screwing than in Japan. In the case of expat men, I would guess, at least half of those who remain in Tokyo do so for reasons connected to sex, sometimes, and sometimes not, coupled with love. It is like one of those fairytale undersea realms where the simple fisherman follows his water nymph, only to realise after a few years of bliss that he can never return to the air. Plenty of gaijin males discover with a jolt that they have become incapable of getting laid anywhere else. Richie’s Journals make explicit what is only suggested in his other writing: that, whatever the delights of Japan’s culture and the fascinating perspectives available to the writer in exile, it is sex – or Richie’s particular version of it – that has kept him tethered here for so long.

The Japan Journals, we are told by their editor, Leza Lowitz, were originally rich in detailed accounts of Richie’s ‘promiscuous encounters’ (he writes with admiration of the ‘Black Diaries’ of Roger Casement), but on the advice of a friend he edited them out, setting them aside in a separate, unpublished volume entitled ‘Vita Sexualis’. What remains may not be technically explicit, but Richie is unabashed in discussing ‘the goût de la boue’, which for sixty years has been the complement to his intellectual and artistic pursuits. By day and in the evenings, he has moved among artists, writers and academics in the circuit of seminars, dinner parties and museum receptions. By night, in parks, on street corners, in ‘accompanied’ coffee shops, in sex theatres, porno cinemas and the ‘boy brothels of Shinjuku’, he has picked up builders, scaffolders, boxers, students, cooks and soldiers. The fascination of these journals, what makes them a literary, as well as historical, document, is the way in which – almost unconsciously and over the course of a lifetime – they reveal Richie’s intellectual and erotic compulsions to be a single consistent project. ‘Even now,’ he wrote at the age of 71, ‘I still go around looking into tidal pools and turning over rocks, trying to find someone (preferably young, unformed and handsome) who can stand for Japan.’

Richie’s taste was formed early, during his childhood in the blankly uninteresting town of Lima, Ohio. He was born in 1924, the only child of quarrelsome parents who scarcely feature in his published writing. His father is unnamed in the Journals; his mother seems to have been called Jean; neither merits a line in the index. Early on, he concluded that ‘I was too different to be theirs.’ His first and defining sexual experience came at the age of six – alone in a park at night, a man in the shadows, gentle and reassuring words, ‘the soft touch of his hard hand’. ‘The intervening years have seen many dark parks and, living my dream, many hard men,’ he records fifty years later.

Richie hitch-hiked out of Lima the day after leaving high school, and spent the war criss-crossing the world in the US Merchant Marine. On New Year’s Eve 1946, his ship docked in Japan’s southernmost island, Okinawa, which had been blitzkrieged in the last appalling battle of the war. He travelled to Tokyo and became a clerk for the US occupation, then a feature writer for Pacific Stars and Stripes, the army newspaper. As the paper’s film critic, he fell in love with the cinema of Ozu, Kurosawa and Mizoguchi before he could understand Japanese. He became an aficionado of the traditional dance dramas bugaku, kabuki and noh, and spent Sundays fruitlessly studying Zen under Daisetz Suzuki. ‘You are, you know, very much of this world, very much of this flesh,’ the master told him, and this seems to have been true from the moment Richie set foot in Japan. ‘In Okinawa,’ he later said, ‘I felt my testicles descend to the earth.’

The received view of Japan is of a rather prissy, buttoned-up place, but Richie found the erotic all around him: in the ‘studied expressionless faces and blank dark eyes’ of the bugaku dancers, and the drunk, sweating bearers of the portable shrine in Shinto festivals (‘two hours of naked thighs and barely masked loins, pounding buttocks, strained shoulders and faces turned skyward, chanting the rhythmic cry’). There was nakedness everywhere, from urchins in the street to ‘the fisherfolk of the further coasts of Chiba’ who ‘traditionally worked nude with only a small red ribbon tied around the member lest the goddess Benten, deity of the sea, be offended’. Much of this was a consequence of poverty and ruin, of course, but to Richie it was both erotic and romantic. ‘When you look at naked people one of two things can occur,’ he wrote. ‘You become excited, feel sexy, view the nude as desirable. Or, you see the human race, finally, as it is: innocent, vulnerable, unknowing and beautiful in that general way which discourages possessiveness. Standing on those street corners, I felt both.’ Only much later, when Japan had changed beyond recognition, did he begin to understand the political pulses which charge the relationship between the victor and the defeated.

Until the 1990s, there are frequent gaps in Richie’s diaries which have, in any case, been rewritten and edited down to half their length over the years (the original manuscripts, it turns out, were first transcribed and then destroyed by their author). Perhaps it is not surprising that Richie comes across very well in the pages that remain: earnest but witty, passionate and sometimes sentimental, but equally capable of dryness and restraint, and generous even in the face of rudeness and ignorance. Never once does he indulge in the favourite gaijin pastime: whingeing about Japan and the Japanese. ‘Why is it, I wonder, that when expatriates in Japan get together they always do this – find fault?’ he asks. ‘Do they do this in other countries? “Oh these Luxembourgians, these people!”’ Later, he is reproached by his old friend, the literary translator and scholar of Tokyo, Edward Seidensticker: ‘You will not allow yourself to be furious with these people. Yet, you know at heart you are.’ He replies that Seidensticker ‘really hated himself, not these people, and that he should acknowledge the depths of his self-loathing’. As a lover, too, Richie is loyal and responsible, and becomes a lifelong ally to several of the younger, mostly heterosexual men whom he seduces – meeting their oblivious families, helping to put them through school, attending their weddings, investing in their businesses and becoming a friend to their wives and children. But here and there are hints of a wilder, less steady and more tormented personality.

‘I had first fallen in love with him when he told me … that he loved gangsters, that he must kneel before them and drink of their manhood and that sometimes they threatened to kill him.’ This comes from a surprising source: A Romantic Education by Mary Richie, a 1970 novel dedicated to Donald and based on her four-year marriage to him during the early 1960s. Donald had a ‘slender heterosexual history’ (‘Strong women all, they knew what they wanted, saw it, took it,’ he wrote; ‘I’m a type who must be raped in order to get it up’). Still, it is difficult to understand how he and Mary believed that their marriage had a chance of lasting. She knew that he liked boys, but knowing it was not the same as having to live with it. He invited her to take other lovers, but when she did it made him ill. ‘I must admit he is intelligent, quick, gifted by nature,’ Mary wrote in her diary, ‘very affectionate, but ruined as a boy and so afraid of affection, easily unsure, so amused by the trivial, or is it that only the topical and prankish seem to him “interesting”.’ Richie too identifies the capacity for distraction as one of his chief flaws. ‘Just where do I think I am going?’ he asks, as his marriage is breaking down.

Here I am a novelist who writes few novels, a critic who usually can’t even criticise himself, a husband who prefers sleeping with men. Yes, somehow all those unwritten novels were supposed to appear; my criticism was to strike every target; and marriage was to save me … The reluctance to find oneself – the evasions. And the burden of it. No wonder I wanted someone to share it. But one does not drop one’s history any more than does the plodding turtle drop its shell.

The Inland Sea, a learned, beautifully paced elegy for one of ‘the last places on earth where men rise with the sun and where streets are dark and silent by nine at night’, is the only full-length work of Richie’s that will be remembered a generation from now. His various collections of newspaper articles and magazine essays are patchy and poorly organised, and I couldn’t get through the long-out-of-print early novels, Where Are the Victors? (1956) and Companions of the Holiday (1968), well-meaning and empathetic attempts at social observation which, even as period pieces, hold scant interest today. But for a writer with a limited attention span, the journal is the ideal medium. An overarching structure, pace, and the deployment of developing themes are unnecessary; all the successful diarist needs is a consistent tone of voice and the ability to be interesting about something, once a day. The distractions to which Richie succumbed may have wrecked his novels and his marriage, but they gave him all the diary material he needed. In a life of prolific underachievement, The Japan Journals are the masterpiece.

Up until the late 1980s, English-speaking foreigners who knew their way around Tokyo were few, and Richie’s status as tenured gaijin brought him a stream of visiting intellectuals requiring guidance and companionship. He escorted them, helped them to find boys and girls, then wrote acute little sketches of them, a chronicle of the naivety, arrogance and insensitivity which overcomes so many otherwise intelligent people in Japan. Dry and good humoured as ever, Richie is patronised by Sacheverell Sitwell and his wife, dines with a near-gaga Somerset Maugham and shops for pornographic woodblock prints with Stravinsky. He conducts a farcical tour of eminent writers, which reaches its climax in a mountain temple, where Stephen Spender and Angus Wilson look on as an enema is administered on the tatami to a haemorrhoidal Alberto Moravia. The indifference and obliviousness of these literary celebrities find their epitome in Truman Capote. ‘I have seen Japan,’ he announces in the coffee shop of the Imperial Hotel. ‘And I may just as well tell you that I do not like a country that has little cocks … Little cocks, little cocks!’ Richie’s portrait of his whining petulance is one of the best things in the book.

Among those who count as friends, rather than passing acquaintances, are Marguerite Yourcenar, Christopher Isherwood, Susan Sontag and Francis Ford Coppola (among several interesting photographs is one of Richie beside a gawky, 19-year-old Sofia Coppola, who looks thoroughly lost). He knew Ozu and Kurosawa, and wrote books about their work. Then there were the pioneers of the avant-garde of the late 1960s and early 1970s: the composer Toru Takemitsu, the kabuki actor Tamasaburo, the artist Tadanori Yokoo, and Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of butoh dance. Richie met Yukio Mishima as a young celebrity in the 1950s; the two even went to Mishima’s gymnasium together, and a famous sequence of photographs of the novelist posing in his loincloth in the snow was shot outside Donald’s bedroom window. ‘He clowns about the things closest to him,’ Richie wrote in 1958. ‘Like killing himself … none of us ever takes this seriously.’ But when Mishima did disembowel himself, after a failed coup, in the headquarters of the Japanese Self-Defence Force, Richie found himself unsurprised and unmoved. ‘His suicide was entirely ritual,’ he writes. ‘It had few connections with and little meaning for contemporary Japan.’

These were tumultuous times, but despite Richie’s avant-garde leanings, the violent left-wing demonstrations make no appearance in the diaries. A ‘chronic non-joiner’, he actively resisted participation in anything that sniffed of politics, especially sexual politics. ‘When you do this, you invest,’ he writes. ‘You become a card-carrying Catholic, a card-carrying Communist, a card-carrying Cocksucker … I am not thinking of making life better for future queers.’ But the Journals trace Richie’s evolving and self-critical awareness of the politics inherent in his situation.

His mourning for lost beauties and suspicion of change were dramatised in The Inland Sea, but by the 1980s change was taking place at blinding speed. Japan was already an affluent society; very quickly, in the bubble economy of the late 1980s it became rich, then – on paper at least – astonishingly rich. Richie was disconcerted in several ways. For a start, there was the physical alteration in the look of Tokyo. The city of Ozu’s Tokyo Story, with which he first fell in love, had given way to a futuristic megalopolis, ‘larger and taller and – strangely – cleaner, or at any rate less cluttered … In this new postmodern capital of planned cityscapes, the lack of clutter is inhuman.’ Then there was the mounting tension and mutual contempt between Japan and the United States, caused by the huge trade imbalance. A decade of Japanese recession later, it is easy to forget how ominous all this seemed at the time, and how many people in both countries came to regard the other as an enemy. ‘Japan is an unguided missile,’ Richie writes in a rare disquisition on current affairs.

No one is in the control room. When you get the people all pointed in the same direction there is no stopping them. Where is the brake? It is not included in the model … The US, slipping, lost its great supporting enemy in the collapse of the USSR. It needs another one, quick. Japan, slithering out of control, all cool heads hot in this drive to greed, displays an enormous insensitivity to others … I don’t think anyone really believes in this animosity except the stupid. But there are so many.

The biggest and most upsetting change of all is to be found in the Japanese young. By 1988, ‘one of the reasons for spending my old age here is gone, never to return.’

This is the possibility of meeting a stranger and making a friend. Right there, right then. Forever … It is because we are not needed any more. No one has any use for us. They do not see trips abroad in our eyes. These trips are something they can themselves afford. And there are so many of us. We have become common … I am speaking of regretting imperialism, I know. I ought to rejoice that Japan is no longer subject to it, but I do not want to. It was too much fun being treated as someone quite special.

The shock of this change is the realisation, which Richie is too honest not to register, that the gaijin’s special status is unearned, a simple function of economics. In the way of these things, though, money provides its own solution to his frustrations, or at least an alternative. The bubble attracts immigrant workers – Pakistanis, Koreans, Filipinos, Chinese and Iranians – drawn to Tokyo by the mighty yen. And among them, Richie finds erotic opportunities which the natives no longer provide. ‘You seem to have deserted Japan in favour of the Third World,’ a friend tells him. ‘It was not I that deserted Japan,’ he writes, ‘but Japan that deserted the Third World … It was the Third World in Japan that so appealed to lubricious me, and now that Japan is more First World than even the USA, the appeal is no longer there. That makes me that figure of fun, the garden-variety colonial imperialistic predator.’ A gay foreign friend abandons Japan for the less affluent pastures of Thailand. ‘He’s too late,’ Richie observes. ‘We’ll both end up in a Dayak long house and even there it will be too late.’

I have become like those pandas that will eat only one kind of bamboo, a commodity that they have now eaten all up. Soon they will be extinct, done in by specialisation. Concerned friends counsel me to the jungle-like swamps of the sauna, or the conversation pits of the bars, or the strict and narrow confines of the public conveniences, but this is not for me. Only the street, the corner, the park is authentic to me. Only that which is fortuitously found is real.

As he enters his sixties, Richie’s old and distinguished friends begin to die off. He acquires official respectability, honoured by the emperor for his services to Japanese culture, a habitué of embassy functions. The growing self-confidence and obnoxiousness of Japan coincide with his descent into the conservatism of old age. Richie wryly recognises the irony in all this, although he is never able to forgive Japanese youths for their disinclination to be seduced by him; their fecklessness, stupidity and philistinism are a recurring and rather tiresome theme in the second half of this book. Subtlety and complexity desert him as he ventures out from his base in old-fashioned Ueno to cast his fogeyish eye over the youthful ‘hordes’ in ‘noisome’ Shibuya and Roppongi. ‘They lurch and spill on the pavement and in a group sound like a herd of elephants … Young people with their Walkmen and manga, their portable phones – not only do they not know one flower from another, they do not even see them … this generation was taught nothing … the latest gadget satisfies it; it goes to see Star Wars.’ Even masturbation is not what it used to be, as a fellow regular at Richie’s local porn cinema comments: instead of lending one another a hand, young Japanese onanists ‘buy a tape, or rent it, and take it back home and lock the door’.

‘These youthful herds await a deliverer, someone to organise them, and a country to give up everything for,’ he fulminates, in an especially barmy entry. ‘Someone like Mussolini or the Emperor Hirohito.’ Yet it was Richie’s generation, ‘that friendly, ragged, wily, beautiful, and hopeful crew’ of wartime Japanese with whom he fell in love, who submitted to fascism, who swarmed so murderously into China and South-East Asia, and who piloted the suicide planes. By almost any other standard, the young in Japan today are exemplary: a little glazed and indifferent from the outside, but politer, calmer and more law abiding than their contemporaries anywhere in the world. Richie may find it harder to seduce them as he circumambulates the park, but he is not going to be beaten up, robbed or murdered by them either.

‘Being at home means taking for granted going blind and deaf, eventually not even thinking,’ Richie wrote. ‘It means only comfort. I would hate to be at home.’ This is a common perception among long-term gaijin, as among adolescents: home as a place of old age, premature senility. But as he grows older Richie begins to panic about the cost of having no home, not for its human comforts, but its intellectual stimulations. At his most optimistic, he takes pride in his outsideness (‘undisturbed by vagaries, I can regard what I think of as eternal’). But he sees that New York friends ‘live in an element I do not. Theirs is the current of contemporary thought, and they swim – mostly against it – and grow sleek. I have no intellectual climate at all. I have no one with whom to speak of these concerns, no one to learn from, no one to teach. For fifty years I have lived alone in the library of my skull.’

Greater Tokyo contains thirty million people; it is far and away the largest city that has ever existed. And yet to the Westerner with intellectual aspirations it is a small pond. The Catholic novelist Shusaku Endo compared Japan to a tropical mud swamp: when living flowers are transplanted from elsewhere they grow vigorously for a while, put out lurid blooms, but eventually wither in the strange minerals of the new soil. In 150 years, foreigners in Japan have produced important works of history, political science, anthropology and journalism, but no lasting work of literature. Perhaps Donald Richie shows us why.

Richard Lloyd Parry is the Asia editor of the Times, based in Tokyo. His book about Indonesia and East Timor, In the Time of Madness, is out in paperback.

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Copyright Slate
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 30, 2006, at 6:22 PM ET

The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms by W. Joseph CampbellPress scholar W. Joseph Campbell recently voyaged to the late 19th century and has returned with a brilliant new book that pegs 1897 as the exceptional year in which “the contours and ethos of American journalism began to take shape.”

Campbell’s cross-century road trip, The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms, rarely leaves New York City, where three schools of journalism captained by three men in their 30s were battling for supremacy. In one corner stood Adolph Ochs, who preached an impartial, just-the-facts-ma’am approach to newspapering, and who in 1897 was enjoying his first year as the proprietor of the New York Times.

In the second corner was press lord William Randolph Hearst, who practiced the “journalism of action” that “gets things done” at his crusading New York Journal, where he had become publisher in 1895. He spent wildly on new technology, covered sporting events aggressively, and defined his paper by its activism in public affairs. Others slagged Hearst’s style as “yellow journalism.”
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In the last corner was Lincoln Steffens. Appointed city editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser in late 1897, he advocated literary journalism, an anti-journalistic model and reaction against the growing commercialism of the news. He preferred hiring young college graduates over professional journalists and urged them to report the story behind the story.

The journalistic upheavals documented in The Year That Defined American Journalism speak across the centuries because our media atmosphere is equally volatile, what with the emergence of the Web, the proliferation of cable TV news and opinion, the decline of newspapers, and the rancorous debate over standards. All this would be grist for a book that sought to define 1997 as another defining fin de siècle year for journalism.

Unlike many media critics and scholars, Campbell finds as much to admire in the yellow journalism of William Randolph Hearst as he does to censure. Hearst’s Journal “injected itself as a prominent actor in solving crime, extending charity, and thwarting suspected abuses of municipal government,” he writes. Hearst gave bylines to reporters, hired talented female journalists—unlike the Times of the day—and paid his stars very well. He also inflated social issues beyond their true importance with relentless coverage designed to concentrate public opinion on his side. Campbell can’t resist comparing Hearst’s yellow Journal to the yellowish ways of the New York Times under Executive Editor Howell Raines, who tried to shame the Augusta National Golf Club into accepting rich women as members with the paper’s news overkill in 2002.

To be sure, Hearst’s Journal ran oddball Sunday features speculating about the sun spinning out a new planet, advocated war with Spain, “was known to err badly in its daily reporting,” and was inclined not to acknowledge its errors. When Campbell cites a press observer from the time writing that Hearst could create the best English-language newspaper if he were to “cut his newspaper in two, publish the real, vital news in one part, and the sensations, rot, and nonsense in the other,” you can’t help but think how much you could improve CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC by ripping Lou Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly, Rita Cosby, and other sensation-seeking ratings whores from their lineups.

Back in 1897, critics decried the “decay” of American journalism—sound familiar? Politicians sought ways to undermine the pugnacious press. Reacting to the provocations of Hearst’s Journal, the New York Senate passed a bill prohibiting publication of caricatures without first obtaining the permission of the target. The measure died, as did a law introduced to the U.S. Congress requiring newspapers to reveal the names of the writers of editorials. Advancing technology was changing the look and feel of newspapers: In 1897, the New York Tribune published the first halftone photograph in a mass-circulation newspaper; color presses were being deployed; newer models of typewriters—some as portable as today’s laptops—were coming into vogue in newsrooms.

The 1897 paradigm clash took place as newspapers reached their greatest historical popularity: 2.61 newspaper copies circulated within the average urban dwelling in 1900 compared with 0.72 copies in 2000. (Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and Hearst’s Journal cost 1 cent, which is about 22 cents in today’s money. To escape a potential circulation scandal, Ochs dropped the price of his money-losing Times from its premium price of 3 cents to 1 cent in 1898.) The household penetration of newspapers was probably even higher in the nation’s largest cities like New York. There were 2,226 daily newspapers publishing at the end of the century compared with 1,457 today. New York was home to 58 dailies, some of them in foreign languages. The Yiddish Forverts, today’s Forward, conveniently debuted in 1897.

The newspaper of 1897 was the sole purveyor of news until the advent of newsreels in the 1910s (Hearst was a pioneer, by the way) and radio in the 1920s. Its comics, fiction, and features made it the home-entertainment center. Ample advertisements made it the shopping bazaar and wish book, too, both of which explain why so many homes consumed more than one daily each day. The competition for readers in New York was intensified, writes Campbell, by the decline of the previously dominant newspapers—Pulitzer’s World, Charles A. Dana’s New York Sun, James Gordon Bennett Jr.’s New York Herald, and Whitelaw Reid’s New York Tribune. Even so, Pulitzer sensed enough of the crisis to order his business manager to recruit a spy within Hearst’s Journal to find the source of the paper’s ideas and identify what dissatisfied talent might be willing to leave Hearst and join him.

The weakness of Campbell’s fine book is that the triangular paradigm punch-out he promises to chronicle was really a one-on-one contest between Hearst and Ochs, whose newspapers openly warred. Steffens’ literary journalism appeared only in the city pages of the Commercial Advertiser, which he edited. “The experiment disintegrated in just a few years,” Campbell writes. Other New York journalists “sneered” at Steffens’ efforts, and Campbell presents no evidence that other newspapers imitated his model. Steffens gets a call-out whenever the traditions of feature writing are discussed, but his experiment doesn’t rate a half a dime, let alone a paradigm in newspaper history.

Ochs’ restraint and impartiality eventually bested Hearst’s action school as the most influential journalistic model, but his victory has less to do with the superiority of his methods than Hearst’s reckless overindulgence of his own. Campbell catalogs Hearst’s errors: Exaggerated coverage of the Spanish-American War damaged his reputation and his paper’s; his attempt to wed his political ambitions with the editorial direction of the Journal backfired; the financial demands expansion placed on his media empire starved the Journal of the resources needed to produce the “journalism of action”; and the negatives associated with Hearst swamped his positives as others accused him of encouraging correspondents to send fake news, boosting circulation with the sordid and the trivial, and of deliberately rousing the rabble.

Campbell cites as one reason behind Hearst’s downfall this 1931 observation from Walter Lippmann that yellow journalism is almost impossible to sustain:

When everything is dramatic, nothing is dramatic. When everything is highly spiced, nothing after a while has much flavor. When everything is new and startling, the human mind just ceases to be startled.

Is that really true? The Hearst tradition of making everything dramatic continues to live large on cable TV. It disgorges oceans of yellow journalism each week in both its news and opinion slots. At CNN, Lou Dobbs pushes the tabloid limits of xenophobia and on the network’s sister channel, Headline News, Nancy Grace specializes in unsolved and weird murders. At MSNBC, the recently demoted Rita Cosby mixes a dumber version of Nancy Grace with whatever trash she can fish off the wires. With the exception of Brit Hume’s program, Fox glows an incandescent yellow at most opportunities.

Although the cable news and opinion shows don’t draw very large numbers—The O’Reilly Factor, the most successful, attracts an average audience of 2 million—they inform the mainstream news agenda in a way that Adolph Ochs wouldn’t approve.

Campbell notes that Ochs would not approve of the “implicit advocacy”—as Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent put it in his now famous 2004 column—that appears in Times coverage of gay rights, gun control, and environmental regulation. Ochs would probably extend an “attaboy” to Executive Editor Bill Keller for his subsequent promise in a newsroom memo to reach “beyond our predominantly urban, culturally liberal orientation, to cover the full range of our national conversation.”

Campbell concludes his book by writing that the “central planks of the Times’ counteractivist model still guide American journalism.” I won’t argue with that assertion, but I’m convinced that somewhere in hell, “loser” William Randolph Hearst is suing everybody for royalties.

******

What’s the yellowist piece of journalism you’ve ever read in Slate? Send nominations to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. Also, can anyone tell me why the street boxes for the Express, the Washington Post Co.’s free daily tabloid, are incandescent yellow? (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

Posted at 12:35 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Nation

[from the September 11, 2006 issue]

At least 12 million people from Africa were loaded into slave ships and transported to the Americas. How do people of African descent, scattered around the world, see their relationship to their ancestral home? Do they consider themselves “the African diaspora”? If their African heritage dates back several generations, is it “nebulous atavistic yearnings,” as the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen once said, to search for their roots, to want some kind of bond with their ancestral homeland? Or is it important, in a neocolonial and still-racist world, that Africans and people of African descent see themselves as part of a transnational community? After all, the ancestors in question did not choose to leave their homeland; they arrived in the Americas in chains, and from the time they landed they were divided and dispersed, as a strategy of domination. And even though slavery has ended, people of African descent still wear its imprint on their skin, like a tattoo. Out of slavery came an ideology of racism that permeates the Western world to this day. Given the black collective memory of slavery, it is easy to understand the emotional tug of the ancestral land, the longing for Pan-African brotherhood and the desire for a community that is not racist. The trouble is, as these three books all show, Afro-diasporic solidarity is complex, and often fraught.

In Middle Passages James T. Campbell (not to be confused with James Campbell, the Baldwin biographer) looks at various African-American journeys to Africa over the past two centuries. What did Africa mean to them? asks Campbell. What did America mean to them? In the past, the number of African-Americans traveling to Africa remained small. Since the growth of the African tourist industry in the 1990s, tens of thousands of African-American tourists have made pilgrimages there each year, and it often proves a charged emotional experience.

The first story in the book, an astonishing tale of dramatic reversals of fortune worthy of a Grimm fairy tale, reminds us just how ruthless was this trade in “black gold.” In 1730 Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, a highborn Muslim man in West Africa, made a 200-mile trek to a place on the Gambia River where an English ship was anchored. He had slaves to sell, but the English captain was not prepared to pay enough, and Ayuba continued south into Mandinke territory. He exchanged his slaves for cattle and set off for home, unaware that he was being followed. He was waylaid. His captors shaved his head and beard. Back at the English ship on the Gambia, the English captain recognized him but apparently had no qualms about loading him on board as part of his human cargo. Ayuba would find himself working on a tobacco plantation in Maryland. And then came another dramatic reversal of fortune: His noble birth was discovered, and he was put on a ship to England, where he was adopted by the English gentry and met the royal family. After a year there, he boarded another slave ship, this time as a passenger, back to Africa. He spent the rest of his days working for the Royal Africa Company and facilitating the slave trade. “Viewed through the moral lenses of our own time, Ayuba seems guilty of the most appalling hypocrisy,” writes Campbell, “but he would not have seemed so to contemporaries.”

Langston Hughes was 21 in the summer of 1923, when he boarded a ship in the Brooklyn dockyards heading for West Africa. The 1920s was the Jazz Age, and the time of the black arts movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. As Hughes puts it, “The Negro was in vogue.” Caught up in the neo-Romantic “primitivism” was a new fascination with Africa, its tom-tom exoticism, its black vitality. Hughes was as prone to employ these stereotypes as everyone else; the difference was that he was one of the few who actually made the voyage to Africa. Eager to escape the humiliation of racism in America, he hoped to find a truer, freer self in the home of his ancestors. His first sight of the coastline filled him with excitement: “My Africa, Motherland of the Negro peoples!” He would respond viscerally to the beauty of the landscape and the people, but he left Africa feeling rebuffed. Africans treated him like a white man. Years later, in his memoir The Big Sea, he would mock his naïve hopes and illusions.

It is sometimes surprising to see who clings most to the African mystique. W.E.B. Du Bois grew up in New England. At school he was never taught a thing about African history. It was not until he went to Fisk University that he developed an interest in Africa, and in 1907 he embarked on what would become a lifelong project, an Encyclopedia Africana. As Campbell writes, Du Bois was “a twentieth-century social scientist, determined to rescue Africa from the fog of mythology and misprision that had long enveloped it.” In 1923 he set off for Liberia, an African-American colony established on the coast of West Africa a century earlier. (In the nineteenth century, Liberia was the most common destination for African-Americans traveling to Africa.) “The spell of Africa is upon me,” Du Bois wrote in his journal. “The ancient witchery of her medicine is burning my drowsy, dreamy blood…. It is a great black bosom where the Spirit longs to die.”

Campbell is hard on Du Bois’s “romantic effusions.” How could Du Bois remain silent about what was actually going on in Liberia? Wealth and power were concentrated in the hands of a small Americo-Liberian settler elite, who lived off a labor force made up of indigenous people who were treated like slaves. The frequent popular uprisings were brutally suppressed, with the support of the US government.

Richard Wright was another who had no time for Du Bois’s romance with Africa; Wright vowed that he would tell the truth, however difficult and painful. When he traveled in 1953 to what was then “the Gold Coast,” he felt “a vague sense of disquiet.” It was an exciting time to be going there—the Gold Coast was about to throw off the chains of British colonialism—but Wright, like many African-Americans before and after him, was there partly on a personal quest. His ancestors had come from Africa; his grandparents, all four of them, had been slaves. He had been born “free,” though it was not clear what that amounted to in Mississippi, the most impoverished and lynch-prone state in the segregated Deep South. The freedom to flee? At the age of 17 he had fled to the North, and twenty years later he had sailed out of New York Harbor (“I felt relieved when my ship sailed past the Statue of Liberty”) to France. Now he was pinning his hopes on black brotherhood. On board the Accra, from Liverpool to Takoradi, he sat at his typewriter, preparing a statement for the African press. “I am one of the lost sons of Mother Africa. There is something in me that never left this land…. I pray that you will respond to me as one of your blood brothers.”

They did not. Africans saw him as an American. The Western-educated elite did not give a damn that he was in their country. As for the Africans he met as he traveled around, Wright found himself at a complete loss. They stared at him and giggled. They evaded his questions. Even their laughter, he felt, was an evasive tactic. He was shocked that people urinated openly, in public. He was (unlike Du Bois) repelled by the women’s naked breasts. The poverty distressed him, and he blamed the heinous crime of European colonialism. But he also decided that these people, with their superstitions and ancestor worship (he described these as “rot” and “mush”), did not know how to help themselves. Soon he was writing in his journal: “Africa! Where are you? Are you a myth?… I’m in despair. I find myself longing to take a ship and go home.” The book that resulted from the trip, which, ironically enough, is titled Black Power, is honest, almost painfully so, about Wright’s complete sense of estrangement.

Campbell’s narrative is beautifully told and dense with detail. It is also singularly devoid of heroes, owing to the complex burdens of race. In this tangle of myths, contradictions and paradoxes, a visiting African-American is lucky to come away with his sanity intact. What place is there for heroes?

As Kevin Gaines points out in American Africans in Ghana, no one talks about “Pan-Africanism” anymore, though in the first half of the twentieth century black radicals eagerly embraced the concept. It was Du Bois who convened the first Pan-African Congress in 1919, with the aim of strengthening the unity and solidarity of African peoples worldwide. Paul Robeson would also espouse this anti-imperialist vision. Needless to say, the US government was highly suspicious of American blacks who showed solidarity with African people and their struggles for independence; it was viewed as disloyal, a betrayal of their essential Americanism.

When Kwame Nkrumah became prime minister of the independent nation of Ghana in March 1957, it was an exhilarating moment for Africans and African-Americans alike. (Contrary to popular belief, Ghana was not the first African nation to become independent; that honor belonged to Sudan, in 1956.) Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta King attended the independence celebrations in Accra, along with fellow African-American leaders Adam Clayton Powell, A. Philip Randolph and Ralph Bunche. King, like Nkrumah, wept with emotion as the Ghanaian flag went up and shouts of “freedom!” filled the air. Nkrumah hailed the emergence of a new “African personality,” a black subject who would finally be free, and he encouraged black people from outside Africa to come to Ghana and help make the Pan-African dream come true. During the next nine years, some 300 African-American expatriates went to live in Ghana.

The oldest and most prestigious member of the African-American community in Accra was Du Bois. Throughout the Red Scare McCarthy years, he had been relentlessly hounded and his passport had been confiscated. The US State Department had prevented him from attending Ghana’s independence ceremony. When his passport was finally restored to him, he was not going to wait around for it to be seized again. On the day he left the United States, as a final defiant gesture to his homeland, Du Bois joined the American Communist Party. Then he and his wife, Shirley Graham, went to live in Ghana. It was 1960. Du Bois was 93 years old.

African-Americans went to Ghana with a dream, but as Gaines explains, their situation was “fraught with ambiguities.” They were of African descent, but they were not African. Their culture was different; even their race consciousness was different. (The Americans were generally more sensitive to white racism.) Ghana might have been trying to be a revolutionary society, but African-American women were often rebuffed by Ghanaian men, who found them too outspoken and independent. Most African-Americans were there because of their admiration for Nkrumah, yet it soon became obvious to them that Nkrumah’s government was beset by bribery, corruption and the blatant abuse of power by those they called the “big men.” When the Kings visited Ghana, they were dismayed by the submissiveness of the servants who worked for their hosts.

But it was in 1962, when Nkrumah narrowly escaped assassination, that things turned sour. Nkrumah was convinced the CIA was behind the plot against him. The Ghanaian press became obsessed with American espionage. As Nkrumah’s government became more and more besieged, by Western forces and by enemies within, there were whispers, accusations and rumors about certain black Americans who worked for American intelligence. Africans no longer trusted the expatriate community.

And then, in February 1966, came the coup. Nkrumah was visiting Beijing, and his absence gave his enemies the chance they had been waiting for. The military men struck before dawn. There were around 200 deaths; anyone close to Nkrumah was arrested or detained. The African-American expatriate community broke up, with most returning, badly disillusioned, to the United States.

Kevin Gaines has written an excellent and important book; my only complaint is the frequent use of academic jargon, which lessens the pleasure of reading it. On one page I looped five “articulates” or “articulations.” Why do editors not do their job?

It has become a genre of its own: the narrative in which a person of African descent brought up in America, Europe or the Caribbean meditates on travel, migration and exile, and grapples with his or her mixed feelings about Africa. Ekow Eshun’s Black Gold of the Sun was written half a century after Wright traveled to the Gold Coast. Born in London to Ghanaian parents in 1968 (two years after the army coup that overthrew Nkrumah and the Pan-African dream), Eshun flew to Ghana in 2002. He had no illusions about Pan-African unity. Indeed, after four more coups in Ghana and a number of unsuccessful attempts, he had no illusions at all about Ghanaian politics. His pilgrimage had to do with his fragile sense of identity. He was tired of being a black man in Britain. “I’d felt like an outsider there all my life.” He did not expect Ghana to feel like “home,” but he hoped he could “feel at home there,” he writes. “All I knew was that if Ghana didn’t live up to my hopes I’d have nothing left to hold on to.”

Surely, we might think, Eshun’s experience of the ancestral homeland was going to be very different from the African-American experience. In his childhood, his parents brought Africa into the family home: They spoke Fante (one of the seventy-five languages in Ghana); they ate African food; when they had parties, their guests arrived in Kente cloth robes. In the early 1970s, the family had moved back to Ghana for three years. In England, Eshun tried to make British friends by never talking about anything that made him different:

“Where you from, man?”
“London.”
“Cool.”
“You heard the new Public Enemy album?”

In the 1980s, when he was in his teens, Eshun was bemused by the fashionable new black consciousness in Britain. A black culture, largely imported from the United States—black TV sitcoms, Spike Lee films and rap music—gave blacks in Britain a level of popular respect they had never had before. The left-wing bookshops of Hackney were suddenly selling African pendants and statues of Nefertiti. For his part, Eshun was determined not to mystify an ancestral homeland that he knew was beset by political upheavals and the contradictions of neocolonialism.

He went to Ghana with a mental image frozen in the early 1970s, and found Accra full of SUVs, mobile phones and blaring hip-hop music. When he and his cousin went to a discothèque one night, Eshun was taken aback by the sleek young couples who emerged from Mercedes sports coupes carrying brand-name sunglasses and handbags. In restaurants, he winced at the way the “big men” barked orders and snapped their fingers for service, and the subservience of the waiters made him cringe. On his walks around the city, he noticed that people fell silent as he passed. In an inland village, a friend pointed out that everyone was talking about him; they took him for a black American with too much money. Leaving Kumasi on a bus, Eshun was disconcerted by the slogan on the seat in front of him: We’ll Get You There Alive. Tied to the roof of the bus were a flock of goats that screamed throughout the journey, while the bus driver turned up his radio. At sunset every day, Eshun was attacked by clouds of savage mosquitoes.

In a secondhand bookstall in Kumasi, he came across Black Power. “Given the confusions of my own trip I had nothing but sympathy for Wright,” he observes. After a month traveling around, Eshun had the same reaction as Wright: “I couldn’t wait to leave.”

What is this torment all about? Why does Eshun feel much the same alienation as an African-American man whose roots are far more distant from his ancestral land? It is clearly not about the country they are traveling through; it is about lost identity, feelings of exile, dashed expectations of solidarity. They were not white; the world had made that clear to them every day of their lives. In which case, they wanted to know, what does it mean to be black? In Ghana, Eshun learned for the first time that he had a Dutch ancestor who was a slave trader. The man married a chief’s daughter, and their son, Joseph, a light-skinned mulatto, would also become a Cape Coast slave trader.

You imagine that the events of history take place in some nebulous “other time” unrelated to your own life. Yet I feel the consequences of Joseph’s actions every day in Britain. It was partly because of the pervasiveness of racism there that I’d come to Ghana—only to find my ancestor had collaborated in establishing its tenets…. The shock is physical. You feel winded. The sun is too bright. Your head aches. You find yourself walking along a sand-blown highway no longer sure who you are any more.

Black Gold of the Sun is a beautifully written book, rich with colorful vignettes and astute observations. Its probing, courageous honesty reminded me of Richard Wright. Fifty years apart, both men engage in some very anguished soul-searching. Eshun is a modern, more sophisticated man, and readers will no doubt be less unsettled by his conclusions. When Wright found himself disgusted by African behavior, he resorted to somewhat racist generalizations about the “African personality.” Eshun asks himself an important question that Wright does not ask: “Europe looked down on Africa. Maybe I’d been doing the same thing?… Does living in a white country make you, in some way, white?”

What does it mean to be white? It’s time that white people asked themselves the sorts of questions with which people of African descent have wrestled for centuries. Eshun seems to be referring to that righteous complacency and sense of superiority one witnesses every day in the modern world—from the conduct of foreign policy to daily interactions between nonwhites and whites. I can’t help thinking that if we all tormented ourselves with these sorts of questions, the world might be less ignorant, less polarized, less hateful, less bellicose.

Posted at 1:03 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright DER SPIEGEL
Published August 16, 2006

Zhang Qingli, the head of the Communist Party in Tibet, talks about the role of the Dalai Lama, Beijing’s difficult relationship with the Buddhist region and China’s policies on religion.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Zhang, Tibet is traditionally a deeply religious country, whereas the Chinese Communist Party is secular. Marx called religion the opium of the masses. How do you reconcile the two?

Zhang: Nature is diverse. Different life forms coexist and the world is colorful. This also holds true when it comes to ideology. We emphasize harmony, so that different ideologies and ideas can live together in peace. The Chinese government practices religious freedom.

SPIEGEL: But since when has the Communist Party tolerated religion in its current form?

Zhang: The party and the government have a clear policy on religion. First, we have religious freedom. Second, religious communities must make their own decisions, and we cannot have interference from abroad. Third, they must be conducted and managed according to the laws. And, finally, we show them how to become integrated into socialist society. You can see the way it is in Tibet, where people make pilgrimages to the temples, turn their prayer wheels and pray to Buddha.

SPIEGEL: The Dalai Lama is one of the world’s most popular religious leaders, and he is deeply revered by the people of Tibet. But the government in Beijing sees him as a despicable separatist. Why?

Zhang: Our policy toward the Dalai Lama is clear and consistent. After the founding of the People’s Republic and the peaceful liberation of Tibet, he was elected to a leadership position in the National People’s Congress in 1954. He remained a member of that body until 1964. In 1956 he was named director of the preparation committee for the Tibet Autonomous Region. All of this was done so that religious freedom could be guaranteed, and so that Tibet could be integrated into the great family of socialist nations. He fled the country in 1959. There is no doubt that at that time he was a widely respected religious leader.

SPIEGEL: And is he no longer that today?

Zhang: He did many bad things later on that contradict the role of a religious leader. The core issue is this: Everyone must love his motherland. How can it be that he doesn’t even love his motherland? We have a saying: “No dog sees the filth in his own hut, and a son would never describe his mother as ugly.”

SPIEGEL: The Dalai Lama doesn’t love Tibet?

Zhang: Tibet is the home of the 14th Dalai Lama, but China is his motherland. He deceived his motherland. He rebelled in the 1950s and in the late 1980s he incited unrest in Lhasa that was directed against the people, the government and society. He destabilized Tibet.

SPIEGEL: The Dalai Lama is widely respected worldwide.

Zhang: If I remember correctly, from 1959 to the middle of this year he has made 312 visits to places all over the world, which comes to an average of six countries a year. It was even 12 in 2005. And what did he do during these visits? The goal of these so-called official visits was to form alliances with anti-Chinese forces and to engage in propaganda for his separatist views, which conflict with religion.

SPIEGEL: But much has changed in the world in the last 20 years. China has opened up and trade has become globalized. The question of power on the roof of the world has been resolved. The Dalai Lama has abandoned his claims to independence and agrees to a far-reaching autonomy for Tibet. Why isn’t China generous and self-confident enough to allow the Dalai Lama back into the country, as he would like? Does he still pose a threat to you?

Zhang: We have a clear policy. The door to negotiations will always be open to him, but only when he truly and comprehensively abandons his intentions to divide the motherland, intentions that are directed against society and the people, only when he gives up his splittist activities and only when he openly declares to the world that he has given up claims to independence for Tibet.

SPIEGEL: Didn’t he do this long ago?

Zhang: The problem is that his behavior and his statements contradict one another. He says: “I want to take a middle path and I accept that there is only one China.” But in reality he has not spent a single day not trying to split the motherland.

SPIEGEL: What do you mean by that?

Zhang: What his so-called middle path means is this: He wants to integrate Tibetan settlement areas in the provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan, Qinghai and Gansu into Tibet. He wants to be in charge of this “Greater Tibet” and he demands that the People’s Liberation Army be withdrawn from the region. Besides, he wants to see a return to an earlier, theocratic feudal realm, as dark and gruesome as it was. In those days, government officials, noblemen and monks ruled 95 percent of the population. And he wants even more autonomy for Tibet than has been given to Hong Kong and Macau. That is splittism.

SPIEGEL: But haven’t there already been talks between representatives of the Dalai Lama and Beijing?

Zhang: His government-in-exile is illegal. Our central government has never recognized it. No country in the world, including Germany, recognizes it diplomatically. There are no talks between the Chinese and his so-called government-in-exile. The current contacts merely involve a few individuals from his immediate surroundings. The talks revolve around his personal future.

SPIEGEL: The Dalai Lama enjoys a great deal of sympathy in America, Europe and in Asia, also because the Chinese Communist Party is not particularly democratic.

Zhang: Frankly, the number of people who know the true Dalai Lama is very small. His supporters include enemies of China, but also the true faithful, who are being led astray by this false religious leader. And, finally, there are those who do not understand the real situation.

SPIEGEL: Nevertheless, the Dalai Lama is a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Zhang: I have never understood why a person like the Dalai Lama was honored with this prize. What has he done for peace? How much guilt does he bear toward the Tibetan people! How damaging is he for Tibet and China! I cannot understand why so many countries are interested in him.

SPIEGEL: For many Europeans, Tibet is still a country full of myths. A new railroad line to Lhasa was inaugurated a few weeks ago. What does it mean for Tibet?

Zhang: We are very pleased about this railroad. Everyone is convinced that what the Communist Party has achieved on the roof of the world is a miracle. It demonstrates China’s strength and its economic and technological progress. But, more important, the railroad shows that the Chinese Communist Party is doing everything it can to improve life for the various nationalities in the border regions. Tibet is now economically linked to other provinces and the rest of the world.

SPIEGEL: There are rumors that China has nuclear weapons stationed in Tibet. Can you confirm this?

Zhang: I can assure you with all responsibility that this is all a complete fantasy. There is no nuclear weapons factory in Tibet.

SPIEGEL: The Dalai Lama is 71. He has hinted that there may not be a successor or reincarnation. How will you react? Will you nevertheless encourage a search for a reincarnation?

Zhang: The current Dalai Lama is the 14th. We do not know how much longer he will live. We believe that good people live longer while bad people live shorter lives.

SPIEGEL: Then the Dalai Lama, at 71, must be a good person.

Zhang: It is difficult to say whether he is good or bad. But when we consider his actions, he does not appear to be a good person.

SPIEGEL: If the Dalai Lama doesn’t want a successor, will the Communist Party then say that this is a good thing? Or will it undertake its own efforts to search for a successor in Tibet?

Zhang: There has always been a specific system to search for a successor to the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama. According to the historic rules and religious rituals, monks must travel throughout the country and draw lots from the Golden Urn. But the central government has the final say.

SPIEGEL: Will there be an official and an unofficial Dalai Lama, one in Tibet and another in India? After all, since 1995 there has been a dispute over the Panchen Lama, Tibet’s second most important religious leader. The Dalai Lama recognized one Panchen Lama, but Beijing approved another.

Zhang: The reincarnation of the Panchen Lama has been regulated since the Qing dynasty, that is, since the 17th century. The search for and naming of the 11th Panchen Lama was done strictly in accordance with historic rules. This is why he was recognized by the central government. He is the legal Panchen Lama. The Dalai Lama broke the historic rules during the search for the Panchen Lama. He didn’t even have the Golden Urn from which to draw lots. The Dalai Lama creates chaos. But the market for him here in Tibet is shrinking.

SPIEGEL: Religion appears to be gaining strength in many parts of the world, such as in predominantly Islamic regions and in the United States. Isn’t religion also on the rise in Tibet?

Zhang: Religion is a historic phenomenon that will continue to exist for a long time. Our religious policy is very relaxed, and it is in keeping with realities. But religion may not operate against the law and may not interfere in justice, education, production and labor. In China, people are free to believe or not. We do not become involved in this personal decision.

SPIEGEL: But you have announced plans to strengthen the so-called patriotic education campaign in the monasteries, which is also directed against supporters of the Dalai Lama.

Zhang: Every nation on earth teaches its people to love their motherland. We are organizing patriotic education everywhere, not just in the monasteries. Those who do not love their country are not qualified to be human beings. This is a matter of common sense.

SPIEGEL: Do you actually speak Tibetan?

Zhang: Just a few words. I have only been here a few months. But I do want to learn the language.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Zhang, we thank you for this interview.

Interview was conducted by editors Stefan Aust, Andreas Lorenz and Gerhard Spörl in Lhasa.

Posted at 5:44 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times August 28 2006 03:00

Will the Boat Sink the Water – the life of China’s Peasants by Chen Guidi and WU Chuntao, Public Affairs, Perseus books New York $25

China’s national audit office announced a new code of conduct after a macabre incident last week, when one of its auditors died of “excessive drinking and eating” at banquets hosted by the local electricity bureau whose books he was screening. His fellow auditors did not rush home in grief after their colleague’s death. Reportedly too upset to continue work after the bureau’s grande bouffe, they went on an all-expenses- paid trip elsewhere in China the next day to relax.

At first glance, this tragicomic scandal has little to do with China’s long-suffering farmers, even if it does have echoes in one tale of a newly translated book on the local peasantry by two Chinese researchers- cum-investigativ e reporters, Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao. In their account, a peasant demands an investigation into free-loading officials who are bankrupting the village with their banquets. Weeks later, he returns to demand the investigation be called off because the auditor had joined in the festivities.

Chen and Wu’s book is a graphic exposé of the deprivations of rural communities, told through three years of research in Anhui, one of China’s poorest and most populous provinces. A series of hair-raising case studies features a cast of brutal, bullying officials who enrich themselves by stealing land and grain, and imposing ever more ridiculous taxes on already impoverished citizens. The special imposts include collections to pay for “nutrition allowances for post-abortion operations” and charges for building a local theatre and paying the vet.

Every tax must be paid down to the last penny. People who resist are beaten, arrested and imprisoned, sometimes for months without charge. One psychotic official, who was made village chief while on probation for embezzlement and rape, savagely murders a group of peasants who refused to bend to his will.

Villagers take their complaints to the police and to more senior levels of government, at the county, prefectural or provincial level. Some even make the expensive, risky journey to Beijing to petition, in time-honoured fashion, the imperial centre.

Their efforts have little impact, which underlines the central point of the book. The horrors of the countryside are not new in China; nor are promises from on high to remedy them. But as with the drunken accountant partying himself to death on the tab of his audit target, the real failure is the absence of accountability.

In Chen and Wu’s story, Beijing comes across as a centre of relatively enlightened officialdom, struggling not just to impose its will on the rowdy countryside but even to find out what is happening there in the first place.

China’s leaders have long acknowledged the deprivation of rural communities. Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, the present leadership duo, have made the issue a priority of their administration, abolishing with a flourish all agricultural taxes.

In this respect, Chen and Wu’s tales from the farming frontline are singularly on-message. But the accountability issue perhaps also explains how reaction to the book played out inBeijing in late 2003, when it waspublished in Chinese to great acclaim and then peremptorily banned.

After all, accountability cuts both ways. If local officials were to be held to independently enforced standards of governance and elections, the same strictures should surely apply to the higher-ups in Beijing.

China’s policymakers, however, need much more than just a dose of democracy to manage the immense challenges of the countryside. How, for example, do you peacefully and equitably move hundreds of millions of rural residents off the land and into cities, which is what China will have to do over coming decades?

About two-thirds of China’s 1.3bn people live in rural communities but for decades they have effectively been treated as second-class citizens, with their rights to move to urban areas sharply curtailed.

Then there is the issue of land ownership. Unlike in the cities, farmers cannot buy or sell their properties, only lease them. But officials can capitalise the value of rural land if they rezone it for commercial use, giving them a huge financial incentive to drive farmers from their properties.

Chen and Wu focus on another, less talked-about cause of the farmers’ woes - the multiple levels of government. They show how the decision to create township governments in the 1980s and give them the power to raise taxes has bred bloated and viciously self-interested bureaucracies.

Telling the truth about such injustices in all their horror is still not easy in today’s China. Chen and Wu recount the tale of one upright official who delivers bad news up the line about the parlous state of the local economy only to be consistently rebuffed.

Most grassroots officials survive and prosper by painting a rosy picture. They have a simple, survivalist credo - “No lies, nothing accomplished” . Chen and Wu express little optimism that the incentives that foster such chicanery will change in the near future.

The writer is the FT’s Beijing bureau chief

Copyright: The Financial Times Limited 2006

Posted at 6:36 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post
Sunday, August 27, 2006; Page B02

Anywhere else, it might have played out as just another low-stakes battle between policy wonks. But in Japan, a country struggling to find a brand of nationalism that it can embrace, a recent war of words between a flamboyant newspaper editorialist and an editor at a premier foreign-policy think tank was something far more alarming: the latest assault in a campaign of right-wing intimidation of public figures that is squelching free speech and threatening to roll back civil society.

On Aug. 12, Yoshihisa Komori — a Washington-based editorialist for the ultra-conservative Sankei Shimbun newspaper — attacked an article by Masaru Tamamoto, the editor of Commentary, an online journal run by the Japan Institute of International Affairs. The article expressed concern about the emergence of Japan’s strident new “hawkish nationalism,” exemplified by anti-China fear-mongering and official visits to a shrine honoring Japan’s war dead. Komori branded the piece “anti-Japanese,” and assailed the mainstream author as an “extreme leftist intellectual.”

But he didn’t stop there. Komori demanded that the institute’s president, Yukio Satoh, apologize for using taxpayer money to support a writer who dared to question Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, in defiance of Chinese protests that it honors war criminals from World War II.

Remarkably, Satoh complied. Within 24 hours, he had shut down Commentary and withdrawn all of the past content on the site — including his own statement that it should be a place for candid discourse on Japan’s foreign-policy and national-identity challenges. Satoh also sent a letter last week to the Sankei editorial board asking for forgiveness and promising a complete overhaul of Commentary’s editorial management.

The capitulation was breathtaking. But in the political atmosphere that has overtaken Japan, it’s not surprising. Emboldened by the recent rise in nationalism, an increasingly militant group of extreme right-wing activists who yearn for a return to 1930s-style militarism, emperor-worship and “thought control” have begun to move into more mainstream circles — and to attack those who don’t see things their way.

Just last week, one of those extremists burned down the parental home of onetime prime ministerial candidate Koichi Kato, who had criticized Koizumi’s decision to visit Yasukuni this year. Several years ago, the home of Fuji Xerox chief executive and Chairman Yotaro “Tony” Kobayashi was targeted by handmade firebombs after he, too, voiced the opinion that Koizumi should stop visiting Yasukuni. The bombs were dismantled, but Kobayashi continued to receive death threats. The pressure had its effect. The large business federation that he helps lead has withdrawn its criticism of Koizumi’s hawkishness toward China and his visits to Yasukuni, and Kobayashi now travels with bodyguards.

In 2003, then-Japanese Deputy Foreign Minister Hitoshi Tanaka discovered a time bomb in his home. He was targeted for allegedly being soft on North Korea. Afterward, conservative Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara contended in a speech that Tanaka “had it coming.”

Another instance of free-thinking-meets-intimidation involved Sumiko Iwao, an internationally respected professor emeritus at Keio University. Right-wing activists threatened her last February after she published an article suggesting that much of Japan is ready to endorse female succession in the imperial line; she issued a retraction and is now reportedly lying low.

Such extremism raises disturbing echoes of the past. In May 1932, Japanese Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai was assassinated by a group of right-wing activists who opposed his recognition of Chinese sovereignty over Manchuria and his staunch defense of parliamentary democracy. In the post-World War II era, right-wing fanatics have largely lurked in the shadows, but have occasionally threatened those who veer too close to or speak too openly about sensitive topics concerning Japan’s national identity, war responsibility or imperial system.

What’s alarming and significant about today’s intimidation by the right is that it’s working — and that it has found some mutualism in the media. Sankei’s Komori has no direct connection to those guilty of the most recent acts, but he’s not unaware that his words frequently animate them — and that their actions in turn lend fear-fueled power to his pronouncements, helping them silence debate. What’s worse, neither Japan’s current prime minister nor Shinzo Abe, the man likely to succeed him in next month’s elections, has said anything to denounce those trying to stifle the free speech of Japan’s leading moderates.

There are many more cases of intimidation. I have spoken to dozens of Japan’s top academics, journalists and government civil servants in the past few days; many of them pleaded with me not to disclose this or that incident because they feared violence and harassment from the right. One top political commentator in Japan wrote to me: “I know the right-wingers are monitoring what I write and waiting to give me further trouble. I simply don’t want to waste my time nor energy for these people.”

Japan needs nationalism. But it needs a healthy nationalism — not the hawkish, strident variety that is lately forcing many of the country’s best lights to dim their views.

steve@thewashingtonnote.com

Steven Clemons is director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation and co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute.

Posted at 6:33 PM · Comments (0)

——————————————————————————————————-
Thursday, August 24, 2006 (Copyright SF Chronicle)

Philip Hu fled Shanghai as a child after the communists took over China in
1949. After growing up in Taiwan, he went to UC Berkeley and eventually
became a Silicon Valley tech executive.
But he and his wife, Tanlie Chao, 55, have sold their house in San Jose
and plan to retire to Shanghai in September, part of a reverse migration
that reflects a turnabout among Chinese emigres.
“I’ve been living here and speak the language,” said Hu, 60. “But inside
I’m very Chinese.”
Well-to-do Chinese around the world are being drawn homeward by affordable
housing, food and recreation — as well as a sense of belonging. Driving
this trend are China’s booming market economy, improved transportation and
telecommunications, potential returns on real estate investments and the
emergence of a transnational identity for many of the emigres and their
children.
All this is despite the pollution, horrendous traffic and what Hu said are
people in Shanghai who lack the grace to stand in line or to apologize for
jostling someone.
“Everyone grabs whatever they want. You get used to it after a while. They
don’t mean to be rude, but that’s just how they were brought up,” said Hu,
who will leave behind two grown sons and a stepson.
He and Chao purchased their first Shanghai condo four years ago for
$250,000 at the urging of his brother, who was buying two units in the
same building.
“The center of gravity is shifting to China, but to be successful, you
need to be successful in the United States,” said Peggy Liu, 38,
co-founder of a venture capital firm, who moved from the Bay Area to
Shanghai with her husband and two sons — following her parents. “You need
a foot in both worlds.”
Culture and history also play a role, academics and community observers
say.
“It all comes down to one issue: the sense of belonging in America,” said
Marlon Hom, chair of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State
University. Until the 1940s, he noted, Chinese immigrants often returned
home because American society rejected them and denied them citizenship.
“In the past, it was discrimination from the white society; today, it’s
ethno-centrism among some Chinese immigrants.”
Ethnic Chinese in Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and Taiwan, as well as the
United States, are cashing out their investments and putting the money
into Shanghai’s real estate market, said Kenny Ho, associate research
director in the Shanghai branch of Jones Lang LaSalle, a real estate and
money management firm.
As a result of this booming demand, as well as rising incomes in China and
a lack of other local investment options, prices in Shanghai’s real estate
market have more than doubled since 2001, financial analysts say. But the
skeletons of new buildings continue to rise across the city, attracting
people buying properties as investments, future retirement homes or both.
For Bay Area residents not yet ready to move but interested in investing
in Chinese real estate, Milpitas mortgage broker and sales agent Infohome
sells shares in residential and commercial buildings in China using scale
models with miniature silver towers and broad avenues.
Since spring 2005, Infohome has sold about 240 commercial and residential
units for about $150,000 each from its showroom in a Milpitas strip mall,
where a variety of other businesses also cater to Asians.
“China is not a mature market, but a baby that will continue to grow no
matter how much it is fed,” said John Chen, founder of Infohome. Many of
the sales contracts he completes require owners to hold their property for
five to 10 years in return for a guaranteed average annual rent payment
equivalent to 8 percent of the original investment.
In China, there have been many complaints about such rental guarantees —
that developers allegedly inflate the value of the property and then pay a
slight penalty to break the lease. But Chen, a San Francisco native and
son of Taiwan immigrants, said the contracts he negotiates have penalties
of 100 percent of remaining rent they promised.
Eleanor Chang, director of marketing for United Commercial Bank, which
primarily serves Chinese American customers, has noticed an increase in
the last five years of ethnic Chinese from the Bay Area buying property in
the bustling cities of Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Beijing.
“In the U.S, the stock market is risky, going up and down, and there’s not
a huge opportunity to make a big gain in investments,” she said. “In
China, there might be a bigger upside, if they’re willing take the risk.”
In an attempt to cool down the overheating market and discourage
speculators, the Chinese government instituted new regulations last month.
Only foreign citizens who have lived in China over a year or have
representative offices in China can buy housing, but loopholes remain.
Some home-buyers considering retirement in China purchase condos to use
for business and vacation in the meanwhile. It isn’t possible to determine
how many buyers are speculating on the market and how many actually intend
to move to China.
Immigrant Michael Ngan purchased a $42,500, three-bedroom flat in
Guangzhou, in southern China, when he was working at an advertising agency
there in 2002. He moved to Newark last year, joining his wife and two
sons, 23 and 26, who had immigrated in 1994. His four brothers, sister and
mother also live the Bay Area.
When he retires, he would like to spend half the year in China and half
here. Although life in Guangzhou is more exciting, with more entertainment
and great restaurants, the tug of family in the Bay Area is too great,
said Ngan, 55. “It’s incomparable.”
Hu and Chao have three condos in Shanghai and one in Ningbao, which they
have decorated with touches such as a custom 10-foot-long copy of a famous
Chinese landscape in one condo’s dining room and ornately carved door
panels in the living room.
“The fun part is to go out to shop for all the construction materials,” Hu
said. “You think China is much more backward than here, but you go to
those markets — blocks of all kind of things.”
Hu and Chao have been spending more time in Shanghai each year — living
there in spring and fall and moving back in summer and winter, like
“migrating birds,” Hu said — but they decided maintaining two residences
was too much trouble.
In many ways, he has assimilated since he moved to the United States in
1969 — he speaks unaccented English and is tanned and fit from running,
skiing and playing golf. Yet, “it’s very natural for me in China,” he
said, “to be surrounded by my own people.”
In Shanghai, the green fees are reasonable — and include caddies. When he
and Chao play mahjong, a maid prepares food for them, Hu said. And Chao
said she can take private classes in painting or flower arranging and get
frequent massages.
If Chao and Hu have any major illness, they will fly back to the United
States. He’s canceling their health insurance and will pay out of pocket
until they are eligible for Medicare when they turn 65, just as any other
American citizen would be.
They plan to stay in touch with family — who live in Taipei, Hong Kong
and several U.S. cities — with Internet phone service, e-mail and visits.
Chao will leave behind her 90-year-old father and brothers and sisters.
Her American-born son, who works in Taiwan for his father, would rather
she stay in the Bay Area because he plans to move back here.
“I have mixed feelings,” she said. “Here it’s so pretty, and the air is
good.”
For his part, Hu is reconciling the reality he knows with his learning
from childhood that communists were the “evil empire.”
“These people are Chinese, and they’re basically the same as we are: one
of the most pragmatic people in the world. Once you have them taste money,
they never let go. Once they get used to the capitalist lifestyle, they
never go back to communism,” he said. “No way.”
Hu has reunited with relatives who never left China, though a distance
remains. “They have a totally different background and thinking,” he said.
“You feel in China, people look at you, how you dress and act differently.
They think you’re wealthy, better educated, and can speak English. You
live in a better house. You know more than they do. They give you more
respect.”
He and Chao socialize with about a dozen couples in Shanghai, many with
similar backgrounds. And Hu recently reunited with a middle-school
classmate from Taiwan at a mahjong game. That classmate in turn
re-introduced him to a high school classmate who also lived in the United
States before moving to China.
“It made me feel at home in Shanghai, that I was able to run into people.
And will continue to do so,” Hu said. “We’re all going the same way.”

New home, old home

Shanghai
Population: 20 million

Size: 2,448 square miles
Population density: Approximately 8,170 per square mile (the world’s
fourth most densely populated city, after London, Mexico City and New
York)
History: Shanghai was a small fishing village until the British colonized
it in the mid-19th century. It grew as a trading post and hub of
international culture and today is considered China’s economic and
cultural center.
Economy: A quarter of all commodities in China pass through Shanghai
ports. The average person in Shanghai makes $4,910 a year, nearly five
times the national average. The fast-growing city has nearly 2,900
skyscrapers that are 18 stories tall or taller.

San Jose
Population: 953,679 (6.7 million in nine-county Bay Area)
Size: 177.8 square miles (incorporated San Jose)
Population density: 5,394 per square mile
History: San Jose was California’s first civilian settlement. It was
incorporated in 1850 and served as the site of the first state capital.
Economy: Today it is the hub of Silicon Valley and the largest city in the
Bay Area, which has the fifth largest gross regional product in the
nation. The new, 18-floor City Hall is San Jose’s tallest building.
Sources: Bay Area marketing Partnership, City of San Jose, Frontline
World, transit.511.org

Posted at 2:28 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Reuters

Fri Aug 25, 2006 5:53 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - While researchers have long shown that tall people earn more than their shorter counterparts, it’s not only social discrimination that accounts for this inequality — tall people are just smarter than their height-challenged peers, a new study finds.

“As early as age three — before schooling has had a chance to play a role — and throughout childhood, taller children perform significantly better on cognitive tests,” wrote Anne Case and Christina Paxson of Princeton University in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The findings were based primarily on two British studies that followed children born in 1958 and 1970, respectively, through adulthood and a U.S. study on height and occupational choice.

Other studies have pointed to low self-esteem, better health that accompanies greater height, and social discrimination as culprits for lower pay for shorter people.

But researchers Case and Paxson believe the height advantage in the job world is more than just a question of image.

“As adults, taller individuals are more likely to select into higher paying occupations that require more advanced verbal and numerical skills and greater intelligence, for which they earn handsome returns,” they wrote.

For both men and women in the United States and the United Kingdom, a height advantage of four inches equated with a 10 percent increase in wages on average.

But the researchers said the differences in performance crop up long before the tall people enter the job force. Prenatal care and the time between birth and the age of 3 are critical periods for determining future cognitive ability and height.

“The speed of growth is more rapid during this period than at any other during the life course, and nutritional needs are greatest at this point,” the researchers wrote.

The research confirms previous studies that show that early nutrition is an important predictor of intelligence and height.

“Prenatal care and prenatal nutrition are just incredibly important, even more so than we already knew,” Case said in an interview.

Since the study’s data only included populations in the United Kingdom and the United States, the findings could not be applied to other regions, Case said.

And how tall are the researchers?

They are both about 5 feet 8 inches tall, well above the average height of 5 feet 4 inches for American women.

A copy of the paper can be found at http://papers.nber.org/papers/w12466.pdf.

Posted at 2:22 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright OhmyNews International, Seoul, South Korea, August 24, 2006

Li Dunqiu, director of the Korean Peninsula Research Center of China’s State Council. (Photo: Sunny Lee)

South Korea’s relationships with China and the U.S. have come under scrutiny recently.

Controversy surrounded America’s handover of wartime military control of South Korea to Seoul; and a recent report revealed that the South Koreans ditched a trade deal with China under U.S. pressure. South Korea is currently pursuing a Free Trade Agreement with the United States.

Li Dunqiu, a top Chinese expert on the Korean peninsula, argued in Beijing this month that Korea should make a strategic decision to come closer to China because “Korea’s future lies with China, not with the U.S.”

Dunqiu is the director of the Korean Peninsula Research Center of the State Council. The State Council is China’s cabinet of government. He makes frequent trips to Korea and the United States.

With China’s spectacular economic performance and its growing influence in East Asia, including the Korean peninsula, the U.S. is becoming wary of the change in the region’s hegemonic landscape.

Some think that the world’s current superpower and its rising competitor China, are “clashing” in the region’s hottest spot, each hoping to exercise the most influence.

Sunny Lee interviewed Li Dunqiu in Beijing on Aug. 21, 2006.

Lee: There are some lawmakers in South Korea who believe Korea should make a strategic partnership with China over America in the 21st century.

Dunqiu: They are correct. In the 21st century, Korea needs to come closer to China. First, China and Korea share common interests that are larger than those between Korea and the U.S.

In East Asia, America just wants to maintain its hegemonic order. The U.S. has little regard for stability, prosperity and common development in the region. The main reason is that essentially the U.S. itself isn’t located in the region. On the other hand, China pays closer attention to these issues than the U.S. does.

Does China want the reunification of the Korean peninsula?

In the Korean peninsula, the U.S. wants to maintain the status quo. China is different. The U.S. doesn’t want to see economic cooperation between China and North Korea, either. China, on the other hand, wants the two Koreas to improve their relationship because China believes doing so would also benefit itself. But the U.S. doesn’t want to see this [improvement].

Why?

It’s because if South and North Koreas improve their relationship, South Korea’s anti-American sentiment will get stronger.

America also doesn’t want to see the unification between South and North Korea. China on the other hand hopes to see improvement between the two Koreas, including economic cooperation and eventually reunification. A reunified and prospering Korean peninsula would bring immense economic benefits to China’s northeastern region [where China currently borders North Korea].

Could you talk of China’s regional strategy surrounding the Korean peninsula?

China’s regional strategy is essentially beneficial to Korea. America’s stance [against the unification] doesn’t benefit Korea. It is very clear which side is more beneficial to South Korea. Besides, the U.S. is behind Japan’s becoming not just an economic power, but now also its growing military might.

American support of Japan to become a military power gravely damages the interests of South Korea and China. A newly-armed Japan’s target of aggression will first be Korea, and then China. There is a clear difference of interest between China and America on it. Choosing America, South Korea will merely become its scapegoat.

In case of war, America will support Japan, not Korea?

Last Sunday, I met some lawmakers from the United States who were visiting Beijing. I asked them: “If there were a war between Korea and Japan, which side would you support?” They said they wouldn’t take a side.

“Not taking a side” fundamentally hurts Korea’s interests. Practically, Japan’s military power is number two in the world, after that of the U.S. Then, America’s “no engagement” will encourage the hawkish politicians in Japan to be more aggressive toward Korea.

If there is a dispute between China and Japan, America will also support Japan, although they wouldn’t say it publicly.

In economy, politics, security and culture, in all these areas, Korea and China have more things in common than it has with the U.S. So, my most important point is that in the 21st century, Korea’s strategic choice should be China, not America.

Posted at 2:17 PM · Comments (0)

Saturday August 5, 2006

Copyright The Guardian

If any books change the world, Republic has a good claim to first place. It is commonly regarded as the culminating achievement of Plato as a philosopher and writer, brilliantly poised between the questioning and inconclusive earlier dialogues and the less compelling cosmological speculations and doubts of the later ones. Over the centuries it has probably sustained more commentary, and been subject to more radical and impassioned disagreement, than almost any other of the great founding texts of the modern world. Indeed, the history of readings of the book is itself an academic discipline, with specialist chapters on almost every episode in the story of religion and literature for the past 2,000 years and more. To take only the major English poets, there are entire books on Platonism and Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Shelley and Coleridge, to name but a few, and there are many others on whole movements and times: Plato and Christianity, Plato and the Renaissance, Plato and the Victorians, Plato and the Nazis, Plato and us. The story of Plato’s direct influence on philosophy is another study in itself, one peppered with names such as Philo Judaeus, Macrobius, Porphyry, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, as well as the better-known Plotinus, Augustine or Dante. Sometimes the Plato in question is the author of other texts, notably the inspirational dialogue Symposium and the theologically ambitious Timaeus. But Republic is seldom far away.

Article continues

Anyone who stays very long in the vast silent mausoleums lined with works about Plato and his influence runs the risk of suffocating. Anyone writing on this topic must be conscious of an enormous and disapproving audience, dizzying ranks of ghosts overseeing and criticising omissions and simplifications. Many of these ghosts belong to the most brilliant linguists, scholars, philosophers, theologians and historians of their day. They do not take kindly to the garden to which they devoted their lives being trampled over by outsiders and infidels. And Republic is the shrine at the very centre of the sanctuary, since for centuries it has been the one compulsory subject in the philosophy syllabus, so these same scholars will have been educated with it as the centrepiece and inspiration.
Plato wrote his philosophy in dialogues, a form that requires different voices, and the ebb and flow of argument. It was already noted in antiquity that the Socrates who is the hero of these dialogues, and Plato himself, are shifting figures, readily admitting different interpretations: “It is well known that Socrates was in the habit of concealing his knowledge, or his beliefs; and Plato approved of the habit,” said Saint Augustine. One way of taking this is that Plato, and presumably Socrates, really did have doctrines to teach, but that for some irritating reason they preferred to unveil them only partially, one bit at a time, in a kind of intellectual striptease. This line has occasionally been taken by weak-minded commentators in love with the idea of hidden, esoteric mysteries penetrated only by initiates, among whom they are pleased to imagine themselves.

The right way of interpreting Augustine’s remark is that Plato felt philosophy was more a matter of an activity than of absorbing a static body of doctrine. It is a question of process, not product. Socrates remains the great educator, and those who came to him would be listeners and interrogators, participants in conversation, and would have to throw themselves into the labyrinths of thought. Passive reception of the word would count for nothing - this was one of the mistakes made by Plato’s opponents, the sophists, who charged fees for imparting what they sold as practical wisdom (one might think of the witless piles of “wisdom” and “self-help” literature that now choke bookshops). At the end of Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates makes a speech despising reading philosophy as a poor second to doing it. Many people have made the same point subsequently. Schopenhauer describes reading as a mere surrogate for thinking for yourself, and in turn quotes the German polymath Goethe: “What you have inherited from your forefathers, you must first win for yourself if you are to possess it.” Robert Louis Stevenson argued that literature is but the shadow of good talk. “Talk is fluid, tentative, continually in further search and progress; while written words remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber of the truth.”

The insistence on engagement chimes with Plato’s adoption of the dialogue form, in which different voices get a hearing, and it is the twists and turns of the processes of argument rather than any set conclusion that help us to expand our minds as we read. Philosophy, in this view, is about discovering things in dialogue and argument (“dialectically”); anything read later could at best be a reminder of the understanding achieved in this process.

This dramatic conception of what Plato is about makes him harder to criticise. One can reject a conclusion, but it is much harder to reject a process of imaginative expansion, and if we take the link with drama seriously, it might seem as silly as “rejecting” King Lear or Hamlet. In fact, the parallel does not cut off criticism, but encourages it. In the course of Plato’s dramas, theses do get stated and defended, arguments are made, and people are persuaded. Sometimes the drama comes to an end with an apparent conclusion. And in all these cases it is appropriate to ask whether the theses, arguments and conclusions are in fact acceptable. Doing this is doing no more than taking part in the drama or entering the dialectical arena, the very activity that Socrates and Plato commend.

But Plato and his Republic have their detractors. In Raphael’s painting The School of Athens, Plato and Aristotle together hold centre-stage, but while Aristotle points to the Earth, Plato points upwards to the Heavens. Coleridge made the same contrast, saying that everyone was born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian, meaning that Plato is otherworldly, a dealer in abstractions, while Aristotle is the plain empirical man who faces things as they are in the world as we find it. Coleridge continued: “I don’t think it possible that anyone born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist, and I am sure no born Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian.”

Much of Republic can be read as Plato Lite. These parts can be read regardless of our attitude to the heavy-duty metaphysics of the central chapters, notably the part that everyone remembers, the Myth of the Cave. On its best interpretation, it is far from suggesting an airy-fairy, visionary picture of divine raptures and illuminations. In fact, we can tame it, and see it as no more than a sensible plea for just the kind of understanding of the actual world that science and mathematics offer us two millennia later. Perhaps Plato has been horribly betrayed by Platonists - not an uncommon fate for a great philosopher.

But there are other, less doctrinal reasons why the sovereignty of Republic ought to be surprising. The work is long, sprawling and meandering. Far from holding water, its arguments range from ordinarily leaky to leaky in that zany way which leaves some interpreters unable to recognise them as ever intended to hold water at all. Its apparent theory of human nature is fanciful, and might seem inconsistent. Its apparent political implications are mainly disagreeable, and often appalling. In so far as Plato has a legacy in politics, it includes theocracy or rule by priests, militarism, nationalism, hierarchy, illiberalism, totalitarianism and complete disdain of the economic structures of society, born in his case of privileged slave-ownership. In Republic he managed to attach himself both to the most static conservatism and to the most wild-eyed utopianism. On top of all that, the book’s theory of knowledge is a disaster. Its attempt to do what it seemingly sets out to do - which is to show that the moral individual, and only the moral individual, is happy - is largely a sequence of conjuring tricks.

More insidiously, to the extent that there is now an aesthetic tone associated with Plato, it is not one to which we easily succumb, unless we have absorbed too much of it to escape. Plato’s high summer, in England at least, lay in the golden glow of the late Victorian and Edwardian age - the vaguely homoerotic, vaguely religious, emotionally arrested, leisured, class-conscious world of playing fields, expensive schools and lazy universities, the world of Walter Pater, or EM Forster, of half-forgotten belletrists and aesthetes like John Addington Symonds or Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, or golden boy-poets like Rupert Brooke. This is not the world around us. It is not quite a world of slave-ownership, but capitalism throws up its own drones.

An equally shocking thing about it in some people’s eyes is that, in writing Republic, Plato utterly betrayed his teacher Socrates. Socrates is the first and greatest liberal hero and martyr to freedom in thought and speech. For writers like John Stuart Mill and George Grote - practical, liberal, utilitarian thinkers - this was the real Socrates, the eternal spirit of reflection, criticism and potentially of opposition to the state itself. But in Republic he is an out-and-out dogmatist, rather than the open-minded, patient, questioning spirit his admirers love. He is shown as the spokesman for a repressive, authoritarian, static, hierarchical society in which everything up to and including sexual relations and birth control is regulated by the political classes, who deliberately use lies for the purpose. He presents a social system in which the liberal Socrates would have been executed much more promptly than he was by the Athenian democracy. In Republic the liberal Socrates has become the spokesman for a dictatorship. In presenting this figure Plato even betrayed his own calling, being once a poet, who now calls for the poets to be banned.

A work may have many defects yet be forgiven if the author comes through as a creature of sweetness and light, just as Plato’s literary creation, the Socrates of the earlier dialogues, does. But there is not much help here. True, there must have been enough sweetness and light in Plato to create the figure of the heroic, liberal Socrates in the first place. But if that figure evaporates, as it does in Republic, there is not much else to go into the balance. We know very little about Plato, and what there is to know is not generally appealing. If he is put in historical context, we may find an archetypal grumpy old man, a disenchanted aristocrat, hating the Athenian democracy, convinced that the wrong people are in charge, with a deep fear of democracy itself, constantly sneering at artisans, farmers and indeed all productive labour, deeply contemptuous of any workers’ ambition for education, and finally manifesting a hankering after the appalling military despotism of Sparta.

But as so often with Plato, there is a complication to that picture, nicely brought out in Nietzsche’s reaction to the fact that, on Plato’s deathbed, he turned out to have been reading the comic writer Aristophanes: “there is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on Plato’s secrecy and sphinx-like nature, than the happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his deathbed there was found no Bible, nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic - but a book of Aristophanes. How could even Plato have endured life - a Greek life which he repudiated - without an Aristophanes?”

We are told that Jesus wept, but not that he ever laughed. With Plato, as with Socrates, laughter is often nearer than it seems. This is a good sign. Perhaps the grumpy old man was not quite so grumpy after all. But this does not really matter, for it is the concrete, enduring book that concerns us, not its shadowy and departed author. And it is a good dictum that while many books are wrongly forgotten, no book is wrongly remembered. So we need to work harder to come to terms with the unquestioned staying power of Republic. We need to understand something of the hold this book has had and continues to have on the imagination of readers.

· This is an edited extract from Plato’s Republic: A Biography, part of a series called Books That Shook the World, published by Atlantic Books

Posted at 12:50 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright - Asia Times

> >
> > GUANGZHOU - Despite Beijing’s repeated warning that it would
> > severely punish officials falsifying economic statistics, the
latest
> > figures show regional officials continue to cook the books to
inflate
> > local economic growth.
> >
> > According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), China’s gross
> > domestic product (GDP) grew 10.9% in the first half of this year.
> > However, the average of GDP growth rates of the 31 provinces on
> > the mainland of China far exceeded 12% during the same period. In
> > real terms, the sum of GDP figures of all provinces was 804.8
> > billion yuan more than the national figure reported by the NBS.
> >
> > Data earlier released by the National Development and Reform
> > Commission shows that every province recorded double-digit
> > growth in the first half of this year, with 23 of them having a
> > growth rate of higher than 12%. Inner Mongolia attained 18.2%,
> > Jiangsu 15.4%, Shandong 15.3%, Tianjin and Guangdong both
> > 14.4%, Zhejiang 14.1%, Henan 13.9%, Guangxi 13.6%, Hebei 13.5%
> > and Sichuan 13.3%. Only three province reported slightly growth
> > lower than the national rate: Yunnan, Ningxia and Gansu.
> >
> > People may ask: which should be China’s real GDP, the NBS figures
> > or those reported by the provinces?
> >
> > “It is common in China that the mean GDP figure of provinces is
> > higher than the national one given by the NBS,” said Gao Huiqing, a
> > researcher with the State Council’s Information Center. “For some
> > years, the provinces’ mean GDP growth figures have been some
> > three to four percentage points higher than the national ones. I
> > believe that the latter is more reliable because the NBS is capable
> > of rectifying the errors found in the provincial reports.”
> >
> > Li Deshui, former NBS director, had once written to point out that
> > the discrepancy between the statistical figures of the local and
> > central governments, a tendency that is worsening every year,
> > stems from the authorities’ ineffective crackdown on falsification
of
> > statistics by local officials.
> >
> > Analysts say the fundamental cause of such a malpractice lies in
> > the problematic statistics system currently adopted in the country.
> > Basically, the NBS and provinces use the same methods to derive
> > GDP figures. Apart from some difficulties on the technical side,
the
> > main problem is in the attitude and mentality of the officials when
> > reporting statistical figures to the central government. Many local
> > officials tend to try to look right by cooking the figures
according
> > to their needs in order to demonstrate their performance.
> >
> > The system-related causes of such malpractice are twofold: 1)
> > Inasmuch as the GDP figure is a “yardstick” to measure the
> > performance of local officials, there is a strong motive for them
to
> > manipulate the statistics; 2) The local governments are given the
> > power to do so.
> >
> > The data that are most easily falsified by local officials are
those in
> > the category of the so-called “soft” information, such as the
> > amount of investment. Another common falsification is duplicate
> > calculation of industrial output, which also constitutes an
> > important part of the GDP. In many regions, trade figures are taken
> > into calculation of the local GDP f
> > igures, causing it to become
> > unjustifiably higher.
> >
> > The current statistics system in China is working by the principle
of
> > “diversified responsibility under a unified leadership”, by which
the
> > NBS claims the nominal leadership, while the all-important matters
> > regarding personnel affairs and allocation of financial resources
are
> > held fast in the hands of the local governments. Thus local
> > statistics officials would be more obedient to their local
> > governments than to the NBS.
> >
> > To overcome this, Qiu Xiaohua, the current NBS director, now sets
> > a task to screen out all false information and the bureau is
working
> > on measures for this purpose. In the hope of eliminating the
> > possibility for local officials cooking the books, the NBS’s long-
> > term goal is to let economic statistics in any given place be
> > calculated directly by the higher authority. For instance, economic
> > data in a province will be directly calculated by the NBS, and
figures
> > in a city calculated by the provincial statistical authority.
> >
> > In a conference in May, Qiu first advocated reform in the current
> > system, saying that the key to ending fraudulent reporting was to
> > make statistical work independent of local governments’ influence.
> > Analysts have pointed out that falsification of economic statistics
> > could bring disastrous consequences for China.
> >
> > By falsifying figures, the local governments will suffer a
credibility
> > crisis among the public. Some social organizations may take
> > advantage of this to spread more false information to confuse the
> > public for their own interests, and people may also be deceived by
> > false figures masquerading as true and scientific.
> >
> > Furthermore, major decisions on macro-economic policy may be
> > led astray on account of falsified information deviating heavily
> > from reality. As some put it, the risky situation is just like “a
blind
> > man riding on a blind horse on the edge of an unfathomable
> > abyss”.
> >
> > In short, infidelity in statistics is not only a problem of
expertise or
> > technicality, nor is it just one of economics and society. It is an
> > unmistakable symbol of unsound political ecology. As long as the
> > performance appraisal of officials by the GDP yardstick and the
> > promotion of officials based on economic statistics is not
banished,
> > as long as the liars and cheaters are not punished, as long as
those
> > who dare to expose officials’ falsification of economic statistics
are
> > suppressed, it is impossible to get rid of statistics falsification
and
> > its disastrous consequences.
> >
> > David Pan is a freelance writer based in Guangzhou.
> >
> > (Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
> >

Posted at 8:18 PM · Comments (0)

HOWARD W. FRENCH

Copyright The New York Times - Published: August 18, 2006

A new Protestant church in Tuanqianbu was razed in a crackdown.
TUANQIANBU, China, Aug. 13 — The rusty parked bicycles clogging the little lane attested to a strong turnout, as did the sound of voices, which resonated with hymns throughout the hamlet. Despite the 100-degree heat, there was a crowd at the little Protestant church this Sunday.

But there was also a hint of trouble, as some foreigners arrived unannounced at the back of the dilapidated building. “Please, I beg you to leave here,” a woman called out as she approached them from the front. “We have already had a lot of difficulties. Go now.”

Two weeks earlier, as many as 500 police officers surrounded the congregants as they were closing in on their long-held dream of completing construction of a new church nearby. The 3,000 or so people were driven away from the site, and those who argued or resisted in any way were arrested and, according to their lawyer, beaten. Then the church, with all but the roof in place, was demolished.

The campaign against this poor little church outside Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang Province in eastern China, is part of a national wave of repression against independent, or underground, churches that are not registered with the government and do not recognize the authority of state-appointed spiritual leaders.

Since the law regulating religious affairs was introduced in March 2005, provincial and local governments have begun a series of crackdowns on underground churches across China. The vaguely worded new rules call for local governments to “standardize” the management of religion nationwide.

The Chinese crackdown, which also affects other faiths, especially Buddhism in Tibet and Islam in the far western Xinjiang Province, comes at a time of booming growth in underground churches across the country.

The right to practice any of five recognized faiths — Buddhism, Catholicism, Daoism, Islam and Protestantism — is enshrined in the Chinese Constitution, and the authorities routinely insist that religious freedom exists in this country. Under Chinese law, however, all recognized faiths must be registered and approved by the government, and they are closely monitored and required to follow strict and frequently changing regulations.

Armed with the new law, religious affairs and human rights specialists say, local officials are forcing small, independent parishes to close or to merge under tighter government control. The new rules also make it harder to register with the authorities, even for those who wish to operate within the law.

According to the China Aid Association, an American Christian advocacy group that monitors religious freedom in China, 1,958 pastors were arrested at churches like these in the last year alone.

Although the crackdown is decentralized, with each province and locality carrying out the repression on its own, the pattern is as unmistakable as the constant stream of incidents. In one recent case, in Tongwei, a village in eastern Anhui Province in late July, 90 children were reportedly detained with 40 adults after the police raided a Protestant Sunday school, calling the church teachings “illegal evangelism.”

For the entire article, please see the link below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/18/world/asia/18china.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Posted at 8:05 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times
By
Published: August 19 2006 03:00 | Last updated: August 19 2006 03:00
What noise can you hear right now? Birdsong? The buzzing of an insect against the windowpane? Wind rustling through leaves? Or is it a loud mobile-phone conversation in the street? A police siren? The beep-beep of a lorry reversing?

“Britain’s cities are getting noisier and noisier,” says Deborah Withington, professor of auditory neuroscience at the University of Leeds. “The level of noise in cities is sometimes so high it’s hard to have a conversation. It’s to do with the density of population, the density of traffic and the fact that there are more and more electronic-type sounds like car alarms, burglar alarms, sirens…”

Noise was described in 1959 as the “forgotten pollutant” by John Connell, who went on to found the Noise Abatement Society. Connell’s big victory was the banning of night flights into Heathrow (to make his point he went with a group of journalists to the home of Duncan Sandys, then minister for aviation, at 3am and woke him by knocking loudly on his door). He is also the man behind such noise-reduction measures as rubber dustbin lids and plastic milk crates. But even Connell, who died nine years ago, would have been flummoxed by urban noise today. “It’s now cheap and easy to make a device that emits a single electronic tone,” says Withington. “Things are being added all the time and almost nothing is being taken away.”

“The world is a much, much noisier place than it was 20 years ago,” says Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology and health at the University of Lancaster. “We have open-plan offices, aircraft, traffic … and we are becoming slightly more extrovert with each other. In order to get ahead you have to be less timid.”

Peter Wakeham, present-day director of the Noise Abatement Society, agrees: “You can’t see noise, you can’t taste it and until it affects you, you don’t notice it. But noise pollution affects your health in so many ways.”

One man with first-hand experience is Dave Whittel, a firefighter based in Clacton, Essex. Whittel had lived for 12 years in the village of Ardleigh (population 200) in a house about 50ft from the London to Norwich train line. Last August, he returned from holiday to find what remained of his rural quiet shattered. New safety regulations meant two whistleboards had been erected on the line on either side of his house where public footpaths cross the tracks. These require train drivers to sound their horns as they approach the crossings.

“The sound of the whistles was like a HGV lorry sounding its horn outside your bedroom window every 10 minutes, 24/7,” says Whittel. “There are 136 trains a day passing the house between 5.30 in the morning and half past midnight and then goods trains during the night and they all have to sound their horns. And this was for one footpath that was not being used and another that was used by about six people a year.”

Unsurprisingly, Whittel’s sleep was severely affected. He was signed off work for six weeks. (“You would physically jump every time it happened,” he says.) He campaigned hard for the whistleboards to be removed and, with the help of his local council, last month had a small victory when, for an experimental six-month period, the footpaths were closed and the boards taken down. He is now back at work but still can work only day shifts. “It has affected my health badly,” he says.

Withington has taken an interest in cases like Whittel’s. “At first I thought, ‘You knew there was a railway there when you bought your house at the side of the track’ but then I found there was a real problem. The horns on some of the new rolling stock are much louder and the problem comes from the spill noise to the side of the track. Plus, unwanted noise annoys. People are tense all the time waiting for it to go off. It takes over their lives completely. It’s a terrible situation to be in.”

“Noise pollution isn’t just about ambulances, music, people talking loudly and so on,” says Cary Cooper. “Background noise causes you stress when it isn’t continuous, when it undulates, goes up and down in pitch of volume, isn’t always there. It’s not the hum you get from, say, living next to a motorway that’s the problem - in fact some people find that quite soothing. It’s when a noise gets louder and then disappears in a non-rhythmic way that it becomes stressful; when it is unexpected, unpredictable.

“It’s all about control. Take iPods, for example. In terms of decibels, the sound going into your ear when you wear iPod headphones is a lot louder than the tss-tss-tss sound you hear when you sit next to someone wearing headphones on the bus. But which is more annoying? You can control your sound. You can’t control theirs.”

“I worry a lot,” says Wakeham, “about how other people are forced to hear unwanted noise. Sadly, the days of love thy neighbour are gone. People are not considerate any more. Don’t get me wrong. I love my rock ‘n’ roll and I still wear winkle-pickers but I don’t force my music on other people.”

It’s a sunny weekday afternoon in Hackney, east London, and in effect we’re doing just that. I am with Tony Grant, who is proudly showing me the in-car sound system he has rigged up in his gleaming, green Range Rover. There are tweeter and mid-range speakers in each of the four doors, a pre-amplifier in the glove compartment and, in the boot, two more amplifiers and a single, box-mounted bass speaker, about 15 inches in diameter, that vibrates like a bass drum when the music is turned up.

And, believe me, it is turned up. We’re listening to Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” and I’m hearing it in a totally new way. The sound itself is crystal clear (afterwards my own car stereo sounds like a transistor radio by comparison). But it’s the bass that moves you, literally. The vibration runs through the chassis of the car, into your seat and up through your body. You are feeling the music as well as hearing it. It’s not an unpleasant feeling but I don’t know if I could face a long car journey with it on all the time.

It soon transpires that I am not going to. Disappointingly, for Grant at least, the Range Rover’s cooling pump broke the night before and, rather than bombing down the motorway with the music on full blast, we are being towed at about 5mph through one of the area’s main shopping streets - with the music on full blast. It feels a little like the circus has come to town.

On the pavement the reaction splits immaculately down demographic lines. Grant’s is one of those cars whose bass sound vibrates through the road when they are next to you at the lights and, despite the lack-of-coolness that comes with being pulled along by a tow truck, it attracts attention. Young men love it, give him the thumbs up and sing along to the Jamaican reggae he’s switched to. Young women give us a brief glance and raise their eyebrows in that “what can you expect from boys?” kind of way. Older people of both sexes, in other words anyone over about 25, look on disapprovingly.

Grant is having a great time. As the bass pounds through the car he makes little adjustments to the mix, grinning as he gets it just right. “That’s the buzz,” he says, sitting back and watching Hackney’s shoppers overtake us on the pavement. When we stop I ask him whether he thinks people might find the music he plays annoying. “I don’t think so, not if you keep moving. Sure, you can hear the sound coming but it passes. But if you stop, sometimes the slightest sound gets to them. That happens to me. In that case I wouldn’t do it.”

Grant sees himself a little like a performer. He’d like to be a DJ but he has trouble with reading. This is what he knows how to do. “When I am driving, say on a Sunday evening, I clean my car, I am in a good mood and, depending on where I am, I choose some music. In the West End or round the City, you know, there are a lot of different nationalities so I play something everyone knows, like Michael Jackson or … ” He clicks his fingers a couple of times, trying to remember the name. ” … Will Young. But if I am round here [in Hackney] I would play Jamaican culture music … ” He smiles and a gold tooth in his mouth catches the sun. ” … Like Bob Marley and the Wailers or Richie Spice.

“It makes you feel good when you are enjoying it and someone else is enjoying it and people start dancing on the pavement,” he continues. “The other day even this little baby was dancing.

“It can be a noisy living in London,” he says, “but it’s London. That’s what makes the city. If you can’t live with the noise,” he grins, “you’re better off in Essex or somewhere like that.”

James and Jenny (not their real names) do live in Essex but they may not share Grant’s tranquil vision of their county. The couple have in effect been driven out of their ground-floor flat by noisy neighbours moving in above them.

“It started about eight months ago,” says James, “when some new people moved in. At first it was quite friendly - we’d say hello and so on - but soon we started hearing techno music coming from the flat, regularly and really loud. One of the guys up there is a DJ and he has great equipment, which means the sound shakes our ceiling. They do it any time of day.”

One of the couple would go upstairs and request the volume be turned down but “they didn’t like to turn it down, it was either full-on or they would just turn it off completely and stomp around angrily above our heads. The other problem was that it was impossible to tell how many people were living there - three or seven or eight - it kept changing, so you would reason with one person and then never see them again.”

Things took a turn for the worse one Saturday morning in the spring. “We were lying in bed at 8am and the music came on. There was a new guy up there by this time, very threatening-looking. I knocked on the door but he wouldn’t open it. So I decided to take matters into my own hands, perhaps something I shouldn’t have done, and turned the electricity off at the mains. He came out screaming. I only switched it off for about 30 seconds but apparently that was long enough to affect their computers. As far as they were concerned, from then on it was war. They would turn the music on just to annoy us. I would come home from work and it would be quiet and then five minutes later the music would start.”

The final straw came when the tenants upstairs arrived home drunk one night. “It was about half-past midnight and we were asleep in bed. We were woken up by them crashing through the front door. I shouted ‘Shut up,’ from the bed and the threatening guy said, ‘Who are you telling to shut up? Come out here and say that to my face. I’ll break your door down.’ Then they went upstairs and put on the loudest music you have ever heard. So I called the police, which gave them a scare. I also called their landlord, who threatened not to renew their contract. Things have been better since. But we are now looking for another property.”

Wakeham reckons that 500,000 people a year in the UK move because of noise. “When something like this happens,” says James, “you become incredibly sensitive to noise. It changes your mode of life. You lose the ability to differentiate between what is outrageous and what is just the normal sound of people living upstairs.”

Yet how normal is the noise we put up with in a city? In the middle of a postwar council estate just west of the City is a simple brick building. This is the Bunhill Meeting House, built on the spot where Quakers have met for regular silent worship since the 17th century. George Fox, one of the founders of Quakerism, is buried next door. It is 11am on a Sunday and five or six people are sitting quietly in a simply painted room waiting for the service to begin. Quakers have no clergy or services in the traditional sense. Instead, they meet and sit in silence for an hour. Anyone can speak if they feel the call to but there is no obligation and often the hour passes without anything being said at all.

This is my first Quaker meeting and I am quietly apprehensive. When I told a friend I was going, his response was “Oh no. Silence for me means either anger or boredom.”

Indeed, at first it is uncomfortable, like being in detention or disgrace. But gradually you become more aware of the sounds around you and the feelings soften. The low rumble of an aircraft passes overhead. Outside the window children from the estate are playing. One of them drags a piece of wood along the pavement, making a jerky, scraping sound. Someone has put some music on in a nearby flat. I can hear birds in the trees and, this being London, the inevitable police siren in the distance. Someone starts to drill next door.

Inside the room, the silence has settled round us like a blanket. About 10 minutes has passed and from our little oasis of calm the sounds outside seem to grow in clarity until I can sense quite distinctly their different distances from us - their pitches, timbres, volumes and qualities. It is like listening to an orchestra playing. I find myself looking forward to hearing the plank scraping past again. Even the drill has lost its capacity to annoy.

Towards the end of the meeting a couple of people say something but otherwise we have spent 60 minutes sitting quietly. It’s a rare and humbling experience and somehow shows you a new way of listening to the city. Maybe, I think to myself, living with noise would be easier if we all made a little time to quieten down.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006

Posted at 3:25 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

By Howard W. French

Published: August 18, 2006

SHANGHAI Junichiro Koizumi has gotten one thing supremely right throughout his long tenure as prime minister of Japan. Tragedy, to paraphrase him, inevitably follows periods of isolation.
Koizumi has expended great energy dragging Japan out of its predisposition to aloofness, pushing for a greater role in world affairs - from the United Nations, where the country seeks a seat on the Security Council, to Iraq, where it stood alongside the United States, with a deployment of troops that may have seemed timidly symbolic to some, but was groundbreaking nonetheless.
Unfortunately for Japan, with one of his last acts as prime minister, Koizumi has made sure that scarcely any of this will be remembered. Boiled down to its essentials, any concise take on his place in history will begin and may even end with his singular obstinacy in visiting Yasukuni Jinja, the controversial shrine to the soldiers who have fallen in Japan’s modern wars, and most famously 14 Class A war criminals.
Koizumi’s boldness in ignoring the sensibilities of his neighbors, whose elderly still have vivid memories of marauding, raping, massacring and chemical and biological weapons-using Japanese Imperial troops, will carry far more weight in this region and beyond than his efforts to re-engage the world. His actions have pretty much sealed the question of Security Council membership, given that China already sits on the body, where it enjoys a veto. And he has put his country in so deep a hole, diplomatically speaking, that his presumed successor, Shinzo Abe, may find himself incapable of following the old political dictum that says that when one finds oneself in such a hole, the most important thing is to stop digging.
How could such a clever man have committed such a blunder, as gratuitous as it is damaging?
The answer lies buried deep in the Japanese political culture, which has made a habit of dishonesty, and even of nihilism.
To sense the emptiness at work in Koizumi’s Yasukuni policy, one need only listen to his rhetoric. Over and over in recent weeks the prime minister has repeated two justifications for a visit to the war shrine on Aug. 15, the day of Japan’s surrender in World War II, that was all but pre-announced. Not to go, Koizumi has said, would be to cave in to pressure from China, which is habitually cast in the adversary’s role in today’s Japan, despite the striking mutual dependency of the two countries’ economies.
(Democratic South Korea, which objects just as vehemently but makes a less apt villain, usually goes unmentioned.) Secondly, Koizumi says that he made a pledge to visit Yasukuni on the anniversary of the surrender. “It’s important to honor pledges, isn’t it?” he has often asked.
If honor had anything to do with this, Japan’s leaders would come clean on their country’s war history, and be done with a sad spectacle that demeans a country of great achievements, both cultural and economic. The truth, however, is that the history of the Liberal Democratic Party, the group that has enjoyed a virtual hammerlock on power in Japan since 1955 makes honesty in matters regarding the war painfully difficult.

For the full article, please see the link below:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/18/news/letter.php

Posted at 1:20 PM · Comments (2)

Copyright The Los Angeles Times
August 6, 2006

Joe Francis, the founder of the “Girls Gone Wild” empire, is humiliating me. He has my face pressed against the hood of a car, my arms twisted hard behind my back. He’s pushing himself against me, shouting: “This is what they did to me in Panama City!”

It’s after 3 a.m. and we’re in a parking lot on the outskirts of Chicago. Electronic music is buzzing from the nightclub across the street, mixing easily with the laughter of the guys who are watching this, this me-pinned-and-helpless thing.

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Francis isn’t laughing.

He has turned on me, and I don’t know why. He’s going on and on about Panama City Beach, the spring break spot in northern Florida where Bay County sheriff’s deputies arrested him three years ago on charges of racketeering, drug trafficking and promoting the sexual performance of a child. As he yells, I wonder if this is a flashback, or if he’s punishing me for being the only blond in sight who’s not wearing a thong. This much is certain: He’s got at least 80 pounds on me and I’m thinking he’s about to break my left arm. My eyes start to stream tears.

This is not what I anticipated when I signed up for a tour of Joe Francis’ world. I’ve been with him nonstop since early afternoon, listening as he teases employees, flying on his private jet, eating fast food and watching young women hurl themselves against his 6-foot-2-inch frame, declaring, “We want to go wild!”

Tonight we had spent almost five hours in a sweaty nightclub, crowded with 2,500 very young and very drunk people. Clubs like this are fertile fields for Francis. He’s made a fortune selling videos of women who agree to flash their breasts and French-kiss their friends for the cameras. In exchange, a girl who goes wild will receive a T-shirt, a pair of panties, maybe a trucker hat. It had been a typical night for him. He’d scoured the club, recruiting young and, for the most part, intoxicated women. Because filming wasn’t allowed inside, he and his newly discovered entourage had stepped outside, heading for the confines of a “Girls Gone Wild” tour bus parked across the street.

Before climbing aboard, he walks in my direction, and the next thing I know, he’s acting out his 2003 arrest on me.

I wriggle free and punch him in the face, closed-fist but not too hard.

“Damn,” bystanders say. Francis barely blinks. He snatches at my notebook. He is amped, his broad face sneering as he does a sort of boxer’s skip around me, jabbering, grabbing at my arms and my stomach as I try to move away, clutching my notebook to my chest. He stabs a finger in my face, shouting, “You don’t care about the 1st Amendment. I care about the 1st Amendment, but you are the kind of reporter who doesn’t care.”

Maybe you’ve seen the “Girls Gone Wild” infomercials that run on late-night cable, advertising mail-order videos of women exposing themselves (“and more!” as the jackets promise). Francis didn’t invent the notion of spring break�and all the binge drinking, flurried hookups, wet T-shirt contests and general you-only-live-once exhibitionism that it entails�but he and his company, Mantra Entertainment, have affixed themselves to this youthful domain and transmitted its middle-American hedonism to the world. By packaging and dispersing it, people close to Francis tell me, Mantra does as much as $40 million a year in sales.

At 33, and after almost a decade as the king of soft porn, Francis says he wants to leave this twilight existence and wade into the mainstream. He is quick to list the projects he says he has in the works: a feature-length film, a series of “Girls Gone Wild” ocean cruises, a “Girls Gone Wild” apparel line and a chain of “Girls Gone Wild” restaurants. He says he’s producing a new line of videos called “Flirt” that will be racy, but not explicit, and could be sold in mass-market retail outlets such as Wal-Mart and Target.

In short, Francis wants to insinuate himself and his view of the world into the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the vacations you take and the entertainment�filmed and glossy�that you consume. He sees “Girls Gone Wild” as the ultimate lifestyle brand. “Sex sells everything,” he says. “It drives every buying decision … I hate to get too deep and philosophical here, but only the guys with the greatest sexual appetites are the ones who are the most driven and most successful.”

Mantra’s headquarters are in Santa Monica, just down the street from MTV, and the d�cor is bachelor hip: flat-screen TVs, mod lighting, bowls of candy. Francis doesn’t show up every day. That, he says, is because a big part of his job is simply to be seen, and not in the office. He doesn’t often visit the “Girls Gone Wild” call center in Inglewood, either. I tag along on a day that employees there get the rare treat of a visit from the boss. Avoiding eye contact, wearing a T-shirt and sneakers, Francis looks more like a kid visiting his father’s office than the chief executive of his own company. But when he pushes through the double doors, his employees gasp.

“Joe Francis. Wow, I love your work,” says one flabbergasted young man who passes him in the hall. Francis smiles uneasily and doesn’t stop as the man keeps muttering, “Wow. Wow.”

The call center, just past Los Angeles International Airport, is staffed by rotating shifts of 250 employees who earn $9 an hour, plus commission, to hawk “Girls Gone Wild” videos, which sell for as little as $9.99 each. A whiteboard on the wall sets the agenda: “Push That Porn!!!”

The workers are mostly young and African American, and the videos they’re pushing are almost exclusively of twentysomething white girls. “You like watching triple-X, right? You seen our doggy-style videos? Well, I’m going to send you out eight of the hottest videos of the year,” goes the pitch.

Francis serves in many of the videos as a playboy host, surrounded by members of the opposite sex who appear to be titillated by his presence. “Spring Break 2005: Anything Goes!” is like most of Mantra’s video products. Women in bikinis giggle as they stare into the camera and explain just how wild their vacations are getting: group showers, oral sex in bars with strangers, topless dancing. One girl, surrounded by her friends, explains, “I’m ready and willing, and I’m a dirty slut.”

For “Spring Break 2005,” Francis and his crew prowled the beaches of Miami, South Padre Island, Canc�n and other sunny destinations. They filmed women not just taking off their tops but taking it all off, and having sex with one another. Francis is often on the other side of the camera, asking sweetly if he can hold the girls’ tops, inquiring about their class schedules, chiding them for being “so naughty,” saying he wants to see if they’ve shaved their genitals, begging them to play with their breasts and bend over to expose their thong underwear. They comply.

Francis has aimed his cameras at a generation whose notions of privacy and sexuality are different from any other. Nursed on MySpace profiles and reality television, many young people today are comfortable with being perpetually photographed and having those images posted on the Internet for anyone to see. The boundaries that once contained sexuality have also fallen away. Whether it’s 13-year-olds watching a Britney Spears video, 16-year-olds getting their pubic hair waxed to emulate porn stars or 17-year-olds viewing videos of celebrities performing the most intimate acts, youth culture is soaked in sexuality.

Francis has manufactured his own celebrity. He has become famous not just by selling soft porn but by affiliating himself with a tribe whose notoriety is perpetuated by the tabloids. He’s been romantically linked to heiress Paris Hilton and Kimberly Stewart, Rod Stewart’s daughter, and the gossip columns have reported that he’s hosted Lindsay Lohan, Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn at his house in Mexico.

Until recently, the New York Post’s Page Six, the paper of record for this world, treated Francis as an inconsequential hanger-on. Then, in March, Francis hosted a bachelor party in Mexico for Richard Johnson, the page’s editor, and within weeks Page Six was wondering if he could be the next Hugh Hefner and even a likely candidate to buy Playboy.

Francis happily acknowledges that he courts attention. The effort, he says, is not about his ego but about selling his product. “Everything that gets covered in my name drives the business,” he says. “The two are synonymous. You have to play the image up.”

Francis, who grew up in Laguna Beach and went to USC, got his start in the gritty world of reality television, working as a production assistant on “Real TV,” a syndicated show of home-video bloopers. He says he came up with the idea for his first commercial video venture after noticing that much of the material submitted for the show was too violent or explicit for network television. In 1997, using $50,000 in credit card debt, he released “Banned From Television,” a compilation of footage of gruesome accidents�shark attacks, train wrecks and general gore. Then Francis moved on, releasing the first “Girls Gone Wild” in 1998.

In 2000, Les Haber, a producer who had worked with Francis on “Real TV,” sued for breach of implied contract, breach of confidence and unjust enrichment. He accused Francis of stealing the idea for “Banned From Television” after Haber had pitched it to Francis as a potential partner. A jury agreed and found Francis and his company liable for $3.5 million; later the two sides settled for an undisclosed sum.

It seems like Francis spends a lot of money on lawyers. I guess that comes with the territory of filming strangers who take off their clothes. More than a dozen women have sued him, alleging that his company used images of them exposing their bodies on “Girls Gone Wild” videos, box covers and infomercials without their permission. Only a few have convinced the courts that they were unwitting victims. For the most part, judges and juries have sided with Francis’ 1st Amendment argument that the plaintiffs’ images were captured in public places and that the company was free to use them as it pleased, particularly in light of the fact that the women had signed waivers.

In Panama City Beach, his lawyers successfully fought another battle. Authorities had filed a 77-count complaint in state circuit court that accused Francis and his crew of gathering a group of minors�a 16-year-old and four 17-year-olds�and taking them to the Chateau Motel. There Francis paid two of the girls $100 each to make out in the shower while his crew videotaped them and told two of the girls he would pay them $50 each to touch his penis, according to the complaint. Francis pleaded not guilty to all charges.

After sheriff’s deputies arrested him, he spent a night in jail. The deputies impounded his Gulfstream jet, his silver Ferrari and a stockpile of footage that authorities say shows him encouraging underage girls to engage in sexual activity. (Francis tried to use the scandal to a profitable end, coming out with “Girls Gone Wild: The Seized Video,” featuring scenes filmed in Panama City Beach.) His lawyers asked a judge to suppress all the evidence, claiming it was illegally confiscated, and she agreed.

The parents of four of the girls in the Chateau Motel case filed a civil lawsuit in federal court accusing Francis and his company of a raft of offenses, including child abuse and sexual exploitation. Eleven months ago, FBI agents conducted a search of Mantra’s offices, acting on a warrant issued in Washington. People close to the investigation say the FBI is looking at Mantra in connection with the alleged filming of underage girls. Francis’ lawyer, Michael Kerry Burke, says Mantra is aware of the investigation and that similar warrants have been served on other companies.

The more time I spend with Francis, the more I suspect that for all his talk of living the dream, he’s pretending at enthusiasm. His franchise is by its nature a constant party, and it can be exhausting. Two tour buses, splashed with the “Girls Gone Wild” logo, crisscross the country every day in search of the latest and hottest footage for the millions of videos the company sells each year. Club promoters pay Mantra up to $10,000 a night for the privilege of hosting Francis’ film crews, sure to draw big crowds. And the money keeps pouring in.

But the women are changing, Francis tells me, and that makes him sad. In the beginning, when “Girls Gone Wild” cameramen first popped up in clubs, the women who revealed themselves seemed innocent�surprised, even, by their own spontaneity. Now that the brand is so pervasive, the women who participate increasingly appear to be calculating exhibitionists, hoping that an appearance on a video might catapult them to Paris Hilton-like fame.

And Francis is getting a bit old for spring break. He says he’s tiring of the eternal vacation. “It’s really the worst thing, in my mind,” he says, comparing it to a trade show or a convention. “It’s fun for everybody else but me. I just get hounded by kids. It was more fun not being famous on spring break.” What’s more, the press has been omnipresent and, he says, too critical. “I’ve been anally raped over and over by the media.”

It’s an odd sort of thing for him to say. In January 2004, as news reports recounted, he was forced at gunpoint to simulate sodomizing himself with a vibrator as an intruder videotaped him in his Bel-Air mansion. A 28-year-old named Darnell Riley was arrested 14 months later, after police received a tip from Paris Hilton. Riley pleaded guilty to robbery and attempted extortion and was sentenced to 10 years and eight months. He is serving his time in Corcoran State Prison.

On his jet, Joe Francis flies above America, fast asleep, curled up on a foldout leather bench and swaddled in crisp white sheets. His tan face is still, his large mouth slack. The Gulfstream is stocked to cater to his needs�a Sony PlayStation, stacks of newspapers and magazines, a cabinet crammed with liquor and soft drinks and drawers full of snacks such as gummy bears, mesquite barbecue potato chips, M&M’s and sugarless gum. Nearby, his crew of young men sit quietly, careful not to disturb him.

When he wakes from his nap, Francis pads in white socks to the bathroom. There the fixtures shimmer and the hand towels are plush, white and stitched with his initials in gold thread. His crew is deferential to him, and when he tells them that I am the new “Girls Gone Wild” topless model, they laugh obediently, even though the joke is flat from overuse.

Francis has the confidence, charm and sly intelligence of a back-slapping fraternity leader. He can be persuasive, to a degree, when he argues that “Girls Gone Wild” is just something that gives a good time to all. On the plane, his feet kicked up onto the seat in front of him, he turns to me and ponders what kind of footage his crew will gather that night. He hopes the girls will be pretty, he says. Pretty and wild. He says he loves women, is crazy about them. But sometimes it doesn’t sound as though he is. The words he chooses, the stories he tells�they make a different point.

“My favorite is explaining to dumb chicks why the qwerty keyboard is called a qwerty keyboard, and why the letters aren’t in order,” he tells me. “They’re, like, 18 years old, and they’re, like, ‘Wait a minute, there were typewriters?’ And you got to start there.”

I give him a look that says I have no idea what he’s talking about. I haven’t spent much time with 18-year-old girls lately, but the ones I know have usually heard of typewriters. But a qwerty keyboard? Never heard of it.

His eyes register my blank stare and he pounces, full of glee. “Hold on,” he says excitedly. “You are a writer for the L.A. Times and you don’t know this answer to this question?” He is shouting, turning to the back of the plane, making sure that everyone hears. “Unbelievable, she’s 29 years old and she doesn’t know about the qwerty keyboard!” It’s a game, it seems. He’s being playful. Sort of.

“She’s going to slaughter me now,” he shouts to the group as I keep smiling, writing in my notebook, tape recorder running. Apparently, he wants more of a reaction. He’s pantomiming me typing furiously, writing an article.

“She’s going to be looking at her keyboard going, ‘Ah, you think you’re so smart now.’ Qwerty keyboard. Who’s smart now?” He sounds happy. “She’s going to be playing that tape back. It’s going to be echoing in her head. Qwerty, qwerty, qwerty. She’s going to go all psycho.”

In the early ’90s, when I was a high school sophomore in Iowa, two senior boys bought themselves a laminating machine and founded an association they named, simply, “The Horny Club.” To gain admittance, girls had to unbutton their shirts, unhinge their bras and bare their breasts for a minimum of 10 seconds. They were rewarded with a laminated membership card and a ride whenever they needed one in the cofounder’s 1989 red Trans Am.

The two seniors zeroed in on my friends, who were rebellious and too young to drive. I wasn’t interested. Although I had often gone skinny-dipping with large groups of kids, the idea of taking off my shirt for two dorky guys in exchange for a badge seemed silly. No one would fall for that.

Then one summer day, my best friend and I were walking to the video store when the Trans Am pulled up. The owner of the laminating machine rolled down the window and pointed to my friend, saying, “She can get in, but Claire, you can’t.” I turned to her, shocked. She was a shy, straight-A student. Why would she do it? Her answer: “Just for fun.”

I know that Francis’ assertion that women bare all for “Girls Gone Wild” because they enjoy it�while undeniably self-serving�is at least partly true. But I find myself asking the same question I had put to my friend back in Iowa: Why?

Francis doesn’t have an answer. “I’ve never focused on why they do it,” he says. He rattles off suggestions: “It’s empowering, it’s freedom.” Would he do it, I ask? “Probably not,” he responds. “I’m too shy.”

I call Vicki Mayer, a sociologist and Tulane University assistant professor, for guidance. Mayer teaches a class on the nudity rituals that take place on New Orleans’ infamous Bourbon Street. She has studied and written about “Girls Gone Wild,” and she contends that it’s simplistic to say that Mantra takes advantage of women. “For some women this is liberating, for some women this is something they do on a goof or for a lark to show friends they can, for some it’s a way of flirting with the cameramen,” Mayer says.

Francis and his staff maintain that it’s the “girl next door” they seek out for their videos. In reality, the “Girls Gone Wild” girl is almost always slender and young, with nice teeth and very carefully groomed private parts. At the same time, Mantra recruits hard-working and attractive young men who will be able to sweet-talk women into taking their clothes off for the cameras. (Mantra has released several “Guys Gone Wild” DVDs filmed by female camera crews, but they have not sold as well.)

Mayer has studied the young cameramen, who, she says, often sign up because they hope to break into Hollywood. Usually, she says, they end up disillusioned after spending night after night with women who lose their inhibitions for a T-shirt. “As much as it would be easy to see this as a simple relationship of men treating women a certain way, there are mutual relations of exploitation. I kind of feel like both sides could be seen as exploited.”

She’s concluded that the winners are “the owners of these companies who are contracting cheap labor and free talent for a media product.”

Francis arrives at the nightclub outside Chicago and is waved past a long line of people that snakes in front of the low-slung building. His crew follows him, single file, as he pushes his way through crowds of young women encased in a synthetic Victoria’s Secret sexuality and swarms of young men who, though pimple-faced, exude an Abercrombie & Fitch confidence.

His entourage heads for the bar, bypassing an expanse of empty tables, to climb up to a narrow platform surrounded by a metal fence. This is the VIP section. Women in fishnets greet the crew wearing “Girls Gone Wild” tank tops and not much else. They are writhing against one another, their faces fixed in dazed sexual stares. Everyone clusters around a small table stocked with Red Bull, vodka and pitchers of fruity punch. When I turn to the flock of pretty girls, Jillian Vangeertry, a 21-year-old student, offers me a warm smile. I feel as if I’m in a bed of kittens. Why, I ask, is she here?

“Anybody enjoys the attention. T-shirts, hats�we got all the accessories,” she says. I ask if she plans on going wild for the cameras later. She shrugs. “If you do it, you do it,” she says confidently. “You can’t complain later. It’s almost like your 15 minutes of fame.”

I sip my awful fruity cocktail, one of two that I’ll nurse that evening, and turn to Francis’ road manager, Chris Parisi. He says his boss is nothing short of brilliant. “He created a monster: the name, the image, the brand�he created something that everybody knows or wants to be a part of. Even my dad knows ‘Girls Gone Wild.’ The name itself is so powerful, and he’s powerful. They all want to feel like they are a part of Joe’s world.”

Francis returns from his dance-floor foray. He’s hyper, like a kid on sugar, talking fast. He says he’s discovered the ultimate quarry: a girl who says she will be 17 for just a few more hours and who wants to get wild for the cameras the minute she’s legal. “Girls Gone Wild” crew members can receive a bonus of $1,000 if they discover such a treasure, he shouts happily.

I follow Francis and his bodyguard through the crowd to find Kaitlyn Bultema. She’s dancing on a podium and leaps off at the sight of Francis. She’s wearing a skirt-and-shirt ensemble that exposes her stomach, most of her breasts and much of her bottom. I ask her why she wants to appear on “Girls Gone Wild” and she looks me in the eye and says, “I want everybody to see me because I’m hot.”

It’s then that it hits me: This is so much bigger than Francis. In a culture where cheap and portable video technology lets everyone play at stardom, and where America’s voyeuristic appetite for reality television seems insatiable, teenagers, like the ones in this club, see cameras as validation. “Most guys want to have sex with me and maybe I could meet one new guy, but if I get filmed everyone could see me,” Bultema says. “If you do this, you might get noticed by somebody�to be an actress or a model.”

I ask her why she wants to get noticed. “You want people to say, ‘Hey, I saw you.’ Everybody wants to be famous in some way. Getting famous will get me anything I want. If I walk into somebody’s house and said, ‘Give me this,’ I could have it.”

Above the dance floor, the stage is full of girls who rotate, twist and shimmy their way up and down three strip poles. One of them is Jannel Szyszka, a petite 18-year-old who prances around the stage like a star. At her feet, a crowd of hundreds is gyrating to the pounding house music. Dozens of polo-shirted boys shout up to her, making requests like “shake your titties” and “get crunk” (meaning crazy-drunk).

Szyszka tells me later that as she was spinning around the strip pole that night, Francis appeared, grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him. “You are so going on the bus later,” she recalls Francis saying. “I was like, ‘Um, OK.’ I was shocked. I was like, ‘Whoa�Joe’s, like, trying to talk to me, like out of all the girls in here.’” Francis invited her back to the VIP area to do shots with him, she says, and she said yes.

Szyszka says the more shots she drank, the cloudier her judgment became. She says she agreed to join Francis and his crew on the “Girls Gone Wild” bus. “I thought ‘Girls Gone Wild’ was like flashing, and I thought I would flash them and be done. And so when I’m walking to the bus, that’s all I’m thinking is going to happen.”

At first she felt comfortable, she says. Inebriated and excited, she says she was led to the back of the bus, to a small bedroom. The double bed, with its neatly folded iridescent purple sheets, takes up most of the room. A flat-screen TV faces the bed, and cabinets are filled with remote controls, lubricants, condoms, sex toys in plastic bags, baby oil, a DVD called “How to be a Player” and a clipboard full of waivers for girls to sign. A small bathroom is off to the side, with a half-sized shower with faux marble tiling, and on the floor of the shower is a crate holding cheap and fruity-flavored rum, whiskey, tequila and Kool-Aid.

Footage from that night shows a close-up of Szyszka’s driver’s license, proving she’s not a minor. The camera then captures Szyszka lying on the bed. Her nails are chipped, her eyes coated with makeup. Following a camerman’s instructions, she shows her breasts and says, “Girls Gone Wild.” She seems shy but willing. She smiles. The unseen cameraman asks her to take off her shirt, her skirt, then her underwear. She sprawls on the bed, her legs open. At his suggestion, she masturbates with a dildo, saying repeatedly that it hurts but also feels good. Francis enters the room at certain points and you hear his voice, low and flirtatious, telling her, “You are so adorable.” When she says she’s a virgin, he responds: “Great. You won’t be after my cameraman gets done with you.”

When I talk to Szyszka seven days later, she says she “didn’t quite realize” she was being filmed. “But I didn’t care because I was drunk and who cares?” Then she adds: “It didn’t feel good to me at all, but I was totally faking it because I was on ‘Girls Gone Wild.’”

Eventually, Szyszka says, Francis told the cameraman to leave and pushed her back on the bed, undid his jeans and climbed on top of her. “I told him it hurt, and he kept doing it. And I keep telling him it hurts. I said, ‘No’ twice in the beginning, and during I started saying, ‘Oh, my god, it hurts.’ I kept telling him it hurt, but he kept going, and he said he was sorry but kissed me so I wouldn’t keep talking.”

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Copyright Spiegel

Carsten Volkery in Havana, Cuba

Accusations, arrests, executions — the Cuban revolution isn’t known for handling its critics gently. The spectrum of punishments ranges from beatings to prison in Guantánamo, where prisoners are served mud soup.

We’re On The Good Track? Don’t say that to Cuba’s dozens of jailed dissidents.
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AFP
We’re On The Good Track? Don’t say that to Cuba’s dozens of jailed dissidents.
Oswaldo Paya sits in his living room in Havana’s Cerro district. The door is locked and the window shutters are closed. Pictures of his three children hang on the wall next to a framed award certificate — the Sacharov Prize the European Union’s parliament awarded him for his commitment to human rights. Paya sways nervously back and forth on his rocking chair. He wipes his brow with a handkerchief. “It’ll start in a moment,” he says.

The Cuban national hymn blasts from loudspeakers outside as he gives an interview to European journalists. Paya gets up and peers through a gap in the shutters. Cuban flags hang suspended on the walls of the building opposite. A group of people stands in front of the building and yells insults in his direction. “You worm!” they holler. “Long live the Revolution!” Paya asks his visitors not to take any pictures. He doesn’t want to provoke anyone. In the past demonstrators have vandalized his house, but this time there is no physical violence.

The Cuban version of the medieval pillory is called “Acto de Repudio” — act of repulsion. Paya is Cuba’s most well-known dissident and he often has to endure this kind of treatment. The government regularly drums together groups of people and urges them to pay visits to critical citizens and to brand them as counter-revolutionaries. Usually undercover policemen or other strangers are recruited for the purpose. Sometimes the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution pressures neighbors to do the job. “Afterwards a few of them come by and say they’re sorry,” says Jaime Leygonier, a journalist critical of the regime.

“The counter-revolutionaries are under control”

This method of alienating and humiliating dissidents helps nourish the culture of fear that enables Castro’s regime to continue ruling the tropical island 47 years after the dictator took power. The harsh treatment of non-conformists isn’t likely to change after the temporary transfer of power to Fidel Castro’s younger brother Raul. In fact, the opposition’s current options are even more restricted than they were before. Castro’s so-called “Rapid Deployment Brigades” have stepped up their presence in order to intimidate would-be demonstrators.

CUBA: A VISIT WITH CUBA’S PERSECUTED
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True, some dissidents expect that Raul will implement economic reforms if Fidel should not return to office — but only in order to stabilize the one-party rule of the Communist Party. Fidel’s younger brother is a fan of the Chinese model: capitalism yes, but without political opposition, freedom of opinion or freedom of the press.

When Paya steps outside his door, he sees slogans on the walls near his house. One reads: “In a Place that is Under Siege, Dissidence Amounts to Treason.” There is also the inevitable “Socialism or Death.” Still, it’s not so different from the US Interest Section on the Malecon promenade — that building is surrounded by wall-sized posters that compare United States President George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler.

The Cuban Revolution doesn’t handle its critics gently. “There are internal and external enemies,” explains Mario Gonzalez, a high-school teacher and the president of a “Committee for the Defense of the Revolution” in Manzanillo, on the eastern part of the island. The committees provide the grassroots foundation for the informer state — they’re the first place an informer will go to if he wants to snitch on his neighbor. There are more than 2,000 of them in Manzanillo alone — a town with 130,000 residents. The committee logo is a machete — if need be, the revolution must to be defended by violence.

There are about 30 “counter-revolutionaries” in Manzanillo, according to Gonzalez. “They’ve been identified and they’re under control.” He refuses to explain what that means exactly. He’s standing around a table under the open sky with some of his neighbors on Cuba’s national holiday, July 26. There is a flower vase on the table, and a pink cake — “el cake,” as Gonzalez says. He and his friends are celebrating the revolution. A portrait of Fidel Castro hangs on a lantern post. Gonzalez isn’t worried about what will happen if Fidel dies. “There are many Fidels among the people,” he says. “The revolution will continue.”

Lack of Western support

The Cuban opposition has a difficult time organizing. The only demonstrations worthy of mention are those organized by the regime. Nevertheless, last year, the first-ever conference was held in Havana for dissidents. Several hundred people attended, but the international press barely took notice. When Paya’s Christian Liberation Movement presented a first draft for a democratic constitution in May, the public response was even weaker. Paya blames the cult of personality that surrounds Fidel. “Read the Western media and you’ll get the impression Cuba has only one inhabitant,” he complains.

Journalist Leygonier also complains about the lack of support from the West. He’s worked as a freelance reporter since 1997. He can only publish his news items and commentary pieces abroad — on the US-based website Cubanet.org. He receives five dollars for each piece — but the pay doesn’t arrive regularly. Since he, like the vast majority of Cubans, has no Internet access, he dictates his reports to Miami by phone. Or he uses the US Interest Section’s Internet access, which has been specially set up for dissidents. The price for using the US-sponsored Internet cafe? He’s accused of being a “mercenary of the USA” — the standard accusation leveled at regime critics.

Despite their limited influence on the outside world, the dissidents believe that their strength is growing. In spring 2003, Castro ordered the most massive wave of arrests in years. Seventy-five political activists were sent to prison. A new opposition group was founded — one that attracted considerable attention. The “damas de blanco” (“women in white”) are the wives, mothers and daughters of those who were arrested. Every Sunday, after the church service, they march down Quinta Avenida in Havana’s embassy district, demanding that their relatives be released. They dress entirely in white and carry pink gladiolas and white parasols — symbols of peaceful protest — and hence represent a serious challenge to the state’s security forces.

“Castro hasn’t found a way of fighting us yet,” one of the founders of the movement, Miriam Leiva, says cheerfully. Still, some members of the group are regularly harrassed and at times kept from participating in the peaceful protests. The weekly protest has also already become the victim of one of the dreaded “acts of repulsion” that sees Castro loyalists harrassing regime critics on a grassroots level. “All of a sudden we were surrounded by 200 screaming people,” Leiva remembers. “We had to flee into the church.” But they refuse to be intimidated.

At an event last Sunday, everything went quietly. Most car drivers just passed by. Someone yelled from a window: “I admire you!” That’s the usual reaction, Leiva says. But sometimes the women go to other neighborhoods in Havana, where they distribute flowers and engage in discussions. The reactions they get show that the Cuban population is tired of being deprived of its rights, Leiva believes. The other churchgoers sympathize fully with the weekly protest. “I would do the same thing,” an older woman says. “They have no other way of making themselves be heard.”

20 years for collecting signatures

The “crime” committed by most of the 75 dissidents who were incarcerated in 2003 was the fact that the collected signatures for the Varela project, which was started by Paya. Twice already, the group has collected more than 10,000 signatures in favor of a referendum on Cuba’s political system. According to the constitution, this number of signatures obliges the Cuban government to conduct the plebicite. But the activists were thrown into prison and convicted of treason, receiving sentences of up to 20 years. Prison conditions in Cuba are bad: A former detainee of a jail in the Cuban city of Guantánamo recalls that the drinking water was so muddy you had to wait for the sand to settle before drinking it.

The arrests of the dissidents and the shooting of three men who tried to escape the island caused Cuba’s relations with the EU to fall to their lowest point yet. The EU passed a resolution sharply condemning the Cuban government’s actions. Later there were attempts at rapprochement, championed by Spain. But the frosty period continues, a European diplomat in Havana says: “The Cubans aren’t speaking to us.”

The US Interest Section also began quoting human-rights related news items on a highly visible electronic display on its building, a provocation that prompted an immediate response from Castro. Despite his country’s notorious shortage of construction materials, he immediately had 138 flagpoles set up — one for every year since the beginning of the island’s struggle for independence in the year 1868. Now, bellicose-looking black flags obscure the US Interest Section’s display.

If Fidel Castro fails to return to power because of his illness, it could provide a big boost to the opposition because acceptance of the present administration would diminish significantly. But the greatest problem remains that of even reaching the population in a country where the media is state-controlled and heavily censored. In Eastern Europe, there were printing presses, Leygonier says, so dissidents could at least print leaflets. While Paya’s signature campaign reached many people, the dissidents still don’t know how a mass movement could take shape.

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The Party of Democratic Solidarity, a Havana-based opposition group, has already warned against “false expectations.” In a statement, the party appealed to Cuba’s (temporary) new leader to implement economic reforms and allow greater civic engagement. But the party knows that a radical transformation isn’t likely — after all, the new leadership consists of Fidel’s brother and other stalwarts of the Castro regime.

So far, the two most effective ways of providing the population with an alternative worldview have been tourist contacts and contacts with Cuban exiles. That’s why most dissidents also sharply criticize the US embargo and its various intensifications, such as the travel restrictions for Cuban exiles. A July report presented by the US government’s Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba — which continues to want to enforce democratization by means of boycotts — is also viewed critically. Cuban dissidents are calling for rapprochement: Nothing would be more lethal to their country’s current regime, they claim, than hordes of US tourists and Cuban exiles.

“Bush’s plan is the best birthday gift Fidel could have gotten,” says Leiva, speaking of the Cuban dictator’s 80th birthday on August 13.

Posted at 5:38 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Slate

Posted Friday, Aug. 11, 2006

Bob Dylan’s 44th album, Modern Times, isn’t coming out until Aug. 29, but it’s already planting stories in the press. The album’s title alludes to Chaplin and possibly Sartre, but a shout out to an R&B diva born in 1980, the year of Dylan’s Saved, has already generated advance buzz. “Dylan Searches for New Soul Mate,” blared a headline from the Guardian, offering as evidence the following lines from “Thunder on the Mountain,” the album’s opening track:
I was thinking about Alicia Keys, couldn’t help from crying
When she was born in Hell’s Kitchen, I was living down the line
I’m wondering where in the world Alicia Keys could be
I been looking for her even clean through Tennessee.
Maybe Dylan looked at Keys’ Wikipedia site. Keys was indeed born in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen (when Dylan was “living down the line” in his born-again phase). Keys was asked for a sound bite about the reference, and she gushed that she was “crazy excited about it” and “honored to be on his mind.” Some Dylan watchers, still reeling from his creepy 2004 appearance in a Victoria’s Secret ad, may be a little less crazy excited. Does Keys inspire Dylan’s tears merely because, at 26, she’s way too young for him?

In fact, Keys is just the latest in a long line of black female singers who have besotted Dylan since his youth. (OK, Keys is half black, and maybe Dylan learned that from Wikipedia, too.) Dylan has long worshiped at the shrine of the black female voice, a source of musical inspiration, erotic obsession, and even religious conversion.
In the beginning, there was the mighty Mavis Staples, whose vocal on a Staples Singers record inspired the teenage Dylan to “stay up for about a week, and who, in turn, made a gospel anthem out of “Blowin’ in the Wind” after she learned that this white boy had been her fan since childhood. (The white boy had also blown harmonica on a Victoria Spivey record in 1962 and said that he was first inspired to play folk music after hearing an Odetta record.) But despite Dylan’s efforts, they were not to be the next Johnny Cash and June Carter. A couple of years ago, Staples revealed that Dylan had been the lost love of her life. “We courted for about seven years, and it was my fault that we didn’t go on and get married,” recalled Staples, who would later regret turning down his marriage proposal because she thought Dr. King wanted her to “stay black.”
Dylan stayed black anyway. In the ’60s, his attempted crossover found its way into lyrics. “Spanish Harlem Incident” : “The night is pitch black, come an’ make my/ Pale face fit into place, ah, please!”; “Outlaw Blues” : I got a woman in Jackson,/ I ain’t gonna say her name/ She’s a brown-skin woman, but I love her just the same”; and, in a lamentable image, “I Want You” : “Well, I return to the Queen of Spades. … ” By 1978, when Dylan embarked on what was cynically called his “alimony tour,” he provided spectacle by adding, along with disco arrangements and Neil Diamond-style jumpsuits, a group of African-American backup singers, who the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau, in a reference to Ray Charles’ Raelettes, dubbed “The Dylanettes.” Dylan would often wryly introduce these singers as “my ex-wife, my next wife, my girlfriend, and my fiancee.” In fact, one of the singers, Helena Springs, was not only his girlfriend but cowrote more songs with him—most of them unrecorded—than anyone else and helped inspire him to write “New Pony” and to find Jesus. Another, Carolyn Dennis (the daughter of an original Raelette, who eventually brought her mom into the lineup), became his secret wife in 1986 and gave birth to Dylan’s fifth child.
Dylan called the singers the Queens of Rhythm, and would later admit that he hid behind them to compensate for his own musical uncertainty. “I had them up there so I wouldn’t feel so bad,” he said. His born-again Christian phase lasted only a few years, but his ethnic conversion was just beginning. One foggy night in Switzerland in 1987, Dylan had a mystical experience and realized that he could deliver what the Queens of Rhythm had been giving him. “It’s almost like I heard a voice. It wasn’t even like it was me thinking it,” he recalled. “I noticed that all the people out there—I was used to them looking at the girl singers, they were good-looking girls, you know? … But when that happened, they weren’t looking at the girls anymore. They were looking at the main mic.” When Dylan found his inner soul sister, the Queens of Rhythm lost a gig.

For the entire article, please see the link below.

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Please have a look at this link. This festival is an incredible opportunity for photographers and for the people of Cambodia:
Click to read more

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An excerpt of an excellent Kristof column.

Copyright The New York Times

Three weeks ago, with President George W. Bush supplying the weaponry and moral support, Israel began bombarding Lebanon. The war has killed hundreds of people, galvanized international attention and may lead to an international force of perhaps 20,000 peacekeepers.

Three years ago, Sudan began a genocide against African tribes in its Darfur region. That war has killed hundreds of thousands of people, and it is now spreading. There is talk of UN peacekeepers someday, but none are anywhere in sight.

The moral of the story? Never, ever be born to a tribe that is victim to genocide in Africa.

Arabs have often argued that Americans have a double standard in the Middle East: We are more solicitous of casualties in Israel than in Gaza or Lebanon. I think they’re right, for a variety of reasons. (One is that terror attacks are particularly newsworthy; another is that journalists are more likely to live in Jerusalem than Gaza).

But if we have double standards, so do Arabs. I sympathize with their horror at what is happening in Lebanon, but I wish they were just as outraged when Muslims slaughter Muslims in Darfur.

Even the world as a whole has double standards. The United States and European countries are working frenetically on a UN solution in Lebanon, and there is talk of rapidly sending European peacekeepers to stop the bloodshed. In Darfur, there is nothing like as much interest in what is often considered the ultimate human crime: genocide.

The Tyndall Report, which monitors television network evening news programs, says that since the bombardment of Lebanon began, the crisis there has received more minutes of coverage on average each week than the Darfur genocide has received in total since it began in 2003.

Posted at 2:26 PM · Comments (0)

Jul. 30, 2006
Copyright The Toronto Star

Like a dove flying a gauntlet, my article flew out of my hands at 6 p.m. and landed in the next day’s paper a flightless, ugly thing. It sailed the jet streams of copy editors, senior editors, and night editors, both foreign and Chinese, losing a feather here, a quote there, a harsh edge, a word, a thought, an idea, and, eventually, its point. What I read the next morning was still, in its discussion of political theory, riskier than the state-owned China Daily’s usual fare, and that consoled me a little. But it had no bite.

Soon after I arrived as an intern at China Daily, I was asked to profile Daniel A. Bell, a Canadian professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. He teaches political philosophy, a touchy subject in China.

After a few emails and our first encounter, it dawned on me that I would need to tread controversial territory. First, there was only one reason his academics focused on China: He fell in love with a Chinese woman in the tense, pre-tragedy moments of May 1989. Second, though a communitarian and a critic of both U.S. policy and American values, he has less than glowing praise for the Party and continues to encounter various forms of censorship.

Bell had written about his teaching experiences in Beijing for Dissent magazine, a leftist American academic journal, and the article was later translated into Chinese. This prompted a storm of online commentary.

A Chinese-language newspaper ­ the weekly Freezing Point supplement of China Youth Daily, whose editors a few months ago got “clearing-housed” for political reasons ­ had profiled him already.

When I was done my first draft, one editor began to point out tidbits from that article mine did not include. She repeatedly asked me to insert them. Among such crucial detail was him lecturing at the Central Party School in Beijing and being called handsome by some girls in the audience. She also asked me to find out if he had Chinese furniture in his apartment.

Mentioning that Bell had experienced some censorship in China was itself censored, and bizarrely at that. The word “censorship” was removed and replaced with “restrictions” by one editor. Even that euphemism was obliterated in the copy that made it to print.

The editor who axed the censorship sections of my article, while listening to me list the mistakes that had been edited into my draft, turned to me and said, “I thought the most interesting part of your article was that he owned a restaurant.”

The word “revolution,” used in a quote, underwent the strangest transformation. Bell told me that May 1989 was a heady, passionate time ­ that on one hand he was in love and on the other “… she was cancelling dates for the revolution.” This was juicy and I included it.

However, after the sentence had made it through several editorial levels, it became “`cancelling dates’ for the goings-on at the time.” I’m not kidding. One editor tried to edit that ending into the direct quote. Eventually, even the reference to the month of May was removed, and it simply became 1989 ­ not passionate or particularly heady of the night editor, an Indian expatriate formerly of Singapore’s pseudo state-owned The Straits Times.

He was not the one, however, who aborted the entire section on Singapore’s authoritarian oppression; it was removed far earlier than that, though the editor made a point of noting I had not, in discussing Singapore, violated “the cardinal rules” of China Daily. I replaced the section with a less detailed, more softly worded critique, which made it through.

Hong Kong was, obviously, changed to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and China (in the same sentence) to “the mainland.” This was, as an editor offhandedly remarked, not a politicized change but a matter of style. I promptly consulted the China Daily style guide. Oops. On other points of “style,” the guide instructs its followers to use quotation marks around the title of any government official from Taiwan. And also, that “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China.”

By this time of course, the whole thing was turning into a farce. My enthusiasm at Trojan-horsing a meaningful article at this non-meaningful paper was waning. It was only such edited-in gems as “… U.S.-style democracy, as a social model to be imitated, is not so widely embraced in Asia,” that kept me going. I read that phrase and burst into tearful laughter.

“Some people in Asia embrace it,” an editor later told me without looking at me.

I knew I was asking for trouble with most of the article. This is China Daily, after all. But what could I do? They asked me to profile someone inspired to come to China by a horrible massacre and who writes about human rights. These are slightly more than trifling, removable details.

An English copy editor called me over to clarify some details; he then separated vast swathes of my article, turned to me, and said, “This is China Daily. We just don’t, you know, say this.” It seemed that some foreigners were almost more anxious to axe controversy than our Chinese colleagues.

I was in my apartment the evening before the article’s publication when I received a call from the night editor. A solid guy, that night editor. He made some good comments about cultural inaccuracies. He then made no changes to my cultural inaccuracies, but tore my copy to shreds and replaced an uncontroversial sentence with a Strunk and White-soul-destroying diamond: “It was 1989 and among the Chinese students he was hanging out with was someone he met and fell in love with: Song Bing …”

The next morning I read the awkward headline grinning at me like a naughty child: “Communitarianism, Confucianism: He’s got all that figured out.” I am, perhaps, not alone in thinking this reeks of an entertainment magazine for children heralding a new boy band, and not of a national newspaper.

Near the end I included the professor’s suggestion for Confucian-styled democratic reform: a bicameral legislature with two houses, the highest being elected by competitive exams. Sexy, huh?

Strangely, this was left untouched. The editors probably assumed anyone among China Daily’s readership who made it that far either would not understand it, would not care, or would have grown up under a democratic system.

They probably had nothing to worry about, I suppose: No one gets to the end of articles anyway.

Iain Marlow is a Canadian journalism student working at China Daily.

Posted at 2:03 PM · Comments (0)

A quick excerpt:

Great understanding is broad and unhurried; little understanding is cramped and busy. Great words are clear and limpid; little words are shrill and quarrelsome. In sleep, mens’ spirits go visiting; in waking hours, their bodies hustle. With everything they meet they become entangled . Day after day they use their minds in strife, sometimes grandiose, sometimes sly, sometimes petty. Their little fears are mean and trembly; their great fears are stunned and overwhelming. They bound off like an arrow or crossbow pelle, certain that they are the arbiters of right and wrong. They cling to their position as though they had sworn before the gods, sure that they are holding on to victory. They fade like fall and winter — such is the way they dwindle day by day. They drown in what they do — you cannot make them turn back. They grow dark, as though sealed with seals — such are the excesses of their old age. And when their minds draw near to death, nothing can restore them to light.

Posted at 3:52 PM · Comments (0)

Howard W. French - Copyright The International Herald Tribune

Published: August 4, 2006

SHANGHAI Returning to this city after an extended absence can be a jarring experience. Most jarring of all is how Shanghai, with its frenetic pace of change, redefines the word “extended.”

In my case it was a three-week vacation, and the shocks began on my very first drive through the city, which has been lit in recent days by spectral sunshine bearing down from blue and unaccustomedly clear skies.

When I left town, cranes and heavy equipment were still laboring loudly over the large work site at the end of my street. On the day of my return, as I rounded the corner, still groggy with jet lag, a casual glance in that direction was followed by an immediate double take.

The huge work site I had seen three weeks ago was now a finished hospital, sleek and gleaming and soaring skyward. The next morning, in fact, a Monday, it had opened for business and was already humming with patients and visitors.

The drive home from work that evening provided another surprise. At another huge work site, hidden in recent months behind large billboard ads for the Chinese edition of Cosmopolitan magazine, a tall building stood.

To my partial relief, the building wasn’t finished yet. But for many months I have driven this same route almost every evening, and the fact remains that from the vantage point of the street, just three weeks before, there was no sign of any building at all.

For me, jolts like these were revelations of China’s stunning growth, the growth that we all read about constantly, made palpable. And there were many more of them in the days that followed, like a drum roll of stories this week about the breakneck pace at which new subway lines are being laid underneath the proliferation of skyscrapers that in less than a generation has become today’s Shanghai.

There are many things going on here, with the striking rise of this city, as with the extraordinary boom under way in the country at large, which despite the dire headlines from the Middle East has a good claim of being, for the entire world, the story of the present generation. Among other things, this Miracle-Gro act, with real-life hospitals and office towers and bridges and five-star hotels popping into view almost like blooming flowers in time-lapse photography, is a statement on Chinese know-how.

To put the matter just as plainly as the facts deserve, these people know how to get things done.

For the entire article, please see:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/04/business/letter.php

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Copyright Barrons

IT ALL STARTED WITH MARSHALL MCLUHAN. His actual name was Herb, an embarrassing fact leaked to and printed by a gossipy newspaper, which explains why he wrote that not entirely flattering book about the media and the message, which in a nutshell sought to prove that who spread the news was more important than the news itself. It was a subtle bad-mouthing of the media that struck a chord (it was a runaway best-seller, but nothing like a Harry Potter) and people have never quite trusted the press, traditional and electronic both, ever since.

As a paid-up member of the media, we naturally take exception to Herb’s thesis and especially the nasty inferences widely drawn from it. Mistakes are made by the media, to be sure. But they’re honest ones; well, mostly. And, yes, sometimes the coverage is a bit over the top, as witness the rush to bury Fidel Castro while he still has a pulse; but then, face it: Cigar smokers are just not very popular these days.

And, we allow, there’s a tendency to indulge in pack journalism, particularly in the reporting of ill-tempered divorces and wars. Take Lebanon (granted, in its current condition, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to). Virtually every reporter filing a story from that beleaguered country contends that Hezbollah has the winning hand. If we were Hezbollah, that sort of unanimity would scare the devil out of us (although it’s hard to imagine what Hezbollah would be like devoid of the devil; maybe your local temperance union?).

Of course, it’s not easy to get a decent fix on a war when you’re busily dodging bullets and bombs and trying to get a catchy quote from one of the targets of those bullets and bombs. But there are noticeable lapses, it grieves us to say, in the way our journalistic colleagues handle less perilous stories as well. A case very much in point is the flap over Mel Gibson. Superficial and sloppy are the censorious adjectives that leap to mind in describing the reportage.

Mel Gibson is a film star; we can all agree on that. But rarely pointed out even in such learned journals as the Hollywood Reporter — yet of crucial importance — is that he’s a devotee of the method school of acting. You know, the sort of acting that enabled Marlon Brando to mumble his way to an Oscar. Method actors don’t merely assume a role, they invest their entire being in it. If, for example, they play Hamlet, they immerse themselves in what it’s like to be a melancholy youth of Danish extraction whose mother married his uncle who, as it happens, had knocked off his father.

Only someone, like Mel Gibson, who has subjected himself to the rigors of method acting, is capable of eerily replicating the feelings of a melancholy youth of Danish extraction who finds to his great dismay he is a member of such a dysfunctional family. And hence only someone like Mel Gibson can do justice to the famous soliloquy that poses the momentous question, To be a schmo or not to be a schmo….

The business of totally identifying with a character in a play or a movie can, to be sure, be carried to excess. And that’s key to the contretemps that has enveloped Mel Gibson. As usual, the news reports had it all wrong. Yes, Mel seemed to be under the influence — and we stress seemed — and made some indelicate remarks about people of the Hebrew persuasion. But the truth is — and this has yet to be revealed in the scandal-mad media — he was merely preparing for the lead roles in two prospective film projects and preparing with all the passion of a seasoned method actor.

Thus, far from being drunk, he was earnestly rehearsing for his remake of The Lost Weekend, in which he has the part of the alcoholic hero originally played by Ray Milland. Videos of the incident plainly show Mel ingesting whiskey, but there’s not an ounce of evidence that he swallowed the vile stuff (one of his perks as a genuine Hollywood star is a gold-plated spittoon that a loyal servant always keeps within range).

And as for his supposedly bigoted aspersions, the fact is that here, too, he was simply seeking to develop the right persona for his cinematic treatment of the Holocaust (working title), a potential box- office blockbuster in which he portrays Adolph Eichmann. One can only hope that given such unstinting commitment to his art and his unswerving pursuit of verisimilitude, Mel never decides to star in a remake of Dracula.

We trust this little homily on the media will serve to increase your sympathy and tolerance for its small foibles that may tend to obscure its critical role in keeping the public informed. Absent the media, how would we ever know how dedicated Mel Gibson is to his chosen craft or that Hezbollah has seized the advantage in Lebanon despite its preternatural eagerness for a cease-fire, which an uninformed person might take as evidence of weakness?

And, except for the media’s cheerfully echoing what the pundits prophesy, how would we ever know that the latest dismal employment report was bullish as all get-out for stocks because it would prompt the Federal Reserve at its scheduled conclave on Tuesday to forgo another interest- rate increase? And, deprived of that wisdom, some unsuspecting widow or orphan might be swayed by the historical record that shows the market much more likely to go down than up following such a change of course. In other words, she might — gasp! — sell.

Posted at 1:41 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Bloomberg

Aug. 3 (Bloomberg) — Sports fans can cease their never- ending search for the next Michael Jordan. He has been identified in Boston, only he doesn’t dribble a basketball for the Celtics.

There’s even a chance the next Jordan, who seemingly defied gravity en route to greatness, would have difficulty scaling a deck of playing cards. It doesn’t matter, though.

One way or another, single or slam, David Ortiz is going to beat you. He’s in the pitcher’s head even when he’s in the dugout. He lurks. His reputation looms. Then he wins. It has happened again and again and again.

Someone asked Boston Red Sox manager Terry Francona about the Ortiz-Jordan link after the July 31 game against Cleveland, which ended when, ho-hum, the man affectionately dubbed “Big Papi” launched yet another game-ending home run.

Red Sox 9, Indians 8. Goodnight everybody. Drive home safely.

“I don’t think David can dunk,” said a giddy Francona, Jordan’s manager when the former Chicago Bulls star tried his luck at minor-league baseball in 1994. “But I know what you’re saying.”

We all know.

No lead was ever safe against Jordan. Opponents never felt comfortable. He was the consummate leader, the one who wouldn’t let his team lose.

Here’s the funny part of Ortiz’s most recent heroics: The outcome was determined long before Fausto Carmona’s, gulp, 2-0 fastball, found a resting place somewhere in the center-field seats.

Cleveland held a two-run advantage in the bottom of the ninth. Ortiz licks his chops at last-licks.

Ortiz was scheduled to hit fourth in the inning. We’ve seen it too many times before.

Like Babe Ruth

With two men on you just knew Ortiz was going to win it. The Fenway Faithful sure knew. That guy with the front-row seat knew. There he was, seen in the background, his right arm extended, calling Papi’s shot. It was reminiscent of Babe Ruth, who supposedly pointed his bat toward the outfield and predicted a home run during the 1932 World Series.

“The whole inning we’re just thinking, `Let’s just get David to the plate”’ Francona says.

Good idea.

Just get Papi to the plate. He’ll take it from there. He always does.

Remember, this is baseball, where you’re a superstar if you fail 70 percent of the time. Jordan didn’t do failure. Neither does Ortiz.

Check out these stats: July 31 marked Ortiz’s third walk-off home run this season, and his seventh regular-season walk-off homer since joining the Red Sox three years ago. He also has 15 regular-season walk-off hits.

21 Home Runs

Not impressed? How about this from the Elias Sports Bureau: Ortiz has hit 21 home runs in 138 at-bats in late-inning pressure situations in the past two years. In that period, no other player has hit more than 13. Sounds like Jordan and buzzer-beaters.

“You’re thinking, `He can’t do it again,”’ Cleveland’s Casey Blake says. “The guy’s unbelievable.”

The numbers are so staggering that it’s time opposing managers picked the other poison. That would be RBI machine Manny Ramirez, who rarely gets the chance to play hero because Ortiz keeps ending games while he waits in the on-deck circle.

Ortiz flashed his inner Jordan long before the night was over.

Perhaps you caught a glimpse of Big Papi congratulating Wily Mo Pena, who in the fourth inning belted one over the Green Monster and onto Lansdowne Street.

Jordan Versus Ortiz

They celebrated like Little Leaguers, exchanging choreographed high-fives, shoulder taps, hops and, finally, a leaping bump of shoulders. It was 475 pounds of silliness on display.

Ortiz keeps things fun. His smile is infectious.

Unlike Jordan, who was pegged for stardom from the day he arrived in the National Basketball Association in 1984, Ortiz was released by the Minnesota Twins after the 2002 season. If only baseball executives were granted a do-over.

Jordan earned six NBA Most Valuable Player Awards. Ortiz is seeking his first.

Ortiz is hitting .289 with a major league-best 37 home runs and 105 RBI in 105 games. Some voting members of the media, however, can’t overlook the fact that Ortiz rarely plays in the field.

That would be like Jordan only having to play offense.

No designated hitter, or DH, has ever won the MVP Award.

Last year, I backed New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez for MVP. He won. Ortiz was second, right where he belonged.

Ortiz was serenaded with chants of “MVP” after stomping on home plate following his latest big hit.

“I like it,” he said. “You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. Like I said before, the worst thing that can happen is the pitcher getting you out.”

Sounds like Jordan, one MVP channeling another.

(Scott Soshnick is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Posted at 1:10 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

Published: August 2, 2006

MONROVIA, Liberia I’m staring at the deep-blue Atlantic, with the gentle wind swaying the palm trees, as the waves lash the beachfront. It is idyllic, and so are the rest of my surroundings: a luxury hotel where a large screen shows reruns of the World Cup, and chefs are preparing a Mongolian barbecue. A restaurant across the road is serving sushi.
We are in Africa, I remind myself. In Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, a country that has been ravaged by a civil war that has killed thousands of people and devastated its infrastructure.
There was a time, barely a generation ago, when Monrovia was regarded as the queen of cities in West Africa. Today, those images remain in the minds of older citizens who can remember the years before the war. For many others, the only memory is of the terrible war. The images of a tranquil Monrovia linger on a few Web sites.
Recreating that halcyon era sounds impossible. Liberia’s president, the continent’s first woman head of state, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is aware of her country’s limitations. To mark the anniversary of Liberia’s founding on July 26, she said she would light up Monrovia.
But not in the self-indulgent or bizarre way that other African leaders have celebrated in the past. When Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic declared himself emperor, the cost of the ceremonies was said to have amounted to nearly a quarter of the country’s wealth.
Johnson Sirleaf’s idea of celebration was to bring electricity to her people. Harvey Gilbert, who used to work as a plumber when the city’s pipes carried water but who is now a driver, says: “We have children who have never seen water come out of the tap. We have teenagers who have never seen street lights. She is doing the right thing.”
It is a hard task. Almost every third street lamp is crooked, precariously hanging on, its bulbs stolen. Power lines have fallen by the wayside, their cables cut and stolen. Telephones, even in nicer hotels, perform one useful function - connecting you to various hotel services. To call anyone elsewhere, you have to use your cellular phone.
The late Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri poet, described his beautiful, mountainous homeland as a country without a post office; the same could be said about Liberia. Don’t send me anything by post, one activist tells me.
There are no jobs either; the biggest employer is the international community.
No country deserves this, but in Liberia’s case, the misery is all the more unnecessary. As Africa’s first republic, Liberia was spared the legacy of colonialism and endowed with resources that could have made it shine like a beacon.
Traveling through Liberia in 1935, Graham Greene wrote in “Journey Without Maps” that he found a country with genial, friendly people who could teach manners and civilization to his compatriots in Britain. But over the last two decades, Samuel Doe, and later Charles Taylor, unleashed a reign of terror first within the state, and then beyond: to see its effects, travel to Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, where you will find children and adults with amputated limbs, victims of the sadistic cruelty of the Revolutionary United Front, the armed group in Sierra Leone that Taylor supported, in return for diamonds.
Today Doe is gone, executed brutally, the RUF defeated, and Taylor is in the Hague, a defendant in a war crimes trial. The real cost is borne by Liberians who are trying to piece together their lives.
That old, dangerous Liberia lurks behind the corner: Even as Johnson Sirleaf switched on the lights, her presidential palace, where she was to meet leaders of Ghana, Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone, was ablaze in a mysterious fire. It took hours to put it out.
Liberia needs sustained international goodwill - not only from its neighbors, but from all of us: not only to ensure that water flows when those children turn on the taps, not only so that letters are written again and delivered, but also so that its children go to schools again, where there are teachers, blackboards, benches and textbooks. And that it stays lit. Those are small dreams, not grand visions.
But Africa has had too many grand visionaries. As Liberia moves from darkness to light, it is fine to walk one step at a time. A long journey begins with a single step, and Johnson Sirleaf is doing just that - lighting up one road at a time.
Salil Tripathi is a writer based in London.
MONROVIA, Liberia I’m staring at the deep-blue Atlantic, with the gentle wind swaying the palm trees, as the waves lash the beachfront. It is idyllic, and so are the rest of my surroundings: a luxury hotel where a large screen shows reruns of the World Cup, and chefs are preparing a Mongolian barbecue. A restaurant across the road is serving sushi.
We are in Africa, I remind myself. In Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, a country that has been ravaged by a civil war that has killed thousands of people and devastated its infrastructure.
There was a time, barely a generation ago, when Monrovia was regarded as the queen of cities in West Africa. Today, those images remain in the minds of older citizens who can remember the years before the war. For many others, the only memory is of the terrible war. The images of a tranquil Monrovia linger on a few Web sites.
Recreating that halcyon era sounds impossible. Liberia’s president, the continent’s first woman head of state, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is aware of her country’s limitations. To mark the anniversary of Liberia’s founding on July 26, she said she would light up Monrovia.
But not in the self-indulgent or bizarre way that other African leaders have celebrated in the past. When Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic declared himself emperor, the cost of the ceremonies was said to have amounted to nearly a quarter of the country’s wealth.
Johnson Sirleaf’s idea of celebration was to bring electricity to her people. Harvey Gilbert, who used to work as a plumber when the city’s pipes carried water but who is now a driver, says: “We have children who have never seen water come out of the tap. We have teenagers who have never seen street lights. She is doing the right thing.”
It is a hard task. Almost every third street lamp is crooked, precariously hanging on, its bulbs stolen. Power lines have fallen by the wayside, their cables cut and stolen. Telephones, even in nicer hotels, perform one useful function - connecting you to various hotel services. To call anyone elsewhere, you have to use your cellular phone.
The late Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri poet, described his beautiful, mountainous homeland as a country without a post office; the same could be said about Liberia. Don’t send me anything by post, one activist tells me.
There are no jobs either; the biggest employer is the international community.
No country deserves this, but in Liberia’s case, the misery is all the more unnecessary. As Africa’s first republic, Liberia was spared the legacy of colonialism and endowed with resources that could have made it shine like a beacon.
Traveling through Liberia in 1935, Graham Greene wrote in “Journey Without Maps” that he found a country with genial, friendly people who could teach manners and civilization to his compatriots in Britain. But over the last two decades, Samuel Doe, and later Charles Taylor, unleashed a reign of terror first within the state, and then beyond: to see its effects, travel to Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, where you will find children and adults with amputated limbs, victims of the sadistic cruelty of the Revolutionary United Front, the armed group in Sierra Leone that Taylor supported, in return for diamonds.
Today Doe is gone, executed brutally, the RUF defeated, and Taylor is in the Hague, a defendant in a war crimes trial. The real cost is borne by Liberians who are trying to piece together their lives.
That old, dangerous Liberia lurks behind the corner: Even as Johnson Sirleaf switched on the lights, her presidential palace, where she was to meet leaders of Ghana, Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone, was ablaze in a mysterious fire. It took hours to put it out.
Liberia needs sustained international goodwill - not only from its neighbors, but from all of us: not only to ensure that water flows when those children turn on the taps, not only so that letters are written again and delivered, but also so that its children go to schools again, where there are teachers, blackboards, benches and textbooks. And that it stays lit. Those are small dreams, not grand visions.
But Africa has had too many grand visionaries. As Liberia moves from darkness to light, it is fine to walk one step at a time. A long journey begins with a single step, and Johnson Sirleaf is doing just that - lighting up one road at a time.
Salil Tripathi is a writer based in London.
MONROVIA, Liberia I’m staring at the deep-blue Atlantic, with the gentle wind swaying the palm trees, as the waves lash the beachfront. It is idyllic, and so are the rest of my surroundings: a luxury hotel where a large screen shows reruns of the World Cup, and chefs are preparing a Mongolian barbecue. A restaurant across the road is serving sushi.
We are in Africa, I remind myself. In Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, a country that has been ravaged by a civil war that has killed thousands of people and devastated its infrastructure.
There was a time, barely a generation ago, when Monrovia was regarded as the queen of cities in West Africa. Today, those images remain in the minds of older citizens who can remember the years before the war. For many others, the only memory is of the terrible war. The images of a tranquil Monrovia linger on a few Web sites.
Recreating that halcyon era sounds impossible. Liberia’s president, the continent’s first woman head of state, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is aware of her country’s limitations. To mark the anniversary of Liberia’s founding on July 26, she said she would light up Monrovia.
But not in the self-indulgent or bizarre way that other African leaders have celebrated in the past. When Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic declared himself emperor, the cost of the ceremonies was said to have amounted to nearly a quarter of the country’s wealth.
Johnson Sirleaf’s idea of celebration was to bring electricity to her people. Harvey Gilbert, who used to work as a plumber when the city’s pipes carried water but who is now a driver, says: “We have children who have never seen water come out of the tap. We have teenagers who have never seen street lights. She is doing the right thing.”

For the complete article, please see the link below.

Posted at 12:25 AM · Comments (0)

Volume 53, Number 4 · March 9, 2006

Review
‘The True Epic Vision’
By Jasper Griffin
Gilgamesh: A New English Version
by Stephen Mitchell

Free Press, 290 pp., $24.00

There were two ancient languages and literatures: Greek and Hebrew. One of them, probably Hebrew, was the original language, from which (after the Fall) all the others arose as degenerate and distorted descendants. That was, roughly, how things looked to educated Westerners until, in the early nineteenth century, there began a great age of discoveries and decipherments. European conquests and Western inquisitiveness combined to unearth, and gradually to make intelligible, a huge variety of ancient scripts and forgotten languages: Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Hittite, Phoenician, and more. The history of mankind became suddenly much longer and more complex. At the same time, the sciences of geology and archaeology were busy extending the age of the world and the evolution of species, the human race itself—very controversially—not excluded.

The decipherment of those scripts and those languages is one of the truly great stories of human intellectual history. An extraordinary series of achievements, it has changed our image of the world and of our place in it at least as much, perhaps, as the invention of nuclear fission or the possibility of space travel.

The world, it turned out, was enormously older, and history enormously more complex, than anyone had suspected. What of civilization? What of culture, the arts, literature, religion? Passions ran high over the theory of evolution and its impact on literalist belief in the Book of Genesis. The unquestioned ascendancy, in education and history, of the classical world of Greece and Rome, their status as the fountainhead of culture, seemed no less threatened than that of the Bible in matters of faith. What to do, in fact, with all this new material: How to fit it into a coherent and intelligible history?

As some of the dust began, slowly, to settle, the shaken disciplines of theology and classical studies began to mark out fields which they could claim as especially their own. Assyrian histories of conquest, Egyptian creation myths, Canaanite legends: none of them, really, could claim the unique truth of the Bible, or the aesthetic beauty or deep human significance of the masterpieces of classical litera-ture—of the serene yet terrible poetry of Homer, or the penetrating and skeptical history of Thucydides, or the universal genius of Plato or Aristotle.

That was, perhaps, not wholly unconnected with the fact that in those days many educated people had learned some Greek and Latin, could read some of those literatures, felt at home with their forms and their content; while the new discoveries, which were never going to make it onto school syllabuses, have remained exotic, unfamiliar, and rather remote.

How good, in fact, was any of this literature? Did it really stand comparison with the glory that was Greece, or even with the grandeur that was Rome? One of the strongest cases, it emerged, could be made for an extraordinary epic poem, turning up and gradually becoming known in several recensions, of quite widely separated dates and in various languages, on the mythical career of the great Meso-potamian hero Gilgamesh. The name was not a familiar one. Diligent search of the Greek sources found it occurring once, as an exotic item in a magical spell. To all practical purposes, Gilgamesh had been lost to memory.

Who was he? He was king of Uruk, or Erech, a city of Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq. He was more than merely human, in fact he was, like Homer’s Achilles, the son of a goddess; and (more quaintly) he was two-thirds divine. Not surprisingly, perhaps, he was of superhuman stature and strength. Our earliest texts about him date from about 2100 BCE, and various poems on his exploits and fate have come to light, in the Sumerian, Akkadian, and Old Babylonian languages, all of the Semitic family, which were recorded on baked clay tablets, most of them nowadays reposing in the British Museum in London. The longest, most coherent, and most readable version is in Old Babylonian, composed, it seems, about 1200 BCE, by a scholar-priest named Sîn-l¯eqi-unninni.

That is essentially the version which underlies the new translation, ingenious and very readable, by Stephen Mitchell, who has published versions of such other classics as the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, and selected poems of Rilke. He makes no claim to be a scholar of those widely different literatures, and he relies for his text on the work of professionals. He has produced a satisfying result. It is cast in the form of lines with four rhythmic stresses, unrhyming, in a diction raised a little in tone, but not unrecognizably far, from that of speech.

Gilgamesh appears at first as a tyrant and oppressor:

The people suffer
from his tyranny, the people cry out
that he takes the son from his father and crushes him,
takes the girl from her mother and uses her,
the warrior’s daughter, the young man’s bride,
he uses her, no one dares to oppose him.

The people cry to the gods, who raise up an opponent for him: a wild man, Enkidu. At first he runs with the animals and does not eat human food; a woman has to be sent out to meet him in the wilderness, a sacred prostitute and priestess of the goddess Ishtar. Her name is Shamhat. She introduces him to sex and to human cuisine. After that, the animals shun him: he must become a man. He challenges Gilgamesh, wrestles with him in a mighty duel, and is defeated. Gilgamesh and Enkidu make friends:

They embraced and kissed. They held hands like brothers.
They walked side by side. They became true friends.

Parallels come to mind: David and Jonathan; Achilles and Patroclus.

Such a pair of young heroes must feel the need of heroic exploits. Off they go together to the Cedar Forest, to fight the monster Humbaba, a fearsome giant with fiery breath, whose “jaws are death.” Killing him, we read, will drive from the world “the evil the gods hate.” That evil is never specified or described: it is not really what interests the poet. And the story has an unexpected complexity. Humbaba, it turns out, has been put there by the great god Enlil himself, and for a purpose. Defeated and threatened with death, he pleads for his life:

Humbaba said, “If any mortal,
Enkidu, knows the rules of my forest,
it is you. You know that this is my place,
and that I am the forest’s guardian. Enlil
put me here to terrify men,
and I guard the forest as Enlil ordains.”

A modern sensibility is disconcerted: this monster has an unexpectedly Green and eco-friendly side. But the two heroes kill him. Enkidu encourages his friend:

Enkidu said, “Dear friend, quickly,
before another moment goes by,
kill Humbaba, don’t listen to his words,
don’t hesitate, slaughter him, slit his throat,
before the great god Enlil can stop us,
before the great gods can get enraged….
Establish your fame, so that forever
men will speak of brave Gilgamesh,
who killed Humbaba in the Cedar Forest.”

Heroism prevails over ecological scruples—as usual. The monster dies, but not before cursing them both. Next the goddess Ishtar, queen of sexual delight, becomes enamored of Gilgamesh; he rejects her rather direct advances with words of insult. In revenge, the furious goddess gets her father to send the Bull of Heaven to ravage the country; Gilgamesh kills it, and flings its thigh (possibly a euphemism, though Mitchell does not say so) in Ishtar’s face.

So far, so good! But gods, even disagreeable ones, cannot be defied with impunity. For killing Humbaba and the Bull, either Gilgamesh or Enkidu must die. A dream reveals—the epic is studded with prophetic dreams—that it is Enkidu. He falls ill and is marked for death. In despair he curses Shamhat, the woman who made him human:

Never may you have a home and family,
never caress a child of your own,
may your man prefer younger, prettier girls,
may he beat you as a housewife beats a rug…
may wild dogs camp in your bedroom, may owls
nest in your attic, may drunkards vomit
all over you, may a tavern wall
be your place of business….

for the entire article, please see the NYRB website: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18770

Posted at 3:42 PM · Comments (0)

I’ve got a Blues collection that runs into the hundreds of discs, and had somehow never come to understand until now, upon listening to this recording, what an essential genius Skip James is. Well, as they say, better late than never.
Its all Skip all the time here, solo guitar or piano — both brilliant — in accompaniment of his ambling, laconic vocals. This is simply great stuff.

“You know, I’d rather be ther devil. Rather be the devil than to be that woman’s man.
You know I’m so sorry. You know so sorry. That I ever fell in love with you.
Because you know you don’t treat me, baby like you used to do…

You know the woman that I love. The woman that I love. I stol’t her from my best friend.
But that man he got lucky and stole her back again.

You know you used to cut your kindling, and then baby I’d make you some fire.
Then I would turn on your fire. Way way away from the boggy bottom.

You know my baby don’t drink whiskey. My baby don’t drink no whiskey, and I know she ain’t crazy about wine.
No, it wasn’t nothing but the devil, he done changed my baby’s mind.

I could be right, and then again I could be wrong.
But it ain’t nothing but the devil got my baby in heat and gone.”

Posted at 11:29 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Omoyele Sowore

There is no doubt that when the African-American, Reverend Leon H. Sullivan dreamt up the idea of African Summits, he did so with the noblest of intentions. Having fought apartheid all his life, he wasn’t content on just the idea of political freedom for the continent. He thought it was a great idea to get international political and business leaders together to dialogue about Africa and its various needs and to act on the consensus reached at these Summits. There have been six Summits so far. These were in Abidjan (1991), Libreville (1993), Dakar (1995), Harare (1997), Accra (1999) and Abuja (2003). Curiously, the seventh Summit has already kicked off in Abuja again and is scheduled to last till July 21, 2006. But Reverend Sullivan has been dead for five years now and today, there is increasing doubt as to whether his heirs are actually pursuing his principles, even though they claim to be doing so in his name. Indeed, when one assesses the activities and associations of the key personnel of the Leon H. Sullivan Foundation, you can’t help but see vestiges of family aggrandizement and crony capitalism.

Hope Masters (nee Sullivan) is the President and CEO of the Foundation. In an elaborate ceremony sponsored by President Olusegun Obasanjo in Abuja, Nigeria, this daughter of Rev Sullivan married Carl Masters, Co-Founding Partner (with Andrew Young) of the Atlanta-based Goodworks International, a firm of lobbyists permanently retained by President Obasanjo (on a $60,000 monthly fee) to supposedly do public relations job for Nigeria in the US, even though the country operates an embassy and two consulates there. Mrs. Hope Masters with Andrew Young are the only members of the “Leadership” of the Foundation, while there is the ceremonial list of board members of big names, one of whom is former President Bill Clinton. In every function organized by the Foundation, Mr Carl Masters, even though not formally listed on the website as a member of the Leadership actually is the Secretary to the board. The relationship between President Obasanjo and his Goodworks International friends seems to overshadow whatever it is the Foundation is supposed to be doing. In fact, one wonders why Obasanjo has to host another Summit consecutively when there are literally scores of African venues outside Nigeria to do this.

Obviously, the leaders of the Foundation today are only paying lip-service to the principles of self-help, social responsibility, economic empowerment and human rights – principles Rev Sullivan himself espoused. Today, the reverend’s heirs are more interested in feathering their own nests in cahoots with tainted political operators in Africa. Rather than championing corporate responsibility in Africa, they’re actually exploiting its absence. For instance, they feel no scruples receiving millions of dollars in donations from Shell, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Chrome Petroleum, Sea Petroleum and the like, while the Niger-Delta burns and their environment destroyed by callous oil exploitation. They take the money but feel no responsibility for Obasanjo and the oil companies’ unwillingness to truly show transparency with regard to proceeds from the oil revenues.

One of the most blatant abuses of their position was perpetrated by Carl Masters last year when he presided over one of the worst cases of abuse of office by Obasanjo as the chief organizer and fundraiser for the latter’s library project. It wasn’t just that a sitting president found it morally justifiable to set up a library in his name that rankles, but the fact that he did this by more or less coercing public and state officials to donate towards this project. We are talking of a country notorious for the corruption of its public officials and its President used his incumbent position to collect supposed donations from well-known pilferers of public funds, both serving and retired, to serve his private ends. They raised a whooping $50 million and Carl Masters, a Jamaican-American, was not ashamed to preside over this, even as Gani Fawehinmi, the irrepressible advocate of public propriety is in court challenging the affair. In fact, the largest single donor to the project, Mr Mike Adenuga, a local business magnate with extensive political connections, was recently arrested by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). He’d since been released, but up till now the reason for his arrest remains a mystery, as neither him nor the government are saying anything.

But anyone who’s followed young and co and their careers wouldn’t be surprised at what they’re doing in Africa, which is to cash in on Reverend Sullivan and Mr. Young’s statuses. As an ‘icon’ of the civil rights movement, a former mayor, ambassador and recognized elder in the African-American community, Mr. Young leads his acolytes on a mission to convert this status to cash by betraying his people’s trust to the highest bidder. Anyone who doubts this mission only needs to note the job that first catapulted Goodworks International into the big time in 1997. At a time when the world was waking up to the appalling atrocities being committed by Nike in its Asian shoe factories, Young and Masters took the Nike commission to burnish their image. Young produced a seventy-five page full colour report on Nike’s Asian operation. He concluded that there was “no evidence or pattern of widespread or systematic abuse or mistreatment of workers” in the twelve operations he examined, filling up the pages with doctored pictures of smiling, ostensibly happy workers. But a few weeks after, the accounting firm, Ernst & Young visited some of the same places Mr. Young claimed to have visited and put a lie to his report by detailing the unsafe, terrible and subhuman conditions under which these people work. But to Messrs Young and Masters, the principle is why let the truth get in the way of a big fat cheque? Goodworks International is on the map and they are now “international business consultants”, so what the heck!

In February this year, true to type, Goodworks International continued its betrayal with the announcement that Mr. Young is now chair the Working Families for Wal-Mart. The world’s largest retailers, with a stinking reputation amongst women and minorities now have as their spokesperson an African-American civil rights icon – just for a few dollars! In fact, Wal-Mart proudly announced they were funding Young and Goodworks International, because they belong to a group of people “who understand and appreciate Wal-Mart’s positive impact on working families in America”. Of course, it matters not that Wal-Mart discriminates against minorities and women, pay poverty-level wages and are pushing competitors out of business.

As this Summit opens and close once again in Abuja with highfalutin jives and no action, Nigerians, nay Africans must be weary of these so-called do-gooders. Andrew Young and Carl Masters can use their friendship with Obasanjo and other notorious Africans to feather their own nest at the expense of the ordinary people of Nigeria and the continent while Rev Sullivan turns in his grave, but we mustn’t allow them to sell their snake oil as some kind of solution to African problems. Evidently, they do not care about democracy, constitutionalism and the rule of law, because if they do, they wouldn’t have supported Obasanjo’s attempt to subvert the Nigerian constitution towards his third term agenda. If they care, they wouldn’t be gallivanting in Abuja, laughing into their wines as their friend and benefactor, Olusegun Obasanjo presides over a repressive fascist and neo-military regime that cares very little about the welfare and economic well-being of Nigerians or the African people. African-Americans must also begin to take people like Young to task for cynically cashing in his Freedom Movement chips. It is not the dream of Martin Luther King, Rev Sullivan and Black America that their icons use the same putrid principles their oppressors used against them to fleece their African brethren.

It is time for Africans, African-Americans and Blacks everywhere to take a closer look at these Summits and ask the right questions.

Posted at 11:25 PM · Comments (0)

Yes, the title sounds trite - like a cheap advice, or personal improvement book of the sort that already innundates the market.
This book is the fruit of long and deep reflection, though, and I’d like to call it profound. Much of the t hinking here is inspired by Ricard’s experience as a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, but this is not, strictly speaking, a book on Buddhism. Rather, it is a searching exploration of the cause of misery and ill-ease and hatred and envy, coupled with some very considered suggestions for attaining greater peace.
For now, it is atop my gift-giving list.

Posted at 1:06 AM · Comments (0)

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