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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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Copyright Reuters

BEIJING, Oct 30 (Reuters) - Chinese appear not to have warmed to a
”free hugs” campaign aimed at cheering up strangers by hugging them on
the street, with some huggers even being hauled away by police for
questioning, media said on Monday.
The campaign hit the streets of Beijing, Changsha and Xian this
weekend, with participants opening their arms to embrace passers-by and
brandishing cards saying ”free hugs”, ”care from strangers”, ”refuse to
be apathetic”, the Beijing News said.
In the capital, police moved in and took away four huggers briefly for
questioning, baffled by their wacky, Western activities on a busy
city-centre shopping street.
In the ancient capital of Xian, home to the terracotta warriors, no
more than 20 people, mostly children, had volunteered for the free hugs in
two hours.
”Passers-by showed interest and curiosity, stopped and asked, but
most of them walked away after hearing the explanation,” Xinhua news
agency said, quoting a local newspaper.
”Embracing is a foreign tradition. Chinese are not accustomed to
this,” a man named Li, a Xi’an citizen, was quoted as saying.
The ancient city of Changsha, capital of Hunan province, fared better,
a local affairs Web site reported.
”Though some people refused (to be hugged), I hugged 20 people in one
minute,” one girl was quoted as saying.
The Free Hugs campaign started in Australia and gained fame with a
music video this year.
20061030 105324+0000REUTERS

Posted at 9:43 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Spiegel

In the West, gradual de-industrialization has created a new underclass of the unproductive and intellectually depraved. The spiritual cousin of the American phenomenon of “white trash,” these strangers in their own land have become a serious threat to democracy.

Editor’s Note: The following essay has been excerpted from the German best-seller “World War for Wealth: The Global Grab for Power and Prosperity” by SPIEGEL editor Gabor Steingart. SPIEGEL ONLINE is publishing a series of daily excerpts from the book.

The modern-day member of the underclass is not hungry. He has a roof over his head, he is not disproportionately vulnerable to illness and he even has a bit of cash in his pocketbook. In every Western European country, he is both a citizen and a beneficiary of the welfare state, even if the state’s services are no longer as generous as they once were.

Beer can ashtray: Close to 8 percent of Germans consume 40 percent of the alcohol sold in the country.
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DDP

Beer can ashtray: Close to 8 percent of Germans consume 40 percent of the alcohol sold in the country.
Such luxuries, bare bones though they may be, are relatively new for the Western proletariat. The best lodging his pauper predecessor could have hoped for was a homeless shelter or a men’s hostel. Food for the poor was meager and it was often delivered only after long waits in bread lines or in soup kitchens. The ill were neither insured nor could they afford to pay for doctors, let alone medication. Old men were, for better or for worse, turned over to the care of the younger generation, or put in the hands of church aid programs.

Still, even if the modern-day proletariat is materially much better off, he is actually in worse shape.

The destitute laborer of old had something that today’s poor no longer have: He knew who the enemy was; he had a class identity; he often even had a well-developed culture. He sang songs, fought his political fights, founded associations and idolized social theoreticians, even if he didn’t fully understand them.

During the days of the German Empire, he could still choose between political groups that, although technically illegal, sought his support. The pauper of yesterday was the subject of history, seen with the sober clarity of hindsight. So far, the pauper of today, in a united Europe, is little more than the victim of circumstances. And while his predecessor may have been on the margins of society, today he is an outsider.

Although they hardly have a voice of their own, we know a lot about today’s members of the underclass. Though they keep largely to themselves, cocooned as they are within their apartment blocks, they are scrutinized by dozens of sociologists — examined to almost the same extent as biologists have researched the common hare. And while they may be strangers in their own land, we have access to a clear typology that allows us to better recognize them.

Intellectual neglect

We know, for example, that today’s proletariat is richer than the worker of generations past. Indeed, with a little skill, he can tap into the coffers of the state’s social safety net, which provides him with access to an income comparable to those of police officers, warehouse workers and taxi drivers. Thus, it is not material poverty that separates him from others.

BUCHTIPP
This essay has been excerpted from “War for Wealth: The Global Grab for Power and Prosperity”, Germany’s best- selling book by Gabor Steingart. SPIEGEL ONLINE is publishing a series of excerpts from the book in English.

Piper Verlag, Munich; 384 pages; €19.90. The German- language edition of the book is available online at SPIEGEL Shop.
Rather, what stand out are the symptoms of intellectual neglect. The poor of today watch television for half the day. These days, television producers even refer to what they call “Underclass TV.” The new proletariat eats a lot of fatty foods and he enjoys smoking and drinking — a lot. About 8 percent of Germans consume 40 percent of all the alcohol sold in the country. While he may be a family man, his families are often broken. And on Election Day, he casts a protest vote for the extreme left or right wing party, sometimes switching quickly from one to the other.

But the main thing that sets the modern poor apart from the industrial age pauper is a sheer lack of interest in education. Today’s proletariat has little education and no interest in obtaining more. Back in the early days of industrialization, the poor joined worker associations that often doubled as educational associations. The modern member of the underclass, by contrast, has completely shunned personal betterment.

He likewise makes little effort to open the door to the future for his own children. Their language skills are as bad as their ability to concentrate. The rising rate of illiteracy is matched by the shrinking opportunities to integrate the underclass. The Americans, not ones to mince words, call them “white trash.”

European democracy’s greatest threat

The new proletariat as a homogenous class first came into existence in the last 10 years. And it is by no means an exclusively German phenomenon: An underclass is emerging in every self-described leading industrial nation. The modern political economy clearly has nothing to offer to those who possess little knowledge.

It is no mere coincidence that the rise of the new underclass is happening in tandem with the erosion of industry jobs. In Europe, the process of de-industrialization may end up being more influential than the common currency or the effort to forge a shared constitution. The disintegration of society threatens the West today more than international terrorism, even if politicians are focusing on combating the latter.

THE AUTHOR
MARCO- URBAN.DE
Gabor Steingart, 44, heads DER SPIEGEL’s Berlin office. His last book was titled “Germany: The Decline of a Superstar” and, like “World War for Prosperity,” was a bestseller in Germany. Steingart was chosen as “The Economic Writer of the Year” in 2004.
Though bombs can shake a democracy or market economy, they cannot destroy it. But the process of economic erosion deprives the West of jobs, then money and, in the end, democratic legitimacy. What is citizenship worth if people are denied the opportunity to participate in the working world? What use are civil liberties if the right to an independent lifestyle is no longer among them? Would it be acceptable if the rights set down in the constitution were only applicable to the educated classes?

Questions of fundamental importance are forcing their way to the foreground: Can a democracy tolerate having part of its populace continuously shut out from the rising quality of life? And if that is accepted, will this decision come back to haunt us in our lifetimes?

Will nations again face off against one another because boiling anger seeks an outlet? Or perhaps the underclasses will revolt? Both scenarios are possible. The only outcome hard to imagine is that nothing happens at all.

Posted at 4:10 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post
Sunday, October 29, 2006; BW10

MAO’S LAST REVOLUTION

By Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals

Belknap/Harvard Univ. 693 pp. $35

It has been enthralling to read Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals’s exhaustively researched new book on China’s Cultural Revolution — a sensation akin to returning to a Chinese painting in which a mist-shrouded landscape has miraculously cleared to reveal what was obscured beyond. While it was not difficult to feel the tension, even the fear, aloft in the land when I reported from Mao Zedong’s China for the New Yorker during the mid-1970s, being there gave few intimations of the dark complexity of the political struggle playing out beneath the surface. By making sense out of this opaque decade, MacFarquhar (who teaches at Harvard University) and Schoenhals (who teaches at Lund University in Sweden) have provided the most definitive roadmap to date of China’s odyssey through those tumultuous times.

But what happened is still not easy to explain completely. For complex reasons that involved Mao’s political beliefs as well as his own psychological pathologies, the communist leader felt compelled to goad China into an extended paroxysm of revolutionary madness that ran from 1966 to 1976. Both to protect his own political supremacy and to wrench China out of its “feudal” past, he made politics and “class struggle” the currency of his revolutionary realm. In his own words, he created “great disorder under heaven.” Proclaiming that “to rebel is justified,” he called on students to “bombard the headquarters” of the Communist Party and thus set in motion one of the most unprecedented upheavals of the 20th century.

“You ask us how to do it,” President Liu Shaoqi, who later died as a political enemy in one of Mao’s prisons, told students as the leftist surge gathered momentum. “I tell you honestly, I don’t know either. We’re mainly going to be relying on you to make this revolution.”

In the name of wiping out “capitalist roaders” (a euphemism for anyone seemingly opposed to Mao’s revolutionary line) and “bourgeois revisionism,” tens of millions of innocent victims were persecuted, professionally ruined, mentally deranged, physically maimed and even killed. “Beat to a pulp any and all persons who go against Mao Zedong Thought — no matter who they are, what banner they fly, or how exalted their positions may be,” proclaimed one Red Guard poster.

“Whereas party violence had normally been carefully controlled and calibrated, now the rules had been suspended,” note the authors. “Freed from parental and societal constraints, youths, both girls and boys, had been unleashed to perpetrate assault, battery, and murder upon their fellow citizens to the extent their barely formed consciences permitted. The result was the juvenile state of nature, nationwide, foreshadowed in microcosm by Nobel Prize-winner William Golding in Lord of the Flies .”

A few of China’s more pragmatic leaders did shrink from Mao’s cataclysmic vision of revolutionary extremism. But Mao’s Last Revolution suggests how easy it can be for a mercurial “Big Leader,” operating within a totalitarian system, to throw doubters so far off balance that none was able to organize resistance. And if there is one thing that Marxist-Leninist states do well, it is defoliating the political landscape of checks and balances, as well as watchdog institutions like the press. This is especially true when the media fall into the hands of one faction so that any sense of the actual variety of contending viewpoints is eclipsed, making it impossible for an outsider to discern how different factions were actually struggling against each other behind the scenes.

Mao was a master of keeping all comers in a state of paralyzing uncertainty. He garnered enormous power from his imperial opaqueness: While almost everyone wished “to work toward” Mao and his policies in order to please him, they could never be quite sure whether they were measuring up. Mao was the embodiment par excellence of the advice implicitly given by the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov when he chastises Jesus for failing to compel belief by ruling by “miracle, mystery and authority.”

By frequently absenting himself from the everyday sordidness of Beijing politics, Mao conjured up an almost otherworldly authority. And by making conflicting pronouncements that were impossible to factor together, he maintained both deniability and an ambiguity that kept his subordinates “transfixed like rabbits in front of a cobra,” as the authors put it.

Posted at 3:53 PM · Comments (0)

Sunday October 29, 2006
Copyright The Observer

Google is to enter the political arena in earnest this week when it
debates freedom of speech, intellectual property rights and how to
connect Africa to the internet at a special UN conference.
The Silicon Valley giant will attempt to position itself as a force for
change that can finance web entrepreneurs in the developing world,
champion the rights of consumers against ‘over-zealous’ copy-right laws
and use the web to protect diverse minority cultures and languages.

But Google will declare itself unrepentant over the controversial
decision to censor its search engine at the behest of Beijing. At the
first Internet Governance Forum in Athens, starting tomorrow, the firm
will insist its presence in China does more good than harm by getting
more information to more people.

That claim was firmly rejected last night by Amnesty International,
which is five months into its joint campaign with The Observer,
irrepressible.info, which calls for an end to online censorship and the
persecution of bloggers.

The forum will be attended by delegations from more than 90 countries,
including China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Tunisia and Vietnam, all of
which have been criticised for curbing freedom of expression on the web.
Amnesty will present a petition, signed by more than 47,000 people,
demanding an end to such abuses, which in the worst cases have seen
people jailed.

A session on openness will feature a panel including Richard Sambrook,
the BBC’s director of global news, Andrew Puddephatt, a human rights
activist, and Fred Tipson, director for international development policy
at Microsoft, who declined to be interviewed by The Observer. Google
will not be taking part but says it intends to tackle freedom of
expression topics in smaller gatherings.

Google’s motto, ‘Do no evil’, has taken a battering in recent months. It
will try to repair some of the damage during three ‘workshops’. Andrew
McLaughlin, head of global public policy at Google, said the first
event, ‘Building local access’, would discuss getting internet access to
more people in developing nations. At another session, ‘Access to
knowledge and free expression’, Google will warn how developing
countries fear that Western intellectual property rights work to their
disadvantage. It will call for a balance to be maintained in copyright
law that respects the rights of the consumer as well as the content
producer.

But Google is bound to be put under pressure over its foray into China.
McLaughlin said: ‘Google.cn is censored but we’ve come up with a
technique for deciding what is to be censored that is basically
technical, not editorial, and very reactive. That leads us to blocking
from our site the minimum that the ISP [internet service provider] level
requires.

‘I’m sure there are lots of people who will say it’s just too
distasteful, it’s too gross, it’s too political, you shouldn’t do it.
That’s a totally legitimate point of view,’ he said.

‘We’ve made an empirical judgment, though, that being able to hire
Chinese employees and have them be part of the Google culture and be
free-thinking, freewheeling internet people … when you add it all up,
we think we’re helping to advance the cause of change in China.’

Kate Allen, UK director of Amnesty International, did not accept the
argument. ‘One of the things we haven’t seen from Google, Yahoo! and
Microsoft is any move by them to use their collective bargaining power
to negotiate with and change the terms in which they operate in
countries like China,’ she said.

‘We do see Google with a search engine in China that gives very
different results from the one for the rest for us. I think the starkest
example is the picture search for Tiananmen Square. We get the man in
front of the tank; in China you get a happy, smiling couple, standing in
Tiananmen Square as tourists.’

Posted at 2:23 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Sunday Times

Shanghai

CHINA has taken a turn to the left just as foreign investors are lining up to place their bets on a capitalist future by buying shares in its biggest bank.
A world record $19 billion (£10 billion) was raised in the biggest flotation ever when the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China sold shares to investors ahead of its debut on the Hong Kong and Shanghai exchanges last week.

The state will retain majority control over the bank, making its partial privatisation a model for the way China’s new rulers see the future.

Significant new policies mean a decisive shift back towards state intervention. This is likely to have important implications for foreign investors and manufacturers and may lead to higher wage costs, stronger unions and stricter regulation.

Denise Yam at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong said: “Administrative controls on lending and capital expenditure in specific industries, as well as stricter rules on land use, appear to have brought down gains in investment.”

She noted that China’s policymakers “all reiterated the need to maintain and even strengthen controls on the economy”.

Two new documents from the Chinese government, disclosed officially but little noticed abroad, left no doubt that “leftist” factions have won the argument to rebalance economic policy after two decades of a dash for growth at any cost.

Even the state news agency, Xinhua, said the new policies responded to “rampant pollution, growing wealth disparity and complaints about the high costs of education, housing and medical services”.

Yan Shuhan, director of “scientific socialism” at the Central Party School, complained to Xinhua that the richest 10% in China controlled more than 40% of the wealth and the poorest 10% had less than 2%.

Reform has lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty but now the party’s leaders want to tilt the scales towards equality. The consequences for international capital, labour, trade and investment are only just beginning to be felt.

But they are certain to be on a global scale — almost everything is in China, which has just reported a trade surplus of £58 billion in the first nine months of this year and said that its economy had grown at a rate of 10.7% over the same period.

Among the effects already felt by business are tighter controls on foreign investment, pressure to raise wages, official demands for union recognition in every foreign enterprise, state curbs to cool property prices, restrictions on foreign property ownership and a heavier hand of regulation over commercial activity.

Tax breaks for foreign investors could come under scrutiny next, while the government is already phasing out subsidies for exporters.

“In short,” commented a Chinese financial journalist in Shanghai, “the cost of doing business is going up.”

The reasons range from the Communist party’s fear of rising discontent to nationalism and the renaissance of “New Left” theoreticians. “China has now come to a critical moment in building a comprehensively well-off society,” said vice-premier Wu Yi, a veteran advocate of “reform and opening up”.

The new generation of leaders has reacted to riots and protests with stern repression — but it also sees the need for pre-emptive concessions to stave off challenges.

“If China’s reform doesn’t emphasise socialism, justice and social responsibility, it will fail,” said Liu Guoguang, a professor at Beijing University. “Government must be able to play an intervening role. We should not blindly worship the market and we cannot hand over all the economy to the market.”

All the evidence is that the two men driving policy, president Hu Jintao and premier Wen Jiabao, have listened to these arguments, which are laid out in the two government documents.

They will make uncomfortable reading for some global businesses and investors, such as manufacturers sourcing ultra-cheap goods in Chinese factories, who have assumed there will always be a huge compliant workforce and suppliers willing to tolerate razor-thin profit margins.

But other companies stand to gain from opportunities presented by a more prosperous workforce as the domestic appetite grows for products and services — insurance, financial services, healthcare and human- resources providers could all benefit.

“Support given to the domestic sector, such as raising minimum wages in cities and handing subsidies and support to rural households, have given a boost to consumer demand,” said Morgan Stanley’s Yam.

One of the government documents summarised the proceedings at an executive committee of the State Council headed by Wen Jiabao. It promised aid for farmers and said the state would intervene to stabilise grain and fertiliser prices.

It ordered local authorities to make sure private employers paid migrant workers on time. And it commanded them to curb soaring property prices by imposing controls over land supply, bank lending and market access.

Anger is boiling in Chinese cities over housing costs — speculators and corrupt officials made fortunes while an emerging middle class has been priced out of ownership.

This led to the biggest purge in recent history when Hu Jintao sacked Shanghai’s party chief last month and used the housing crisis to rout the faction most closely associated with freewheeling capitalism.

“Market order should be further rectified,” said vice-premier Zeng Peiyan, announcing a fresh effort to impose regulations on property last week.

The second document, which emerged from a meeting of the Communist party’s central committee, enshrined the theory that unites all these regulatory moves in a coherent doctrine.

This is Hu Jintao’s pursuit of a “harmonious society” in which grievances are smoothed out under the party’s guidance.

The document called for “co-ordinated development, social equity and justice”— a far cry from the great reformer Deng Xiaoping’s reported declaration three decades ago that “to get rich is glorious”.

The new leaders called for “transforming the economic growth pattern” and the premier stated unequivocally that the eradication of poverty was a top priority.

Since 150m Chinese exist on less than $1 a day and 200m migrants have surged into the country’s seething cities, the regime has a lot on its hands. It has told officials to prepare a tough new labour law to level unequal pay, make it harder to sack workers, curb short-term contracts, enforce collective bargaining and raise workplace standards.

The official All-China Federation of Trade Unions, which has already won access to workers at the American retailer Wal-Mart, has called for all foreign companies to recognise Chinese unions. Loud protests from some multinationals are unlikely to win friends or compromises.

In the present climate, many leftists and nationalists are ready to think what seems unthinkable to foreign investors. “I do not mean that we should protect our old industry, but I do mean that if China’s economic lifelines fall into foreigners’ hands, our society will not be able to endure,” wrote Yang Fan, a well-known professor.

Commenting on a popular website, an economist named Jiang Hai said four things struck him about China’s shift to the left on his return after three years abroad.

First, he said dissatisfied young people were leaning to the left “because they have no memories of starvation in Mao’s time”.

Second, ordinary citizens had turned left because they were sick of the bureaucratic corruption that had flourished under reform.

Third, Jiang argued, the barons of state-owned industries were hanging on to their power and trying to stop free-market reform.

And, finally, he said, Hu Jintao and his comrades were afraid of a complicated modern economy but familiar with orthodox ideology.

However, there will be no long march back to socialism. As the official China Daily noted: “The fact that the Chinese Communist party now names ‘building a harmonious society’ as its basic guiding principle suggests that it has abandoned the concept of ‘class struggle’.” And that, surely, must be good for business.

Posted at 8:08 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Associated Press

Washington:
China’s information minister told Americans on Wednesday that claims his country tramples internet and media freedoms stem from a cultural misunderstanding of the role the press plays in Chinese society.

The US State Department’s annual global human rights report accuses China of clamping down on print, broadcast and electronic media and censoring internet content. But Cai Wu, the state council’s minister of information, insisted that Chinese websites “offer probably the most free forum for opinion in the world.”

With more than 100 million internet users and millions of websites, Cai said that when a breaking news story emerges, thousands of follow-up posts spring up within minutes in cyberspace.

“In China, we think that the relationship between the media, the society and the government should be characterised by coordination and cooperation, rather than by confrontation,” Cai said in remarks at a Washington hotel, speaking through an interpreter.

China, he explained, has different “press concepts” than the West. “In some Western countries, good news is not news; bad news or strange news is news. For example, if a dog bites people, it’s not news; but if people bite dogs, that’s news.”

His comments belie regular, often harsh criticism by US government officials, academics and rights groups of China’s treatment of the press.

A survey earlier this year by the Committee to Protect Journalists said of China: “Never have so many lines of communication in the hands of so many people been met with such obsessive resistance from a central authority.”

As local Chinese media test government controls in efforts to capture more readers, Chinese President Hu Jintao’s government has pushed back.

The US government has said that dozens of dissidents are held in Chinese prisons for internet activity. Zhao Yan, a researcher for The New York Times, was cleared in August of charges that he leaked state secrets to foreigners but convicted on unrelated charges of fraud and sentenced to three years in prison.

During Cai’s remarks at an event sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, he did not comment about specific journalists’ cases.

“I can assure you that in China no journalist or any individual will be arrested or jailed due to his different opinion or [because] he expressed some opinion against the government. Maybe there are some other reasons” for arrests, he said.

In response to a question on whether media control is a good or a bad thing, he asked a question of his own: “Could you find any country in the world where there is no control at all on press or media? There exists control over media in all the countries, sometimes by government, sometimes by media themselves.”

Posted at 6:55 PM · Comments (0)

http://www.whattheduck.net/

Posted at 10:27 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright allAfrica.com

October 26, 2006
Posted to the web October 26, 2006

Washington, DC

After a professional career spent proving that investing in Africa can be profitable, telecommunications entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim has embarked on a new task: to improve the quality of African leadership. To that end, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation has announced a $5 million annual prize for African leaders who were elected fairly, improved their country’s standard of living, and handed over power peacefully to the next elected government.

Recipients of the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership will get $500,000 a year in their first 10 years out of office, and $200,000 a year for the rest of their lives. The prize will be the world’s most generous award, according to the foundation.

“The message is that we, Africans, it is time for us to take charge of our issues,” Ibrahim said. “It is our responsibility to look after our continent, to look after our kids.”

Ibrahim told AllAfrica that he hopes the award will spark a debate on the role of governance in Africa, and provide the means for former leaders to stay engaged in the national life of their countries.

“You don’t need the power of the office to do things,” Ibrahim said. “Civil society is so rich. We need to get engaged there.”

More than anything, he said, the prize will be a reward to leaders who deliver to their people. He hopes to make the first award by the end of 2007.

“It’s important that the citizens of Africa take the leaders to account,” he said.

The prize’s selection committee will choose winners with the help of a governance index that is being developed by Dr. Robert Rotberg at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The foundation will spend about $500,000 a year to develop and update the index. Rotberg has previously written on governance indices and has been developing new measurement methods with students for years.

Rotberg told AllAfrica that most existing measures rely on interviews and other forms of documentation for comparison, but that he will use only quantifiable, objective measures. For example, in measuring changes to the national infrastructure, the index may count the miles of paved road in a country. To measure political freedom, team members may identify the number of journalists or opposition leaders held in prison.

Details of the selection process still need to be hammered out, but Ibrahim said he is pushing forward so African leaders will be prepared before next year’s award.

“If you’re going to start a measured competition, you need to tell the players,” he said. “There’s a competition going on and these are the terms.”

Because the prize is awarded over the lifetimes of recipients, initial expenditures will be relatively small in comparison to the amounts the foundation expects to spend in coming years. Ibrahim said his financial models assume that leaders will live 25 years after leaving office, making the estimated net prize worth $8 million. With new winners being added each year, the cost to the foundation will quickly rise into the tens of millions, but Ibrahim said he is not worried.

“I have put all my proceeds and wealth behind this,” he said. “We are fully funded. We are not seeking money from anybody.”

Much of Ibrahim’s personal fortune comes from last year’s sale of his African telecommunications company, Celtel, to Kuwait’s MTC for $3.4 billion.

Posted at 9:21 PM · Comments (0)

This notice about my photographic work on the city where I live ran today on Dan Washburn’s popular site, the Shanghaiist:

Click to read more

Posted at 3:28 PM · Comments (0)

This notice about my photographic work on the city where I live ran today on Dan Washburn’s popular site, the Shanghaiist:

Click to read more

Posted at 3:22 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Slate

Posted Tuesday, Oct. 24, 2006, at 7:34 AM ET

Tourists pose near a beach pavilion at PIFF. Click image to expand.Tourists pose near a beach pavilion at PIFF
BUSAN, South Korea—I’ve been in the southeastern Korean port city of Busan for two days now, and I have yet to meet a single Korean who is unnerved by the fact that Kim Jong-il has conducted a nuclear weapons test a few hours to the north. The closest thing I’ve seen to concern comes from a rosy-cheeked college student named Hae-Min, who I meet along the boardwalk at Haeundae Beach.

“The bomb test made me very nervous,” she says as we wait in line to buy bottled water from a street vendor. “I was afraid foreign reporters would be scared to come to the film festival.” She pauses and smiles, indicating the press pass hanging from my neck. “So, I’m happy to see you here.”

Asian cinema stars at the Pusan International Film Festival. Click image to expand.Asian cinema stars at the Pusan International Film Festival
Hae-Min is talking about the Pusan International Film Festival—PIFF for short (the festival started in 1996, when Busan was still transliterated as “Pusan”)—and for South Koreans jaded by 50 years of provocations from the North, this event appears to be far more intriguing than the notion of nuclear war. Currently the biggest and most influential festival of its kind in Asia, this year’s PIFF boasts 170 feature films from 63 countries. Variety has nearly 20 reporters in Busan to publish a daily from the festival, and over 5,000 industry professionals are said to be in town for the festivities.

Despite my press credentials, however, my motivation for visiting Korea’s second-largest city goes beyond an interest in Korean Wave filmmaking or the desire to catch the latest Asian premieres. Rather, I am here because I worked in Busan as an English teacher in the late ’90s, and Korean-born U.S. director Wonsuk Chin has written a screenplay about this experience, titled Expats. Since Chin is at the festival, meeting with possible financiers for his film, I’ve made plans to see him this afternoon at the Grand Hotel.

Chin has been involved with the PIFF organization since its inaugural year, and his first film, Too Tired to Die (starring Mira Sorvino, Jeffrey Wright, and Takeshi Kaneshiro), made its Asian debut here after opening at Sundance in 1998. Three years later, when he came to the festival to promote e-Dreams (a documentary about the celebrated dot-com-era rise and fall of online convenience store Kozmo.com), Chin became fascinated by Busan’s expatriate subculture and decided to write a movie about it. In the course of researching the screenplay, the filmmaker came across an article I wrote for Salon about late-’90s expatriate life in Busan, and he and I have been e-mail acquaintances ever since.

Admittedly, Expats is not literally about my life, though I have enough in common with Chin’s protagonist Jeremy Keller to feel like it could be. As was the case for me 10 years ago, Keller isn’t sure what to do with his life in his mid-20s, so he elects to buy some time (and make some cash) by moving to Korea to teach English. Like I did, Keller finds himself charmed, bewildered, and frustrated with the extremes of expatriate life, as well as the challenges of living and teaching in an unfamiliar culture. Like I did, Keller falls in with an eclectic group of acquaintances, including an international roster of fellow expats.

Unlike my experience, Keller and his expat friends decide to buy black-market guns and rob some Korean gangsters—but I suppose that’s how movies work. Chin describes his new film as a cross between Lost in Translation and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels.

In his film synopsis, Chin has described Busan as “the modern Casablanca”—a romantic comparison that has aroused some skepticism among current expats in this crowded, workaholic city of traffic jams and concrete high-rises. Still, Casablanca wasn’t a romantic city until the movie Casablanca made it into one. Movies have a way of reinventing how places are perceived, and a big reason I’m back in Busan is to get a last look at its foreigner subculture before Chin’s movie puts the city onto America’s pop-cultural radar.

The recently constructed Gwangan Grand Bridge. Click image to expand.The recently constructed Gwangan Grand Bridge
As I walk along Haeundae Beach to the Grand Hotel, I can see that Busan has transformed since I left Korea to become a full-time writer eight years ago. The most notable change is an elegant white suspension bridge that spans Suyeong Bay (imagine returning to Houston to discover it suddenly has its own Golden Gate Bridge), as well as two new subway lines, one of which connects this beach with the rest of the city. Back in 1998, when PIFF was in its infancy, movies were screened in the gritty port district of Nampodong; now, in an apparent attempt to imitate Cannes, the festival is centered around a hotel-studded stretch of Haeundae Beach—which has itself gone upscale in recent years. The Haeundae I last saw was a bustling tangle of frumpy bars, bathhouses, and motels fringing a half-mile-long stretch of sand; the resort beach has now become a tidy, sanitized strip of luxury hotels and Starbucks franchises, modern-art museums, and aquariums.

For a returned expat like me, the globalized gentrification of Haeundae Beach feels a bit artificial—but I’m sure it’s a welcome sight for international film tourists, who might otherwise find themselves bewildered in this manic city of 4.5 million people. Haeundae’s cosmetic makeover is no accident: For the past decade, the city government has invested huge sums of money in the attempt to transform Busan into a hub for the Asian film industry. Thanks to the British Invasion-style success of Korean Wave films and soap operas across Asia, this investment is paying off. More than 40 Asian films will be shot in Busan this year, and tourist arrivals for PIFF (mostly from other Asian countries) have steadily increased since the beginning of the decade.

Wonsuk Chin. Click image to expand.Korean-born U.S. film director Wonsuk Chin
Since Wonsuk Chin is an old PIFF hand, my conversation with him is punctuated with continual introductions to other film-fest regulars in the lobby bar. With a boyish smile, goatee stubble, and a thinning crew cut, Chin looks younger than his 38 years. He puffs on a cigarette as he tells me about plans for his new film.

“Most Americans have strong cinematic impressions of Japan or China,” he tells me. “It’s easy to imagine samurai, or the Forbidden City. It’s not that way with Korea: People think of North Korean military parades—or maybe old M*A*S*H episodes—but nothing that truly represents the culture. Korean Wave films are doing well in Asia, but there hasn’t been a substantial American movie filmed here in decades. I want to change that. My movie might be an action comedy, but I want American audiences to absorb a real piece of Korea for two hours.”

“So why make a move about expats?” I ask him. “Why not portray something more distinctively Korean?”

“I want to show Korea through an outsider’s point of view, because I realize how strange this country must seem to visitors. The teacher expats who come here see Korea in a unique way. They aren’t isolated like soldiers or businessmen; they’re working right in the middle of the culture. They’re young, and they’re going through a transitional time of life. They’re more likely to throw themselves into new experiences.”

“And you think these experiences would include robbing Korean gangsters?”

Chin grins and lights another cigarette. “I’m not writing about a specific incident; I’m just exploring a possibility. But in researching the movie, I saw this as a realistic plot idea. Gangsters in Korea don’t carry guns; they use baseball bats and sashimi knives. To gun-culture Americans like Jeremy Keller and his friends, Korean gangsters must seem like an easy target if you want to make a quick buck.”

Although the IMDb.com page for Expats lists Chris Klein (American Pie) and John Cho (Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle) in supporting roles, Chin won’t tell me who he has in mind to play the Jeremy Keller part. Online scuttlebutt has suggested that Jake Gyllenhaal, Jared Leto, and Ryan Phillippe have been approached for the part, but Chin will only concede that he’s in the market for a well-known twentysomething Hollywood actor. “Once we cast the Jeremy Keller role,” he says, “everything else should fall into place. I’d like to shoot it in Busan next spring and debut it as the lead film next fall at PIFF.”

Chin is still curious about what it’s like for an outsider to live in Korea, and he asks me about my own experiences in Busan eight years ago. I tell him I have mixed feelings about my time here, but that I look back on Busan like Ernest Hemingway looked back on Paris—as a “necessary part of a man’s education,” an essential rite of passage in my own life. Since tens of thousands of Americans have made a similar Korean sojourn in the past decade—and since more than 6 million Americans live as expats—I like the notion that indie filmmakers are trying to capture the American expatriate experience on the big screen.

When Chin excuses himself to go attend a meeting, he asks me how I plan to reconnect with Busan’s expat scene. For anyone who’s ever lived overseas in their 20s, the answer to this question should be obvious.

“I’m going to hit the bars,” I tell him.

Indeed, if Busan is really the modern Casablanca, it’s time for me to head out and find the local equivalent of Rick’s Café Americain. Walking outside, I hail a cab and head into the city.
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Posted at 11:19 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Telegraph

Bombarded by petty rules, bossy advice and celebrity tittle-tattle, we have forgotton how to be adults. It’s time we grew up, says Michael Bywater

I imagine myself to be a grown-up, as, presumably, do you. You think that because you negotiated puberty and developed secondary sexual characteristics, and got qualifications and opened a bank account and subjected yourself to the scrutiny of anti-terrorism laws and anti-money-laundering laws and learned to drive and got a job and perhaps a spouse and maybe children, and quite possibly even pay your taxes, you are a grown-up.

A lego figure
It’s time to stop behaving like children and face up to responsibilities

Sometimes, things strike you as a bit odd. It strikes you, for example, as out of kilter that between getting off the plane and reaching the outside world at London Heathrow there were, at last count, 93 notices telling you off for things you hadn’t done or which it hadn’t even occurred to you to do.

The plain fact is that you are being treated like a baby. You, I, all of us are on the receiving end of a sustained campaign to infantilise us: our tastes, our responses, our behaviour, our private thoughts, our decisions, our buying habits, our philosophies, our political sensibilities.

We are told what to think. We are talked down to. We are distracted with colour and movement, patronised, spoon-fed, our responses pre-empted and our autonomy eroded with a fine, rich, heavily funded contempt.

Here is a random sample of what is implicit in the assumptions that are made about all of us: We are unable to control our appetites;
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We cannot postpone gratification;

We have little sense of self, and what we do have is deformed;

We have no articulable inner life;

We are pre- or sub-literate;

We are solipsistic;

We do not have the ability to exercise responsible autonomy;

We require constant surveillance and constant admonition;

We are potentially, if not actually, violent;

We have no social sensibilities beyond the tribal;

We have no discrimination.

Do we still want to sign up to this? Do we want to be Big Babies?

My grandfather was born in 1888 and he didn’t have a lifestyle. He didn’t need one: he had a life.

He had a hat and a car and a wife and two sons and a housekeeper and a maid and a nanny for the children, and the housekeeper had a dog and the dog had a canker and lived in a kennel.

My grandfather read Charles Dickens mostly. Sometimes they went on holiday. His house was furnished with furniture.

There were some exotic things in it, brought back from exotic places. The most exotic things were African carvings and Benares brassware. The African carving had been brought back from a war, possibly the Boer one.

The brassware was brought back from Benares by my grand-father’s friend Dr Chand, who lived next door but was a Brahmin from Benares.

Dr Chand didn’t have a lifestyle either. Nobody had a lifestyle then, because there was nobody to tell them to, and anyway they were too busy having lives.

They were grown-ups. They went about their business. In my grandfather’s case, it was seeing patients and making them better, where possible. In Dr Chand’s case, it was the same, because he was a doctor too.

I suspect that my grandfather’s life was real in a sense that my father’s life hasn’t quite been, and my life is not at all.

The crucial difference is my grandfather’s lack of self-consciousness, and that self-consciousness is a hallmark of the perpetual, infantilised adolescents we have all become, monsters of introspection hovering twitchily on the edge of self-obsession, occasionally aware that the life that exists only to be examined is barely manageable; barely, indeed, a life.

It is a preparation for a life. The consistently introspective life of the Big Baby is as much a simulacrum as life on Big Brother.

To keep the simulacrum going we need help. And we need that help because that help is available.

It’s the old paradox. We need distraction from our fragmented and solitary lives because the distractions available to us have rendered our lives fragmented and solitary.

And we need lifestyle advice from magazines and websites and newspaper supplements and health advisers and personal trainers precisely because we are being nagged about our lifestyle all the time by magazines and websites and newspaper supplements and health advisers and personal trainers…

If one of the markers of adulthood is autonomy, then one of the preconditions of autonomy is being left alone.

My grandfather wasn’t nagged. Once he turned 21, he was a man, and a grown-up, and nobody battered him round the clock with opportunities he was missing, miseries he didn’t know he had, aspirations ditto, inadequacies doubly so.

Nobody told him about being good in bed, grooming tips, what his car said about him, what he should have to eat, how much he should drink, what his house said about him, how Benares brassware was so over, where he should go on holiday, what this season’s must-have product would be, how his suits should look.

He knew some of these things, and didn’t care about the others because nobody was drawing them to his attention. He knew what his suits should look like: trousers, waistcoat, jacket, all made out of the same material.

He knew about grooming: you shaved. He knew what he should eat: breakfast, lunch, dinner. He probably had no idea that good-in-bed even existed, or that furniture did anything except furnish, or that where he went on holiday was of any significance, or that his car said anything about him at all, except ‘Oh, here comes Dr Bywater, I recognise his car.’

But the Big Babies have no such autonomy, and are harangued to death; nor have they learned the adult trick of simply ignoring the fishwife-and-huckster voices. Instead, Baby tries to comply.

Believing it when he is told that he is unhappy, he then believes the cure the same fishwives and hucksters proceed to offer.

The house, the furniture, the car, the exotic holidays, the new wines to try, the squid and worms and foreign muck cooked in jam with the gravy underneath the meat, the peculiar vegetables like weeds or tumours, best thrown away; the uncomfortable places to go, the uncomfortable ways to get to them (‘Travel the Amazon on anaconda-back’), the uncomfortable and dismaying sex (‘Do we have to do buggery?’), the uncomfortable and dismaying life, funded on credit, built on debt, Carol Vorderman smiling as the bailiffs home in and the Official Receiver prepares for another day’s official receiving.

And it is all a world of make-believe, a set of status symbols notable only for symbolising someone else’s status… except that when there is nothing but status for the Big Baby in the Age of Distraction, then our symbols are our status.

We live on a diet of shadows, and we can only imitate them, stuck in the playpen, waiting to be distracted.

Admittedly, it’s tricky, being grown up. The great thing about being a Big Baby is it’s so easy and so rewarding, and everybody else can just bugger off.

Once one has embraced the ‘isms’ that characterise the Baby Boomer’s creed of modernity - individualism, relativism, voluntarism - and lapsed into the hooting, crooning self-validating babyhood that inevitably follows, then one is beyond criticism.

Anyone who says otherwise just doesn’t understand us and, what is more, is just plain wrong.

Being grown up is not nearly as comfortable. Let’s, just for a moment, beg the question and say that one of the qualities of being a grown-up is what the Romans called discrimen and what we would perhaps call ‘discrimination’, though that doesn’t quite cover it.

Discrimen is the ability to judge a situation and to take right action without being sidetracked by peripheral considerations. Sailors would call it ‘seamanship’.

Surgeons speak of ‘decisiveness’. In all cases, discrimen is about knowing what to do in the circumstances, even if there is no guarantee of pulling it off.

But if discrimen is a cardinal virtue of adulthood, the tenets of infantilism work against it. Discrimen calls for right judgment; but the idea of something being ‘right’ is in profound conflict with individualism (which says I can only claim my judgment as being right for me).

It is in conflict with relativism (which says others may have different ideas, which are right for them) and with voluntarism (which says that those different ideas are just as valid as mine, because they, too, have been chosen).

Infantility, indefinitely prolonged, is also the indefinite prolongation of (false) promise.

It’s never too late… never too late to stomp, cadaverous, around the stage singing ‘Can’t get no satisfaction’.

Never too late to cast off the old wife and find a new one. Never too late to make the big killing, to score the goal, to find the perfect shoes, to acquire the perfect six-pack, rack, complexion, butt, pecs or thighs. Never too late (hell, someone must be answering the spam) to get the perfect dick, pumped up with a scoopful of mail-order Viagra; never too late to give her the perfect orgasm, get the perfect house, fill it with the perfect furniture, take the perfect vacation, drive the perfect car…

As the body ineluctably decays (the mind’s long gone, of course; who needs it?), perpetual infantility glosses over the rheum, the pains and creaks and flaccidities. As the opportunities dwindle, perpetual infantility offers us illusion on easy terms with pick-‘n’-mix spirituality, self-improvement, angels and goddesses, diversion and aspiration.

As time slides past, doling out its irreversible quanta, perpetual infantility offers us… the perfect wristwatch: shockproof, waterproof, antimagnetic, a perpetual movement which says everything about us except the single intolerable truth: that we have had it and are headed for oblivion, tick by tick.

We have had to make it up as we go along, we Big Babies. And we have not done a terribly good job. We want (don’t we?) to grow up. How? Here’s the simple answer: watch carefully, ask why, and mind our manners. It’s really that simple. How would the world be if everyone did it?

It would be grown up.

How to be an adult

Don’t be affronted Being affronted (or offended, or complaining about ‘inappropriateness’) is no response for a grown-up. Only children believe the world should conform to their own view of it: a sort of magical thinking that can only lead to warfare, terrorism, unmanageable short-term debt and the Blair/Bush alliance

Mistrust anything catchy, whether it’s the Axis of Evil, advertising slogans, or blatant branding (‘New Labour’). Catchiness exists to prevent thought and to disguise motive. Grown-ups can think for themselves

Ignore celebrities, except when they are doing what they are celebrated for doing: acting, playing football et cetera. Skill does not confer moral, political or intellectual discrimination. (Except in the case of writers. Writers know everything and can lecture you with impunity.) If a celebrity is not celebrated for doing anything but being a celebrity, smile politely but pay no notice

We should not assume that market forces will decide wisely. The market is rigged by manipulation and infantilisation

Consider our own motivations. We may rail about being treated like children, ordered about, kept from the truth, nannied and exploited… but are we complicit in it? Could the reward actually be infantilisation itself?

Autonomy is the primary marker of being grown up. Babies, children and adolescents don’t have any. We don’t want to be in their boat

Suspect administration Its purpose is to free the organisation to do what it’s meant to do: but the triumph of the administrators - the lawyers, the accountants, the professional managers - means that too many organisations now believe that what they are meant to do is administer themselves. This is a profoundly infantile attitude

Do not love yourself unconditionally. Such love is for babies and comes from their mothers. Ignore fashion, particularly in clothes. You don’t want to look like a teenager for ever

Never do business with a company offering ‘solutions’ as in ‘ergonomic furniture solutions which minimise the postural strain associated with sitting’ (chairs) and ‘Post Office mailing solutions’ (brown paper). The word suggests we have a problem, but since we are grown-ups, that is for us to decide

Denounce relativism at every turn. Shouting ‘not fair’ is childish. Demanding respect without earning it is childish. Don’t fear seriousness. Babies aren’t allowed to be serious

Watch our language. Is there really much difference between a six-year-old in a fright-wig and his father’s waders shouting ‘I’m the Mighty Wurgle-Burgle-Urgley-Goo’ and an ostensible grown-up demanding to be called ‘Tony Blair’s Respect Tsar’?

Hide Grown-ups are not required to be perpetually accountable, while the instincts of government and big business, both of which are, almost by their nature, great infantilisers, are to keep an eye on everyone all the time

Eat it up There is nothing more babyish than having dietary requirements

Never vote for, do business with or be pleasant to anyone who uses the words ‘ordinary people’
# Taken from’Big Babies’ by Michael Bywater, published by Granta on 2 November. It is available for £12.99 plus £1.25 p&p. To order, please call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4115 john reynolds

Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full copyright statement see Copyright

Posted at 11:16 PM · Comments (2)

Copyright The BBC

Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years’ time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said.

Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge.

The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said - before a decline due to dependence on technology.

People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added.

The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the “underclass” humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.

Race ‘ironed out’

But in the nearer future, humans will evolve in 1,000 years into giants between 6ft and 7ft tall, he predicts, while life-spans will have extended to 120 years, Dr Curry claims.

Physical appearance, driven by indicators of health, youth and fertility, will improve, he says, while men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises.

Women, on the other hand, will develop lighter, smooth, hairless skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, glossy hair, and even features, he adds. Racial differences will be ironed out by interbreeding, producing a uniform race of coffee-coloured people.

However, Dr Curry warns, in 10,000 years time humans may have paid a genetic price for relying on technology.

Spoiled by gadgets designed to meet their every need, they could come to resemble domesticated animals.

Receding chins

Social skills, such as communicating and interacting with others, could be lost, along with emotions such as love, sympathy, trust and respect. People would become less able to care for others, or perform in teams.

Physically, they would start to appear more juvenile. Chins would recede, as a result of having to chew less on processed food.

There could also be health problems caused by reliance on medicine, resulting in weak immune systems. Preventing deaths would also help to preserve the genetic defects that cause cancer.

Further into the future, sexual selection - being choosy about one’s partner - was likely to create more and more genetic inequality, said Dr Curry.

The logical outcome would be two sub-species, “gracile” and “robust” humans similar to the Eloi and Morlocks foretold by HG Wells in his 1895 novel The Time Machine.

“While science and technology have the potential to create an ideal habitat for humanity over the next millennium, there is a possibility of a monumental genetic hangover over the subsequent millennia due to an over-reliance on technology reducing our natural capacity to resist disease, or our evolved ability to get along with each other, said Dr Curry.

He carried out the report for men’s satellite TV channel Bravo.

Posted at 1:07 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post

Saturday, October 21, 2006; C01

AGOURA, Calif.

Aluxury station wagon rolls up to the temple here at the Sai Anantam Ashram and everyone stands at the ready, even the little ones, hands clasped in prayer. The door opens, and from it, Swamini Turiyasangitananda, nee Alice McLeod Coltrane — yes, that Coltrane — steps out.

She is tall, mahogany of skin, swathed in a saffron sari, ebony hair pressed smooth, rippling past her shoulders, a long layer of dreadlocks snaking out from underneath. She smiles shyly. A devotee rushes to her side, drops to her knees, and, in the tradition of Vedantic followers everywhere, bows at the feet of her guru.

Inside this temple, located about 35 miles west of Los Angeles, worshipers practice a sort of ecumenical Hinduism: The men sit on one side of the royal blue carpet, the women on the other; Alice presides from a fuchsia velvet armchair. During a Sunday service, she kisses a baby and christens him with a Sanskrit name. Someone announces there will be no services next week, thanks to a rare concert that Alice is giving “back East” — a reference to her show tomorrow at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. She gives a short sermon, quoting from the Bhagavad-Gita: “You don’t need any religion to get devoted to God,” she tells them. Some of the 30-plus present wipe tears from their eyes.

Then she sits at the electric organ. Places fingers to keys. Chants “Ommmmmm.”

And begins to play.

Heads nod; bodies sway. They’re singing in Sanskrit — Bolo Bolo Asrita Bolo Om Namah Sivaya — but something else is going on. The deep bass humming from the organ … the funk emanating from tambourines and hand drums … the soulful singing and fervent yeah yeahs … the sister crying out, hands raised, caught up in the rapture …

Hindu gospel?

Indeed, watching Alice on organ, beaming till her dimples pop, it’s not hard to catch a glimpse of the child prodigy from Detroit playing in the Baptist church. To see the young bebop player, the one with whom John Coltrane fell in love, back at Birdland so many years ago.

Another lifetime ago.

* * *

Hers is a life reinvented, in the classic American way of taking sorrow and spinning it into something that gleams brighter than gold. She’s got a last name attached to one of jazz’s all-time greats, and yet few know her for the highly gifted musician and composer she is: an artist admired for her righteously rumbling arpeggios, for the deep vibrancy of her tone, for her dynamism as an improviser. She joined John Coltrane’s quintet in 1965, and together they explored the limits of avant-garde jazz, marinating in the mysticism of Eastern music, improvising their way into a deeply transcendent experience.

Theirs was a brief but intense union — just five years — but one that brought three children and altered her life’s trajectory. John Coltrane, 11 years older, introduced Alice to Eastern religion, meditation and philosophy. He pushed her to take up the harp, at the time a rare addition to the jazz canon. That instrument, along with her ecclesiastical explorations and noodling with North African and Indian instrumentation, formed the musical basis of her solo albums in the late ’60s and early ’70s: “Journey in Satchidananda,” the staple of many a yoga class; “Ptah the El Daoud”; “World Galaxy”; and “Universal Consciousness.”

Her latest, critically acclaimed album, “Translinear Light,” released in 2004 after a 26-year absence from the mainstream jazz scene, looks both backward and forward, traveling between John’s compositions to the gospel hymns of her Christian childhood to the Hindu hymns of her own Vedantic-based beliefs. She’s now at work on “Sacred Language of Ascension,” scheduled for release early next year, an album that incorporates Hebrew devotional chants, Vedic culture, Coltrane jazz, along with orchestral and congregational church music.

“She’s got an incredible strength and direction,” says bassist Charlie Haden, who played with John Coltrane, worked with Alice on “Journey in Satchidananda” and “Translinear Light,” and will be performing with her tomorrow. “She’s always exploring and discovering… . She’s an incredible musician.”

When her one great love died in 1967 of liver cancer after years of alcohol and drug abuse — Alice manages the jazz legend’s estate — she kept on playing, jamming on the piano, harp and Wurlitzer organ in studio sessions with the likes of Jimmy Garrison and Pharoah Sanders, with Rashied Ali and Archie Shepp, and collaborating with Carlos Santana, Laura Nyro, McCoy Tyner and Jack DeJohnette. Music swirled all around her until 1978, when Alice decided that she’d rather pursue all things spiritual. She spent weeks at a time in India, studying with spiritual masters such as her guru, Sri Swami Satchidananda, and the Indian sage Sri Satya Sai Baba, he of the beatific grin and the splendiferous ‘fro.

Ask her about this change in life direction, and she carefully measures her words, her voice a lyrical murmur punctuated by abrupt, staccato bursts:

“This is what we did, [my children’s] father and I, this is what we did when we were young,” Alice, 69, says of her jazz career, sitting by a burbling stream at the ashram. “We concertized, we were busy and we played in various places and we recorded a lot. I felt that he completed his mission. And I felt that my time had passed on.

“You see where I am today,” she continues, gesturing at the Santa Monica Mountains, the lush trees. “I wanted to spend time in spiritual search.”

So she stopped making music for secular consumption and began recording spiritual music with members of the ashram’s choir. But her second-eldest son, Ravi Coltrane, 41, a talented saxophonist, coaxed her out of retirement, bit by bit, for occasional concerts. Ravi produced and performs on “Translinear Light,” five years in the making, and this year cajoled her to perform in four concerts across the country in the 80th year since John’s birth. Tomorrow’s concert will be her only East Coast appearance.

“The performances for me are really commemorating that Alice wants to get onstage and play a little bit,” Ravi says from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y. “All my ideas — ‘C’mon, Ma, we should make a record, let’s go in the studio’ — it was me begging her.”

* * *

Growing up in Detroit in the aftermath of the Depression, the second-youngest of six children, money was always tight. Her father drove a delivery truck; her mother, a homemaker, didn’t truck with childish nonsense. Alice learned about music from her older half brother, Ernie Farrow, a bassist. When Alice was 7, she went knocking on a neighbor’s door. The neighbor had a piano; Alice didn’t.

“I decided one day that I was going to ask her to teach me,” Alice says. She learned the rudiments and moved on to Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky. Classical music grounded her in technique. She composed her first song at 10 and played in church choirs, and then music halls, weddings, funerals, didn’t matter. “Music,” Alice says, “was just in my heart, somehow.”

Farrow, who died in 1969, turned her on to the intricacies of bebop, to the genius of Charlie Parker and Bud Powell. “He loved music,” Alice says of Farrow, “and umph , he could play .” She fell in love with bebop’s muscular braininess, with its off-kilter chord changes and speeded-up tempos. By high school, she was gigging all over town, chasing bebop’s jagged rhythms. If Cannonball Adderley or Sonny Stitt landed in town without a pianist, she was on their shortlist to call.

After graduating from Northeastern High School in the mid-’50s, Alice passed up a scholarship at the Detroit Institute of Technology and headed straight to New York, with a temporary detour in Paris to study with Powell, legendary even then. Jazz — instrumental jazz — was a macho world, and with the exception of a few, such as Mary Lou Williams, Carla Bley, Hazel Scott and Marian McPartland, women weren’t exactly welcome. Alice ignored the macho machinations.

“There was no way I was going to be mannish and do the things men did,” she says. She just played, mindful of her Baptist upbringing. She carried herself like a lady, just like her mother taught her, and that, she says, is exactly how she was treated.

“She was a sweetheart, a lady lady , that’s how I would put it,” says vibraphonist Terry Gibbs, with whom Alice played Jewish melodies as part of her New York experimentation. “A good-hearted person.”

And what made her a good musician?

“What makes anybody good? They’re good. She played all the right notes, all the right chord changes. Her timing was perfect. What makes Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, good? That cliche ‘good for a girl’ was not true.”

For the entire article, please see the link below.

Posted at 8:40 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Policy

Zero-sum positional conflict is avoidable in a liberal market society, argues Will Wilkinson

HL Mencken once quipped that, ‘a wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife’s sister’s husband.’ Writing last April on the definition of poverty in The New Yorker, journalist John Cassidy takes the logic of Mencken’s satire of low-grade ressentiment fully seriously and plumps for its liberal application to public policy. Cassidy argues that it is indeed a hardship to make less than your wife’s sister’s husband—or your co-worker, your next door neighbour, or anyone within the same national boundaries—and proposes that for the purposes of government ‘poverty’ be defined in terms of relative rather than absolute deprivation. In particular, he suggests that the poverty line be set at half the value of the median income. ‘If poverty is a relative phenomenon,’ Cassidy writes, ‘what needs monitoring is how poor families make out compared with everybody else, not their absolute living standards.’ [1]

While capitalism does in fact produce absolutely egalitarian results—enabling the poor to own high-quality mobile phones, microwaves, and cars functionally equivalent to those of the wealthy—it cannot, critics say, manufacture more and better ‘positional goods’, to use economist Fred Hirsch’s term, because, basically, it is impossible to fit more than ten percent in the top ten percent.[2] No matter how trusty, safe, comfortable, and efficient your new Hyundai Accent may be, the fact that is within the grasp of so many will keep it from signaling that you inhabit the commanding heights of society. And that’s what you really want, isn’t it? To be king of the mountain?

Policy arguments like Cassidy’s that pivot on the alleged importance of relative position rather than absolute opportunity and wealth, are now much in vogue—on the left, at least. The politics of relative position is the egalitarian welfare statist’s new favorite game. Richard Layard, head of the London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance and member of the British House of Lords, argues that considerations of relative position justify regulating and even censoring advertising, for it makes us feel bad to see people who own things we cannot afford, and even if we can afford them, having them wouldn’t make us happy.[3] British epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson claims that low relative income is a direct cause of illness, and that equalising income redistribution ought to be reconceived as a ‘public health’ measure.[4] Cornell University economist Robert Frank argues in rigorous detail for a steep consumption tax designed to dampen the alleged enthusiasm for zero-sum status races through the display of opulence.[5] ‘Every time [some people] raise their relative income (which they like),’ Layard writes, following Frank, ‘they lower the relative income of other people (which those people dislike). This is an “external disbenefit” imposed on others, a form of physical pollution.’[6] The solution? Slap a tax on ‘the polluting activity’—you and me working hard to get a raise—in order to get us to play more and produce less.

Are these arguments any good? Does our taste for relative position help vindicate egalitarian social democracy? The answer is no. A more benign and scientifically adequate picture of human nature, together with a more up-to-date notion of ‘externalities,’ show the politics of relative position to be a non-starter.

Happiness, position and pollution
The politics of relative position encourages us to see life as a competitive climb up a ladder of status. If there can only be one person per rung on any dimension of status or rank, then each step up the ladder for one person logically requires a step down for another. You can’t make space for an eleventh restaurant or university on a ‘Top Ten’ list, just as two runners can’t both come in first. Competition for higher position is a paradigmatic zero-sum game. So if inherently scarce positional goods like ladder-rank are highly valued, then whenever you get a raise, a promotion, or a swank new suit, it will create a shower of negative psychic consequences that rain on those occupying the rungs below. So the story goes.

According to Layard, Frank and others, we fiercely value positional goods because we fiercely value status—the ultimate positional good. This explains, they posit, why average self-reported happiness has not gone up over time, though wealthier people at any time are more likely to be happier. Higher relative standing makes us happier, but the middle of the income distribution is the middle, no matter how big the number. So there simply is no avoiding the positional downside of every positional upside. But, they argue, we cannot simply shrug off the inevitable cruelty of a world in which our interests are in irreconcilable conflict. Policy must take human nature seriously, and do what it can to help. We should take the dismay and anxiety caused by zero-sum competition over positional goods just as seriously as sludge dumped in a stream, the roar of jets at a nearby airport, or other classic examples of negative spillover effects (or ‘negative externalities’) of economic activity.

In addition to the ‘harms’ caused by any upward positional move, Frank and Layard worry about the negative effects of positional ‘arms races’. If I try hard to move up the positional ladder, the people just ahead will try harder still to maintain their lead. In the end, we’re all likely to be about where we started in terms of relative position, but we’ll all be exhausted by the futile dash. As an illustration in several of his papers and books, Frank highlights the signalling function of fashion:

[I]f some job candidates begin wearing expensive custom-tailored suits, a side effect of their action is that other candidates become less likely to make favorable impressions on interviewers. From any individual job seeker’s point of view, the best response might be to match the higher expenditures of others, lest her chances of landing the job fall. But this outcome may be inefficient, since when all spend more, each candidate’s probability of success remains unchanged. All may agree that some form of collective restraint on expenditure would be useful.[7]

Perhaps Frank has yet to hear about Overstock.com, where you can buy a $1,000 suit for $300. In any case, he argues that it is often impractical or impossible for individuals to negotiate a truce, so a trusted third party—the state—must step in and impose a price cap or a tax on fancy suits (or cars, houses, or whatever) in order to mitigate the ‘harm’ caused by the self-defeating attempt to get ahead.

The intractability of zero-sum positional competition for Frank and Layard flows from a rather nasty conception of human nature involving a universal, inflexible, deep-seated, status-seeking instinct together with a remarkably narrow, materialistic conception of how positional competition is culturally mediated. Theirs is a distressingly agonistic vision of the human predicament in which life is irremediably brutish and nasty, if not short. ‘The desire for status is utterly natural,’ Layard writes. ‘But it creates a massive problem if we want to make people happier, for the total amount of status is fixed … If my score improves, someone else’s deteriorates.’[8] Your heel is always on someone’s neck, but you can hardly help it. Primates will be primates.

Status-seeking missiles
In our original evolutionary context, Frank argues, higher rank individuals would have greater access to material resources and the highest quality mates, increasing the proportion of their genes in future populations. Therefore, Frank concludes, ‘it would be strange indeed if the relentless forces of natural selection had not honed a human brain that strongly motivated its bearer to seek high rank.’[9] Mother nature has made us, like other primates, status-seeking missiles.

Layard recognises this line of thought may sound ugly to certain ears, and so imagines a ‘libertarian’ who objects that public policy based on our status-fixation affirms and rewards an ‘ignoble sentiment [like envy] that ought to be disregarded.’ He responds:

This is an extraordinarily weak argument. Public policy has to deal with human nature as it is. The desire for status is after all ubiquitous, and we all recognise it. Greed is also common, and libertarians do not disallow it. Both sentiments are features of human nature. We are not perfect, and public policy should help us make the best of what we are.[10]

Layard is concerned to get us to take the inescapability of status-racing seriously, or else his argument for taxes on positional ‘pollution’ will fall apart. He’s right that we must deliberate about policy ‘taking men as they are and laws as they might be’, as Rousseau put it. And we should not be surprised to find that our theory of human nature will largely determine which laws and institutions seem feasible and desirable. However, while Frank and Layard’s forays into speculative evolutionary psychology are better than ‘extraordinarily weak’, they don’t amount to a state-of-the art conception of human nature ‘as it is’. Taking men as they really are is the downfall of the politics of relative position.

Status civilised
It is true that status is not ideological fancy. Frank and Layard both refer to studies involving vervet monkeys showing that serotonin and testosterone concentrations correlate positively with position in the deference-dominance hierarchy.[11] Status has a real organic basis. In his article on relative poverty Cassidy, too, cites evidence that low-ranking baboons have elevated levels of stress hormones, and that low-ranking rhesus monkeys face elevated risk of arteriosclerosis. And there is some good evidence of similar physical correlates of status in humans. ‘If monkeys enjoy status, so do human beings,’ Layard reasons. He then rushes to explore the policy implications of intractable status competition.

But not so fast! The fact that we are not actually vervet monkeys matters. Species differences matter a lot, even between monkeys and chimps. Pioneering primatologist and psychologist Abraham Maslow first pointed out the vast difference in behaviour between often friendly and tolerant dominant chimpanzees and vigilantly despotic dominant rhesus monkeys.[12] ‘Real and profound differences are glossed over by flat statements that all primates know dominance-subordination relationships,’ writes Frans de Waal, the world’s leading expert on primate hierarchies.[13]

Real and profound differences are also glossed over by failing to acknowledge what is peculiar to humans. For one thing, we are uniquely cultural creatures, and this fundamentally transforms the zero-sum logic of the primate dominance hierarchy. Even universal human psychological traits are highly mediated by diverse human cultural formations. Like monkeys and chimps, we all eat. But some eat with fingers, some with forks, some with a waiter and muzak, some squatting in the bush over a bloody wild pig. All humans signal status and station, but the differences between a silk necktie and a bound foot are not morally trivial. A high-status drug-dealing gangster thug and a high-status barn-raising Amish family man may each be alphas within their groups, but the social consequences of positional competition for power and for upstanding modest piety are hardly the same.

Indeed, a sensible measure of a culture’s quality is the extent to which it can shape potentially destructive natural propensities, such as self-interest, status-seeking, tribal solidarity, and mate competition into benign or even beneficial cultural forms.[14] While our taste for status may be deep, the fact that our cultural capacity mediates our instincts, causing the form and value of their expression to vary wildly, prevents facile extrapolation from tendency to policy.

The turn to culture is not a soft-headed evasion of hard biological truths. Cultural flexibility just is our biological nature. Recent work by Peter Richerson, Robert Boyd, Joseph Henrich (a zoologist and two anthropologists), and others point out the adaptive advantages of a labile cultural capacity that allows human populations to adapt quickly to changing environments, and to accumulate and transmit useful knowledge, norms, and institutions across generations.[15] In a paper on the cultural evolution of cooperation, Boyd, Richerson, and Henrich point out that the common human cultural capacity explains the huge variation in cooperative institutions and norms between societies. Whether we happen to be locked in zero-sum or positive sum games is more a matter of culturally transmitted institutions (norms of interaction and coordination, explicit or tacit) than of brute facts about our genetic constitution.[16] The question, then, isn’t whether we are status-seeking. The question is how our culture and institutions harness, suppress, or amplify our natural tendencies.

Manufacturing status
Henrich, with psychologist Franscisco Gil-White, has argued that the distinctive human cultural capacity creates space for kinds of status based in the positive-sum trade of specialised cultural knowledge and expertise for prestige. Freely conferred prestige is both an incentive to develop excellence in a valued domain, and a payment for the demonstration and transmission of scarce knowledge and skills that benefit members of the group.

In humans, in contrast [to other primates], status and its perquisites often come from non-agonistic sources—in particular, from excellence in valued domains of activity, even without any credible claim to superior force. For example, paraplegic physicist Stephen Hawking … certainly enjoys high status throughout the world. Those who, like Hawking, achieve status by excelling in valued domains are often said to have ‘prestige’.[17]

It cannot be denied that prestige based in superior theoretical physics is a far cry from a tyranical vervet monkey keeping its cowering underlings in thrall. Henrich and Gil-White’s conception of non-agonistic prestige based in valued excellence points to the exit from Layard and Frank’s grim, zero-sum world. For sure, the runner-up in the race to cure a disease may be infuriated by the prestige granted to his winning nemesis, but this triviality will be swamped by the benefits that flow to people who may not even know the innovators name, and never paid in esteem.

The logic is basically David Hume’s in his essay ‘The Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, where he attributes the advance of knowledge and beauty precisely to a combination of ‘emulation’, the ambition to surpass others (positional competitiveness) and a taste for ‘praise and glory’ (freely conferred prestige). Hume may well have had himself in mind when he said that ‘A writer is animated with new force, when he hears the applauses of the world for his former productions; and, being roused by such a motive, he often reaches a pitch of perfection, which is equally surprising to himself and to his readers.’[18] The world is better, not worse, for Hume’s own avidly status-seeking ‘love of literary fame’, his confessed ‘ruling passion’.[19] We applaud for a reason: to stimulate the supply of excellence by gratifying the demand for status.

Crucially, there is no limit to the possible forms of excellence. So, while the number of positions on any single dimension of status may be fixed, there is no reason why dimensions of status cannot be multiplied indefinitely. It does not in fact require a violation of mathematical law to produce more high-status positions, for it is possible to produce new status dimensions.[20]

New dimensions of excellence and status often open up due to technological innovation. It was impossible to be a chart-topping pop star or a champion triathalete before there were radios and bikes. Liberal market societies not only create new technologies, they create proliferating forms of association, affiliation, expression, and identity at a sometimes alarming rate.[21] Each musical genre, each hobby, each committee, each church, each club, each ideology, each lifestyle provides a new dimension—a new frame of reference—for positional competition. Environmental purists can compete with one another to conspicuously consume eco-friendly products (or conspicuously refuse to consume much at all), while punk rockers duke it out on grounds of anti-establishment authenticity, and economics professors knock themselves dead trying to get articles into esoteric journals no one else cares about.

The cultural fragmentation some critics lament is precisely what liberates us from unavoidable zero-sum positional conflict. Surfer dudes don’t compete with Star Trek geeks for status. Dynamic market liberal societies create higher-order positive-sum games (for example, the ‘create a new status dimension’ game, or the ‘find the status dimension on which you rank highest’ game) that have lower-order zero-sum games as parts.

Once we recognise the anarchic multi-dimensionality of status, the frequent supposition of Frank, Layard, Cassidy, and others that the distribution of income—whether within the office or within the nation—is the the main dimension of positional competition begins to look bizarre. Struggling artists do not doubt their superiority in the face of successful accountants. And it should not need pointing out that many of us simply don’t know how much our friends make, and don’t much care.

Getting out of the rain
Are the external effects of positional competition really like pollution, as Layard says? Or is positional competition more like the light of the sun: it can burn you, but nothing grows without it? It’s not so easy to tell. Nobel Prize-winner Gary Becker and his University of Chicago colleague Kevin Murphy have argued that without the motivating prospect of increased status, there would be ‘underinvestment’ in entrepreneurial activity: ‘Great scientists and outstanding entrepreneurs receive enormous prestige and status precisely in order to encourage scientific and startup activities,’ they write.[22] The benefits of such status-seeking, they say, may more than offset the negative effect of status ‘arms races’. Even if the taste for positional goods is unavoidable, Indiana University economist Richmond Harbaugh argues that fear of falling behind may induce high rates of savings—a kind of stockpiling for future status-signaling consumption races—with positive overall effects on economic growth.[23] There’s no excuse for ignoring the benefit side of the cost-benefit ledger.

Even if some positional competition creates negative spillovers, the best policy solution is rather less clear than Frank, Layard, and others imply. In his seminal 1960 article, ‘The Problem of Social Cost’, Ronald Coase destroyed the older conception of externalities. Coase drew attention to the fact that externalities exist only as an interaction of preferences. I may smell of jasmine, to the delight of most who enter my orbit. But if you are allergic, my fragrance may be far from pleasant. A tax on jasmine may benefit you, but at the cost of those who take pleasure in the scent. Coase instructs us to look for the ‘least-cost avoider’. If it costs you least simply to stay out of wafting distance, then that will be the most efficient course.

The cultural variability and open-endedness of status makes it clear that we are not helpless to avoid the harsh side-effects of positional competition. It is within our power to opt out of any particular status race, and to compete for status on a different dimension, those ‘harmed’ may well be the least-cost avoiders. Remember Frank’s example of competing job-applicants in a race to buy an ever-fancier suit? The fact is, you simply don’t have to apply for that job. And even if you really want to, you can always buy your suit on the cheap from Overstock.com, hope nobody notices, and use the $500 you saved to buy studio time for your new indie-funkcore-folk band.

Frank, acknowledging the logic of Coase’s least-cost avoider principle, argues that even people who are uninterested in status may be harmed by others’ positional competition. For example, ‘positional externalities in the housing market,’ Frank argues, ‘also entail far more tangible costs, most notably that failure to keep up with community spending patterns means having to send one’s children to schools of below average quality. The scope for accommodation to such costs seems far more limited’ than in cases where we can simply choose not to let relative position bother us.[24] But this, Frank’s best example of a case where it is hard to opt out, is in fact a strikingly poor example. It turns entirely on the irrational bundling of schools and neighbourhoods in the American public system, a problem that could be entirely alleviated with a system of school vouchers that would allow families to send their kids to fancy schools outside their own modest neighbourhood. This suggests that the most direct policy implications of positional competition may not be higher taxes on work and consumption, but policies, like school vouchers, that make it easier to pick and choose among races. It should be possible to give your kids a leg up in the education race without also buying a mansion.

Conclusion
The argument for the politics of relative position is at bottom an argument about the limits of human freedom. We are, it is alleged, locked into the rat race by the relentless engine of our evolved status-hungry nature. And we are, it is argued, almost helpless to reinterpret the context, the frame of reference, within which we evaluate our own choices. But the unique human cultural capacity—equally a part of our biology—liberates us.

Where benevolence, fidelity, cooperation, innovation, and excellence are esteemed, positional races may produce mutual advantage instead of mutual destruction. And while the game of status may be locally zero-sum, it can be globally positive-sum, as scientific, economic, and cultural entrepreneurs identify new dimensions of excellence in which to compete and earn freely conferred prestige as payment for benefit to others. We are not destined to want fancier cars, bigger houses, and more upscale outfits, nor are we helpless to feel diminished by those who out-consume us. We can opt out by opting in to competing narratives about the composition of a good life. And we do it all the time. We can, like Gauguin, quit law and family to paint naked natives in Tahiti. Or, better, we can move the family to a quieter place where houses are cheap and schools are good. (‘Is this heaven?’ ‘No, Iowa.’) If we are aggrieved by the rigours of the rat race, the answer is not the clumsy guidance of a paternal state. The answer is simply to stop being a rat.

Posted at 8:36 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Guardian

Nearly 900 African-Americans fought on the Japanese island but not one appears in Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-tipped film, writes Dan Glaister

Los Angeles
Friday October 20, 2006

The portrayal in Clint Eastwood’s film, Flags of Our Fathers, of the raising of the US flag on Iwo Jima.
The portrayal in Clint Eastwood’s film, Flags of Our Fathers, of the raising of the US flag on Iwo Jima.

On February 19 1945 Thomas McPhatter found himself on a landing craft heading toward the beach on Iwo Jima.

“There were bodies bobbing up all around, all these dead men,” said the former US marine, now 83 and living in San Diego. “Then we were crawling on our bellies and moving up the beach. I jumped in a foxhole and there was a young white marine holding his family pictures. He had been hit by shrapnel, he was bleeding from the ears, nose and mouth. It frightened me. The only thing I could do was lie there and repeat the Lord’s prayer, over and over and over.”

Article continues
Sadly, Sgt McPhatter’s experience is not mirrored in Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood’s big-budget, Oscar-tipped film of the battle for the Japanese island. While the battle scene’s in the film - which opens today in the US - show scores of young soldiers in combat, none of them are African-American. Yet almost 900 African-American troops took part in the battle of Iwo Jima, including Sgt McPhatter.

The film tells the story of the raising of the stars and stripes over Mount Suribachi at the tip of the island. The moment was captured in a photograph that became a symbol of the US war effort. Eastwood’s film follows the marines in the picture, including the Native American Ira Hayes, as they were removed from combat operations to promote the sale of government war bonds.

Mr McPhatter, who went on to serve in Vietnam and rose to the rank of lieutenant commander in the US navy, even had a part in the raising of the flag. “The man who put the first flag up on Iwo Jima got a piece of pipe from me to put the flag up on,” he says. That, too, is absent from the film.

“Of all the movies that have been made of Iwo Jima, you neve