Inside Bureaucracy Today

The Joys of BB: Part XII Faster Pussycat Kill, Kill!

2008-02-20T07:09:00.000-08:00

So we were cruising along at 17 m.p.h. and I was chatting with the labor union representative and Yale grad about the South African Communist Party (SACP) and wondering if we had dropped the Dutch girl who had been an Olympic diver and now studied African development at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and the communist asks me...

You wanna join our team?

How did I feel about racing with Team The Bike Rack? I have ridden with Squadra Coppi, Whole Wheel Velo Club, with guys from Capitol Hill, with National Capital Velo Club, with riders from Artemis and Potomac Peddlers.

No one from these teams disagreed with me on Bush's PEPFAR policy (as the Dutch, diving, SAIS student did) or outlined the nuances of the Powell doctrine (as Jonathon, a Swede and SAIS student did), or fixed my cheapo spare tire kit for me because my fingers were too cold (as the owner of The Bike Rack, who I call in my head "Gay Lance Armstrong" did).

Riding with The Bike Rack was easier, sure. This will be their first year of racing. I've ridden their Sunday "no drop" rides, which are leisurely paced. They don't have any Category 1 or 2 riders. None have 3% body fat. The best had the kind of muscular legs only overweight riders can build. The rest were like the communist and me--uninspiring physically. None were major league a-holes.

Gay Lance Armstrong, part owner, helped addicts and druggies for over ten years before opening his bike shop last year. He can ride, too--he's dropped me at will. He rides a sweet custom Seven Titanium with SRAM Red; the guy's a bike geek. His website stated yesterday, but not today, that The Bike Rack is "gay-owned."

I love the idea of riding for a gay-sponsored team. I don't know if that is discriminatory or what. I like the idea of a guy--a really decent, nice guy--who devoted fifteen years of his young life to helping down-and-outers saying, "I'VE DONE ENOUGH GOOD!" and getting all full of rage on his bike and kicking ass and scattering the capitalist over-the-top heteros. I like the idea of Gay Lance Armstrong. I like the idea of being Gay Lance Armstrong's (very hetero) George Hincapie.

G.L. Armstrong, at left

I turned to the communist.

I'm in.

The Joys of BB: XI Happiness is a Warm Bar

2008-02-15T11:18:00.000-08:00

A book came out recently called "Against Happiness."

I wondered, when I first examined the title: what kind of person would write such a book?

Existentialists no longer mope about cafes, so I doubted he was a philosopher. Perhaps a mental health professional? No, happiness is their golden goose.

None too surprisingly, a professor of literature (Eric G. Wilson, called Manic G, by his homies) wrote the book--more precisely, a professor of Romantic literature. What a depressing field of study. Wordsworth running through the Lake District chasing his sister. Coleridge cut off in the middle of "Kubla Khan" the world's most artistically productive opium trip, by an insurance salesman. The collapse of the French Revolution in 1789 and the subsequent interruption of the Tour de France for a few years.

Guess which Eric G. Wilson doesn't like happiness

Happiness is a word--like crankset, nipple wrench and lube--with various connotations. Ambrose Bierce, in his "Devil's Dictionary" defines happiness as "An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another." Plato's eudamonia has been translated as happiness, but is expresses the notion of possession or control by good spirits. The Beatles said happiness is "a warm gun."

Happiness is related to happenstance and the fortuitous intervention of chance or fate. Oedipus, after happenstance has ruined him, warns us to "count no man happy until that day he goes down into the grave." The old limerick states:

See the happy idiot
He doesn't give a damn.
I wish I were an idiot.
My God! Perhaps I am.

Happiness is a state of mind. Ignorance is bliss (i.e., happiness). Happiness is sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

The connotations of happiness suggest confusion and disagreement about it. The place to start is not by disavowing happiness, but by agreeing that there is something we all desire, and then trying to define it.

We all want happiness, we just may not know precisely what me mean when we say that. Perhaps if G-Manic had titled his book "Defining Happiness," I could condescend to read it, but as it is, I think I'll ride my bike instead.

The Joys of BB X: Squirrel in a Fork on Ice

2008-02-13T07:09:00.000-08:00

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
-- Robert Frost

Broken plastic plates and bits of food covered the sidewalks in Dupont last night. I helped a woman back to her feet and helped her brush off refried beans and salsa from her jacket. I was waiting for my bus. People fell or nearly fell up and down O Street and staggered from signpost to parking meter, and slid on all fours.

Bodies upending, feet flying, torsos smacking the pavement--I paid attention. I know that, if I race this summer, I am likely to do this at least once. I am likely to go over my handlebars, under wheels, break my collarbone, or lose my skin. Cyclists do a girly thing (shave their legs) for a very manly reason (when the road shreds off their skin, hair gets stuck in the rash and makes it more difficult to bandage). You know how nurses shave patients before surgery? Cyclists shave themselves anticipating surgery. That is sobering.

I thought about that especially when a cyclist zipped by, in the dark, on a thin sheet of ice. I would have bike commuted myself, except my knee's a little gimpy. Glad I didn't. Commuting, especially after ice storms, is even more dangerous than racing.

I hope to avoid some accidents by being smart and cautious. For example, not carrying an umbrella while riding:

Most commuters don't worry about road rash or a few rain drops on the head--we worry about complete obliteration. That is, cars. Cars do to cyclists what cyclists do to squirrels, as seen here:
Cyclists ride a path that is perpetually icy, figuratively speaking. We cover ourselves with blinking lights and wear helmets. We ride in packs. We discuss falling techniques. We have separate threads for different injury prevention techniques entitled "Wear your helmet", "Wear your elbow pads!!" where we dispense advice such as

"first DONT EXTEND YOUR HANDS!!! second..... RELAX AND ROLL!!!"

and suggest taking judo to improve falling technique.

Really! Take up a martial art, just to learn how to fall. Would judo have helped the poor squirrel escape getting jammed into some poor guy's fork? Would it have helped the hundreds of cyclists hit this year by drunks and dufuses?

When it comes, I'm sure I'll be surprised. Hopefully, this guy remembered to RELAX AND ROLL:

The J of BB IX: The Mystery of Decency

2008-02-08T06:44:00.000-08:00

It used to be that news of genocide, ethnic cleansing, or the NY Yankees got me thinking about the problem of evil. I wondered how a good God allows evil to flourish (and especially concentrate itself in the NY Yankees)? God brought home the groceries of creation, and it was all good stuff, but somehow the dinner of life is bitter and sometimes poisonous.

Now I think about the problem less, perhaps because I doubt we're in the hands of a good God.

I therefore worry less about the problem of evil, at least as a polemical problem (it certainly exists as an annoyance, especially when the Yankees win). Bad things don't happen under the watchful eye of a good God; bad things simply happen because that is the way of the world.

And that causes a problem. A world without either a divinity, or a "God of the Completely Indifferent" (see Kurt Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan) must contend with a different problem: the problem of good. That is, how did goodness come to exist in a completely indifferent universe?

I have found some goodness on the plate of life (after I scraped off the broccoli). Can I call it good in any transcendent sense of the word? Or do I merely mean when I say "good" that x is "liked by me"? I merely say, with Macbeth, that "there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so."

The question, then, is which of the two problems--of good and of evil--is more significant?

A nine dollar check. Made me think about this. I won the bid on a Dura Ace crank and, in addition to the price, paid the $9.00 shipping and handling charge. The seller lives up the street from me, and was kind enough to deliver the crank to my door. Though I had not mentioned reimbursement, the seller sent me a check for $9.00.

This was surprising, especially since it was anonymous and will in all probability be without consequences. I would expect this from a lot of people I know, most believers in God, but not someone I don't know.

And here we come to another issue--I prefer to live in a world where people believe in God, where the problem of evil exists. The rules of that world exist in perpetuity and goodness is more than an expression of personal taste. That's appealing.

And, of course, I like $9.00 checks. Most people do, which is why most people believe in a good God, and why, for most people, the problem of evil exists. Such a world, where evil must be explained as an anomoly, is appealing. It assumes a basic goodness in the universe, and this offers immense comfort.

Comforting ideas have a tendency to be wrong, though. That the Cubs will win the World Series. That Barack Obama will revive America. That unicorns exist and yearn to give rides through lands of pixee dust to lonely girls. That I am a unique and beautiful snowflake. That God listens.

Thank goodness, some comforting ideas are actual. That I love my family, and they love me. That a stranger will send me $9.00.

When it is 5:30am and I am twisting my stationary indifferent machine with my indifferent body, and my cadence is 96 rpm, and my heart rate is 165 bpm, and the whine of the trainer is almost as loud as my breath, I pass by God. Maybe he's the God of the Completely Indifferent, or maybe he's just God. He's riding a unicorn, wearing a Yankees jersey and sporting an "Oh Mama, Obama!" button. I thank him for the $9.00.

The J of BB VIII: The Unbearable Lightness of Building

2008-02-06T08:23:00.000-08:00

Calvini and Big Troy

My brother Troy, a philosophy professor, likes to talk about economics. I suppose it's relaxing for him, in his line of work, to take a break from rigid designators and such, and to chat instead about Pareto efficiency and inflation, and how it's old people who hate it, mostly, because the thought that a box of Cracker Jacks should cost more than 3 pence disgusts them. And so forth.

Anyhow, Troy has a pet economics theory which he tells to anyone willing to listen because the theory allows him to talk about bicycles. He is, obviously, an amazing person and a wonderful conversationalist, and I'm not just saying that because he's my brother and likes to talk about bicycles.

His theory is simple:

More expensive goods are literally lighter goods; the more developed an economy, the lighter its goods.--Big Troy

So now we get to talk about bicycles. Ah hem.

Bike builders (like me) pay a premium for light parts--parts made of carbon fiber, titanium, scandium, magnesium, and other exotic materials. Big Troy tells me that some crazy philosophers might even go so far as to say that bikes have souls--truly, an exotic and thankfully weightless material.

I had to pay a fair amount for my componenets. I chose SRAM's respectable Force line of components: brakes, shifters, crank, chain, casette, and deraillers.

Big Troy, never one to compromise, chose SRAM's top of the line Red groupset. This half pound SRAM Red does not have (that SRAM Force does) cost him a fair amount of money.
Scott Addict Frame and SRAM Red Components

My components sit in a box in my bedroom. I tell myself that six months ago, they were the lightest components available, that Lance never road anything nearly as light as my SRAM Force, that my components weigh half as much as Eddy Merckx's, and probably a third as much the components Coppi road.

But that is hardly the point. The point is that they could be lighter. That all-important half pound that separates Red from Force. It bugs me. That I'll have a little weight just hanging there, serving no function, holding me back.

One cannot be a moral person, a lover of humanity, and be a weight weenie. I am a Peace Corps Volunteer. I have to remind myself this. I love humanity more than the dream of bicycle weightlessness, of travelling on a cushion of pure soul. And yet I can't help but be drawn to the purity of this vision.

There are other, more difficult ways of dropping weight (and inevitably cash). On the table:

Appendix Removal. The appendix is the Federal employee of the body; it weighs at least a pound and doesn't do anything except watch shit flow by. Ridding myself of my worthless appendix would cost me somewhere around $12,485. This is a high cost/per pound ratio; perhaps too high. But this thing looks kind of nasty:
Appendicitis

It probably does something important if it looks nasty.

Lose weight. I can't do much to change myself except lose weight, and that requires a lot of work and not eating. I don't like that, and I lack the discipline.

Buy a lighter bike. So it's back to the bike--what can money buy me? I was drawn to this:
World's Lightest Bike at under 1818 grams (4 lbs)

The frame is made of styrofoam over steel rods.

Looking at the pitiful thing, I'm not sure if it was meant to be ridden. The web site mentions that the wheels are glued together. That's not exactly reassuring.

Part of this building process, I'm coming to realize, requires building me. Or, rather, it's re-building me: stripping off the fat, atrophying unnecessary muscle, and becoming strong in the right places.

Everyone does this generally, I suppose. If there had been bicycles in St. Paul's time, I'm sure he would have used cyclists instead of runners in his "I have run the good race" pep talk. There's something mortifying--in the original sense of the word--about cycling. The flesh is weak, so it must go. That's the purity of bike building.

The J of BB: Part VII Clean Water

2008-02-01T11:36:00.001-08:00

The J of BB: VI Power Lines

2008-01-31T08:29:00.000-08:00

We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
Stephen Vincent Benet (1898 - 1943), Litany for Dictatorships, 1935

Jimmy Carter's grandson Jason, like me, served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in South Africa. Jason wrote a book, Power Lines, about his experiences. Our experiences were similar--so similar that, after I read Power Lines , my own writings about my experience in South Africa seemed derivative. Most of the superficial details of our experiences are identical: our villages were in KaNgwane, a former bantustan; we learned SiSwati from the same language teacher; we went to the same backpackers, shopped in the same stores, and took some of the same vacations.
Jason Carter

He was there a few years before me; I never met him. But everywhere I went, I felt myself to be his shadow. When I went through his village, people ran toward me, only to stop short and turn away disappointed. My language teacher, Lindiwe, once confided in me that I was the best student she had had, aside from Jason.

I must admit that Power Lines is an apt title for a book about South Africa. Mandela's revolution redistributed political power; it also began the process of redistributing electrical power. This distribution was just beginning when Jason Carter was a Volunteer. I saw its further implementation.

The average South African judges the extent of democracy in his country by the proliferation of water taps and power lines in his neighborhood. That my host father, Zephaniah Mbatha, and I sometimes had to drive over a mile to a tap to find water was a violation of his constitutional rights, according to the South African Constitution, in fact.
Babe Mbatha Unloading Water Barrels in Mgobodi, South Africa:

A lesser violation of Mbatha's rights was the erratic power supply. Power came to the village in 2000, causing Mbatha, a shopowner, to scrap his solar panel, which had powered the lights and refrigerators in his shop. He regretted doing so, since the sun, he told me, was a more reliable source of energy than ESKOM.

Now, according to a New York Times article , there are so many new consumers of power that there is an extreme shortage. Rolling blackouts are stalling the economy: mines, industry, and restaurants have been forced to close for periods of the day. The government will likely fail to achieve its goal of reducing its 25% unemployment rate.

So much for power to the people.

Here's a fellow who uses a bicyle to create power.

I've always wondered if we could tackle some of our energy problems by harnessing our bodies. All the power from weightlifters, runners and cyclists dissipates. I cycle for an hour almost every day--could I power my apartment with the energy I create?

According to Los Gatos (the man picture above), I'd have to pedal for six hours just to keep my refrigerator going for 24 hours. Hardly worth it. Los Gatos recommends a Poor Richard approach to power: a watt saved is a watt earned.

Riding a bicycle, unless you are Lance Armstrong, is hardly an act of power. Despite the ubiquity of devices that measure power output on the bicycle--Floyd Landis claims it was his Powertap device, not drugs, that helped him win the Tour de France--a bicycle will never be a Humvee. It does not strike fear into the heart (cyclophobists excepted).

Everyone can ride a bicycle. Riders, unlike drivers, are not hidden behind steel and glass. Riders tend to group together. Cycling is a team sport. Honor. Dignity. Integrity. Banana hammocks.

The Joys of BB: Part V الحب

2008-01-30T12:14:00.001-08:00

A winged angel, my seatpost, seatpost clamp and headset alighted onto my doorstep, and into my heart. A big fat gift from heaven--why'd they have to weigh so much? Seems like these components doubled the weight of my bike.

I started telling my friend John Nelson, the biggest cyclist I know (both literally and the other way), about my Leroi, which I'm trying to get to drop some weight before I ride. John thought I was talking about my LeRoy. This surprised him, since I've indicated that I'm thoroughly heterosexual and married.

Maybe it was my tone of voice. John noticed some personification there, some anthropomorphism. Some autistic aspergers stuff.

Yesterday, in Arabic, we were conjugating the verb الحب which means "to love." I said "I love my bicycles." This, my teacher said, was excessive, that الحب is not something directed toward inanimate objects.

Dr. Bruno Bettelheim chararacterized the ultimate autistic in his piece, "Joey: The Mechanical Boy." Bettelheim, with grand Teutonic objectivity, catalogues Joey's mechanistic world: his drawings of self as plumbing pipes and cogs and gears, his discomfort with touch, and his hatred for all things Thomas Kincade (I hear ya, Joey). Zee parents, Bettelheim said, zey are zee cawz of zees malady. Bettelheim's cure for autism he called parentectomy. That is, autistics were removed from their parents for nine months.

Some have linked autism with maleness. In particular, one study linked autism with high levels of testosterone in the womb. A fellow named Simon Baron-Cohen (perhaps a relative of one Sasha) conducted the study, so one wonders. One wonders if there will be forthcoming studies linking things to Jews and Gypsies from Baron-Cohen, in addition to starring roles in Talladega Nights II and Borat II.

A subspecies of autism is asperger's syndrome, defined by one asperger's father as "a form of autism in which words and academic achievement come easily, but social interactions are virtually impossible."

Unlike Joey, I don't picture myself as a series of pipes and wires. Yet I can't help but feel like sometimes, when I'm on my bike, this piece of machinery feels a part of me as much as my arms or feet. There's something pleasing about this. I wonder if it's how Oscar Pistorius feels on his carbon legs?

A bike is an extension of the self into the world.

H.G. Wells' Martians in War of the Worlds have forsaken their bodies for mechanical improvements. They are mere brains, incapable of surviving outside of their impressive machinery. Over a century ago, Wells predicted humanity's evolutionary direction, our move to the couch and the car, the growing irrelevance of our bodies for all but cosmetic purposes.

We build machines, but only some seem to build us.

The Joys of Bike Building: Part IV

2008-01-18T11:05:00.000-08:00

Bobby Fisher, total genius, freak, died today.

"I'm very concerned because I think the Jews want to drive the elephants to extinction ... because the trunk of an elephant reminds them of an uncircumcised penis. ... I'm absolutely serious about that." -- Bobby Fisher

Bobby Fisher had a strange brain in his head. He was the youngest Grandmaster, a high school dropout, a Jewish anti-Semite, probably the greatest chess genius all time, and a major league a-hole. Evidence for this last attribute is abundant.

A recent LA Times article links the duration of brains malleability with the development of intelligence. The longer a child's brain remains malleable, according to one study, the more intelligent the child:

Among average children — those with an IQ measuring 83 to 108 — the growth of the cortex peaked at age 8, while among those with high intelligence — rated with an IQ of 109 to 120 — growth peaked at age 9.

The smartest children — those with IQs measuring 121 to 145 — displayed a pattern of brain growth that peaked at age 11 or 12, the researchers said.

Fisher was a child prodigy. He was the youngest player in the U.S. with a master's rating; at age 14 years and 9 months he won the 1957 / 58 U.S. Championship. Within a few months became a Grandmaster, the youngest ever.

Shortly thereafter, he dropped out of high school.

A long time thereafter, after he had won and forfeited the world championship of chess, after he had given all his money the the World Church of Christ, and after he had become an outlaw for participating in a chess tournament sponsored by Milosovich, Fisher became concerned about elephants and elephanticidal Jews who suffer from proboscis envy.

What happened to Fisher's brain over forty years, from 14 to 64? By all accounts, Fisher as an old man was just as sharp at the chess board. But his moves in the real world just got crazier and crazier.

Maybe Fisher mistook the logic of the chessboard for the logic of nature. The world doesn't move square to square; there are no black and white pieces; nature is messy; there are no winners or losers; one cannot flee from life as Fisher fled from the chessboard in 1975.

If the study cited by the LA Times is right, Fisher's brain probably stayed malleable for a lot longer than mine. I don't know if it failed to remain sane because of this, because it hardened excessively afterward, or because of other factors--habits, will, environment, his social infantilism, or, as some claim, because of his horrible relationship with his mother (who was Jewish).

Fisher never cooked his own meals. He never did anything for himself. He was only interested in chess: "chess," he said, "is life."

I don't know if Fisher ever built anything away from the chessboard--even a meal for himself. Fisher was a notorious analyzer, breaking apart games. He could also put games together. What mattered to Fisher was the victory, though. That was the joy of it.

Two forces--centrifugal and centripetal--pull on everything. I take joy in the putting together. It's the one way of laying into the great plow of disintegration and saying "this one thing, this thing I love, it won't fall apart."

Even if that one thing is only a bike.

The Joys of Bike Building: Part III

2008-01-17T18:22:00.000-08:00

The eyes are the groin of the head.
--Dwight, from The Office

I'm happy if I've got something to obsess about. That is, something to think about while all the beauty and grandeur and magnificence of life passes by. I can't bear that magnificence of life stuff-it's just too grand and beautiful, and I'd rather think about carbon fiber, bottom brackets and 31.7 mm seat clamps. I wonder if that's what Whitman was getting at, praising a leaf of grass. Maybe he wasn't elevating the leaf; he was saying it was just a leaf. No big whup.

Cranksets. That's what I'm thinking about. What crankset can I get for under $300?

The sexiest is the Stronglight, which runs about $500, is made of teflon and ceramic, and is only found on ebay in France:

Equally light and functional, but without that certain French flair, the Zipp 300:

Then there's the nominative heavyweight Full Speed Ahead K Force Light with Megaexo Bottom Bracket:

I could say a lot more, but there's just something about the word "crank" that embarrasses me. A lot of bike components are like that. Handlebars. Bottom bracket. Down tube. Seat tube. Nipples (they connect spokes to hubs).

The mechanics who named these things did so for a reason; maybe they saw something desirous in the parts they built. Maybe they grabbed the nearest, handiest, and most constant words hanging about their minds. But maybe they grabbed the words that fit, because the parts they describe are at once ecstatic and mundane, flesh and machine.

"God bless my wheel! it knows nor care nor strife,
For one day out the ever-coming seven
I run with it far from the hells of life
To find in nature's handiwork a heaven."
-from "A Quiet Revere," by Anonymous

The Joys of Bike Building: Part II

2008-01-16T20:21:00.000-08:00

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
Michelangelo

The problem with building a bike is that, unless you know how wrap carbon fiber and have a few thousand dollars worth of equipment and supplies lying around, you can't actually build the thing yourself these days. My friend John Nelson tells me that more research has gone into today's road bikes than went into the Space Shuttle. No wonder every third launch the tiles fall off and they blow up.

Point is, gone are the days when riders could stop by the local smithy's and build themselves a bike, or fix it up. This is what “Cri-cri” Christophe, a Frenchman who broke his front fork in a collision with a car during the 6th stage of the Tour de France in the Pyrenees in 1913 did). In those days, the riders were not allowed any outside help. So what did he do? He walked the bike 9 miles downhill to a village blacksmith shop where he made the repairs himself. He finished the race but was penalized 1 minute for having a neighborhood boy pump the bellows. Outside help was not allowed.

I suppose I could forge my bike out of steel or iron. Or I could just steal pieces from improperly-secured bikes--a lot of people seem to do that.

I want my bike to be light, and only aluminum and carbon parts can help me achieve this dream. No steel, iron or lead. No heavier than 17 pounds--that's the dream.

I also want it to be cheap, though. My budget is $1,000--what I spent on my last bike. I've got to buy drivetrain components, a seatpost, a headset, and then find a good way to put it together. Assembly costs $250, so I'm going to try to do it myself. Or at least do all the simple stuff myself, and let the boys in the shop wrestle with attaching the fork to the frame.

Oh, I can just feel it. The thrill of that first moment, when I climb aboard my featherweight, frugal race machine.

The Joys of Bike Building: Part 1

2008-01-15T08:08:00.000-08:00

The good thing about babies is that they come mostly assembled. And the "some assembly required" part of putting together a baby is a fairly enjoyable, fairly simple event that requires little brain power and very few tools.

Jamie Lynn Spears

This is the case with most things now: cars, houses, furniture and cities. This kind of convenience allows primitive folk to use things they can't possibly understand, and use them in the same intuitive way that they use their reproductive organs.

Assembling stuff is generally held to be unpleasant. Steve Jobs has made millions because his intuitive little machines help us avoid the unpleasantness of assembly. So have auto mechanics and the big geeks who rule the Geek Squad empire. If we could just snap our fingers or jump into bed and produce a neighborhood or a house or a bike, we could avoid the unpleasantness of assembly. Who wouldn't want to avoid this?

Well, a lot of men I know. The kind who buy hydraulic pumps on e-Bay so they can build a push-button dumping trailer on their lawn tractor. The kind who grow furious when denied (by their spouses or other family members) the right to change their own damn timing belt. The kind that buy eight sheets of styrofoam to place around their apartment in various formations to manipulate the sound coming out of their hand-built tube amplifiers and resurrected turntable. The men in my family, probably mildly autistic, all.

In this spirit, my brother sent me this bike frame, probably the most extravagent Christmas gift I've ever received:

It doesn't look like much, but, believe me, it doesn't feel like much either. It weighs less than a coffee cup (under two pounds). No one has ever given me something so perfect. Please note, my wife's supernatural gift of putting up with me is hardly a gift; more like an endowment or divine grace.

As it is, the frame, all 956 grams of MMG carbon of it, is useless. I must assemble a bike around it. I have to buy a seatpost, wheels, shifters, etc.

My brother's gift is an engine or a pile of lumber or a block of marble.

Let the assembling begin.

Annapolis Forum: Part I

2007-12-07T12:14:00.000-08:00

We cannot know today what we will only know tomorrow.
--Karl Popper

The November 27th Annapolis peace conference began--and ended--in a single day. It produced little: a statement, a photo, a date, and much speculation. After so many failed peace initiatives, what should we make of Annapolis?

Two weeks after Annapolis, Georgetown's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) gathered a panel of regional experts to address this question. Dr. Hunter of CCAS opened the forum, listing by name forty odd initiatives from 1942 to the present that have failed to resolve the essential conflict between the Israelis, Palestinians and the surrounding countries. The panelists that followed...

Dr. Imad Moustapha
Syrian Ambassador to the United States

Ambassador Clovis Maksoud
Director, Center for the Global South, American University

Dr. Michael HudsonDirector, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University

Ambassador Phillip C. Wilcox
President, Foundation for Middle East Peace

Mr. Nathan Guttman
Washington Bureau Chief, The Jewish Daily Forward

The participants were united (perhaps only) in pessimism--of the Bush administration, the trustworthiness of the participating nations, and of the utility of the Annapolis conference. Syrian Ambassador Imad Moustapha spoke with great bitterness about the suffering of Syrians and Palestinians; Mr. Guttman spoke of the Jewish sense of betrayal and how Israel wants, more than material benefit, acceptance from the regional governments; Ambassador Wilcox warned of the power of the settlement movement--a minority, but a powerful minority; and Ambassador Clovis Maksoud spoke with great eloquence about the trend of "so-called" peace process to ignore the issue of the legality of Israeli occupation.

Though approaching 80 years of age, Maksoud spoke with fervor about the obligation of the international community to the Palestinian people, whom he describes as the "world's last occupied nation." That the occupation has lasted since 1948 does not somehow make it acceptable; in fact, it heightens the injustice of it. Israel, according to Maksoud, was wrong to uproot the Palestinians in 1948 beyond the mandate established by the United Nations, was wrong to advance into the West Bank in 1967, and remains in the wrong by still occupying these territories and refusing to allow Palestinians to return.

For Maksoud, and for Imad Moustapha, negotiation for possible return of land is far short of just. Return of some land is likewise not a matter for negotiation. The Bush administration, according to Maksoud, delegitimized the United Nations, whose proper role is to enforce international law, to set precedents. Israel has thus escaped the international rebuke it deserves. For Maksoud, the US-sponsored Annapolis "peace process," simply by existing, prohibits peace itself.

The Grand Tours and Beatings

2007-12-06T12:34:00.000-08:00

The undersigned twenty professional bicycle riders, who have always abided by the rules of the National Cycle Racing Association, protest against the unjust criticism heaped upon us by the promoters of the bicycle racing track in Newark, who claim they constitute the N.C.A. because we refuse to bow to their wishes and repudiate contracts which we legitimately entered into to ride in a six-day race in the Twenty-second Regiment Armory, New York, the week of Nov. 21 to 27.
We are threated with suspension if we ride in the race and for no other reason that we can see than that we refuse to give the Newark promoters preference.
The Newark promoters fear open competition in the cycle racing sport and whenever there has been any danger of opposition they have been using a club on the riders. This we now resent.
New York Times, 12 November, 1920

Cyclists have it rough today, especially compared with athletes from other sports. Cyclists without question work more for their money than any other professionals. They give up more (watch Hell on Wheels if you doubt this assertion). Professional cyclists earn less, from $13,000 (the European minimum) to over $5 million. The typical American professional, racing here in America, earns less than $20,000. The typical American professional is not a true professional, since he works off the bike to support himself.

The sport is punishing and the pay is paltry. Promoters no longer use "a club on the riders," thankfully, but have you seen the gaunt face of Michael Rasmussen? The sport is about suffering.

So why does anyone do it? Why do I?

There's something pure about it, I suppose, beyond the carbon fiber and lycra.

But I don't know, really, why anyone does it.

Like sex, if you don't have the desire, the act seems absurd. It's a compulsion that makes no sense, just something that you want to do and do.

And doing it a lot probably warps you. Look at Lance, Landis, and the rest. Not exactly healthy, well-adjusted people.

The Bomb, the Hulk, and What are We Going to do about Grandpa?

2007-12-04T08:59:00.000-08:00

"We judge with high confidence that in Fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program."(October 31st NIE)

So Ahmadhadhiminadhinajhad stopped building The Bomb in 2003. (About this time I finally dropped "the bomb" from my lexicon; no 30 year old man should use this phrase regularly, the exception being as a culinary descriptor (i.e., "this boxed Bordeaux is the bomb").)

What a blow to the Neo-Cons. Cheney's battery powered ticker skipped a beat. John Bolton nearly wiped the dead mouse from his upper lip. The Judeo-Christian response, articulated in Ha'aretz , is an ad hominim attack on the U.S. intelligence community. The stallion RumChenFeithaWolfaRice once rode into Iraq they now call an ass.

No one wants Iran to be able to turn green when it gets angry. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty has succeeded in limiting the spread of nuclear weapons, for the most part (red = known capacity, dark brown = stated capacity, light brown = possible capacity).

I heard Ambassador Dennis Ross address this issue recently. Iran building The Bomb isn't merely a threat to the U.S.; it's far more than a simple terrorist threat. A Hulkanized Iran would threaten the delicate regional balance. According to Ross, a nuclear Iran would lead to nuclear weapons capacity in Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others. There are sufficient numbers of states with Hulk capacity, the kind that can build The Bomb without even dreaming big and giving it their all. Presently, these states lack sufficient reason for developing nuclear capacity, but a nuclear Iran would change all that.

Thus Bush is right about the severity of anIranian Hulk.

But this in no way excuses Bush's extraordinarily obfuscatory reading of the NEI and what the intelligence community now says about Iran. Here's Bush's interpretation: "I view this report as a warning signal that they had the program, they halted the program," Bush said. "The reason why it's a warning signal is they could restart it."

I'm confused. The NEI stating that Iran's halting its program is a warning sign?

LOOK OUT! I'M DISMANTLING MY NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM! WATCH IT! LET THIS DISMANTLING BE A WARNING TO YOU!

Some analogous non sequiters:
CAUSE: The Bears bench Rex Grossman. EFFECT: GROSSMAN RETURNS!
CAUSE: DoD cancels its Star Wars program. EFFECT: DoD BUILDS MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD!
CAUSE: Iran cancels nuclear program. EFFECT: IRAN BUILDS THE BOMB!

The NEI report states, no matter how Bush reads it, that Iran is not about to turn green. What the report calls "international pressure" has worked and continues to work. According to the report, Tehran is guided by a "cost-benefit approach," not by ideology. In other words, incentives can work to keep Iran in Bruce Banner form.

Bush calling this a "warning" is an absurd misreading, even in this age of snot on a doorknob semantic slipperiness. It makes you wonder about the hermeneutic standards with which he reads other intelligence estimates, the news, My Pet Goat. Or if he reads them at all.

Dennis Miller once said of Senator Robert Byrd

"...this guy stands there and lectures Bush in the well of the Senate. He was in the Ku Klux Klan! He's demented. You know, this guy's burning the cross at both ends! And you know something, if Robert Byrd were your grandfather and he came to Thanksgiving dinner and went off one of these demented screeds, everybody would sit there smiling at him, and as soon as he left the room, somebody'd say, 'Hey, what the hell are we gonna do about Grandpa?'"

So Bush stands there on the podium and lectures the intelligence community, sort of a demented screed. What the hell are we gonna do about Grandpa?

Why I am Angry: Part 1

2007-11-20T20:04:00.000-08:00

1. The smart people guffawed when George W. said that Jesus was his favorite philosopher, but the rest of us ate it up. In American politics Jesus is pretty much the correct answer to any question beginning with the words "What person...?" It's the answer the American people, who share little other than our love of Jesus, want to hear. When John and Elizabeth Edwards failed to mention Jesus during an entire 60 Minutes interview, I knew they were done for, politically at least.

2. PAT ROBERTSON ENDORSES NEW YORK HOMO-LOVING CATHOLIC CROSS DRESSER!!!! When Giuliani was mayor, he (Jesus-like) lived with the sinners, but for very un-Christ-like reasons (his wife found out he was fornicating. He also wore a dress, a wig, and heavy makeup. That Pat Robertson, of all people, should endorse this man...

...is astonishing. Then again, he did endorse one of the world's most despicable perpetrators of crimes against humanity, Charles Taylor of Liberia. They were business partners.

In the end, Pat decided that he was more afraid of terrorists than immorality: “The overriding issue before the American people is the defense of our population from the blood lust of Islamic terrorists.” Pat had previously stated quite the opposite: the threat to the United States from activist judges, he said, was “probably more serious than a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings. Robertson, peace out." (He didn't say that last part, but the rest is from the NYTimes.)

What's with the anti-folicular sentiments of the phrase "bearded terrorists," by the way? The 9/11 terrorists were clean shaven. This is a lame attempt to link Moslems and hippies in a kind of vortex of the scruffy spirit of the anti-Christ.

3. My mother has this picture of our bionic Vice-President on her kitchen wall:

John Wayne. Gary Cooper. Clint Eastwood. Tommy Lee Johns. Some men are allowed to wear cowboy hats. Some men are not.

4. Martyr Libby and Lynn Cheney of AEI have written books with racey portions, and no one within their camp has spoken out against them. The New Yorker published an article about it, but that's to be expected. For all Clinton's deviancy, he never wrote a book about a child being repeatedly molested by a bear.

5. Pat Robertson (him again) said that people who get too much plastic surgery "have oriental eyes.". I have a hard time ordering "Oriental" dressing and buying "Oriental" rugs. Maybe I'll send Pat a copy of Edward Said's Orientalism. I

6. Mitt Romney is an astonishing relic of the past. Consider the story of how Romney put the family dog on the roof of the family station wagon on trips to Maine, and how it hence and prolifically lost control of its bowels. Romney dismissed the bleeding hearts who have called the episode cruel, stating:

PETA has not been my fan over the years. PETA was after me for having a rodeo at the Olympics and was very, very upset about that. PETA was after me when I went quail hunting in Georgia. And they're not happy that my dog likes fresh air.

This is what his dog had to say...

The Squids and the Whales

2007-11-19T11:07:00.000-08:00

Some stats:
U.S. Marathon Finishers (up 1,700%)
1976: 25,000
2002: 450,000

U.S. Triathlon Members (up 150%)
1993: 16,000
2002: 40,000

12- to 24-Hour Mountain-Bike Races (up 5,900%)
1992: 1
2003: 60

U.S. Adventure Races (up 19,900%)
1995: 2
2003: 400

Sources: USA Track and Field; Association of Mountain Bike Team Relays International; USA Triathlon; U.S. Adventure Racing Association

At mile 55 my quads dripped off my bones. The hill appeared and I wondered if I'd have to let go of even the appearance--of untapped strength--I'd struggled to impress on the other riders.

I couldn't see the top of the hill. It didn't disappear behind a curve. No, the road edges merged together at a horizon point somewhere far above.

Six had already popped off the back, the guys on Fujis with maybe five pounds extra, maybe their first group ride. I could still hear the loudmouth on the e-Bay wonderbike dropping off the back, wheezing from the ten beers he said he'd had the night before and his homebuilt wheels knocking and groaning on his brakes.

The lawyer and Chuck, the shop owner, raced ahead, all titanium and more engineering than the space shuttle, a part of it, but the glory of it was the engines, their lungs and legs, the ergo of five winters of three nights a week sweating over the training watching bad TV. Sweating and not talking to anyone, but watching 165 bpm on the heart monitor and then it was 500 watts on the powertap, counting the time, hanging up the clothes and hearing the drop of the sweat into the tub afterwards, opening the window and sticking bare chest into the winter air. And in summers it was riding five nights and five mornings a week, of weekends with nearly broken collarbones from the crits and shredded skin.

They went ahead of me, left me behind.

At the top they waited, and then I waited with them, where we breathed and coasted. Squeeky eBay came up eventually.

Cranberry Crawl 10K Double Loaf

2007-11-17T15:35:00.000-08:00

To the victor, and second and third place within ten year age categories, go the loafs.

The Colorless All-Color

2007-11-15T06:56:00.000-08:00

When I was arrested I was dressed in black
Put me on a train an' took me back
Had no friends for to call my bail
They slapped my dried up carcass in the county jail.
--Johnny Cash

Mom never let me dress in black. She color-coded her children from the time she decided what color hair and skin we had. At the time, it made sense to me, but it was, I think now, bizarre: after all, all Mom's children are white kids with brown hair. We're as different from each other as crackers in a box.

But moms have a way of exaggerating difference between their children. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe they like the notion of birthing a diverse brood--a vegetable garden, a zoo, a menagerie, a circus, a full bouquet, all the colors of her and my father's genetic rainbow rainbow.

Being freckled and hazel-eyed meant, according to Mom, that my natural habitat must be green. I took a green lunch pail to school, slept in green sheets, wore tighty-whities with a green elastic band, received green sweaters for Christmas, and still in my childish period before I could dress myself, wore green Toughskin jeans. I liked the Grinch, Green Lantern, Jolly Green Giant, Puff the Magic Dragon, St. Patrick's Day and leprechauns, the Green Knight (Gawain's nemesis), and the Lady of the Green Kirtle from C.S. Lewis' The Silver Chair.

Dad was unaware of my mother's color-coding his children, although if he had been aware if it, it would have helped him greatly. He barely distinguished between his children and the three dogs, calling us by any seven of our names indistinguishably. My sister was as often Muffy as she was Natalie. I was as often Jasper as Kevin. That he could count on me to be in a green jumpsuit, and that he could count on Jasper having long reddish fur and to walk on four legs didn't seem to provide him with enough of a clue.

I accepted my green self wholeheartedly. This probably has had a lasting effect on my personality. For example, I've always felt that being envious was excusable for me, just like shedding fur was excusable for Jasper, although still a sin, of course, especially when it clumped out on the white upholstered couch. But I imagined God saying, upon the listing of my feats of envy, sighing and admitting that he had, after all, made Jasper a dog, and me green.

Strange how a child can take on a color identity, finding himself an identity within a type of light. I remember wanting, and mom purchasing, a pair of verdant green sneakers with extra wide yellow laces. They matched my eyes, she said. They were very me.

Dad watched me play my first basketball game in those green shoes. They weren't basketball shoes, but they looked spectacularly good with our school uniforms (which happened to be green) and my white knee-high socks with three horizontal green stripes. Nothing about me was not green.

I think Dad finally noticed. Good game, Jasper, he said aftwards.

The next day he drove me to the store and bought me some white shoes, basketball shoes. When I protested, reciting Mom's argument that they did not match my eyes, Dad responded that all in all it was not that important that shoes matched eye color. More important was function--cushioning, support, and durability.

After that, I wanted to give up green, but my wardrobe wouldn't let me. Christmas gifts came in shades of green. I wasn't a feisty child, and green being the color of acceptance and passivity, I wore what I was given.

My wife buys me green clothes now. Others have taken to it. I gravitate toward green, out of habit. The drumbeat is there, in my head, and I can't stop listening to it. Thankfully, I've lost the somewhat nutty notion of a color identity. I no longer believe that God made me to be clothed in green.

But there are some that keep the notion of color identity, and, I'll admit, there is something fascinating about a man in a color, say, Johnny Cash in black, his mileau, the color of his voice, his stories, his drugs, and his shirts.

A man in green cannot sing with a voice from the darkness, from the fringe of the human city, about the malevolent black world. No, the green man's sort of a pansy, he stands for something, but not much. The green man doesn't pretend to be superhuman, like Captain Ahab, who fights and loses the war against "a colorless, all-color of atheism" (Ch.42 of Moby Dick).

Melville connects color with the metaphysical. His is a coloring book world of filled with the color of belief, the metaphysical, that which is the opposite of atheism. The whale, Moby Dick, is nihilism--I think this is a more accurate term than atheism--personified, and Ahab's aim is to kill it. It's a heroic quest but an impossible quest, and Ahab fails.

Ahab fails not only as a slayer of nihilism, but also as a man of color--of belief. His hatred of colorlessness--the white whale--defines him, but he paints himself without color, unlike this Pakistani child...

...sports fans, Christians, Muslims, believers of every color. Ahab is not a believer; he's merely anti-nihilistic.

In my case, I was assigned belief, and find it hard to escape. I have, in the past, rejected the pursuit of color altogether, became swallowed up in incredulity toward metanarative altogether, by the white whale. The alternative, a watching, writing, surviving Ishmael--is it any better?

Well, there's Johnny Cash:

Well, we're doin' mighty fine, I do suppose,
In our streak of lightnin' cars and fancy clothes,
But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back,
Up front there ought 'a be a Man In Black.

Ah, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day,
And tell the world that everything's OK,
But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,
'Till things are brighter, I'm the Man In Black

Races Run 2007

2007-11-12T08:26:00.000-08:00

"What makes a great endurance athlete is the ability to absorb potenial embarrassment, and to suffer without complaint. I was discovering that if it was a matter of gritting my teeth, not caring how it looked, and outlasting everybody else, I won. It didn't seem to matter what sport it was--in a straight-ahead, long-distant race, I could beat anybody. If it was a suffer-fest, I was good at it."
- Lance Armstrong, My Journey Back to Life

I've done a few races, two triathlons, enough to learn that I'm decent at suffer-fests. I can run, swim, and bike fast enough to avoid the lions, but I'm no lion.

No one will ever notice me for doing anything like winning the Tour. Oh, for someone to say of me what Mel Brooks says of Larry David: "there's something about this middle-aged bald[ing] guy that is...THRILLING!"

It bothers me that this will never happen.

I imagine that's how a great many of us feel, trapped in the pews, never on the pulpit.

There should be enough things to do out there that we could all--all 6 billion of us--be extraordinary, be the nonpareili, be the spokesman for the human species in this one endeavor.

I suppose there are some fringe dwellers, the fillers-of-Guiness books, who would rather not be spokespersons for the human fringe. The tallest, the shortest, the strangest, the most worthy of stares and bar conversation (that is, of course, why the brewer published the book in the first place). Someone drunk people talk about--that's hardly an aspiration.

If we all resided on the fringe, if there was enough genetic variety within the human species to suggest that each of us occupies some tendril of possibility, then we might be more interested in each other. I don't believe this is true; we're much too alike, the world is full of mediocrity.

The extraordinary, that's what art is for. In Kafka's short story "The Hunger Artist," the spectactle of a man depriving himself of food draws crowds. In Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf's film "The Cyclist" a man bicycles in a circle for days without break to raise money. David Blaine stood on a pillar in New York City. He had this to say: "endurance [like magic] is also important to me because it represents something greater. ... It's a sign of trying to do your best to do something."

But the uh...duh question that attaches itself to endurance tests is "why?" Why stand on a pillar? Why ride a bike across America? If there is money or fame or, as in "The Cyclist," a life is at stake, then there is an answer. But for most, there is no answer. Why climb Everest? I don't know if Mallory's answer ("because it is there") is adequate.

In hard times, we ask ourselves that question of the many acts of maintaining life, of simply enduring, to be-ing. Sometimes we test our endurance on the fringes so we don't have to think about endurance at the center.

Don't Hate Me Because I'm Beautiful

2007-11-07T12:49:00.000-08:00

Posting on Post-Post

2007-11-06T08:50:00.000-08:00

Obama Emerging from the Surf. For a Smoke.
Boy, people throw around the prefix "post" these days. Once is not enough for Barack Obama, who hits us with a two fisted double down, using the phrase "post-post-911 presidency." Serious post-age.

What notion of progress or escape does Obama hope to express through the repetitive adjective?

In an article by James Traub in the International Herald, Obama elaborates:

I think," he said, in that deep and measured voice of his, "that if you can tell people, 'We have a president in the White House who still has a grandmother living in a hut on the shores of Lake Victoria and has a sister who's half-Indonesian, married to a Chinese-Canadian,' then they're going to think that he may have a better sense of what's going on in our lives and in our country. And they'd be right.

Here Obama uses the comparative better --better than whom? For one, candidates whose relatives are former Presidents and live in boring places such as New York and Massachusetts. I don't think Obama's post-post-ness is only his cosmopolitan-ness, or his post-white-ness (because he isn't exactly post white). Some of us, Obama speculates, are ready for a post-Insularity Presidency.

Obama is perhaps the first candidate to talk of soft power and actually understand its role in security policy. Bush surrounded himself with Russian experts (Condi) and Cold Warriors (Cheney and Rumsfeld), and while the Cold War is over, the Global War on Terror is being fought with the same tools as the Global War on Communism. Hillary, for all her experience and brillance, accepts the world security game in these terms and continues to play by the Cold War rules. Some of us, Obama speculates, are ready for a post-Cold War President.

Obama's supporters appreciate his complex identity, but they also admire the way it has allowed him to understand complexities:

“He has,” Lake says, “the kind of mind that works its way through complexities by listening and giving some edge of legitimacy to various points of view before he comes down on his, and that point of view embraces complexity.”

Zbigniew Brzezinski and the the Dalai Lama spoke for most of us when they called Bush simple. Some of us, Obama speculates, are ready for a post-simplicity Presidency.

Whatever it is that is now, Obama's phraseology suggests, can be got beyond. We can put this--Iraq, Bushisms, Scooter Libby, pigeon shooting people in the face, Halliburton, the Patriot Act, vanishing Social Security, gas guzzling, pre-emption, fodder for Steven Colbert, Alberto Gonzalez, Don Rumsfeld's "known knowns and unknown knowns"--behind us.

Still Shot from the recently released video to "I Got a Crush on Obama" video:

Incredulity Toward Girlfights and Christio-Zionism

2007-11-05T06:11:00.000-08:00

Big Al Jacobs

Ten years ago my professor, Dr. Alan Jacobs, introduced me to postmodernism using Jean-François Lyotard's three word definition of the term:

incredulity toward metanarrative

I had trouble understanding how post prefixed modern. Postmodernism was an interesting notion, but in the same realm as Nietzsche's post-human (ubermensch, uberbull). I believed in the universality of Augustine's notion of restlessness ("Our hearts were made for You, O Lord, and they are restless until they rest in you"). All wish for belief, and thus all are believers, whether they wish to be or not. Cultural conservatives have a craftier critique--that the notion of universal incredulity is a self-defeating concept, because if you are incredulous toward everything, then you are necessarily incredulous toward incredulity (i.e., you are credulous!).

I've since seen that incredulity is not the same as dismissal--PoMo is not mere skepticism. Further, "incredulity of" can coexist with "longing for."

Postmodernism has become a common, maybe even hackneyed, notion. There's been some kind of tipping point, where people now feel comfortable using the word to describe everything from excrement to psychotherapy to both Nike and Wile E Coyote.

Intellectuals (I gather from my Yale professor brother, because I'm not an intellectual) are these days fairly tired of postmodernism. In contrast, theologians, preachers, and cultural conservatives are just getting started on it. I found plenty of sermon notes on the cultural disease of postmodernism (I didn't find any sermon notes on,say, the actual disease of malaria in Malawi). Google postmodernism, and it's clear that the witch hunters vastly outnumber the witches.

This brings me back to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the debate between historians about the Nakba in 1948. Israeli historians Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris have carried on an testy public exchange about the conflict. It's a shame Morris and Pappe are not glamorous, because their exchange rivals the Richie-Hilton smackdown in intensity, if not sass. Things got nasty when Morris made remarks about Pappe's two boys, which sent Pappe into a froth.

The Rumpled Ilan Pappe
The Unattractive Benny Morris

Here is Morris' book review of Pappe's A History of Palestine
which sent Pappe into a frenzy.
Here is Pappe's response (and his defense of his sons).

Morris' review of Pappe's History of Palestine started the spat. Essentially, Morris' criticism is that "Pappe is a proud postmodernist." Morris finds substantial errors in Pappe's book--errors of dates, fallibility of the oral histories of Palestinians, and of allowing politics to supersede truth. But instead of calling Pappe a poor historian and leaving it at that, Morris argues that such shoddiness is a syptom of postmodernism, that postmodernists enjoy fabrication and lazy scholarship.

Once again history vs. History, narrative vs. Metanarrative.

Avi Schlaim, an Israeli historian and peer of Pappe and Morris, had this to say about the topic:

"A nation, said the French philosopher Ernest Renan, is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors. Throughout the ages, the use of myths about the past has been a potent instrument of forging a nation. It is interesting to observe how often the phrase forging a nation is used because all nations are forgeries."

For Schlaim, the practical use of story is of more value than its veracity. I take this two ways: 1) that Schlaim is sick of people using the past to ruin the present and future, and wishes that they would use the past constructively; and 2) that Schlaim, condones a certain amount of falsification.

An analogy:
To an applicatant a resume, defined by its practical purpose, is a get-hired tool, not a list of qualifications. To an employer, the resume is also a hiring tool, but it is one which separates actual from claimed qualifications.

For the applicant, the ideal Postmodern resume will be not necessarily be fabrication, but it will stretch the boundaries of acceptable credulity. Its function will be to persuade. To some extent, all good resumes are postmodern resumes.

The employer would prefer it if all applicants were not Postmodernists (except if the advertised position be in advertising or literary criticism). Employers would prefer to have God write and review resumes, a role many assume. Whether or not a resume must necessarily be postmodernist is another question.

In any case, as long as Palestinians play the role of applicant, they will be seen as postmodernists, fudge experts. Their self portrayal--their narratives--will be seen as a collection of exaggerations and half-truths because such histories aim to bring them power, wealth and their own state. They'll lie, surely, as long as we ignore the truth of their claim--that the Nakba occurred.

Israel and its American supporters will continue to confuse the fight against relativism with the fight against such lies. They will be prejudiced when examining the Palestinian story, since it casts incredulity on the myths that forged the Jewish state.

Those who confuse the Israeli narrative with the Metanarrative--the Biblical account--will, of course, refuse even to examine the Palestinian account.

Evidence: this proclamation by the 3rd Annual Christian Zionist Conference:

"The Islamic [Palestinian] claim to Jerusalem, including its exclusive claim to the Temple Mount, is in direct contradiction to the clear biblical and historical significance of the city and its holiest site, and this claim is of later religio-political origin rather than arising from any Quranic text or early Muslim tradition."

Wow.

The World Belongs to Gangsters Now

2007-11-02T11:32:00.000-07:00

Manohla Dargis in her NY Times review of the Ridley Scott film American Gangster criticizes the filmmakers for seducing us with "blood and nihilism." She blames the era itself--the Bush era, presumably--for familiarizing us with the more-than-flawed hero:

"Once, another gunman, or the director, might have taken direct aim at Lucas [the film's antihero]. But the world belongs to gangsters now, not cowboys."

We no longer revolt at portrals of gangsters, Manohla suggests, because we voted for them, we buy their goods, and we created a whole genre of music for them. We want to be them.

This is a difficult time to be proud of humanity.

Ilan Pappe's recently released book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, offers further reason for shame. To blame for the ethnic cleansing of 800,000 Palestinians in 1947 and 1948 are nation-states (Israelis, the United States, Great Britain, Jordan, neighboring Arab countries), religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) and the whole world (in the form of the United Nations).

Pappe makes a convincing case that the Jewish leadership in Israel planned and carried out the ethnic cleansing. A Zionist committee headed by David Ben-Gurion formulated the plan, called "Plan Dalet." Two paramilitary groups, called the Irgun and the Stern Gang, and the Palmach, special commando units from the Zionists' army, carried out most of the cleansing. Typically, they advanced into Arab villages, forced out the inhabitants, and then handed over the empty villages to Israeli army regulars.

Israeli historians have argued that the land was empty when the Israeli army arrived. Palestinians, they claim, voluntarily evacuated as the Arab armies approached. Pappe presents evidence suggesting that very little of the evacuations were voluntary, that the Palestinians were forcibly removed.

Like the Trail of Tears and the Group Areas Act in South Africa, the forced removal of Palestinians passed without much notice from the rest of the world.

I suppose that's the way most tragedies occur--unseen. While we are seduced by "blood and nihilism," the victims gather their belongings and flee, trying to find a world where such seductions no longer haunt them.

Paul Scham and Ghaith al-Omari Amidst Dragrace

2007-11-01T07:35:00.000-07:00

Outside, in blocked-off 17th Street, a few thousand people gathered to watch the drag queen parade and compete in a "dragrace", a footrace of men (and maybe some women) in high heels.

I didn't see any of this. Oh, I was there, on 17th Street, but I was indoors, underground in a church basement. I could see flashes of wobbly masculine skin through the windows, but I didn't come for spectacle. I was there, sitting in a metal folding chair, surrounded by mostly gray-haired men and women, to hear two men debate the role of stories in politics and the peace process in Israel.
Paul Scham
Paul Scham spoke first. The program stated he "was a lawyer," using the past tense, suggesting that litigiousness, like darkness, is something decent men pass through on their way toward illumination.

Narratives, Scham was saying, help us explain ourselves to others. They provide our motivation and give us direction. They serve as guides, bring us continuity. Myths, memoirs, family history, memories--the stories we tell and create to help us get by.

Narratives are intangibles. That is, they aren't goods in the economic sense. They can't be traded or sold (except as, say, books such as Scham's own Shared Histories). Yet they guide behavior.

Here I thought of Richard Dawkin's notion of the meme. Dawkins uses the concept to explain cultural progress without biological progress. Memes--e.g., narratives--propagate through natural selection. That is, some ideas spread in the manner of diseases--through a kind of mental infection. Often, memes harm their carriers in the interest of their own propagation. This, of course, complicates the picture for those social scientists who assume that humans act as rational agents in the game of life.

It also expands the scope of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to more than a marketplace exchange--more than tangibles. That is to say, Israeli and Palestinian politicians have bartered land, water rights, and diplomatic recognition. But, according to Scham, the peace process may be, foremost, about intangibles.

Scham's model is one of discourse, and thus differs from game theory modelling. In this, Scham sees a positive role for memes--that in the interest of peace, the contained histories of Palestinians and Jews should be spread through discourse.

This is, I take it, an observation of human conflict in general, not merely that of the Israelis and Palestinians.
Ghaith al-Omari
Ghaith al-Omari, Scham's foil in this debate, agreed that there is a kind of causal relationship between intangible and tangible matters. They concurred that intangibles exist, and that, eventually, both tangibles and intangibles need sorting out.

But they disagreed on which--the sorting of tangible or intangible--should precede the other. For Scham, sorted intangibles allow sorted tangibles. Al-Omari reverses the order.

Al-Omari has experience in negotiations. He was involved in the Geneva Accords and served as a Foreign Policy Advisor to Abbas. New America Foundation) Like Scham, al-Omari is a lawyer by training.

Al-Omari was quick to say he valued narrative, and saw a role for it within the greater Israeli-Palestinian peace movement. But narratives within the context of negotiations, he argued, obstruct settlement. Remembered pasts obstruct futures planned. Thus, substantive negotiation--about the tangibles--should precede discussion of the past through narrative.

Perhaps al-Omari envisions the kind of transformation that occurred in South Africa, where Mandela and de Klerk negotiated tangibles, a political order emerged, and then, through the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, the country sorted through the intangibles.

A South African-modelled transition may not lead to peace in Israel. As Scham points out in his introduction to Shared Histories, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is unique. While it resembles a struggle against colonialism, it is not. And while it resembles an apartheid state (as President Carter has observed), it is not.

Israeli-Palestinian problems are distinct and require distinguished thinking, which Scham and al-Omari supplied. A shame only twenty of us were there hear it, what with the rest of humanity outside watching drag queens sprint.
Princess Di and Entourage
The debate was over, and so was the dragrace. The streets were still blocked off, and the crowds hung about. The colored dresses of the drag queens seemed painted on the black coats of the crowds. They stood around, cold, remembering, coughing up memes.
The Women of The View