Primate Brow Flash

MPR’s midmorning has a talk with Ebrahim Patel, author of “Acts of Faith”.

The radio interview mentions that Osama Bin Laden’s real strength is as a youth organizer / storytelling workshop organizer. His organization tells kids a story of their culture that stars them in the power role.

This makes me ask, “How well does our society inoculate us against such stories?” and “What are we prepared to do when extremists start selling compelling alternatives to our youths?”

We have cultural antibodies against what Patel calls totalitarianism of belief. First among them is ridicule. In the face of late night TV and south park, it is hard to get any mass berserker rage going with today’s youth. Individual berserker rage, sure, but collective berserker rage based on some shared cultural story is hard to come by.

When the time came to try on different masks on my journey into adulthood, I couldn’t do it fully. I found self-consciously adopting a persona impossible and comical. I couldn’t maintain it because it felt silly, obvious and false. When Greenpeace came along and told me a compelling story and put me in the power role, I retained some comic understanding.

We have in our society a built in protection against extremists, against groups taking themselves too seriously. For example, I have, taped to the inside of my skull, a picture of the Simbionese Liberation Army holding up a bank. The media took that and examined it and stuffed enough copies of that image down our collective pie hole so that it can never be done again except maybe at a 70s nostalgia party. In other societies, that image might be buried and never examined.

I’ve seen ads from the armed forces that try to appeal to youth, but they don’t try to manipulate our feelings of culture and heritage, probably because they want to appeal to people of many different cultures. Instead they try to sell military service as an adventure and as a coming of age story. So, that is another form of inoculation. We don’t exactly have a common past that a clever communicator can exploit.

I’m reminded of a storefront near Macalester where students gathered under the wing of a certain charismatic patriarch. It isn’t important what particular ideas were shared at this storefront. I did get to see several of my classmates slowly change and get a clear-eyed distant gaze, become hard to talk to and go off somewhere. Patel’s ideas help clarify what was going on there. They were told a tale of their history and culture, with the story continuing with them in the staring role. These were bright, affluent kids steeped in mainstream American culture, but with no innoculation against the specific story they received. No violence involved there, as far as I know, but life-changing forces were at work that were fully understood by the patriarch but not understood by the students, I think.

Enjoy these songs. Thanks to Matt for sending them They won’t be up here for long.
I See A Darkness (mp3 - 6 MB) Johnny Cash covers Will Oldham
field of diamonds (mp3 - 5MB) From the same record - Solitary Man

This song helps me deal with the utter lack of “sexy cocktail hour doubles” in my life:
Trouble (mp3 - 5 MB)

Wikipedia article about the band, Over the Rhine

Chapter 4 of Dream Palace of the Arabs condenses the history of Egypt since the assassination of Anwar Sadat into a painful and intense little package. It describes the destruction of the Egyptian judiciary system and the darkness that fell over Egyptian society as the islamists gained power. This is illustrated with profiles several writers who were affected by it (if I can use “affected” to mean “shot in the chest” or “sliced in the neck”). I vaguely remember the story of Dr. Nasr Hamid Abu Zeid in the news. Most of the chapter is about him and uses his story to illustrate the great changes in Egyptian society. From the description of his work, he sounds kind of like a Muslim Joseph Campbell, though his dense scholarly works did not bring much notice. The average Egyptian certainly did not know of him. That changed when a colleague of his accused him of not being a good Muslim. It ended with him and his wife being chased from the country after a judge declared his marriage void.
This chapter has several interesting stories about Egypt making adjustments for so-called moderates as a bulwark against the radicals. For example, the Mubarak government vigorously pursued armed militants while letting unarmed ones take over the schools. When they woke up to this mistake, they found half the schools in the country turned against them.

There was a taxi strike yesterday and we needed a cab to the airport. There seemed to be plenty of cabs around and we got one within seconds of walking out of our hotel. The thing about a cab strike is that cabs are allowed to pick up multiple passengers and, at least according to our cabbie, negotiate prices themselves instead of using their meters. Our guy waited until the other passenger was dropped off before he said, “how about $45.00 to La Guardia … special price today.”. On the way into the city it was $20. I was in a pretty bad negotiating position since we were already running late, but I said, “drop us off at the bus stop”.
Not really. I said, “45 dollars???” and he said how about 40? and I agreed. I suck at negotiating.

He then called his buddy and proceeded to brag, in French, about the money he was raking in on this fine day and giggling maniacally.

Frank, whispering in the back of a cab: “Dad. Has anyone here ever heard of the giant spoon and cherry?”

If Frank left New York right now, he would carry an image of a giant park surrounded by a fringe of tall buildings. In the park, he would know about a huge museum with a cafeteria that opens rather late.

Mike and Amanda live about a block from the park and I took Frank and Mabel on a big walk there. Mabel was very cute and wanted to hold Frank’s hand. She had a baby with a pretend nook along with her. The nook kept falling on the ground and she had me wash it each time. We spent some time at Cleopatra’s Needle. That might be my favorite place in New York.

Frank has been in a monkey state of bounces and screeches since we’ve been here. He’s contributed greatly to the polished-iron look of the park hardware. He hasn’t been able to settle down enough to look at anything, even though everything we’ve done so far has been for him. He always wants to be at the next place, it seems. He’s resting now. We’ve been walking all day I’m exhausted and ready for a nap. That is the strong, bull-loving truth.

I’m still reading Dream Palace of the Arabs. The third chapter, “In the Shape of the Ancestors” kind of speeds up and instead of the careful unfolding of one guy’s life from the first chapter, and issues series of statements that bounce the reader around from Beirut to Cairo to Damascus to Bagdhad and back to Lebanon. The Lebanese are this. The Arabs are that. “An easy leap was made from Ottomanism to Arabism.” I believe him, but I’d like to have some examples like the one of Hawi from the earlier chapter.

Actually, I soon as I wrote that, he did exactly what I asked:

“The men, militia leaders and clerical tribunes who sacked the old order in Beirut were a generation removed from the land, the countryside, and the peasant world of the south. Half a century earlier, when the parents of the new Shia claimants began their timid migration to the city, the dead among the Shia had to be taken back to be buried in their ancestral villages because there were no Shia cemeteries in the city. Beirut, for the most part, belonged to the Sunni Muslims and Greek Orthodox. These new warlords and foot soldiers of the Shia movements could hardly grieve for the ruin that had befallen West Beirut: In its charmed days, it had not been theirs.

He mentions many writers and books. I added a few to my reading list.

Mr. Mo

Originally uploaded by zummersweet

I could take or leave the greater part of Stranger than Fiction. I enjoyed him playing the guitar for Maggie G. I always enjoy Emma Thompson. One scene really stands out in my memory, though. It is the central scene in that movie and it gets amazingly close to what it feels like to meditate.

The main character is instructed to sit still in a desperate move to keep the plot from going forward. The phone rings. His hand wants to react and pick up the phone. He sits on his hands. I felt his visceral pull to answer that phone. His renunciation of all action, just to see what happens, that’s Buddhism in a nutshell. The plot does eventually impose itself and crash his little experiment in a manner that made me shriek and made Kate laugh at me. I don’t usually shriek when I meditate, but if I get quiet enough, thoughts can be as loud as earth moving equipment coming through the walls.

The radio show American Routes kicked my ass tonight. Every song is brand new.
Topsy Chapman,
Katie Dear by the Louvin Bros.
Charlie McCoy and Bo Chatmon
Sonny Clark
Kermit Ruffins

all brand new.

I’ve tipped over more times in the past week than at any time in my whole life. Everyone, it is said, falls down at least once when starting out on clipless pedals. The first time I just plain forgot my feet were essentially bolted to my pedals. Other times I stopped unexpectedly on a hidden object in deep brush and didn’t have time to unclip. Another time I got stuck on a log and went down pedaling. This was in the middle of nowhere and I wasn’t sure if I’d be getting up again. I had just seen “Into the Wild” and starving to death while impaled on a tree stump was on my mind.

These things about doubled the value of my bike and I probably could have found the same pedals cheaper if I had shopped a little instead of having a few beers and wandering into a random bike store. I love them just the same. There are some off road hills in the area that I couldn’t climb on my single speed dirt bike and now that I have these pedals I can suddenly climb them and have a much easier time on ordinary hills. I feel sore in completely new parts of my legs now.

The Covert Rationing Blog

I find that making a Wikipedia edit or entry about stuff I read is a good way of making it stick in my brain better. So, last night I created a brand new page: Stanley Kerr. Grandfather of NBA player Steve Kerr. Father of assassinated AUB president Malcolm Kerr. Author of “Lions of Marash”. Rescuer of Armenian children after the Genocide(oooops! there’s that word again).

George Packer’s blog mentioned Fouad Ajami’s Dream Palace of the Arabs. I got it out of the library. It fills in a lot of gaps in 20th century Middle Eastern history. Even though it was written 8 years ago, it lends insight into the world as it is today. It is good to read about stuff that has settled a little.

The author tells personal stories from all over the Middle East to paint a picture of an Arab intellectual class that had a glimpse of a united Arab world, Muslim and Christian, businessman, writer, sheik, imam, and farmer. I’ve just finished the first chapter. In it, a poor Lebanese Christian struggles to get to the American University of Beirut (AUB), has a glimpse of a prosperous Lebanon in a larger Arab world, only to see the rest of the world come to use Lebanon as a proxy battlefield and the Lebanese themselves, free of outside influence, get their sectarian violence on. This man was Khalil Hawi. He became a famous poet and was a veteran of various political movements. During the Lebanese civil war, some young militiamen stopped him at a checkpoint. (Yes, militias had checkpoints then too.) He was an original member of their party but, sick of mobs with guns, he refused to cooperate and they were going to do him in before his buddies from the old days interceded.

Ajami talks a lot about Anton Sadaah (known to Wikipedia as Saadeh), a Lebanese gadabout who started the Greater Syria Party and was executed after leading a revolt.

Looking at these old pictures of him and his cronies, I can start to imagine the incubation of this alternative Arab world. It is a revelation how important the American University of Beirut was to this Arab class.

This is Steve Kerr, the most accurate three point shooter in NBA history. His grandfather was a missionary who rescued Armenian children after the genocide and later taught at the AUB. In the epilogue of the first chapter I learned that his father, Malcom Kerr, was the president of the AUB until he was assassinated in 1984 shortly after the American Embassy was bombed and the Marine barracks there was blown up. The book surprised me in how many different western and Christian organizations went to Lebanon and set up outposts, training students, giving them scholarships to go study in Cambridge and New York, Milwaukee and Cairo. These western universities helped form the core of this Arab Intellectual Class. It also amazes me the speed with which this Arab intellectual class of poets, journalists, scholars and secular politicians was swept away into either death or exile and replaced with Islamic theocrats. The author uses Steve Kerr’s NBA career to illustrate the end of our missionary ideals.

Packer accuses Ajami of liking the current outcome of the Iraq war because he is really a Shiite partisan. That does not come through in this book.

This is a better idea than the exploding banana:

In a typical interaction, a dominant baboon gives a threat grunt, and its inferior screams. From their library of recorded baboon sounds, the researchers can fabricate a sequence in which an inferior baboon’s threat grunt is followed by a superior’s scream.

Primate Brow Flash supports the scientific community in their effort to confuse Baboons. Actually, it is a really interesting article.