Ambiance

The Economist: You Gotta Love It . . .

April 3, 2010 at 7:14 pm (By Amba)

. . . when you read this:

Why is it anonymous? Many hands write The Economist, but it speaks with a collective voice. Leaders are discussed, often disputed, each week in meetings that are open to all members of the editorial staff. Journalists often co-operate on articles. And some articles are heavily edited. The main reason for anonymity, however, is a belief that what is written is more important than who writes it. As Geoffrey Crowther, editor from 1938 to 1956, put it, anonymity keeps the editor “not the master but the servant of something far greater than himself. You can call that ancestor-worship if you wish, but it gives to the paper an astonishing momentum of thought and principle.” […]

What, besides free trade and free markets, does The Economist believe in? “It is to the Radicals that The Economist still likes to think of itself as belonging. The extreme centre is the paper’s historical position.” That is as true today as when Crowther said it in 1955. The Economist considers itself the enemy of privilege, pomposity and predictability. It has backed conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It has supported the Americans in Vietnam. But it has also endorsed Harold Wilson and Bill Clinton, and espoused a variety of liberal causes: opposing capital punishment from its earliest days, while favouring penal reform and decolonisation, as well as—more recently—gun control and gay marriage.

Lastly, The Economist believes in plain language. Walter Bagehot, our most famous 19th-century editor, tried “to be conversational, to put things in the most direct and picturesque manner, as people would talk to each other in common speech, to remember and use expressive colloquialisms”. That remains the style of the paper* today.

*Why does it call itself a newspaper? Even when The Economist incorporated the Bankers’ Gazette and Railway Monitor from 1845 to 1932, it also described itself as “a political, literary and general newspaper”.

It still does so because, in addition to offering analysis and opinion, it tries in each issue to cover the main events—business and political—of the week.

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Royal Blessing [UPDATED]

April 3, 2010 at 12:06 pm (By Amba)

Just when I was getting that reclusive, haggard, nail-biting feeling . . . along comes $2,519.56 in royalties from this book!  Most of it from this country, where it was brilliantly published and is still selling a decade in.

UPDATE: And now, on the same day, I find out that I’m pretty certainly still gainfully employed, as before.  I’m so blessed I’m blitzed.

Thank you to all of you who prayed for us, and to all of you who sent thought beams that became the wind beneath our wings, or twisted Fate’s arm, as the case may be.

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Israel: Adamah (land) or Eretz (Land)?

April 2, 2010 at 10:28 am (By Amba)

No matter where you stand on Israel, and even if it makes you mad, this is a must read, packed with astonishing insights into Jewish history and identity, the Hebrew language, and the political uses of any language.  Just a couple of startling examples to whet your appetite:

For [poet and dissident Yitzhak Laor], the essential truth underlying historical ambiguity can be found only in and through common language, and one wonders, reading him, whether the ultimate synoptic history of Israel and Palestine would not be a poet’s history, a linguistic history — a version that can be all versions, once the vocabulary has been agreed upon: vocabulary having to do with, for example, the sanctity of “life,” or chayyim, a word that in Hebrew is uniquely plural, and so, as Laor reminds us, cannot be lived by one person, or one nation, alone.

What do you know!  I’ve been saying “L’chaim!” all my life without ever knowing I was saying “To lives!”, even though I know just enough about Hebrew to know that “-im” is a plural ending, as in the familiar “seraphim and cherubim.”

If the decades following 1948 found Israelis aspiring to Aryanhood [see e.g. the blond, blue-eyed Paul Newman in Exodus], then the roots of that loathing grew from decades previous, from the Nazi desire to cast European Jewry as entirely Oriental — the infamous Der Sturmer cartoons of the fattish Jew with the hooked nose and tasseled fez, the cigar and ruby rings. Laor argues that the Nazi genocide represented a purgation of this stereotype, and that the Jew emerged from the war intensely Westernized, as if Auschwitz’s fires had burnt away all traces of Otherness and now the Jew was fit to be not just a citizen like all Western citizens but the very paragon of a polis, the Western citizen par excellence. In Laor’s interpretation, if the Holocausted Jew is today regarded as the special guardian of Humanism, then the new Oriental Other or Easterner can be said to be the Arab, and especially the rock-throwing, half-literate Palestinian.

This reminds me of the way, when I fill out any form like the census that asks for ethnicity, I always hesitate before checking “Caucasian” or “white.”  It just doesn’t seem quite true.  (I know, you don’t have to answer that question, and there are libertarians who say you shouldn’t stand up and be counted at all.  Filling out forms just appeals to my nit-picky, compulsive-copyeditor side.) This is, of course, a loaded and potentially evil point to make, because it means that Jews can now be accused of being racists and Nazis even as they are, on the other hand, still declared by Arabs and Europeans alike to be a “disease,” no matter how Western we may look and think.  (The Nazis, like the segregationists, had a “one-drop rule.”)  Despite the evil uses that are made of this point, there’s still some creepy truth in it, a truth that has something to do with the decline in American antisemitism and the embrace of the Jews by Christians who’ve found a new sinister Semite to despise.

You don’t have to be Jewish, or a critic of Israel, to find much in this piece by Joshua Cohen that is mind-blowingly enlightening.

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Broke.

April 1, 2010 at 7:18 pm (By Amba)

All within the last week:

• my cell phone [under warranty, but AT&T is sucking]
• the land-line phone [cheap; old; replaced]
• the windshield wipers (in the rain; fortunately, not on the highway) [replaced]
• the passenger side mirror [actually was duct-taped into holder; duct tape disintegrated.  Re-duct taped.]
• J’s hospital bed [repaired, on Medicare]
• the toilet [plastic strap connecting flush handle to flapper; replaced]

What else?  We both had a cold for a week [gone now; immune systems not broke].  The water gets shut off for repairs just when we’re getting ready to go out.  J has ill-timed accidents.  It’s all small stuff.  We should be (and are) grateful that if we have to have a run of bad luck and breakdowns, it’s so small-bore.  But it’s a little unnerving when it all happens at once.  Things of completely different type, material, age, and provenance all choose the same week to break down??  What’s next?  Me?  I’m fine but frazzled, feeling behind the curve, stumbling over myself trying to get up to speed as the little things around me break down, both demanding my attention and spitefully sabotaging me.

Change of season shaking things up?  Transition from hibernation?  Adjustment to underemployment?  Full moon?   Why would duct tape and toilet flappers get drawn in to these things?

Jungian psychologist Arnold Mindell thinks he knows.  As Stephan Bodian explains in the intro to an interview with him, Mindell came up with the theory of “the ‘dreambody’ — the unconscious as an active agent constantly expressing itself in our lives.”

Dreams, physical symptoms, relationships, accidents, altered states of consciousness — all are manifestations of the dreambody in action. […] Mindell believes that what happens to us in each moment is exactly what was meant to happen. Our task is to learn to follow this process as it unfolds and thereby help it to reveal its deeper significance. A physical symptom, for example, may force us to deal with a relationship issue, get us in touch with a mythological figure, resolve an old childhood dream, or guide us into a profound meditative state.

Mindell himself says:

There’s a flowing or dreaming process at the bottom of it all.  This process manifests itself in many different ways, depending on the channel in which we perceive it. One of the channels is proprioception — you feel things inside your body in terms of temperatures, pressures, pains, aches, joys, sexual stimulation, and so forth. Or you experience things in terms of visual imagery, or in terms of auditory phenomena, like voices, or in terms of movement — the way you trip over your shoelaces or make certain kinds of gestures — or even in terms of relationship processes. Other people can act as sensory channels for you; you can experience yourself in terms of the behaviour of others. And the process also manifests itself through extrasensory or parapsychological channels: The trees do things; the sky appeals to us.

I remember reading Mindell’s book River’s Way decades ago and being particularly struck by the notion of the “world channel” — the idea that apparently unrelated things going on in the world can manifest your own state of mind.  That may sound pathologically narcissistic (it’s clearly related to Jung’s famous concept of “synchronicity,” or significant coincidence), but have you ever had a burst of anger just as two cars collided or thunder exploded outside?  It’s sort of the poltergeist effect.  (Coincidentally — or not! — the Word A Day for April 2 is “poltergeist.”)

Bodian says, “What you’re referring to here, if I’m not mistaken, is what you call the ‘dream field’, in which people and objects take on the qualities of our dreaming process.”  Mindell responds:

Yes. We dream up the world around us to behave like our own dream field. […S]ometimes things happen synchronistically that can’t be explained in terms of simple projection. For example, you dream that a huge bird speaks to you, and the next day you’re walking down the street and for the first time in your life a huge bird actually bumps into you. […] The world sometimes does literally behave as if it were a sensory channel, as if it were a part of your dreaming field.

Warning:  it gets pretty woo-woo and new-agey, talking about a sort of conservation of the ignored, denied, and repressed:

[I]f you’re a good ecologist, you have to wonder where your signals and processes — the parts of you seeking expression — go when you disavow or let go of them. […T]he negativity doesn’t just disappear. It goes into your body, into a less tractable process, maybe a cellular or metabolic or cancerlike process. Or it goes into your partner, who hates you. Or it goes into accidents on the street corner or into the collective, for you and me to pick up. Devaluing certain perceptions and just letting them go is like tossing wastepaper onto the street. Somebody has to clean it up eventually.  […C]ompassion also means having compassion toward all your perceptions, even the unhappy or unfortunate ones, and trying to process them.

Wow, like, quantum, man.  I lose patience with the tone of this interview, and particularly with the new-age notion that your cancer is trying to tell you something (other than “Die, motherfucker!”).  But there’s something to the “world channel.”  We don’t interact with things (much less people) like another thing bumping into them in a straightforward Newtonian way.  The observer bends and warps the experiment.  We recruit duct tape, windshield wipers, and toilet flappers into our field of dreams.

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A Vulgar Miracle

April 1, 2010 at 9:13 am (By Amba)

This is what I found when I opened my freezer this morning:

Pilgrims devoted to the god Priapus should be beating a path to my door about now.

And somewhere Ice Cube is saying, “I toldja so!”

If you think you can explain how this happened, have at it.  Also:  Caption Contest!

P.S.  Is there some connection between Priapus and April Fool’s Day?  Bet there is.  It’s that time of year.  But, believe me or not, I didn’t do this.  I wouldn’t know how.  If it’s an April Fool’s joke, it’s a (micro)cosmic one.

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“When the world is down to the last tuna, someone will be willing to pay a million dollars to eat it.”

March 31, 2010 at 6:56 pm (By Amba)

As noted here, vanishing animals are as good as gold, these days.

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Opinion is Social. [UPDATED]

March 31, 2010 at 4:19 am (By Amba)

Talking to a dear friend on the left side of the political spectrum today (not far left) was painful, not only because politics is exceedingly painful these days (the temptation to hunker down into a stoical — and possibly armed — private life has never been so great in my lifetime), but because it brought uneasiness and alienation into what has always been a close relationship.

She said, “the stupid people on the right.”

She said Rush Limbaugh wanted Obama to fail, and she wished Rush would make good on his threat to leave the country.

She said that Obama had broken his heart trying to get bipartisanship on health care.

[UPDATE I: I remembered later that she also told me she had just heard that it had now been proven that last year was the warmest year ever.]

I recognized that these were tribal signals meant to elicit ritual agreement from me.  Then that would be settled, and we could go on with our personal catching up in a happy miasma of accord.

Except that when she reached out, I wasn’t there.  (Imagine!  I, who think Rush has done a lot of harm, found myself restoring the context of his “fail” remark, explaining that it wasn’t about race but about ideology.)  Instead, I found myself numbly trying to tell her about the different reality that was there behind the scrim of her assumptions.  I felt stupid having to explain why people on the right fiercely resent being lumped together and smeared as “stupid.”  I refrained from telling her what a stupid thing that had been for a smart person like her to say.  But she wasn’t thinking when she said it.  She was bonding.  When I didn’t bond back, it was shocking and disorienting.  Suddenly we were stumbling in this weird, mined DMZ.

It struck me as profoundly anthropological and even biological — like worker ants or naked mole rats comparing scent badges when they meet in tunnels underground.  We touch antennae and find out if the other person is safe and approved and “one of us.”  If not?  We drive them out the nest, or kill them.  If so?  Nest solidarity is reinforced.

What business does this crap have between human friends?  What bewilders me is that the signals that are exchanged (and on the right they would be:  “the elitists and freeloaders on the left,” rah-rah Rush, and something about Obama’s leanings toward treachery and tyranny; I have close friends who reach out to me with those signals, and I can’t return them, either) are the crudest and most stereotyped and involve the least thought.  They are knee-jerk, groupthink slogans precisely because their function is tribal identification in an era when the old identifiers like class and religion have become muted and muddled.

This is so hard to talk about.

Only if you’re jolted out of your original identification can you catch a brief glimpse of the whole picture.  Class is the river that runs through it, class and family history.  If you’re upper middle class and economically secure, a kind of noblesse-oblige indignation on behalf of the disadvantaged is part of your heritage.  (I speak from experience.)  You may be cosmopolitan and Jewish, or descended from the highly educated abolitionist and pacifist strains of Christianity.  If your family was working class but unionized, part of the labor movement, you may have inherited a more collective common-man tradition that once carried a stirring idealism (if it also, in its heyday, veered uncomfortably close to idealizing the Soviet Union).  And if you’re a member of a minority group, you may feel you, or your less fortunate cohorts, started life under a historical handicap that must to be redressed.  On the right, you’re probably from the fiercely independent smallholder/yeoman/tradesman/craftsman class, and the “millionaires next door” that are so many of its sons and daughters; your ancestors’ lives were rooted in skilled labor or farming and hunting, homestead, church, and clan.  (You can see that I still have a much more detailed picture of the left than the right.)

I think the one smart thing Karl Marx ever said was, “The conditions of existence determine consciousness.”  That probably struck me so hard because the conditions of my own existence have changed so much, and because I’ve traveled so much, not only in space, but between worlds.  “Determine” is a little strong, but it’s close.

I suppose it’s natural that these groups of Americans should be set against each other; in many ways, their interests are.  And I can see (having grown up on the left) what drives the right crazy about “us”:  our interests are not direct and forthright.  We always purport to be doing things on behalf of others, often with admirable dedication; but insofar as we didn’t have to struggle to establish ourselves, our self-interest is in our self-image.

(To my friend, the opposition to Obama is self-evidently racist.  It would be crazy to deny that any of it is.  But to me, now, it seems evident that the convenience of being able to tar all opposition as “racist” was a major strategic weapon in the Democrats’ bid for power.  Race jiu-jitsu.  How racist is that?)

I’m going to have to leave this inconclusive.  I need some sleep.  My instinct is to reconcile, to find common ground.  And there is some:  it’s called America.  The divisions are real, but those who exacerbate them for sport or profit, on both sides, will deserve the blame for what’s to come.  Right now everybody feels warlike and heroic.  Hardball is admired.  Revolution is commended.  Unyielding enmity is intoxicating.  Compromisers who actually want to accomplish something that everyone can grumble and accept, rather than rant about some never-never-land Utopia of the pure left or right, are booed off the field.  These are the signs of a country that hasn’t had a real war in too long.

UPDATE II: Sure enough, today I had to cut short a close friend on the right by saying that talking about politics makes me sick.  While I could almost agree with her on “Throw the bums out — all of them,” she was seeking my agreement with the suspicion that the election of Barack Obama was only possible if “there was a plan” — a sinister, global plan, was the implication.

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