Anti-Immigrant? Or Just Fucking Nuts?

I got a little flak today in the comments to the first story I wrote for my new job. I described the Minuteman Project as a "radical anti-immigrant group" -- actually, my editor changed the original wording, but I think it's still fair/accurate. I think I initially said something like "armed anti-immigration vigilante network," also perfectly true. They call themselves "a citizens' Vigilance Operation monitoring immigration, business, and government," with an emphasis on the illegal nature of most immigrants coming through the southern border.

Why the pushback? Because I didn't say "anti-illegal immigration." Technically, this would be most in line with the Minutemen's stated objectives. But let's be honest. If they were truly only interested in enforcing existing law, they'd be overjoyed if Congress suddenly made all immigration legal. They could pack up their guns and go home.

That wouldn't happen, though: that's "amnesty." I'm betting they'd love to see immigration laws made stricter, because that would mean less immigrants. They just don't like them, especially those whose names end in "o" or "a."

Incidentally, I also got flak from the left, saying I did not characterize FIRE as the conservative hacks that they supposedly are. For shame! It's always the controversial lightning rods that attract both extremes. Another one coming up tomorrow!

300 Update

A while back, I blogged about friends of 300 in academia. Here is one of them, Victor Davis Hanson, defending the movie in a recent Washington Times article.

Where were the sailors detained?

In a story in the NYT today, the headline reads "Iran Detains British Sailors in Iraq." When you read further into the story, however, you find:

The sailors were from the H.M.S. Cornwall, a British Type 22 frigate. Commodore Nick Lambert, the Cornwall’s commanding officer, told the B.B.C. that he hoped the incident was the result of a “simple misunderstanding at the tactical level.” The waters separating Iran and Iraq have long been the subject of bitter territorial disputes between the two countries.

“There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that they were in Iraqi territorial waters,” Commodore Lambert said of the British sailors. “Equally, the Iranians may claim they were in Iranian waters.”

So, there are three alternative possibilities:

1) The vessel was in Iran's territorial waters.
2) The vessel was in Iraq's territorial waters.
3) The vessel was in disputed territorial waters.

Given that the NYT seemingly has no evidence (if they do, they didn't reveal it) as to which of these three stories is true, it is remarkable that the headline assumes that the sailors were in fact detained in Iraqi waters. What were they thinking?

UPDATE: The Washington Post makes the same error. Bizarre.

US Attorneys

For some time now, a controversy has raged in Washington now about the firing of seven United States Attorneys. I have been puzzling over the issue of what it means to be a political appointee in this context. I think most reasonable people would agree that "serving at the pleasure of the president" is a legal term of art rather than a natural language phrase. What do I mean by that? Well, to serve at the pleasure of the president basically means that the President is not legally obliged to give you any specific justification if he/she wants to fire you. On the other hand, there has typically been an understanding that while virtually all political appointees serve at the pleasure of the president, not all of them serve literally at the pleasure of the president. So, for instance, if the President wants to replace his chief of staff or his press secretary, he can do so for really any arbitrary reason he wishes. These aren't what we would typically think of as "public servant" positions. Really, these people just happen to be on the public payroll, but they really are just serving the president in a personal capacity, and their loyalties ultimately lie exclusively with the president. They do not take an oath of office to uphold the Constitution. On the other hand, some political appointees serve important public functions, and the US Attorneys are perhaps one of the best examples. They are the top law enforcement officers in their various districts. It is their job to make sure that federal crimes are prosecuted in their district. As such, they have an obligation to the public at large to vindicate the public interest. This is an extremely important position, as you can imagine, and one of the reasons it is so important is that one of the features of our justice system is that private parties are unable to enforce the law in circumstances where they don't have a particularized, concrete injury (standing doctrine). Thus, most of us are looking to federal law enforcement officials to ensure that law-breakers are punished.

Now, in the ideal world, US Attorneys would bring all criminals to justice. Of course, we live in the real world, where prosecutorial discretion is a very important consideration. The most important reason for that is scarcity of resources. If the federal government didn't have some sense of prioritization in criminal prosecutions, things would fall apart. As one may imagine, each new president may have a different understanding of what deserves the most attention. Suppose for instance that a particular president believes in the "broken windows" theory, and wants all kinds of petty criminals prosecuted. Suppose another president believes that the federal government needs to focus less on victimless crimes, and focus more energy on white-collar crime. Suppose yet another president believes that prosecuting illegal immigration cases is paramount to improve US security and deter people from coming across. Notice that I am only talking about priorities here. Whether a President can actively stop prosecutions of a certain type of crime because he believes that it ought not in fact be a crime is a different question, not treated here. Now, if the President has a certain set of priorities, she is likely to want someone in charge who shares the President's view of those priorities, such that the President's agenda can be carried out most effectively. It would make sense in that situation for an incoming President to replace the law enforcement officers of a previous President if that President had a different set of priorities. Typically, Presidents have done this on some significant scale, and it doesn't seem to have raised any red flags.

Now, the tougher question is what happens if a President finds that his/her US attorneys are not following through on his priorities. Is he justified in replacing them? As a theoretical matter, the answer would appear to be yes. But there are practical complications. Even assuming that the President is genuinely concerned about the priorities being fulfilled, replacing a US Attorney in this context is likely to be seen by others as an attempt to influence specific prosecutions against specific individuals, either by stopping existing prosecutions/investigaions of the President's friends, of friends of his friends, or initiating new prosecutions/investigations of the President's enemies. What appears to have happened in the current crisis is that those fears are well-founded, and that the President's cronies were genuinely trying to influence specific investigations/prosecutions. Now, one might say, if federal prosecutors are the ones with the discretion and they also serve at the pleasure of the president, what's wrong with the President replacing them because of specific prosecutions? It appears that we have some shared intuitions about what is right/wrong for a president to do, and using the power of the presidency to micro-manage the criminal justice system in a way that rewards one friends and punishes one's enemies appears to fall into the unacceptable category- and good riddance for that intuition.

But I am not sure matters are that simple. Can we draw such a clean distinction between specific prosecutions and abstract priorities? In some of the current firings, the DOJ alleged that the problem was that the prosecutors weren't bringing enough voter fraud indictments. If you have set out a priority, in this case voter fraud, but the US Attorney doesn't press charges, and says that he just doesn't have the goods on the targets of the investigations, is that a good enough reason to let the US Attorney go and replace him/her with one who is more likely to be more aggressive? That seems problematic, and I think we want the President to rely on the qualified judgment of a career prosecutor. On the other hand, if the President asked a US Attorney to focus on drug crimes, and he wasn't bringing enough drug prosecutions, can the President fire him then without impunity? If so, is that because the element of partisan taint is absent from that class of cases, given that drug dealers are no more likely to be Democrats than Republicans? There are tough questions here about to what extent the President should be able to set his own agenda with respect to what kinds of criminal violations should receive the most attention, and then how much supervision he can exercise over a US attorney after the initial determination. Do we want US Attorneys to be like Supreme Court justices, in the sense that once you have made an initial determination, the appointee exercises her own independent judgment, and regardless of what the President may have expected from that US attorney at the outset, now he is stuck with whatever happens? What to do with the Souters?

I am not entirely sure of the answers to these questions, but I think they are quite important, and that we need to start thinking about them. It is an often neglected fact that prosecutorial discretion is one of the greatest powers of the prosecutor. There is an initial stage at which he/she can essentially cherrypick which criminals are worthy of punishment, and which are not. Who should decide, and at what stage, and at what level of abstraction, how those determinations are made? That is the question.

Small-town Amerrica and Iraq

Driving to school today, I heard a segment on the BBC radio (can't find a link, unfortunately) about the impact of the war in Iraq on small towns in the United States. As it turns out, a significant number of casualties in this war were residents of towns with less than 25,000 inhabitants. The segment featured an interview with residents of one such small town, and one particular interview with the parents of a decased American Marine in Iraq. There were a number of interesting points made during this interview which I found thought-provoking. The interviewees adopted the following propositions:

1) There is the East Coast, the West Coast, and then there is small town America.
2) Kids in small town America not only go to school, they also go to church.
3) People in "that region" started this war, and if we leave the job unfinished, we will be conceding defeat to "those people in that region."

Why are we at war in Iraq? Even taking the administration's most broad justification for the war, it looks something like this: The terrorists attacked us on 9/11, Saddam was a bad guy who we thought had WMD, and there was some possibility that the terrorists and Saddam might co-operate in the future, and that was simply not a risk we were willing to take, since our freedom was at issue. Even on that now thoroughly discredited view, there is no implicit notion that what is at issue in this war is the "way of life of church-going Americans." Here, we see a naked admission of just that, and it is not terribly difficult to infer that many of these people also think this is an essentially religious conflict, between Christianity and Islam.

To the extent that the motivations of the soldiers and their families, their narrative about why they are fighting this war, is incosistent with the purported narrative offered by the Bush administration, what does that mean for this war, and for our nation? Has this happened before in our history?

'Supporting the Troops' Redux

Following up on Mahmood's alternate-reality scenario....

Most of the Iraq war debate is dishonest, but the arguments over who's "supporting the troops" is the most fundamentally mendacious feature of our public discourse. Let's break this down.

In 2002, most of Congress -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- vote for the war resolution that gives the president the power to invade Iraq if he sees fit. This essentially makes going to war in Iraq legal. The instrument with which Congress's and President Bush's new policy -- invading Iraq -- is to be implemented is the U.S. military, a volunteer organization under the Department of Defense.

Today, Republicans routinely demonize Democrats who advocate for any sort of pullout (timed or otherwise) as not "supporting the troops." Democrats, on the other hand -- and probably as a result of this knee-jerk reaction by pandering neoconservatives -- declare their support for America's troops as often as possible. But the idea of supporting the troops is meaningless. The armed forces consist of people who are there voluntarily, and they take orders from those who might send them to war -- the commander-in-chief and his enablers in Congress who make his actions legal.

Troops are needed for war, regardless of whether the mission is noble or selfish, inevitable or by choice. We now have liberal politicians who are using their "support of the troops" as a rationale for pulling them out of Iraq. The logic is hilariously circular: I want to give the president the authority to send our troops to war, so I vote for the resolution. Now I believe (or say I always believed) that this war is wrong, therefore I will point to the instrument of the policy I voted for and use that as a reason for reversing that policy.

I find this "supporting the troops" rhetoric to be hypocritical not only because it's meaningless (some troops will have to die in some wars, whether justified or not; even opponents of the war wouldn't deny troops armor, and in fact that's never in history been a point of contention until this war), but because in civilian life, most Democrats don't like the kind of people who voluntarily join the army anyway.

They're disproportionately conservative, patriotic, and strongly support aggressive defense measures. They're disproportionately white and rural ("hicks," a city person might put it). They're relatively uneducated.

Pro-war Republicans are just as illogical, but their fallacy is the sunk cost: I voted for this war, and since I support the troops that are carrying out this war I advocated for (whatever that means), and since we've put so much effort and sacrificed so many lives so far, I believe they should finish the job.

So how should principled opponents of the war advance the debate? They should go back to the original antiwar arguments before the invasion -- none of which invoked "our troops," because any serious, necessary war must be waged regardless of casualties. The best arguments against the war in the first place revolved around Iraqi casualties, destabilizing the region, and inadvertently boosting terror networks around the world. All three fears have been borne out, with some estimates of Iraqi casualties topping 600,000 (which makes the 3,000+ American deaths seem paltry by comparison).

True opponents of the war would be more concerned with the death and destruction being wrought in our name, rather than the damage being done to our armed forces. I have two friends who are either in Iraq or on the way there, and I'm not diminishing their contributions or the casualties of American soldiers. I am saying that an honest debate would center on the effects of the war on Iraq and the war on terror and not the troops who were sent to implement the war strategy. Anything else is posturing.

Of course I "support the troops" -- I can go to the supermarket and buy a yellow ribbon! Give me a break.

De-funding the war and supporting the troops

Yesterday, the House Appropriations Committee voted out of committe a record $124 billion supplemental funding bill for the war in Iraq. It is widely expected that the full House, and following that, the United States Senate, are likely to pass the bill, sending it to the President for his signature. One might wonder why the Democrats, who have a majority in both houses, are affirmatively authorizing more than a hundred BILLION dollars, while they are also calling for the troops to come home as soon as possible. The common wisdom is fairly straightforward: If Democrats voted against this bill, that would be seen as undercutting the troops, and leaving them defenseless in harm's way. But what does this mean?

A reasoned explanation for this argument would probably go something like this: If you withold funding for the war, then there would be no money for the troops. But money for what? Congres has previously authorized billions of dollars, and no reasonable person can believe that if Congress didn't authorize this supplemental, the government would be unable to pay its bills tommorrow, next week, or even in six months. But, critics counter, the Bush administration would divert money appropriated for other purposes, and redirect it to the military. Thus, if Congress doesn't appropriate the extra money, the troops will suffer in some other respect. The bottom-line is that the troops would suffer the consequences, rather than the Bush administration.

Now, let me set up an alternative scenario. Suppose that a President decides to go to war with Canada to finish the job we left off in the mid-19th century. Suppose further that he sends a large number of troops to Canada to occupy it, and that the Canadians put up fierce resistance. In response, the President decides that he is going to intern all Canadian men aged 18-45, and shoot any resisters. Suppose that as a result of this policy, several massacres of young Canadian men have taken place. Now, suppose that such a war becomes very unpopular with the public, and that the opposition party which controls Congress wishes to do something to end the occupation of Canada. Now suppose that the President comes and asks Congress for a supplemental to support the further occupation of Canada. If Congress were to refuse such a supplemental, one of two things would happen:

1) The President would come to his senses, and decide that the collective voice of the American people expressed through their Congress were against a continued war effort in Canada, and would end the occupation of Canada
2) The President would decide to disregard the will of the American people, and continue the war effort by using other funds, thus depriving other programs of their funding. Alternatively, the President could start cutting corners for the troops, depriving them of certain equipment, supplies etc. but still keep them in Canada.

Now, let's assess the effect of each approach:

1) The Canadians would be happy, Congress would be happy, and the American people would be happy.
2) Everyone except the President would be unhappy, but whom would the American people blame? They would rightly see that Congress tried to stop the President from pursuing this mad policy of war by the means it had available to itself, but that the President was determined to carry on by any means necessary. Would they see this as Congress undercutting the troops? No, rather, quite rightly, they would understand the following: The members of the United States Armed Forces serve at the pleasure of the United States Government, and have to follow the orders given to them by the President. If the President orders them into Canada to wage an illegal war, they do not have the right to protest that the war is illegal. That is a determination for the political branches to make. If one political branch (Congress) decides that the other political branch (President) is waging an illegal war, it has certain tools to stop that war, and one of those tools is to decline to authorize funds to wage that illegal war. If Congress believes that the internment and killing of young Canadian men is intolerable, it can attempt to put a stop to it by de-funding the war. If we assume that most troops are basically decent people who would rather not be interning and killing innocent people, is it likely that they will perceive such an action by Congress as undercutting their position on the battlefield? Isn't it more likely that they will thank Congress for trying to end a situation where they are forced to do things that are despicable and contrary to basic human moral norms? Aren't the American people likely to agree with the troops in this assesment? Consequently, aren't they likely to blame the President if he persists in his madness, and continues the war, rather than Congress?

I realize that we are not in Canada, and that the American troops aren't engaging in internment and massacres in Iraq. But the fact remains that most of the American people, and Congress, oppose the continuation of the occupation of Iraq by US forces. My hypotehtical is meant to illustrate that a decision to de-fund a war because of its undesirability is not equivalent to undercutting the troops. Rather, it is an instrument which Congress is constituionally authorized to use to compel the President to end a war which Congress believes is not in the interest of the United States. So long as such de-funding provides enough money for an orderly redeployment, it in no way undercuts the troops, any argument to the contrary is simply wrong.

Friedman falls flat

In his NYT column today, Thomas Friedman celebrates the fact that investment banks have added yet another group to their client base: environmental activists. In an otherwise moderately interesting, if overly exuberant, piece about the power of environmental groups to use market forces to their advantage (an idea I unqualifiedly endorse), Friedman writes:

First, Mr. Krupp said, “what is the message when the largest buyout in history is made contingent [by the buyers] on winning praise for its greenhouse gas plan? ... The markets are ahead of the politicians. The world has changed, and these guys see it.”

TXU not only didn’t understand that the world was getting green; it didn’t understand that the world was getting flat. “Going online,” Mr. Krupp said, “we shifted this from a local debate over generating electricity to a national debate over capping and reducing carbon emissions.” So, what TXU had hoped would be just a local skirmish was instead watched on computer screens in every global market.

According to Mr. Krupp, the group's remarkable achievement was to take a local issue and nationalize, even globalize, its scope. Friedman's parsing of this is "the world is not only getting green, but also getting flat." What do either of those statements mean? First, my understanding is that the environmentalists' real problem is that the world is getting greener (that is in fact what happens when ice melts). But joking aside, the "greening" of the world plugs into a shared metaphor about increased awareness of the impact of human actions on the environment. But what does it mean for the world to "get flat?" Some readers will no doubt be protesting that this is eloquently explained in Mr. Friedman's recent tome about the flattening of the world (insert joke about the Flat Earth Society. But why should the reader of a column have to go and read an explanation of this mysterious usage? Shouldn't Mr. Friedman cabin his idiosyncratic usage to a place where the average reader will actually have some idea of what he is talking about? I admit that part of my animus is driven by my dislike for the term, even when fully explained, but I think I can put that aside sufficiently to make a reasonable argument that a columnist should speak in plain language, instead of using unexplained self-invented terminology in his columns.

African-Americans and Immigrants in Muslim America - Part II

Did the treatment of immigrant Muslims in post-9/11 America finally "equalize" all Muslims in America, exposing the indelibly racist ways of the caucasian elite? Some version of that statement is lurking between the lines in the NYT piece. Imam Talib emerges as the wiser figure at the end of the story. It is the immigrant Muslims who have "seen the light," so to speak. I think that this view reflects an overly simplified understanding of reality.

To begin with, the grievances of Muslim immigrants are fairly simple. They insist that Islam is a peaceful religion, and that Al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers are simplying committing murder in the name of Allah, using religion for illicit purposes. They also seek to safeguard their ability to exercise their faith freely. Unlike in Europe, however, free exericse issues have played a fairly marginal part in our national debate, since few serious commentators question Muslim women's right to wear headscarves etc. It is noteworthy that immigrant Muslims are not calling for some grand reformation of American society- they are not assailing the capitalist system, gross inequalities of wealth along racial/ethnic lines. Rather, they are focusing on rehabilitating their status as ordinary citizens, free of the cloud of doubt that has been cast over their loyalty as Americans since 9/11. While it is understandable that such analytical separation of grievances doesn't prevent the development of empathy among immigrant Muslims who certainly know what is like to be the "underdog," I think that it is unwarranted to assume that immigrant Muslims will adopt the political narrative which is traditionally attributed to African-American congregations.

In fact, such a development would be cause for a great deal of alarm. In my view, Muslim immigrants have nothing to gain from adopting a political narrative which demonizes white Americans. Let me be very clear about something: Muslim immigrants have a serious problem with disregarding their indigenous brethren, and the NYT article points this out excellently, with examples like the unconscionable fact that all the money collected for zakat (tax to benefit the poor) goes to other countries instead of being spent here in the US. It is also true that there is plenty of racism among Muslim immigrants, who are often obsessed with being as fair as possible, and think of dark skin color as a social impediment. However, resolving these difficulties, and bridging the gap between Muslim immigrants and African-American Muslims, does not translate into the transformation of Muslim American society as a radical movement for equality among all Americans. Most Americans begin with the premise that this is a country where all individuals are equal, and that we must work together to end any discrimination. They also operate on an equally strong premise that this is a country where merit is the most important factor in determining how much one can advance, how much wealth one can accumulate etc. Muslim immigrants have embraced this credo with great enthusiasm, and if one examines the bulk of Muslim response to post-9/11 Islamophobia, that is evident. Muslims petition government agencies, organize inter-faith events to promote a better understanding of Islam, write letters to the editor; in other words, they engage the civic and political communities that surround them in a bid to convince them of their opposition to acts of terrorism.

Sometimes such tactics work; on other occasions, it is clear that there are some forces which have made up their mind about Muslims, and they pursue an agenda of ignorance and hate with devastating consequences. Nevertheless, this is the avenue that Muslims have employed, and it is the only one likely to bring them success. When our neighbors see that we are peaceful citizens, when they see that we are making important contributions to the advancement of science, technology, and good governance, then surely they will understand. This is the approach urged upon Muslims by the Holy Prophet (pbuh), who always led by his own good example. By contrast, conjuring up vast political conspiracies where Muslims are inevitably the victims of evil forces, is not only the work of fantasy; but moreover, even if such ideas sometimes seem to be supported by events in the real world, fighting hatred with hatred will do no good.

In summary, I am fuly supportive of the notion that Muslims in the US are being brought together, even if it is only in the wake of the horrible events of 9/11 and its fallout. Every Muslim who inhabits a place has an obligation toward other Muslims in that same place, and Muslims are never permitted to discriminate on the basis of race. As the Holy Prophet (pbuh) stated:

All mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no
superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-
Arab has any superiority over an Arab;
also a white has no superiority over a
black nor a black has any superiority
over a white - except by piety and good
action.”

But such unity must not come at the expense of the destruction of the identity of Muslims in the US as Americans, who believe in, and care deeply about their country, whether they are born or naturalized into it.

African-Americans and Immigrants in Muslim America

Tommorrow's NYT has this fascinating piece about the relationship between African-American and immigrant Muslims in the United States, focusing on two particular communities in Harlem and Long Island, respectively. As the story points out, there has traditionally been a fairly large rift between the two segments of American Islamic society, and there is a stark contrast between run-down inner-city mosques populated by African-Americans and well-to-do suburban South Asian/Arab mosque complexes, mirroring a similar divide between Christian churches in those respective areas. But the socio-economic disparity is exarcerbated by a difference in outlook that can be said to go deeper, which are explored in the article. I want to make a couple of quick points in this regard, but I am barely scratching the surface here, given that this is a topic that can be mined for a great deal more.

The article doesn't point out that the early history of the American Muslim community is quite interesting. Islam was first introduced properly to the United States by missionaries of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, who brought a translation of the Holy Qur'an in 1920, and for the first several decades of Islam's existence in America, the vast majority of Muslim Americans were African-American. However, around the same time as the great strides in civil rights in the United States, immmigrant Muslims, from Arab nations, Iran, and in even greater numbers, from South Asia, began arriving. Significant numbers of these immmigrants were able to get ahead in the professional world, and have since made significant contributions, and reaped the rewards thereof. Today, Indians, Pakistanis, Iranians, and Arabs are extremely common in the professional world, especially in the medical and technological communities. (It is worth noting that while the first wave of immigrants were all professionals, later waves have also brought many working-class individuals, and even some professionals ended up working in the blue-collar service sector, which is why if you quiz your NYC cabdriver about his level of education, don't be surprised if he was a doctor back in Pakistan).

Here is where things get complicated. The reason so many immigrants arrived on our shores in the 1970's and onward has to do with the loosening of restrictions on immigration that had been in place for the better part of a century. Originally, those restrictions were imposed as a response to increased Chinese immigration, and in the wake of World War I, a general impulse toward isolationism. The undertones were clearly racist, and it is quite reasonable to draw a connection between the liberalization of immigration policy in the 1960's-1970's and the general background of more enlightened attitudes toward people of non-European origin. In a very real sense, then, the struggles of African Americans for equal rights paved the way for the prosperity of South Asian and Arab immmigrants. However, when one looks at the history of these groups (Muslim as well as non-Muslim), they could hardly be more divergent. South Asians/Arabs have enjoyed tremedous success over the past four decades, whereas black Americans have made progress much more slowly. As a result, the attitude of the respective consituencies toward American society, and especially towards the caucasian elite, are quite different. South Asian and Arab immigrants, accustomed to hardship from their own lands, practice and preach a creed of getting ahead, no matter the obstacles. To them, the response to discrimination is to work harder until the discriminators are left with no choice but to admit that the "brown" man cannot be dismissed. This narrative rejects any notion of victimhood emphatically, warning that considering onself to be a victim is just self-defeating. By contrast, African-Americans in the wake of the civil rights revolution have arguably moved in the opposite direction. The leadership in the African-American community has emphasized the institutional hurdles that have been put in place by centuries of slavery and Jim Crow. Affirmative action policies have been created in an attempt to overcome those institutional hurdles, to level the playing field so to speak. In recent years, prominent commentators such as John McWhorter have pointed out that a culture of anti-intellectualism and victimization pervades significant portions of the African-American community. McWhorter, and others, point out that African-Americans have in fact made tremendous advances since the 60's, and that racism no longer constitutes a significant institutional hurdle to progress for African-Americans. Of course, many books and articles have been written in response to McWhorter et al. accusing them of neglecting persisting institutional racism. Leaving the merits of this debate aside for now, let's move to 9/11, a watershed in American Muslim history, to say the least.

On one view, all Muslim Americans were finally rendered equal on 9/11. Prior to that, the immigrant Muslims had thought, erroneously, that they had fully assimilated into the caucasian elite. They had become doctors and engineers, moved to Potomac, Long Island, McLean, and Short Hills. Their children attended the same private preparator y academies, and the same elite collegiate insitutions as Johnson, O'Connell, and Goldstein. But now, reality came to haunt them. They were singled out for criticism, profiled at airports, told they were "extremists." Their neighbors were picked up in the middle of the night, their mosques were bugged, their kids were teased at school, their charities raided and shut down. Muslim Americans are still dealing with the reprecussions of 9/11. Some African-Americans, like Imam Talib in the story, think that finally immigrant Muslims have woken up to the reality that there is a caucasian elite in this country, and that no matter how much a Pakistani thinks that he has managed to assimilate, in truth he/she is an outsider. On this view, Muslims can now unite around the calls for fundamental structural reform that have been emanating from pulpits in African-American worship houses (both mosques and churches). What seems like a nightmare to Muslims, namely the erosion of hard-won progress, is seen as a long-overdue wake-up call by others.

Who is right? What does this mean for the future of Muslim Americans? Stay tuned for Part II of this post.

Separate bedrooms

The NYT explores an increasing trend of separate bedrooms among married couples. What's really interesting, but ignored in the article, is that every one of the people interviewed for the article who expresses a desire to have separate bedrooms is female. Is this a fluke in the Times story, or indicative of most cases? Do men complain that they have trouble sleeping well with their wives, or is this gripe the exclusive domain of women?

Friends of '300' in Academia?

My colleague a. guess has an excellent post regarding the more disturbing elements of the new movie about the Battle of Thermopylae. It is worth adding that some of the most avid students of Sparta could also be found among the supporters of the Iraq war. I am thinking of Donald Kagan, who is considered the world's finest scholar on the Pelopponesian wars, and Victor Davis Hanson, author of Carnage and Culture. Both of these scholars are members of the once very trendy neo-conservative movement which has been losing members at an alarming rate recently. It would be intriguing to see whether either Kagan or Hanson approve of '300.'

America Does Not Need '300' at This Time

I ask a question that was at the back of my mind when I first saw the trailer for 300, a Frank Miller adaptation that takes a highly stylized, overly CG approach to the epic battle genre. A. O. Scott's excellent review points out the obvious, that the villains are significantly darker-skinned than the Spartan heroes. But is that really the most problematic aspect of the movie?

There is already a debate going on as to whether the movie tacitly approves of present-day warfare in Iraq, or whether it subtly critiques it. In this vein, we should probably care more that supporters of current Middle East policy will, consciously or not, take the movie as a reinforcement of their existing beliefs. Because it's not the skin color of the enemies that's important; it's the fact that they're imperial, crusading brutes from the Persian Empire. And we all know what mischief the Persians are up to today!

So I think it's worth pointing out right here that, in fact, the Persian Empire during the time of the Battle of Thermopylae, "depicted" in the movie, was not a Muslim civilization but a Zoroastrian one.

That said, does America really need another MTV/videogame-styled gorefest in the vein of Resident Evil, lacking both character and plot or even originality? The visuals in 300 might be nice to look at, but surely it was done far better in the (actually artful) Frank Miller adaptation Sin City? This quote from Variety sums it up best: "Nobody wanted to do an obscure graphic novel with a commercial director and no script." A commercial with no script -- pretty accurate, from early reports.

Anti-Israeli or Anti-Semitic?

Stanley Fish takes on the question of whether critics of Israel are in fact anti-Semites. Fish writes:

[Some say that] there is no reason to assume that those who criticize Israel and argue that America’s uncritical support for a flawed state is strategically unwise and morally wrong are anti-Semitic.

Maybe so, but there is some empirical evidence to the contrary.

He cites a study conducted by Edward Small (Yale) and Robert Kaplan (Harvard) which concludes that 56% of those who are anti-Israel are also anti-Semites. Based on this evidence, and his own impressions of college campuses, Fish concludes:

I believe that the viral version of anti-Semitism is always capable of regaining its full and deadly form even when it is apparently dormant or weakened. All it needs is a pretext, and any pretext will do. If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict didn’t exist, it would attach itself to something else; but it does exist, and anti-Semitism couldn’t be happier.

What is especially interesting is that Fish concludes his column by pointing out that he has a colleague who "tells, and believes, the 'criticism of Israel is one thing, anti-Semitism another' story," but that Fish himself cannot do the same because he was alive during World War II.

First, if 56% of critics of Israel are also anti-Semites, does that imply that the other 44% are automatically delegitimized? Does this mean that anytime a majority of the critics of a particular group's actions are motivated by a deeper hatred of that group, those actions can be immunized from criticism? That appears illogical, and yet such is the logic of Fish's conclusion.

Second, Fish's observation that he was alive during WWII drives home the point of origin of the kind of vicious anti-Semitism which led to the Holocaust, Europe. Even today, the neo-antiSemitism that worries Fish seems to be rooted in Europe's political elite. But the anti-Semitism which is lurking in the background is located in the Arab and Islamic world. Whereas the former is based on the notion that Jews are responsible for deicide and has been around for literally 2000 years, the latter is of much more recent vintage, and stems for the most part specifically from the creation of the state of Israel, and the dispossession of Palestinian Arabs that followed. To be sure, many have pointed out that anti-Jewish sentiment was present among Muslims prior to the 20Th century, and usually the relationship between Jews and the Holy Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) is given as the paradigmatic example, along with passages in the Holy Qur'an which are interpreted as being anti-Jewish. I will not attempt to refute such allegations at length here (because it would consume too much time), but suffice it to say that irrespective of the merits of such allegations the history of Muslim-Jewish relations until modern times has been largely amicable, and that Jewish communities have flourished in Muslim lands over the centuries. No one can dispute that serious anti-Semitism, in the form of pogroms etc., only became a problem with the rise of the Zionist movement.

Thus, to the extent that anti-Israeli sentiment is simply a proxy for anti-Jewish sentiment, that group historically finds its origin in Europe, and not the Middle East or the Islamic world. Why is this significant? Because, hypothetically, if the Israel-Palestine problem was resolved in a manner perceived as just and equitable by Arabs and Muslims, as a historical matter they have no further reason to be hostile to Jews. Of course, as a practical matter, decades of hate-mongering by extremist elements who have used all materials at their disposal to whip up anti-Semitism may be hard to forget, but that is a separate problem. On the other hand, even if the Israel-Palestine problem was equitably resolved, history tells us that European hatred of the Jewry would continue unabated. So, logically, the 56% who are anti-Jewish in their heart of hearts are not the ones who are being victimized and humiliated by Israel's policies in Palestine. (As an aside, calling Arabs anti-Semitic, when they are in fact Semites themselves, is quite ironic; alas, such is the history of language.)

If we focus on the victims of Israel's policies, rather than ancient European anti-Semitism, the following statement by Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer appears eminently reasonable:

Why, they ask, should our foreign policy be held hostage to the interests of a small country that is perfectly capable of defending itself and is guilty of treating the Palestinians, whose land it appropriated, in ways that are undemocratic and even, in the opinion of many, criminal?

Indeed, why should it?

Inside the mind of a gleeful post-verdict Democrat

(12:08:13) dopeymanx: guilty
(12:08:28) AZpokeytec: SWEET!!!
(12:08:46) dopeymanx: haha
(12:09:33) dopeymanx: i'm not sure i understand the liberal glee at his guilt
(12:09:47) dopeymanx: i mean, if he really did try and out that bitch, he wasn't the person behind it
(12:10:57) AZpokeytec: the glee isn't over this specific action, but the general condemnation of this administrations sketchy and densely opaque wheelings and dealings
(12:11:20) dopeymanx: eh
(12:11:24) dopeymanx: not convinced
(12:11:35) AZpokeytec: lol
(12:11:40) dopeymanx: now it's back to biz as usual
(12:11:54) AZpokeytec: well i hope it spreads
(12:12:10) AZpokeytec: and that at least it's a blow to the pride of the administratioon
(12:12:27) dopeymanx: dude they offered him up for sacrifice years ago
(12:12:31) dopeymanx: this is exactly according to plan
(12:12:34) dopeymanx: if it really was some conspiracy
(12:13:05) AZpokeytec: haha it's not a conspiracy as much as it is a pride-filled attitude
(12:13:15) AZpokeytec: and it still refelcts on them
(12:13:39) AZpokeytec: and now that libby has been totally ostracized, maybe he will expose shit about the other folks
(12:13:44) dopeymanx: um, no
(12:13:48) dopeymanx: because he'll be in jail
(12:13:51) dopeymanx: and there was no plea bargain
(12:13:58) dopeymanx: your wishful thinking is hilarious
(12:13:59) AZpokeytec: he can still write from jail
(12:14:03) dopeymanx: keep hoping
(12:14:05) AZpokeytec: it's not wishful thinking
(12:14:07) dopeymanx: yes it is
(12:14:10) AZpokeytec: he's already made accusations about karl rove
(12:14:15) AZpokeytec: just a month ag
(12:14:17) AZpokeytec: ago
(12:14:24) dopeymanx: so?
(12:14:38) dopeymanx: he was trying to defend himself from jail
(12:14:47) dopeymanx: i mean, first he's a liar, but now he's a truth teller?
(12:14:52) dopeymanx: youre contradicting youself
(12:15:07) AZpokeytec: howo am i contradicting myself?
(12:15:14) AZpokeytec: a person is not uniformly a liar
(12:15:25) AZpokeytec: just bc you lie about stealing a cookie doesnt mean everything you say is a lie
(12:15:27) dopeymanx: its just funny how youve totally flipped though
(12:15:37) dopeymanx: he has zero incentive to tell the truth
(12:15:45) AZpokeytec: he has all the incentive in the wrld now
(12:16:15) dopeymanx: absolutely none
(12:16:23) dopeymanx: well, keep hoping!
(12:16:43) AZpokeytec: well, i think i will be vindicated
(12:17:30) dopeymanx: sure! :-)

Vidor, Texas: 'Rough Beauty'?

Continuing what will surely be a rich tradition on this blog of commenting on articles in the day's New York Times, I stumbled upon a piece [$; will be available free this weekend] on the controversy surrounding a book of photographs about the people of Vidor, Texas, called Rough Beauty.

Vidor, Texas has been in the news recently. A CNN special on race in December featured the town, which is in close proximity to Jasper, Texas, where a black man was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck not too many years ago. One of Vidor's finest, a fat white woman who apparently spends much of her time in a diner, said this: "I don't mind being friends with them, talking and stuff like that, but as far as mingling and eating with them, all that kind of stuff, that's where I draw the line." (What's next? Letting them into our neighborhoods? Our bedrooms??)

What's interesting about Rough Beauty, however, is that it is a book of artistic photographs that seeks beauty in the mundane, and the visual poetry that reveals itself in the squalor of rural poverty. This is controversial because there is an unstated belief by like-minded people that beauty cannot coexist with horror. I am happy to report that this is an aesthetic debate that has consumed much of art theory in the 20th century.

The critic Walter Benjamin made a useful distinction between "aestheticizing the political" and "politicizing the aesthetic." The former paradigm fits most closely with fascist regimes, while the latter will be familiar to those who have seen Soviet propaganda (or An Inconvenient Truth). For example: Shorn from its context, is not the image of a bomb dropped on a Spanish village during the civil war -- from the point of view of the airplane -- beautiful, the orange flames slowly pulsating outwards in a ring of fire? By removing this horrible image from the political context, can't we aestheticize it and view it as art? To take a more mainstream example, isn't Triumph of the Will rightly considered one of the greatest documentary films ever made?

On the flip side, Soviet propagandists created an entirely new aesthetic, injecting art, literature and film with their own political ideology. In film, this resulted in the dialectical montage made famous by Eisenstein. In a communist state, it was deemed necessary to define reality in the terms dictated by the Party so that the people would buy into that reality. The only way to do this was to use the very aesthetic means with which artists have spoken to the masses throughout history. For fascist regimes, it was necessary to mask the horrors of totalitarianism by aesthetic means. So, from the leaders' point of view, one method revealed truth while the other concealed it.

My point is, both methods showed that it is quite possible to combine beauty and ugliness, art and evil. Are the people of Vidor, Texas horrible/racist? I don't know, but I do know that they are probably, in large part, not very well-educated. That, besides utter stupidity, is the only way to explain why someone would display open racism to a television reporter. And it explains a curious aspect of the controversy, which is that apparently, many of the protesters are in fact from Vidor. Clearly, they haven't actually read the book themselves, and have assumed that it is another indictment of their ... way of life.

And what of this way of life? It's funny that I caught this article as I was reading the first chapter of a groundbreaking book called Sundown Towns, which basically asserts that the majority of incorporated towns in America, from about 1890-1968, were whites-only, either by law or through more indirect and unstated means. Interestingly, the vast majority of these were not in the South. The author, sociologist Jim Loewen, suggested that Vidor "takes the heat" for these other towns that most people don't know about or wish not to admit exist. It also helps that Vidor is in Texas and not, say, California or Illinois (and that it wasn't built by the FDR administration ... yikes!).

The Times article had this graf about the reaction to the public opening of the book's photographs:

Reactions to the show were mixed. Photography enthusiasts unfamiliar with Vidor praised Mr. Anderson for the formal composition of his pictures, while those familiar with the town tended to focus on the location. "They're nice," said Jonathan Meadows, 26, a painter who grew up in nearby Fredericksburg, when initially asked what he thought. When told that the photographs had been taken in Vidor, Mr. Meadows laughed and clarified his reaction. "A few are beautiful," he said. "But they're not beautiful in the true sense of the word."

This is a perfect example of the ambivalence and hesitation caused by the unholy mixture of aesthetics and ugliness. It reminds me of a very similar reaction at an AFI Silverdocs screening of the documentary The Bridge, which was about people who threw themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge to commit suicide. What's so stunning about the film is the pure beauty of many of the images. Weirdly, though, the director completely denied this in the Q&A afterwards. I concluded, basically, that he actually had an agenda (to build a decidedly ugly barrier that would prevent people from killing themselves at that particular bridge, which would surely drive them to do so in less-patrolled places instead) and misunderstood his own creation. He couldn't accept that the horror of suicide could coexist with the grandeur of great architecture. But there it was.

This controversy also hits close to home. For my senior thesis, I made a documentary about some of the same thorny issues that were the subject of Rough Beauty. Like Dave Anderson, the photographer, I didn't come out with the conclusions I was supposed to. My shots weren't art, necessarily, but I did aestheticize the subjects of my movie (especially at the end, which took on a surreal quality because I didn't use audio). In other words, I didn't demonize them outright -- I merely asked questions. Partially for this reason, I believe, my classmates and instructor were at times fairly hostile to my work. Here's Anderson:

Mr. Anderson said he was surprised by the storm his project started. His curiosity, and his willingness to represent Vidor in a new light, have not been rewarded, he concluded.

"I think artistically it's problematic," he said. "There have been so many strong reactions that I don't want to overcompensate on future projects."

And that's too bad. My project, too, was very problematic -- but I acknowledged this from the get-go. Anderson, too, has tried to embrace a difficult and problematic subject and come out scarred as a result.

It's worth asking what happens when you do come back with the conclusions you're supposed to. The article mentions work by photographers such as Walker Evans, who traveled South with James Agee for the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (which I kind of despise). The book concealed their obviously Marxist (and condescending) sympathies with various rhetorical flourishes. It's since been recognized as a classic. And what do you know? The gorgeous photographs within politicize the aesthetic.

Movie Mysteries and Film Puzzles

Mahmood has given us a great framework with which to evaluate films on both style and substance, and the intersection of the two.

As for the question, Is David Denby right when he claims that Iñárritu/Arriaga are masking a political message with a deceptively complicated structure that seems to suggest that the world is a complex place in which randomness, unpredictability and fate all intersect in order to create sometimes devastating and always unforeseeable consequences?

For Babel, and definitely for 21 Grams, I think this is a plausible argument. I didn't pick up on any subversive messages in Babel, nor do I necessarily think there's an ulterior motive. A. O. Scott of the Times seems to think it is in part a cautionary tale about the perils of globalization -- but that seems silly to me. As much as I respect his opinion, none of the conflicts in the film wouldn't have been possible 50 or 100 years ago. The story about the Mexican nanny could be seen as more of a parable about immigration policy than anything else. (And are the characters heartlessly bounced around in the pinball machine of global capitalism, or is that just the writer's pen -- or fate?)

So the "unfair distribution of power" argument makes much more sense. The most vivid support for this theory is the scene in which Brad Pitt (an entirely unlikable character, which made casting him such a brilliant choice) manages to helicopter out of Afghanistan with his ailing wife, Cate Blanchett. Iñárritu makes sure we understand that in this particular time and place, the two rich Americans are worth far more than the dirty peasants -- the helicopter swoops in to rescue them, dwarfing everyone else as if the king had just arrived. And Brad knows it. The guilt tears him apart, leading to an entirely unbelievable scene in which the actor attempts to fake crying.

I maintain that Iñárritu's first and still superior film, Amores Perros, is among the finest of the new millennium so far. It features three intersecting stories, each with characters from a different socioeconomic class. But all of them have flaws, and all of them have virtues. The world depicted in Amores Perros truly is complex. Far from glorifying the downtrodden, championing the ex-Marxist guerrilla, and vilifying the rich, duplicitous magazine editor, no one comes out especially well in the end. Denby entirely misreads the last scene in the film, in which, he writes, El Chivo "lights out for fresh territory, like the hero of an old Western." On the contrary, he's limping away from the realization that he lacks the courage to confront the daughter he abandoned and the past that doomed him to a life of crime and poverty.

So we're back to the distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Is Babel a mystery? Surely by the end, the filmmakers have tied up the loose ends and made something of a statement about their characters. We're left to hypothesize what it all means -- but does it mean anything beyond what's in the film itself? Can we apply it to life in general? These questions are another way of asking, Is it transcendent? Is it art?

Certainly, the filmmakers are consciously trying to transcend. But I don't know if they do; there's just one caricature too many (pick one: the rich Americans with a sense of entitlement; the hapless Mexican maid with a heart of gold; etc.). The only truly original character is the girl in Tokyo. Amores Perros's characters didn't necessarily stand for anything, and as a result they were fluid, multifaceted and real. So in the end, we can believe that these real people have something to say about life, and about us. Maybe Babel is only relevant within itself, and once it ends, the puzzle is solved. Nothing more about the mystery of life is illuminated.

This puzzle/mystery distinction got me thinking about other films I like. The example of L'Avventura is classic; I'd add Blow-Up, because that Antonioni picture also begins like a puzzle and turns into something of a mystery. But it keeps elements of both. The photographer's investigation into a crime his picture may have captured becomes a bona-fide investigation into perception, reality, and truth. In one scene, someone literally disappears into a crowd. Did the photographer see her at all? In the celebrated final scene, a group of mimes plays pretend-tennis. But isn't that the sound of the ball? And aren't his eyes following something going back and forth? So, throughout, we get clues that not everything is as it seems -- the main character becomes untrustworthy, and depending on what we think of him (and the film's reality), we can attempt to solve the original puzzle. But the mystery remains.

Other films succeed as both puzzles and mysteries. The classic film puzzle is Memento, which requires conscious effort to follow and finally piece together in the end. But the mental work of understanding the story by piecing together the narrative (which is disjointed and backward, like the main character's memory) leads to an understanding of how the character perceives the world. In other words, the film is subjective. And this aligning of protagonist and audience allows the mystery to remain, because, again, the Big Questions haunt us long after we've solved the riddle.

On the other end of the spectrum are films by M. Night Shyamalan. He's the consummate film puzzler. Surely, in his mind, he's making profound statements about God and our place in the world -- but let's get real. I liked Signs and I even liked The Village, but they are what they are. The Sixth Sense will remain one of the best twist endings of all time, but it will not be remembered as a great mystery that continues to reward viewing after viewing. The end does, after all, give everything away. (Incidentally, he's been consistently championed by David Bordwell, a distinguished film scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This is not surprising, because Bordwell tends to focus on relatively superficial scholarship on film structure and film style. This is not to denigrate his sometimes fascinating work, but it's worth noting that in the end, puzzles are superficial and mysteries are not.)

That's because Shyamalan uses film structure to fool the audience, and in the process, his characters and plot points become tools with which he can impose his idealized vision of the world onto us. Stephen Hunter made this point extremely well in a 2002 essay, which unfortunately is not available online in full. His basic point was that Shyamalan's films always have the same subtext, that things will work out in the end, and even bad things serve a purpose in the grander scheme of things because they enable preferable outcomes in the future. In Signs, this became clear with the flashback structure: the dying wife subplot wasn't just there; it existed to serve the purpose of showing that, despite the tragedy of her death, it served a purpose by later driving Joaquin Phoenix's character to "swing away" and knock a home run with an evil alien's green head.

So, Shyamalan: puzzles and nothing more. Once the movie is done, you know how he feels about life, and there's no real mystery about it. Memento, however, continues to intrigue, and for that incredible feat, the Nolans deserve all the praise they've gotten.

Push the Button!

The Times has a story today about Israel's Eurovision contest entry (Wiki-entry), a song titled "Push the Button" by the punk/rock/rap band Teapacks (listen here.) The Jerusalem Post also has an excellent article on the same subject. The bottom line is that this year's organizers of Europe's most important televised musical event arer considering a ban on the song. Why? Because of its allegedly "inappropriate" message. The song mentions crazy rulers who are interested in pushing the button, and is thus a general warning about nuclear warfare. Some have read it as an attack on the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad. Even if the latter is true, why do the Finnish hosts feel that it is inappropriate? As far as I know, the Eurovision contest has no requirement that the songs be controversy-free. In fact, this is a perfect example of what I wrote last week, namely that there is a significant distinction between simply offending certain individuals in the contemporary world, especially when the attack in question carries important substantive meaning, and depicting/offending persons who are held to be sacred in a particular religion. If friends of the Iranian president have written in voicing their protest, that is their right. But there is no basis for the Finnish hosts arbitrarily excluding the song simply because it might draw some heat. Moreover, decisions like this only serve the interests of those who want to lump any criticism of Israel into the same category as being anti-Jewish and/or denying the Holocaust. Shame on the Finnish for censoring this speech.

Wal-Mart's categorization of US consumers

The NYT has this piece on Wal-Mart's new strategy to recover lost ground over the past year, with the new slogan "Saving people money so they can live better lives." As part of this new approach, Wal-Mart customers have been divided up into three boxes:

There are “brand aspirationals” (people with low incomes who are obsessed with names like KitchenAid), “price-sensitive affluents” (wealthier shoppers who love deals), and “value-price shoppers” (who like low prices and cannot afford much more).

To cut through the marketing lingo, we are talking about the following categories:

1) Social climbers. People whose economic status relegates them to one class, but who very much aspire to become members of a higher class. As part of their aspirations, they latch on to typical "middle to upper-middle class" behaviors like buying Kitchenaid, Sony etc. This is calculated both to impress others and thus seek social validation for their aspirations, but also to create a positive sense of reinforcement within oneself about reaching that goal, or at least attainment of some of the accoutrements that accompany the desired status. Usually, these inividuals' worst nightmare would be that one of their friends caught on to the fact that aforementioned status symbols were purchased from Wal-Mart. It has to be fun to plan how to market to people who don't want anyone to know they shop at your store.

2) Frugal middle/upper-middle class consumers. These are the people who have gotten over the inferiority complex associated with shopping at Wal-Mart, and don't let their shopping decisions be complicated by notions that Wal-Mart is immoral. Mostly, they are just wise shoppers who don't have friends and family who will look down on them for shopping at Wal-Mart. Of course, some of these people live double lives, where they talk about how evil Wal-Mart is on the one hand, while they also go shopping there. We can call these people hypocrites.

3) Poor people. They have no choice about going to Wal-Mart, because that's all they can afford.

HIV in Botswana

The Washington Post has this piece on the effects of multiple concurrent sexual partners on the prevalence of HIV-AIDS in Botswana. It is remarkable to me that it has taken so long for the activist community to catch up to the reality that sexual behavior, not just condoms, matter. As the article points out, a combination of circumcision and monogamy has prevented AIDS from spreading in North Africa. Of course, the practice of mutliple concurrent sexual partners is deeply ingrained into Botswanan culture, so it will be interesting to see the reaction of those who believe that persuading others to change their cultural practices is anathema, especially when that involves a move away from libertinism.

Puzzles and Mysteries in Modern Cinema

In the New Yorker this week, film critic David Denby provides a powerful critique of what he calls the new "non-narrative" cinema, and in particular the Innaritu-Arriaga trilogy ("Amores Perros," "21 Grams," and most recently Academy Award-nominated "Babel"). Denby argues that for all of their narrative discontinuity which is meant to imply that the world is more complicated than it appears, the movies are really just simple, overdetermined parables about the distribution of power and capital in the world. That thesis is quite interesting, and perhaps we contributors should talk about it at greater length. But I found the following paragraph interesting for a slightly different purpose:

Arriaga and Iñárritu may be too obsessed with the unfair distribution of power and capital in the world to operate freely as radical experimenters in form. In 1960, in the great “L’Avventura,” Michelangelo Antonioni set up a mystery—a young woman disappears on an island—and then refused to solve it. The woman’s friends, after initially pledging a search, begin a guilty affair. The movie’s mournful despair suggests how often we pay homage to appropriate moral sentiments while our real feelings drift elsewhere. The plot divagation put a crack in the moral universe, and the audience, at first baffled, then wounded by self-recognition, fell into it. “L’Avventura” was an open form; it didn’t play around with time sequences, but it altered our sense of how life works. The Arriaga-Iñárritu films, for all their structural innovations, are closed, even overdetermined, forms—puzzle boxes. All the pieces are there to be put together in our heads, but the rich ambivalence of art somehow slips away as we reconstruct the way one thing connects to another.

Now consider the following excerpt from a Malcolm Gladwell piece, also in New Yorker Magazine (1/7/7), entitled "Open Secrets."

The national-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large. The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much. The C.I.A. had a position on what a post-invasion Iraq would look like, and so did the Pentagon and the State Department and Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and any number of political scientists and journalists and think-tank fellows. For that matter, so did every cabdriver in Baghdad. The distinction is not trivial. If you consider the motivation and methods behind the attacks of September 11th to be mainly a puzzle, for instance, then the logical response is to increase the collection of intelligence, recruit more spies, add to the volume of information we have about Al Qaeda. If you consider September 11th a mystery, though, you’d have to wonder whether adding to the volume of information will only make things worse. You’d want to improve the analysis within the intelligence community; you’d want more thoughtful and skeptical people with the skills to look more closely at what we already know about Al Qaeda. You’d want to send the counterterrorism team from the C.I.A. on a golfing trip twice a month with the counterterrorism teams from the F.B.I. and the N.S.A. and the Defense Department, so they could get to know one another and compare notes. If things go wrong with a puzzle, identifying the culprit is easy: it’s the person who withheld information. Mysteries, though, are a lot murkier: sometimes the information we’ve been given is inadequate, and sometimes we aren’t very smart about making sense of what we’ve been given, and sometimes the question itself cannot be answered. Puzzles come to satisfying conclusions. Mysteries often don’t.

Now, let's consider Denby's piece again. In L'Avventura Michelangelo Antonioni set up "a mystery," with the disappearance of a woman on an island, which never gets solved, whereas the Arriaga-Innaritu films are puzzles, the solutions to which are overdetermined. I think that Denby has hit upon something interesting, but also failed to understand quite what it is. The disappearance of Anna is interesting because it appears at first to be a puzzle, but turns into a mystery. Her disappearance causes the characters in the movie to go off into explorations of their own selves, etc. Not having watched L'Avventura in a long time, I am not in a position to dissect it any further (although I am inspired to watch it again soon), but I think it is important to realize that Antonioni has essentially turned a puzzle, with a clear although unknown solution, into a mystery, which cannot be resolved. On the other hand, Denby is charging Innaritu and Arriaga with doing the very opposite: pretending that they are describing a mystery, a complicated world where time, and by extension truth, has been compromised and disrupted, when in fact they are simply setting up a puzzle which as a clear solution, namely that the world's problems are rooted in the inequitable distribution of power and capital.

Is Denby right? I am not sure, but it may be worth watching all these movies over again to figure that out.

Iran and Saudi Arabia

The Times has this piece about a meeting between the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, and the King of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah. It should be emphasized that Iran and Saudi Arabia are thought to have diametrically opposed interests, and that Sunnis in Iran, as well as Shia in Saudi Arabia, are relentlessy persecuted as heretics. If these two countries can talk to each other (God knows what no-good they are up to, as the prime financiers of Islamist terrorism in the world), we should ask ourselves why the United States has been unable to engage in dialogue with Iran.

Taxpayer standing

The Supreme court heard arguments yesterday in Hein v. Freedom from Religion Foundation, a case involving a challenge to the President's faith-based initiatives program as being violative of the First Amendment's Establishment clause. This lawsuit was filed by the Freedom of Religion Foundation on behalf of three taxpayers, who claimed that their tax dollars were being impermissibly used to fund religious activities. A threshold question before the plaintiffs can get into court, however, is whether they have "standing" to sue, or put differently, whether they have a right to seek redress for the harm they allege is occuring. To understand the standing doctrine, consider the following example: If A were to assault B, A would be doing two kinds of injury. First, he would be injuring B's physical and emotional well-being, and B would have a right to sue him for that harm. That suit would go forward in civil court, and B would be the plaintiff, and A the defendant. But there would also be an additional injury, to the generalized public, namely the violation of the criminal prohibition on assault. It is fairly clear that B is the appropriate party to seek relief of the injury done to him by virtue of A's assualt. But this raises the question as to who the appropriate party is to seek relief from A for the injury he has caused to the public at large. Through the structure of representative government we have established, the "state" is the designated agent (the legislature usually passes a law authorizing the executive to carry out the prosecution for crimes.) Having established this basic principle, let's move to something a bit less intuitive. Suppose that C is a polluter who pollutes the Atlantic Ocean. Suppose further that no significant commercial fishery takes place in that part of the ocean, and so no particular party has a commercial interest in that part of the ocean. Now, who can go after C in court for this injury? Can I sue C because I think it is inherently wrong for C to violate the law? If we analogize back to the assault case, the answer appears to be no. If an an injury is done to the public at large, it doesn't appear to make sense for a particular individual to be able to go to court to redress it. So, it seems that the federal government would be the appropriate agent to seek redress for this injury. But now suppose that this particular part of the Atlantic Ocean has beautiful coral reefs which you go visit every year, and now you can't visit them anymore because the area has become toxic? It seems now that you do have an injury. But what if the site that is injured is the Statue of Liberty, and you visit it every year? Should everyone who visits this tourist attraction be able to sue? As you may be able to see, this gets courts into difficult questions of just what kind of injury is good enough to get you into court, and just how particularized it has to be to a particular plaintiff to support access to a court. One final hypothetical: Suppose that the Constitution prohibits people who serve the Executive Branch to also serve as members of Congress (which it in fact does). If Congress disregards this prohibition, and seats an officer of the military as a member anyway, who is injured? The public at large. But who can sue? Can the President sue? Not unless Congress authorizes it, and it seems unlikely that Congress would in this circumstance. So, the truth is that this constitutional violation has no redress other than the most obvious, namely that voters can boot out the congressmen.

Now, against this background, let's consider Hein v. Freedom of Religion Foundation.

The basic injury is that the federal government has allegedly violated the US Constitution by "establishing" religion by doling out federal money to religious charities. Who suffers? Well, the public interest suffers to be sure, but if we are supposed to rely on the federal government to vindicate the public interest, it is easy to see how a potential conflict of interest can arise. If the executive branch is supposed to be in charge of vindicating the public interest, as in the examples above, it can't reasonably be relied upon to protect the public interest, if one's understanding of hte public interest is that there is an Establishment clause violation here. So, who else in the federal government can vindicate the interest? Congress, of course, which could prohibit that money be spent in this way. But if Congress fails to act, maybe because it happens to agree with the President that what he is doing is perfectly fine, is there any other way for us to stop this constitutional violation, or are we stuck in the same position as in the last case, with the only redress being the ballot box?

This is where the plaintiffs are trying a slightly different tack. Their argument goes something as follows: The money being spent is being taken out of the general funds of the government. The funds of the general government contain a really large proportion of taxes collected from taxpayers. Thus, taxpayers have an interest in how their taxes are being spent. So the taxpayers say that they are injured by having their money spent in an unconstitutional manner. As you can see, this is a bit of a stretch, and raises problems. There is surely no way of knowing that the government was spending the money of a particular taxpayer, because that's just not how the government works. But more importantly, in order to get into court, the taxpayer has to be able to prove that if he/she wins, he will receive some redress. Note here that the end of the government program is not redress. If it is the impermissible taking of taxpayer money that is the problem, then the taxpayer should be getting some money back. But we all know that is not going to happen; the government is going to end up spending that money on the war in Iraq instead. So, it looks like the underlying interest, thinly disguised, is just the interest in having the constitution complied with. As we have already established, that is a public interest, and can only be vindicated by the government. Nevertheless, in the case of Flast v. Cohen (1968), the Supreme Court made an exception, narrowly defined, in the Establishment clause contex, and I don't plan to bore you with the legalese. The bottomline is that the Court felt that there were certain individual rights that were so fundamental that something had to be done. Now, it looks like the Court is going to backtrack on this rathttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifher unprincipled carve-out.

I think the most important thing is to ask the political (non-legal) question. What do we think should happen in circumstances like this? Should we let Establishment clause violations by the Executive branch with approval from Congress that don't cause any particularized injury go unpoliced? This seems troubling in a situation where there are stable majorities willing to overlook important violations. I am not sure what the answer is, but don't think that the "technical" problems that the Court is deciding are not important.

Update: Dahlia Lihtwick has this piece at Slate on the oral arguments.