Accidental Blogger

Obama on Pot (Joe)

Over at Hullabaloo, Dday posts a video of President Obama' s recent town hall, in which the President "responds" to a question about the economic consequences of marijuana legalization.  (I would embed the video here, but I'm not internet-savvy enough to pull that off.)  Basically, Obama says that he's answering a bunch of questions based on the online votes the questions received -- he's apologizing for even taking this question.  But because 3.5 million people voted, and this was one of the most popular questions, well, he's got to address the question of whether legalization would improve the economy or create jobs -- but not before smirking and making the smart-aleck remark, "I don't know what this says about the online audience."  After the audience laughs, he again notes how popular the question was, then asserts, "The answer is, no, I don't think that is a good strategy to grow our economy."  Obama and the audience then share another laugh, the audience applauds, and he presumably moves on to important, serious, non-hippie questions.  Dday remarks:

There are two issues here. First, legalization actually does deserve a serious response. You don't have to agree with it - I'm not certain that I do - but you ought to engage with it. The war on drugs has utterly failed, so it's not like the status quo is any less silly. But the second issue is even more damaging. Obama's Administration wants to bypass the media filter and open the tools of communication to a much larger community. And then a non-Village approved question gets asked and he snickers about it? For a real community interaction to work there has to be a certain level of respect, and that was apparently sorely lacking.

In a subsequent post Digby adds:

But I think this speaks to the deeper problem of our government's approach to dealing with drugs everywhere. When Obama and his very enthusiastic audience laughed and applauded his condescension, it was sadly obvious that administration is as irrational and anti-intellectual on that issue as the Bush administration was on science during its eight years. It's a dangerous attitude considering what's happening south of the border right now. We need rationality more than ever right now.

I agree, of course.  This is extremely disappointing behavior.  First, Is it really necessary to insult liberals?  It would have been better to simply not address the question at all.  He's "our" President and he's taking shots at us, making us out to be the lunatic fringe?

Second, the question deserves a serious answer.  I'm a realist enough not to have ever expected the 2009 U.S. President to support legalization.  But isn't Obama supposed to be an intellectual, rational leader, the likes of whom we haven't seen in this country in many years?  And given the utter failure of the war on drugs, the recent and ongoing major problems that Mexican drug cartels have posed for the U.S., the relative harmlessness of marijuana's effects on users, and the high as opposed to a condescending, out-of-hand dismissal -- is clearly called for.  economic and social costs of prosecution and incarceration, a rational conversation -- (And last I checked, there is a real push in California for legalization legislation, backed up by real popularly elected legislators and everything, not just us wacko activist bloggers on the internet.)

Look, a real discussion doesn't have to result in the conclusion that marijuana should be legalized, or even that it should be quasi-legalized only as a prescription medication.  Data are inconclusive, albeit mainly because the federal government has consistently made performing scientific research in this country close to impossible.  There would have been plausible arguments for Obama to make which indicate that legalization wouldn't be a good move -- perhaps even on purely economic grounds.  Sadly, that's not how Obama approached this.  Instead he sounded exactly like President Bush and administration officials sounded countless times during the W. years, when mocking science, or opposition to torture.

Update:

Shameless Ploy to Show Off My Son (Dean)

So Slashdot has this post about a recent study of the cognitive development of toddlers that concludes that kids don't learn by planning for the future. The comments are, as always, provocative, opinionated, droll, and in ways more informative than the underlying article and study [sub. req'd].

The study is of course far more elaborate and sophisticated (read: beyond me) than the article represents, so I'll take exception to the latter. For one thing--and this may be critical--I don't understand the experiment. How does identifying whether or not a cartoon character Blue is happy or sad about the emergence of either watermelon or Sponge Bob measure proactive or reactive thinking at all? If the older kids "can anticipate the answer before the object [the watermelon] appears," I'd say they're better at guessing, not remembering.

That aside, the truly laughable notion of this study is the hypothesis that one "might expect the child to plan for the future." Even more ridiculous is the prospect that this fairly describes how the minds of adults work. If that were the case, I wouldn't be scrambling right now to figure out how I'm going to make good by April 15 on the employment taxes I have known for a full year I would soon owe the federal government. On the other hand, I have been planning to arrange for a babysitter this coming Saturday to allow my wife and me to attend a beer festival in Berkeley. So maybe one's "capacity to anticipate and prepare for future events" is a function of the appeal of those events. Or maybe it's just the case that beer : watermelon :: taxes : Sponge Bob Squarepants.

Music in Desperate Times (Then and Now?)

Today I came across two stories from different eras separated by nearly seven decades, which struck a common chord in my mind.

The first report is about a group of American musicians who have organized a concert named Music In Desparate Times as a tribute to women musicians who used their artistic skills in order to survive in the death camp of Birkenau during WWII.

 When Gustav Mahler's niece greeted new arrivals at a Nazi death camp, she knew that any woman who stepped off the train with a musical instrument had a chance to live. Women in Alma Rose's orchestra were forced to entertain SS officers at the Birkenau concentration camp. All the women survived — except Rose.

Now, an American chorus and orchestra is paying tribute to those musicians with concerts in the U.S.and Germany titled "Music in Desperate Times: Remembering The Women's Orchestra of Birkenau."

During the 18 months the Birkenau orchestra existed, its musicians played pieces the German officers loved — Beethoven symphonies, Puccini arias, Chopin and Strauss waltzes. The women also had to play marches for emaciated, often sick prisoners as they struggled to walk to their forced labor jobs.

All around was death — people perishing outdoors, or in filthy barracks and gas chambers. More than 1 million disappeared in this place of horror.

When the Vienna-born Rose (pronounced roh-ZAY') was sent to the camp, the SS guards realized she was Mahler's relative and had conducted an all-women's orchestra. She was asked to form one at Birkenau, for the pleasure of the Nazis.

"As the women came off transport trains, if they had a guitar, a violin, a recorder or a mandolin, they were put aside," said Alice Radosh, who helped organize the Ars Choralis concerts. "People would hear classical music — and think, 'How bad could this be?'"

The truth was, "we played with tears in our eyes and guns at our backs," Radosh quoted accordion player Esther Bejarano as saying after the war.

They were still expected to play well — or face possible death.

"At Birkenau, music was indeed the best and worst of things," wrote the late Fania Fenelon, a cabaret singer from Paris who wrote the book "Playing for Time," which was turned into a television movie starring Vanessa Redgrave.

"The best because it filled in time and brought us oblivion, like a drug; we emerged from it deadened, exhausted," Fenelon said, "and the worst because our public consisted of the assassins and the victims, and in the hand of the assassins, it was almost as though we too were made executioners."

With the orchestra, Rose saved more than 50 women, including Fenelon, who died in 1983; three are still alive.

The second story, which evokes a sense of tragic symmetry is also about musicians - Palestinian children from a refugee camp in Jenin in the West Bank singing and playing music for Israeli Holocaust survivors.

The NPRization of Newspapers (Andrew)

Amid all of the print-is-dead triumphalism, Senator Benjamin Cardin of Maryland has taken the very encouraging step of introducing legislation that would allow newspapers to operate as not-for-profits.  This would mean that advertising and subscription revenue would be tax-exempt, and one could make tax-deductible donations to newspaper as educational entities.  I'm pretty sure this would also mean that any profits that the newspapers might make would need to be re-invested in the newspaper, rather than paid out to shareholders.

As someone who  got his his start in media in public radio, I am enthusiastic that this can work.  The traditional cash cow of classified advertising, which sustained large newsrooms for so many years is gone.  But we still need large newsrooms, and this looks like a realistic way to fund them -- and newspapers have NPR and public radio stations as models for how one can fundraise for high-quality reporting as a non-profit entity. 

I asked one of my friends, an editor at a large (for-profit) magazine for his thoughts on the issue.  He argues persuasively that a non-profit model will actually provide better quality news than for-profit newspapers that are driven ultimately by the bottom line:

I’ve always believed that news media as a for-profit venture was a flawed business model. It’s the fiduciary duty of an executive to make the most money possible for his company’s shareholders. Call it a Machiavellian instinct, but successful CEOs run a business with dispassion. They’re swayed by concerns outside profit margins only to the extent that customers or clients might find fault in their perceived callousness. That’s why a company will donate $10,000 to a worthy cause and spend several million trumpeting its good deed.

I’m not trying to judge them, just provide some context when I say that the for-profit business model is an anathema to anything requiring the public trust. Their true objective is not good journalism, per se. It’s simply the product of customer demand. That’s not to say that journalists are tainted—many believe they’re doing the public’s work—but the product will change to meet customer demands. Great journalism is the result of a commitment to the truth, whether or not the intended audience wants it.

A not-for-profit business model shows that a news entity is not restrained by profit motives. It can run stories that companies, that might have been advertisers under the for-profit model, may not like. For example, Consumer Reports regularly runs critical stories about vehicle safety to the chagrin of Detroit’s Big Three. There’s always risk of a lawsuit, but the editors at CR don’t have to worry about offending advertisers. Ditto for the Associated Press and the St. Petersburg Times.

I like the St. Petersburg Times model because it’s run by a university, where ideas are encouraged to flourish. I see the paper as one giant academic experiment. Now, more than ever, with the proliferation of bad information floating on the web, the public needs news sources it can trust.

The Torment of Solitude

The US has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. One recent report puts the number of people behind bars at slightly higher than 2 million (including local jails). That translates to nearly one out of one hundred American adults. Of these, many are in Supermax penitentiaries where prisoners are kept under lock-down 23 hours a day . Inmates who are deemed especially dangerous are kept in solitary confinement where there is no interaction whatsoever with another human being.  The living conditions in the SHU (Security Housing Units), the prison cells designed to create complete isolation, have raised the concern of human rights groups. A UN task force investigating torture argued that the punishment meted out in the SHU is "inhumane and degrading."  Dr. Atul Gawande, the excellent writer of medical matters in the popular media, agrees. In an article in the New Yorker he calls such prison cells "hellholes" and argues that prolonged and forced solitude may be tantamount to torture.

Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.

Children provide the clearest demonstration of this fact, although it was slow to be accepted. Well into the nineteen-fifties, psychologists were encouraging parents to give children less attention and affection, in order to encourage independence. Then Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, produced a series of influential studies involving baby rhesus monkeys. .....

We have been hesitant to apply these lessons to adults. Adults, after all, are fully formed, independent beings, with internal strengths and knowledge to draw upon. We wouldn’t have anything like a child’s dependence on other people, right? Yet it seems that we do. We don’t have a lot of monkey experiments to call upon here. But mankind has produced tens of thousands of human ones, including in our prison system. And the picture that has emerged is profoundly unsettling.

Among our most benign experiments are those with people who voluntarily isolate themselves for extended periods. Long-distance solo sailors, for instance, commit themselves to months at sea. They face all manner of physical terrors: thrashing storms, fifty-foot waves, leaks, illness. Yet, for many, the single most overwhelming difficulty they report is the “soul-destroying loneliness,” as one sailor called it. Astronauts have to be screened for their ability to tolerate long stretches in tightly confined isolation, and they come to depend on radio and video communications for social contact.

The problem of isolation goes beyond ordinary loneliness, however. Consider what we’ve learned from hostages who have been held in solitary confinement—from the journalist Terry Anderson, for example, whose extraordinary memoir, “Den of Lions,” recounts his seven years as a hostage of Hezbollah in Lebanon......

......On December 4, 1991, Terry Anderson was released from captivity. He had been the last and the longest-held American hostage in Lebanon. I spoke to Keron Fletcher, a former British military psychiatrist who had been on the receiving team for Anderson and many other hostages, and followed them for years afterward. Initially, Fletcher said, everyone experiences the pure elation of being able to see and talk to people again, especially family and friends. They can’t get enough of other people, and talk almost non-stop for hours. They are optimistic and hopeful. But, afterward, normal sleeping and eating patterns prove difficult to reëstablish. Some have lost their sense of time. For weeks, they have trouble managing the sensations and emotional complexities of their freedom.

For the first few months after his release, Anderson said when I reached him by phone recently, “it was just kind of a fog.” He had done many television interviews at the time. “And if you look at me in the pictures? Look at my eyes. You can tell. I look drugged.”

Most hostages survived their ordeal, Fletcher said, although relationships, marriages, and careers were often lost. Some found, as John McCain did, that the experience even strengthened them. Yet none saw solitary confinement as anything less than torture. This presents us with an awkward question: If prolonged isolation is—as research and experience have confirmed for decades—so objectively horrifying, so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up with a prison system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other country in history has?

The long article is worth reading.

Lust For Life

The Journal of the American Medical Association reports that terminal cancer patients with religious faith are more likely to resort to heroic measures to prolong life than their secular counterparts. (see the NIH publication, Medicine Plus) 

TUESDAY, March 17 (HealthDay News) -- People with advanced cancer who turn to their religion to help them cope are more likely to use aggressive measures to prolong their lives at the end, new research shows.

Published in the March 18 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the study found that those who turn to their faith for comfort during their illness are significantly more likely to use intensive lifesaving measures, such as mechanical ventilation.

"In a large study of terminally ill cancer patients, we found that patients that rely more heavily on religion to cope are about three times as likely to get aggressive medical care in the last week of life," said study author Dr. Andrea C. Phelps, a senior medical resident at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

Phelps said the study wasn't able to address the question of why people who rely heavily on their religion might be more apt to use any lifesaving measure available, but there are several possible theories. One is that, "they may be more optimistic because they have faith in God, and their religious faith may provide them hope near death," Phelps said. Another possibility is that those who lean on their religion "may want all measures to extend the length of their life because they believe in the sanctity of life." (emphasis mine)

Almost nine in 10 cancer patients involved in a recent multi-center study said that religion and spirituality were important to them in handling their diagnosis, according to background information in the study.

Intensive life-prolonging care was defined as the use of mechanical ventilation or cardiopulmonary resuscitation during the last week of life.

Those who reported a high level of religious coping were much more likely to use intensive life-prolonging measures than those with low levels of reliance on religion for coping -- 13.6 percent vs. 4.2 percent. Just over 11 percent of those with high levels of religious coping were placed on mechanical ventilation compared to 3.6 percent of those with low levels. The rate of resuscitation for those with high levels of religious coping was 7.4 percent compared to 1.8 percent of those with low levels of religious coping.

"Many people, within the framework of their belief system, want to make sure we're giving God every opportunity to see if something can change in the course of care," said the Rev. Percy McCray Jr., director of pastoral care and social services at Cancer Treatment Centers of America's Midwestern Regional Medical Center in Zion, Ill.

"People who are religious or faith-based don't want to prematurely give in to the idea of cancer. They want to know that they did everything they could do; they want the sense of having fought," he said. (emphasis mine)

Phelps said this study shows physicians how important religion can be to their patients. "Doctors need to recognize that religion is central in how many people make their decisions, and we need to be really sensitive to this and open to talking about it," she said. At the same time, she said, patients need to let their doctors know that faith is important to them and that it's playing a role in how they adjust to a terminal illness.

Interesting. One would have thought that a strong religious faith would in fact equip a devout person with greater strength and equanimity to face death than those with secular materialistic beliefs. So, why would the religious be more willing to prolong life? (Remember Terri Schiavo) The report speculates on some possibilities. I would like to add a few more.

• Religious people are more satisfied with their earthly lives and therefore more reluctant to let go.
• Afraid of death, many hold fast to the idea of eternal life but when faced with the impending end, begin to waver in their faith.
• Having internalized the concept of heaven and hell, perhaps some are just afraid that the neighborhood where their life after death will be spent lies on the wrong side of the celestial tracks.

Drugs: Relative Addictiveness (Joe)

I was just reading a Time article about the health effects of marijuana -- pot being a big topic in the press lately due to talks in California focused on trying to legalize the nation's #1 cash crop in order to resolve major financial difficulties -- and stumbled across this interesting set of numbers:

[T]he risk of becoming dependent on marijuana is comparatively low. Just 9% of those who have used the drug develop dependence. By comparison, 15% of drinkers become dependent on alcohol, 23% of heroin users get hooked, and a third of tobacco smokers become slaves to cigarettes.

Disclaimer: didn't see the studies, don't know exactly what was measured, etc.  Still, that's interesting.  Not on the relative lack of harm caused by marijuana, which is well-documented, but rather on the positioning of tobacco -- the biggest gap anywhere (from pot to alcohol to heroin to tobacco) is in the step up from heroin to tobacco.

Suddenly, big tobacco sounds pretty powerful.  And isn't it interesting that restrictions on opioid painkillers are constantly being ratcheted up, while nothing similar occurs for cigarettes?  You should be less likely to get hooked on your hydrocodone (to take an example from near the middle of the spectrum) than heroin, after all, which on a high estimate would make them only mildly worse than alcohol.  But there is widely understood to be an addiction crisis with respect to painkillers.  Whatever else, I think it's at least safe to say that there's a lot going on with drug policy -- and little of it rational.

India - Israel: "Armsdog Millionaire" or A Lethal Love Affair?

Ever since the Indian government established full diplomatic relations with the state of Israel in 1992, a couple of ideas, one historic and the other rooted in the present, have drawn the two countries into developing close, friendly ties. The first, the peaceful and harmonious history of Indian Jews is indeed a cause of pride and celebration for both countries. But the second reason that has strengthened Indian-Israeli relations is not so benign. Targets of radical Islamist terrorism, the two nations find common cause in increased militarization to counter that threat. However in my opinion, if India is not careful, it may feed off Israel's acute existential paranoia. Rather than solve its own problems of religious strife and human rights violations within and around its own borders with diplomacy, fairness and a cool head, India may be tempted into flexing its military muscles unnecessarily, with disastrous results.

Israeli arms manufacturers see a huge market for cashing in on India's security fears. But instead of making an old fashioned sales pitch at arms fairs or in covert meetings, the Israeli armaments company, Rafael is promoting its lethal wares through a Bollywood style song & dance video. The kitschy lyrics evoke historic ties and current anxieties. Examples of the horrendously hilarious and gratingly juvenile dialog between what appears to be the Indian military establishment (the female) and Rafael (the male):  

Rafael: We have been together for so long, trusting friends and partners. What more can I pledge?

Indian Military: I need to feel safe and sheltered. Security and protection. Commitment and perfection. Defense and dedication.

Rafael: I promise to defend you. Fulfill your expectations. Shield and support you [and] meet my obligations.

The song continues with more such mindless and crappy exchanges punctuated by a very annoying  refrain of "Dinga Dinga Dee!"  I am not sure if the actors are a mix of Israelis of varied ethnic origins  who took a crash course in Indian film style dancing and felt confident enough to come up with this amazingly tacky video - some in the cast don't look very Indian. But I suspect that the sales video was probably inspired by the huge success of the movie Slumdog Millionaire.  Don't miss the heavy handed shot of the missile (a phallic symbol?) that floats in the foreground and other weapons in the background around which the dancers cavort.

My co-blogger Sujatha said when she sent me the link, "Don't know whether to be appalled at this attempt to woo the Indian military establishment or double over with laughter." Appalling it definitely is. It could also have been funny if it weren't for the implied deadly message.

Update: The New York Times reports:

Wired’s Noah Shachtman notes via Twitter that the Israeli newspaper Haaretz got in touch with the company that made this video and reports that “The actors are Israelis of Georgian and Indian origin.” Haaretz adds that “A Rafael spokesperson said that the video had been received with much acclaim in India.”

Hope and Change in the Middle East?

Not a chance.

Dick Cheney's Assassination Inc.

If this report turns out to be accurate, I don't see how even the faint hearted Obama administration can avoid seeking prosecution for war crimes ... or at least a thorough investigation. (Unless the Obamaites too are using the same killing outfit?)

Journalist Seymour Hersh speaking at the University of Minnesota:

At a “Great Conversations” event (MP3) at the University of Minnesota last night, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.”

Hersh spoke with great confidence about these findings from his current reporting, which he hasn’t written about yet.

At the end of one answer by Hersh about how these things tend to happen, Jacobs asked: “And do they continue to happen to this day?”

Replied Hersh:

“Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

"It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

"In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

"I’ve had people say to me -- five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?’

"But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”

Carnival of the Liberals # 86

The new CotL # 86 is up at The Greenbelt. With the economy on spindly legs, many of the posts are about money, naturally.

Bare Identity

Part of this post contains information gathered via Ennis' post at Sepia Mutiny.

Is this the first time that a US state has attempted to ban religious head gear from official identity photos?  One Oklahoma law maker has added a requirement in a state bill which if passed will make it unlawful to have one's driver's license picture taken wearing hats, turbans, head scarves and even eye glasses.

The proposed  bill (House Bill No. 1645) is not just about the ban on head / face coverings - it pertains to many other issues. The requirement of a bare visage for driver's license pictures was introduced by state representative Rex Duncan. The following passage appears on page 14 of the web version of the bill.

Hats, head scarves, head garments, bandanas, prescription or nonprescription glasses or sunglasses, masks or costumes that cover or partially cover the head or shoulders are strictly prohibited and shall not be worn by the licensee or cardholder when being photographed for a license or identification card.   

I have a couple of questions:

1. What about facial hair?  My husband's last passport  showed him without a beard. The photo was taken during a short span of time when he had shaved it off. He normally wears a beard. Is a full open face with and without a headdress more difficult to match than one with and without a beard?  
2. How confusing is changing hair color or style? Couldn't that pose a problem?

I do believe that Duncan actually introduced this measure specifically targeting Muslim women with hijabs. All the other accoutrements were included for a show of fairness. I guess women with hijabs are especially menacing. (How many bank robbers choose hijabs as their choice of disguise?)

A Muslim woman was asked to leave her place in line at a credit union in Southern Maryland and be served in a back room because the head scarf she wore for religious reasons violated the institution's "no hats, hoods or sunglasses" policy, the woman said yesterday.

The incident at the Navy Federal Credit Union on Saturday was the second in a month for Kenza Shelley, and Muslim advocates fear it could become a problem nationwide as many financial institutions, intent on curbing robberies and identity theft, ban hats and similar items without appropriate accommodations for religious attire.

"This may be the tip of the iceberg," said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations. "There's got to be a way to work it out so that this security concern does not lead to violations of constitutional rights." ...

Tom Lyons, senior vice president for security at Navy Federal, said he was not aware of Shelley's case and could not discuss it specifically. But he defended the credit union's policy, implemented in December, saying it was designed to prevent armed robbery and identity theft. He said it would not be unreasonable for bank employees to ask customers who refused to take off their hats to move to a separate room so they could be identified.

Well okay, point taken. But do banks check for wigs? 

The Many Faces of the Bard (Sujatha)

This picture on the right was the first picture of Shakespeare that I ever saw, on the cover of the Merchant of Venice, which we had as part of our 10th grade English literature course.He seemed a dour-looking gentleman, but we nevertheless paid our respects at his altar, memorizing and declaiming his prose in all seriousness.

Yesterday, a new picture was unveiled to the world, a far more vivid, aristocratic- looking character, who would give Joseph Fiennes fair competition in any screen test. See below (original link ) :
  "A detail of the newly discovered portrait of William Shakespeare, presented by the Shakespeare Birthplace trust, is seen in central London, Monday March 9, 2009. The portrait, believed to be almost the only authentic image of the writer made from life, has belonged to one family for centuries but was not recognized as a portrait of Shakespeare until recently. There are very few likenesses of Shakespeare, who died in 1616."
This is being called the Cobbes portrait and has all (or at least a goodly proportion) of the Shakespearian scholars in a rare tizzy.
From the Yahoo article:

"Experts say it is the only portrait of William Shakespeare painted during his lifetime — in effect, the sole source of our knowledge of what the great man looked like.

But they can't be certain. In the shifting sands of Shakespeare scholarship, where even the authorship of the plays is sometimes disputed, nothing is written in stone.

"We're 90 percent sure that it's Shakespeare," said Paul Edmondson, director of learning at the Shakespeare Learning Trust, which plans to exhibit the portrait in Stratford-on-Avon. "You'll never be entirely certain. There will always be voices of dissent."

Consider that the earlier 'authoritative' version of the Bard's image was this one,called the Chandos portrait . 

Which of these is the true face of the Bard, I wonder. Inspite of the lavish felicity of the newly-discovered portrait, I think I rather prefer the Chandos portrait. It seems more in line with what I imagine Shakespeare might have looked like, rather than the faintly stylized nobleman look of the Cobbes version.

What do you think?

Wash, Rinse, Spin and Liberate!

I love my washing machine - a sturdy, reliable, oversized contraption with a stainless steel drum that doesn't chip like most enameled ones.  But never have I looked upon it as my liberator! Well, not any more than my car, refrigerator, microwave oven, cooking range, garage door opener and sundry other  household conveniences. And in computing comparative liberating power, it is difficult to assign a higher rank to the washing machine than to education, modern medicine, electricity or even indoor plumbing. But the Vatican  has declared that the washing machine (!) deserves special veneration for unshackling women from their oppressed existence.

  As International Women’s Day is celebrated, the Vatican had a novel message for the women of the world: give thanks for the washing machine. This humble domestic appliance had done more for the women’s liberation movement than the contraceptive pill or working outside the home, said the the official Vatican newspaper, Osservatore Romano.

“In the 20th century, what contributed most to the emancipation of Western women?” questioned the article. “The debate is still open. Some say it was the pill, others the liberalisation of abortion, or being able to work outside the home. Others go even further: the washing machine.”

The article is entitled, “The washing machine and the emancipation of women: put in the powder, close the lid and relax”, taking its name from the Washy Talky, the Electrolux bilingual-talking washing-machine launched in India seven years ago, which would remind the absent-minded housewife how to use the appliance.

The Catholic Church was never likely to laud the pill for its transformative power on women’s lives. Since Pope Benedict became the leader of the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics, he has published a religious document condemning contraception for “negating the intimate truth of conjugal love, with which the divine gift [of life] is communicated” and has urged pharmacists to refuse to dispense the morning-after pill. The Osservatore Romano held the pill responsible for polluting the environment and contributing to male infertility.

Travellers (Sujatha)

I had been recently asked to translate the lines from an 18th century Tamil poem, written in the lingo of the Koravas or Narikoravas, an itinerant tribe often termed the 'Gypsies of South India'.As I researched verse after verse, I found some very interesting essays and commentaries about their history and traditions.

Today Kurava people in the area are officially prohibited from even going into the mountains to collect materials for basketry and broom-making, an occupation that provides a large portion of their meager income. Did the differential literary portrayals, in works like Kutrala Kuravanji, of Kurava people and of wealthy, powerful landowners and little kings factor into justifications for dispossessing real people from their ancestral homes? Literature and entertainment styles and forms from other times and places have clearly played such a role in justifying dispossession. Might Kavirayar’s portrayals have served the expansionist needs of little kings and big landowners by painting Kurava people as so markedly different from those powerful people, indeed painting them as untamed, independent, and silly, that they might seem perhaps unworthy of ownership rights?

Here is a more recent article about their current status as a protected tribal group.

Gypsies used to wander from place to place for their livelihood, receiving sustenance from hunting in whichever region they moved to. “Those belonging to the gypsy communities still have no skill but that of hunting, like their forefathers, who lived in forests and had plenty of game to hunt. Now, hunting is illegal. And since development too has passed them by,  the gypsies lead a precarious existence,” Siva says. While some like the sparrow hunters manage to make a living by hunting and selling beads, many of them live on the alms of travellers and passersby.

Many hundreds of years ago, they claimed hunting-gathering rights in the hills of what are now Tamil Nadu,Kerala, and Karnataka states, awarding the rights over the hills to the various clans in their tribes, a fact frequently referred to in the poem, as well.

Now, they have in general, been banned from those very hills, as practitioners of slash-and-burn style agriculture and inveterate hunting, detrimental to the beauty of the forests, never mind that their numbers are too small to cause significant damage.

Many in this group have been cut off from their nomadic ways, and lead more settled lives, but at the cost of taming the wanderlust which still holds a strong sway over them.

I still remember the harshly musical "Kallukothanundo, ammikal kothanundo, aattukal kuthanundo"  (Do you have grinding stones to be resurfaced?)that the korava woman used to call out, walking the streets of the neighborhood in her swinging skirts, baby with sun-browned hair peering out of the sling on her back. Despite the life of dire poverty, there was always a gracious beauty to these women, going house to house selling small trinkets or resurfacing granite grindstones with their little iron awls and mallets, watched over with an eagle eye by the housewives, who mistrusted their reputation for 'light fingers'. Work done, they would haggle over the price, finally settling for whatever they could extract, milking whatever pity they could muster for their runny-nosed little ones.

They were soothsayers too.

I vividly recall the time when I visited Thiruchendur, a seaside temple, with my parents. We were enjoying the bracing sea breeze one evening when a kurathi came up and insisted on reading my mother's palm. I was about 13 years old at the time. She took a look at my mother's palm and had us close to collapsing in laughter when she predicted that my mother would have another child.
"Look at her," my mother said, pointing to me. "That's my child, and my only one." I was taller than her at this age. "Are you saying that I will have another after all these years?" We were incredulous.
"Amma, I have never made false predictions in my life. You will see. You will be back here in two years to look for me and thank me."
Two years later, we were there... for my baby sister's first birthday ritual hair offering. We looked for the kurathi, but never did find her. She must have moved with the wind, in the manner of her people.

Slumming at the Oscars

Okay, so we haven't talked about it here despite the hoopla. Slumdog Millionaire that is. But today I came across this hilarious video that is worth posting. I am flummoxed by the mass appeal of the movie which swept this year's Oscars and a bit amused when people ask me slightly breathlessly if I am happy about its stupendous success. Friends of my age haven't bothered but two young people at my gym made the friendly overture of mentioning the Oscars "miracle" to me. I am wondering if other Indian Americans are being asked about Slumdog too.

I know, I know, it is just a harmless icebreaker. I thought it was cute that the two young acquaintances approached me with a smile and kind of "congratulated" me for the success of Slumdog. Of the three, only I had hated the movie. And why didn't the film sit well with me? Well, not because it exposed the seamy side of India Shining. India is a huge, complex and multi-faceted country. People anywhere can believe what they wish about India. I myself harbor many complaints and much anger in my heart about the inequities of Indian society. What director Danny Boyle showed in the movie about the heartbreaking squalor of Indian slum life is exaggerated but not entirely incorrect.  But that is not what the movie is about and why it won awards and accolades. It was the puerile, unrealistic and gaudy triumph of the underdog in the story that made it a hit - with just enough sexual tension, cruelty and filth thrown in the mix to complete the image of India that appeals to much of the world. Here is Indian journalist Tarun Tejpal expanding on what I said. (link: Usha Alexander, another non-fan of the Slumdog)

One feels awe not for the film, but for its miraculous journey. Clearly, in an increasingly low-brow ocean of publicity and hype, the idea of true excellence is a drowned raft.

Not shorn of the hype, but because of it, to an Indian, the film ought to disappoint. It tells me nothing that I don’t already know; and it tells me things I know to be not true. Unlike Amitabh Bachchan I have no problems with the film focusing on India’s abject poverty. That focus is salutary, and crying out for further exploration. My problem is the opposite— that it trivialises it. Uses its excreta and chopped limbs to tell a dubious story that leaves the viewer not disturbed but cheerfully smug. You leave the seat exhilarated, not in pain.

The film tells a very big lie: that India’s poor have a happy shot at leaping out of their misery into affluence and joy. One day you can be in the crap heap — diving into excreta — and the next running down a slum girl who may have failed to make school but seems to have managed to walk through Vogue’s offices on her way to teenage. With a stunning lack of plausibility you see the slum child Jamaal grow into a refined public schoolboy who must surely be eating cucumber sandwiches for lunch. India’s wannabe wealthy — billionaires among them — would slice their fingers to boast such a sophisticated son. For that accent alone, they would throw in their toes too.

Aw! Gee! The camera is shaking, the story is sprinting — there is no way anyone can tell if a few chapters have fallen out, several links of logic lost. You have to be grateful Jamal only grows up to be Dev Patel. Given the absence of any need to explain the miraculous transformation, he could well have become Brad Pitt or Prince Charles. To further celebrate the carnival of implausibility, Master Dev acts with the cool flatness of the cucumber sandwich (that he surely must be eating) — no neuroses of the slums tarnishing his soul.

For those celebrating the authenticity of the film, here’s a secret: the makers clearly had no interest in verisimilitude. It’s been the rough approach of artists working the India material for the last hundred years. It arises from a clear understanding of “audience”. The awgee mobs filling theatres around the world, and paying in dollars or some such muscular currency, cannot tell the difference between Hindi and Hindu or the vast distance between Mumbai and Agra. Much like the American tourists at the Taj Mahal, who cannot distinguish between an unlettered, ignorant urchin and a licensed guide.

Update: I wonder if African-Americans are becoming similarly wary of being congratulated on Obama's election to the presidency. Apparently,they are :-)

The Little Known Gateway to America

When we think of immigration to the US, Ellis Island in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty comes to mind. But there have been other historic points of entry for foreigners wishing to seek their fortunes in the land of opportunity. Angel Island in northern California was the main processing station for far east Asian immigrants arriving via the Pacific (see the story of immigrant poetry on the walls of Angel Island). Texas too had its own gateway. Galveston Island near Houston saw some 200,000 foreigners from many different countries come through its port from the late 19th to the mid 20th century.

A.I. Schepps, his mother and seven siblings left Russia in 1913 on the steamship Chemnitz, bound for a new life in the United States.

But they never sailed through the shadow of the Statue of Liberty and never set foot on storied Ellis Island. Their immigrant journey took them farther south, through the Gulf of Mexico and into an island community still recovering from a devastating hurricane a decade earlier.

From there, the family traveled more than 250 miles north to Dallas, where Schepps’ father and three other siblings were preparing to start the farm that would become one of the largest dairies in the nation.

Theirs is the quintessential immigrant success story — they arrived tired and poor, and their brood was likely a huddled mass — but it has a Texas twist: They were among an estimated 200,000 immigrants who came to America via the port of Galveston between 1865 and 1924.

That number, considered by some scholars a conservative estimate, puts Galveston among the 10 biggest immigrant ports of 19th- and 20th-century America.

“People do not think much about Galveston as a national port of entry to the United States,” said Suzanne Seriff, curator of the Forgotten Gateway, a new exhibit that chronicles Galveston as a major port of entry for U.S. immigrants.

On display at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, the exhibit will come to Galveston’s Moody Gardens in November.

“We are trying to add to our national history about a port that has largely been forgotten,” Seriff said.

Like those who arrived via other ports of the time, those who came through Galveston were overwhelmingly European. During the late 19th century, they arrived from countries such as Germany and what was then Czechoslovakia. Later, they increasingly were from Italy or Greece.

As Galveston became more developed, some settled there as tailors and merchants. Others moved on to different states. Many branched out to other communities in Texas, establishing ethnic enclaves such as Fredericksburg and New Braunfels.

The rest of the story here.

Sukrita

My sister-in-law Sukrita Paul Kumar's profile, poems and paintings in the Houston Literary Review.

GLAD sues US in MA (Joe)

From CNN:

A legal advocacy group sued the federal government Tuesday, seeking benefits for 15 gay and lesbian Massachusetts residents who wed after the state legalized same-sex marriage.

Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders -- the same Boston-based group that successfully argued in 2003 for same-sex marriage rights in Massachusetts -- filed the lawsuit Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Boston on behalf of six couples and three men whose husbands have died.

The suit contends the federal Defense of Marriage Act denies them protections and benefits that heterosexual couples receive, including health insurance for federal employees, the ability to file as "married filing jointly" on federal income taxes and Social Security spousal protections.

* * *

GLAD's suit addresses only Section 3 of the law, a portion that prevents the federal government from giving Social Security and other protections to same-sex married couples.

Should they have waited, giving Obama time to fill up the federal courts with a few more moderates?  Will this suit win?  I don't know.  But I'm oddly exited about this.  I think DOMA, on these facts, is plainly unconstitutional -- the provisions refusing federal benefits to same-sex married (or civil unioned) couples pretty clearly reflects nothing more than a "bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group," as they say.  Recently a couple of well-known judges on the Ninth Circuit, including conservative Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, have suggested that DOMA is unconstitutional in this respect.  

One thing the plaintiffs are clearly doing right is limiting the claim.  A challenge to the "no recognition of gay marriages as marriages" portion would surely fail.  That would probably make it harder in the future to overrule that precedent; it would also endanger the rest of the litigation, and cause a greater political frenzy.

And while we're on the topic, I'd just like to mention that Bill Clinton signed DOMA in 1996.  It's one of the most rotten things he did as President, and the Act does far much more than merely allow states to refuse to recognize a same-sex marriage performed in Massachusetts or Connecticut (or at the time, Hawaii), no matter how much he attempts to spin it that way.  As we have noted from time to time at this blog, the Clinton years are far from perfect, no matter how they seem in relation to the (worst of all time?) Bush II years.

Seeking Life Among "Twinkling" Stars

NASA hopes to launch the giant telescope / light meter Kepler on Friday. The mission is to look for Earth-like planets in our galaxy - planets whose size and conditions could support life forms.  From the Houston Chronicle:

The universe may be filled with Earth-like planets — worlds where extraterrestrials might flourish. But these planets were once considered too small to spot, even with the latest in space technology.

Now, many astronomers believe NASA’s $600 million Kepler telescope, which is scheduled to shoot into space this week, will help to clear up the mystery.

Named for Johannes Kepler, a 17th-century German astronomer who studied planetary motion, the telescope is designed to search 100,000 stars in the Milky Way for Earth-sized rocky planets where water could flow and form streams, lakes and oceans.

Some astronomers believe the spacecraft could eventually find about 50 Earth-like planets.

“If we find that many, it will certainly mean life may well be common throughout our galaxy,” said William Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Center, the astronomer who leads the Kepler science team.

“On the other hand, if we don’t find any, that is still a profound discovery,” he said. “It will mean that Earth must be very rare. We may be the only life in our universe.

“It will mean there will be no Star Trek.”

Finding wobbly stars

The unmanned Kepler is scheduled to lift off aboard a Delta II rocket on Friday from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Its quest, though, is not as fanciful as it may seem.

Astronomers first discovered a planet outside our solar system in 1994 and have since identified 340 of them. But even the best observatories, the Hubble Space Telescope among them, are not equipped to spot something as tiny as the Earth at great distances.

So far, the discoveries have been made with telescopes that detect small wobbles in the movement of stars, which astronomers attribute to the gravitational tug of unseen planets.

Most of these worlds rival giant Jupiter in size. Many are larger. Some circle their stars so closely that their surface temperatures are much too high for life.

Inde tibi tuaeque rei publicae quod imitere capias... (Dean)

Are the humanities "relevant"? Should they have to "justify their worth"? I am disturbed by last week's NYT article in which these questions are posed, not because it's reporting an unfortunate, if not entirely newsworthy, phenomenon—the decline of interest in the formal study of humanities given their seemingly inherent impracticality and the excessive costs of education—but because these questions are simply wrongheaded.

The majority of the pro-humanities experts cited in the article perpetuate the error. Columbia's Andrew Delbanco worries about the perceived relevance of studying the humanities. I think he may have chosen the wrong word. Relevance to what? Put another way, how can the humanities not be relevant to the seemingly infinite varieties of topics, themes, problems, and occasions they address? Take the article headline, for example. How are the humanities not relevant to "tough times"?

By viewing the humanities as relevant, I don't mean to endorse the comments of Yale Law School's Anthony Kronman, who seems at once willfully oblivious to history and dangerously naïve, implying that greed, irresponsibility, and fraud are somehow peculiar to today's world, and suggesting that humanistic reflection will manage to fix that circumstance. To my mind, the engaging aspect of so much work in the humanities is precisely their not being "well-equipped" to do much of anything. Perhaps they facilitate accomplishment only incidentally. One learns from poetry, for instance, how to read for a kaleidoscopic range of meanings, a skill that could bolster one's work as an attorney. But that's not the only, let alone the primary, reason for reading poetry.

How are "producing enough trained engineers and scientists" and the study of the humanities mutually exclusive enterprises in the struggle to assure "America’s economic vitality"? Why only our "economic" vitality? I'm with Derek Bok: "There’s a lot more to a liberal education than improving the economy." One might even demand engineers and scientists to justify their worth in humanistic terms.

I cribbed this post's title from an old book review in Slate that discusses the growing popularity of the study of Latin. This is one of those instances of remarkable, perhaps not merely fortuitous timing, when the report of the imminent collapse of the humanities, a "prerequisite for personal growth and participation in a free democracy," is proclaimed pretty much just as the study of its emblematic, dead language becomes fodder for best sellers.