Saheli* II

Deja vu in all the worst ways. Once again, I feel the need to blog in the face of disaster. Haiti has been struck by a terrible earthquake, and I'd like to post a link to a way you might be able to help. The Haiti Emergency Relief Fund was sent to me by a local activist I know who's very dedicated to Haiti and its people. Haiti is just about the last place on earth that can deal with such a disaster, and the best I can think of is to stand by the friends who've been standing by that impoverished nation all along.

Here's a little beautiful Arcade Fire song to show some of the people who now, even more than before, could use a little help. Arcade Fire has previously done a concert to benefit Haiti in conjunction with Partners In Health, another devoted charity.

I feel a little embarrassed that I've drifted away from my once fervent, if possibly overwrought, dreams of Recovery 2.0, but here's my bit for now. The web has changed so much since then that when reading those old posts I can hardly sort the still relevant from the anachronistic. But what hasn't changed is the random sense of connection we start to feel for people near and far, and if that can't be utilized to help those in need in such a time as this, then this whole thing might be useless.

Today, for some reason, I have been particularly jostled by noise. My neighborhood has, perhaps, more than its fair share of sirens, barking pit bulls, screeching cars and echoing circle drums whose rhythms are shifted and dented during their downwind drift. I have at least three musical neighbors who host amplified band parties. My house itself is creaky, with lovely bits of bamboo striking the windows the way nails hate on a chalkboard. But what really got me today was all kinds of alarms going off. I unplugged an extraneous cordless phone so I could use its outlet to vacuum and an hour later it started bleating like its phony heart would break, just infrequently enough that it took me 20 minutes to locate the problem. A neighbor's mysterious device would not shut up. And three separate car alarms went off throughout the day, for no discernible reason (I went out and checked--each mewling car was alone, no one else in site for yards.) This reminded me of my friend Aaron Friedman's ballyhooed work against car alarms in New York City. According to Aaron, research shows that those loud honking car alarms do little to actually prevent theft, despite being a factory default "perk," the removal of which is often an extra cost at the dealership. Today I had the bizarre insight that all these alarms are, in fact, digital---their going on and off is dictated by a microcontroller, and the sound itself often involves a synthetically generated or recorded sound. So why not make them more articulate? When my car alarm goes off, at least let it tell me that it is, in fact, my carl alarm going off. (I wouldn't mind a Stephen Hawking voice declaring, "Saheli's Honda Needs Help! Saheli's Honda Needs Help!") My cordless phone could tell me, "Cordless Phone Requires Charge!" The neighbor's mysterious device could let me know what it was about to do. ("Rocket Cleared for Launch! Rocket Cleared for Launch!")

(After winning some legislative and programmatic victories in New York, Aaron went on to found an annual Summer Solstice city-wide music festival, Make Music NY, patterned after the French Fête de la Musique.)

This AP headline from TPM heated my blood to a boil: Census Worker Hanged with 'Fed' On Body. 51-year old Bill Sparkman was a census worker, and his body was found on 9/12 in a remote, rural area of Kentucky. TPM has its own follow up report today, by Zachary Roth.

First of all, it's possible this was not an attack on a federal employee merely because of his association with our federal government. We'll have to wait and see what investigators find. But the fact that it's even a realistic possibility, and that the census has to stop in Clay County, and that Census workers have to be afraid of doing their jobs infuriates me.

The Census (or Enumeration) is an intrinsic part of the American constitution; its function and reliability one of the few institutions taken for granted by the framers. It is a fundamental function of any nation wishing to hold itself together. Whether you are a tribe on the march, a city planning a festival, or group of school children and teachers on a field trip, you need to keep count of all the people. The Census is the foundation of democracy, the gold standard for knowing who we, the people, actually are. Census data is a starting point for almost every kind of policy analysis, and its invaluable for political reporters, business people, academics, teachers and school children, people just wanting to know who their neighbors are.

If you have a problem with the census, you don't just have a problem with the Obama administration or even the Federal government or the idea of a democractic Republic. You have a problem with living in any kind of useful society. And since humans are social creatures, you need to get your head examined.

I'd say go hug a census worker today, but that's probably against the rules and not good for their health. But please be nice to them when you see them.

Today I rediscovered my friend PJ Tobia's Afghan Desk blog at True-Slant. PJ is living the modern J-school dream--not just the crazy work of being a freelance war-zone correspondent (here's a WaPo article from last December), but also blogging and working at a media nonprofit, the Killid Group.).

The post he has up top right now put a big smile on my face. It's called "Girls in the Trunk of a Car" and while it's a traffic safety nightmare, it's also pretty adorable.

Further down he has a post that makes you want to cry, especially after you've seen those beautiful smiling girls. It's called "This is What An Abused Afghan Woman Looks Like," and he describes two horrifying, misogynistic injuries to two Afghan girls, linking to a photo of one. The other is a quote from Johann Hari's Slate review of Nicholas and Sheryl Kristof's new book, "Half The Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Half the Women Worldwide." And what is our duty in all of this? PJ writes,

The US could take a much stronger tack in pursuing an agenda of women’s rights in Afghanistan, but doing so would likely jeopardize relationships with the above-mentioned warlords, who we need to make any kind of progress here. It sickens me that with tens-of-thousands of US soldiers on the ground here (some of whom, I might add, are women) females are still essentially prisoners in their own homes and considered property to be used for barter.

He acknowledges work American soldiers have done opening womens centers and schools, but bemoans a lack of policy aimed at pushing Afghanistan towards a more egalitarian legal system. Caitlin Kelly, another True/Slant blogger who recently wrote a book about American women and guns, chimed in, wanting to know what, exactly, PJ thought America should be doing. He admitted he didn't have any easy answers--but were we really using the power we have as leverage on behalf of these girls?

There are plenty of people who think we have no business being in Afghanistan at all, and that it's absurd to talk about helping little Afghan girls when we so frequently end up bombing them. I'm still trying to educate myself about the whys and hows of Afghanistan, and will refrain from comment on the mission itself. (Though I will take a moment to plug one of my favorite charities, CIVIC, which aims to fight civilian casualties instead of merely ignoring them.)

Let us take it for granted, for the sake of discussion, that we have a genuine security and humanitarian interest in Afghanistan, and that our mission is at least roughly aligned with the interests of both the Afghani state and the Afghani people. What, exactly, can we do as a government and a military ally, in order to forcefully insist that the laws of the countries we deal with not be genocidally misogynistic? (And, by extension, what sort of policy action can we as citizens pressure our government to undertake in our name?) The controversy this summer over Karzai's passage of an oppressive bill stirred up the usual problem: if you're going to encourage a country to have elections and representative government, you can't really force the legislative body to vote a particular way--even if you think their elections might not be fair. As a military ally you can either participate or not participate, and America has committed to participating regardless. So are there additional pressure points within the framework of alliance? Economic pressures? Political pressure? A way of speaking directly to the Afghan legislature? Because as long as this horrific misogyny persists, we cannot properly "stand on this earth as men and women".

While I think it's important to keep trying to find political tools for these big scale problems, in the mean time, people can always try to help each other across borders.

Robin Sloan at Snarkmarket linked to an LATimes opinion piece proposing that California not only hold a Constitutional Convention but that it select the delegates by random draft, much like the jury system. After very briefly summarizing arguments against elected and appointed delegates, Steven Hill wrote:

The Bay Area Council, a group of business leaders, has proposed randomly selecting 400 Californians to create a body of average citizens who could bring their common sense and pragmatism to the problems at hand. Those delegates would be paid to participate for eight months, starting with an intensive two-month education process in which they would hear from many experts about the problems and potential solutions for California.

Steven Hill is a policy director Steve Coll's[1] New America Foundation; it seems to me Hill (and the headline editor) are loosely hinting at an endorsement of The Bay Area Council's scheme. The Bay Area Council is the main organizations headlining efforts to call such a convention--and it is joined by joined both by our Republican Governator and at least one Democratic State Senator (Mark DeSaulnier, who may end up succeeding Ellen Tauscher in Congress), as well as the Los Angeles Times editorial board. This Sacramento Bee column by Dan Walters seems like the best even-handed summary of the idea and the actual mechanics that the Bay Area Council is pushing for.

Robin thought The Bay Area Council's proposal reminded him of Stanford's Deliberative Polling®. I thought it reminded me of the recent creation of the Japanese jury system which Robin had blogged about last November. The Japanese mixture of regular citizens and judges made me wonder if we wouldn't be better served by a constitutional convention that combined the three delegate selection methods Hill describes. Hill dismisses electing the delegates rather quickly:

But if we elect the delegates just as we elect the Legislature, the results likely would mirror a Legislature widely viewed as a failure.

There's a lot of assumptions packed into the "just as we elect" and I was askance at his quick dismissal of the entire notion of elections. That is, after all, what the democratic system is built on, and it's worthwhile to take a moment and meditate on the specific ills of the California legislature before dismissing the entire process. (It struck me slightly akin to a doctor advising a widow to date robots: "if you marry another human being they might get sick and die! Humans do that!") As the Wikipedia entry helpfully reminds us, the California Legislature is currently bound by the unusual requirement for a 2/3 majority in budgetary votes. Changing this is the most specific and obvious aim of the convention, and while the convention itself should probably require a 2/3 majority, there are other ways to make sure we don't get sucked into gridlock. The state representatives are usually elected from a party vs. party race, post primary, often making the dominant party primary the deciding election and shutting out moderates---we could instead hold a single, competitive election in each district. (Maybe use instant run off?) The state assembly members can have up to 6 years of incumbency and state senate members have up to 8 years; a simple requirement that the constitutional delegates can't have served in elected office in the last 15 years would bring in plenty of new blood. There are lots of possibilities.

I am innately suspicious of adopting The Bay Area Council's proposed procedure for a few reasosn. First of all, I'm just skeptical that their interests would be perfectly aligned with mine, the state as a whole, or the future state as a whole. Since they've had money and time and brains to throw at the problem, they're more likely to have picked a procedure perfectly aligned with their interests than with mine, the state's population, or the state's future population. Secondly, I am very suspicious of the leave-Prop-13-alone bit that Dan Walter's column cites as being part of their proposal. Why that proposition above all others? By definition it is biased towards benefitting the owners of quickly appreciating properties, the more previously purchased the better. There's a lot of timeline evidence that it has led to California's steady decline. Thirdly, I have my own concerns about the California system that The Bay Area Council does not seem to be addressing. One of them is my desire that California's public education system be reinstated to some fraction of its former glory, a great churning engine of upward mobility and creatitivity, with the three tiered higher education system (community colleges, state universities, and the Univesity of California) being able to have a more stable and sustaining fiscal structure. The second is my desire that making sure that a minority can't have its rights taken away by a scant majority. The third is my desire to make the management of California's environment more transparent. I am interested in finding organizations, groups and thinkers who are probably more aligned with my interests than The Bay Area Business Council. Please help me if you can!

[1] Did you know journalist Steve Coll had founded such a large policy organization? I had no idea!

On the wall above my bed hangs a poster of Faith Ringold's painting, Freedom of Speech, the American flag inscribed with the First Amendment and the names of controversial and archetypal American figures. I bought the poster when I was in journalism school and when cynical pragmatism could only get me through the day and not go sleep, I let its lyrical lines be my sentimental lullaby.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

As a religious minority, the first clause has always been an anchor to my most basic, childish sense of safety in being myself. As a writer and a journalist, the second clause has been ananchor to my safety in thinking and expressing. Oddly enough, the most emphatic language is left for the habit I practice the least and feel the least secure about--gathering peacefully is a right. In the language of the Declaration, it might be seen as an unalienable right, one recognized already in the late 1700s as universal and sensible. We Americans rarely do this public assembly and grievance protesting thing because we are afraid of inconvenience, cold, heat, crowds, germs, getting arrested, getting a mark on are record, getting accidentally hurt, getting hurt on purpose by rogue agents of the government, getting hurt on purpose in a sneaky and underhanded, conspiratorial way by a government sometimes harboring conspiratorial agencies. These things--which really, happen pretty rarely here, even in the worst of cases--are enough to stop us from standing up for what we believe in or even for what is best for us. Does anyone sensible stand in witness these days any more, anyway? Well, we stand corrected.

I have long taken the language of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence to be a universal statement, applicable to all peoples; the American part is only the application of those ideas to the specific case and locale of the 13 North American colonies wrenching away from Great Britain. The fundamental idea--that we have an unalienable, innate right to believe, practice, talk, think, gather and complain--applies to all people. I realize that figureheads can be previous tyrants. I realize that there is an awful lot of intrigue and power-trading happening behind the scenes. And I realize that little may come of the current movement, as in the past, and that even if it continues it may be a long, slow haul. I realize that sitting at my computer I'm not being terribly helpful. But I still want to say that I stand with anyone willing to still stand for themselves after so much oppression. There are not American people with our civil rights over here and Iranian people with their civil rights over there. There are human beings with human rights, and citizens of the world with a duty to do what is right by themselves, their children, their future and their world. We should stand together. I hope one day we can.

I liked this part from one of Matthew Yglesias's posts regarding Barack Obama's win of the Democratic nomination:

Relative to Clinton, you see two people with similar policy agendas. But Clinton comes from a school of politics that says liberalism can't really win on the questions of war and peace, identity and authenticity, crime and punishment. It says that we live in a fundamentally conservative nation, and that the savvy progressive politician kind of burrows in and tries to make the best of a bad situation. It's an attitude very much borne of the brutally difficult experience of organizing for McGovern in Texas and running for governor in Arkansas at the height of Reaganism. Relative to McCain, Obama thinks it's possible to accomplish things in the world. He thinks the United States faces a lot of serious international challenges, but doesn't see them as primarily driven by menacing and implacable foes. Obama thinks that a combination of visionary leadership and shrewd bargaining can greatly improve our ability to tackle key priorities without any great expenditure of our resources.

(Emphases mine.) If the 90s were an era of hope, then the generation formed during that era--my generation--may very well have a fundamental and unshakable belief in our ability to fix the future. As we come of operational age--not just the age to cast votes, but the age to move and shake--we may demand a sea change in liberal attitudes.

I have a friend whose physicist father likes to note that knowing a solution is possible is a huge help to finding that solution. In an arena as complex as, oh, fixing the world, finding future "solutions" requires both a healthy attachment to facts and evidence and a healthy ability to guess and approximate, to dare, to insist. Can we balance these demands, dramatically changing our future course without succumbing to either foolhardy risk or mind-numbing caution? I think the answer is yes, yes we can.

A few hours ago a glorious full moon rose over the land of Nadia, greeted with bugling conches and the sweet thunder of beating drums. The joyful noise is following it across the globe, in many town and villages, and soon enough it will be here. It's Gaur Purnima, the start of Gaurabda 522, and for all of you I wish a new year and a new season of kindness and good works. If you are so inclined, accepted my obeisances and wishes for a weekend of singing and dancing and feasting---otherwise, Happy Holi as well!

The 3731 soldiers who will not come home from Iraq, and the 583 who will not come home from Afghanistan.

Update: In exchange for not having to identify anyone on the tape or testify about what people told him at the protest, Josh is turning it over and being released, according to news reports. He's also posted it.

Josh Wolf is still in jail. You can read about his case on Wikipedia and at his own website. He's been in jail for over 200 days, held on civil contempt, for refusing to obey a federal subpoena to turn over tapes. Legal issues aside--the arguments about various interpretations of various shield laws are complex--he is steadfastly resisting the idea that the state should be able to rifle through his pockets on what, many agree, is a very flimsy pretext. In an age when we all have camera phones and email notes on each others' activities and opinions, I have to admire someone taking a stand against that trend.

Civil disobedience, however, hinges on the hope that the rest of us will notice and pay attention to other people's principled stands, and that we will speak up when we think our Government is acting badly. In this age of irony and ostriches, it's easy to ignore or cynically dismiss a random stranger. But I've met Josh, he's a kind and thoughtful person, and so I ask you to try to put aside your apathy or cynicism, just for a minute. Consider that if someone is willing to stay in jail for over 200 days to make a point, that point might be worth paying attention to. Some of the groups calling for Josh's release are: the American Civil Liberties Union, the Society of Professional Journalists, the National Press Club, Newspaper Guild/Communications Workers of America, the National Lawyer’s Guild, the Northern California Media Workers Guild, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Center for Media and Democracy, Reporters Without Borders, the National Writers Union, the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the Contra Costa Times.

There's a new U.S. attorney who might reconsider the case, and Josh has a mediation meeting on Monday.

They're a couple days old, but there were some interesting observations on Iraq and Iran in my blogroll recently.
Chris Albritton of Back-to-Iraq cites his friend George Packer's New Yorker article and his own experience in noting that the United States's refugee policy is particularly humiliating and embarrassing when it comes to Iraqis who have served as American translators. Over at Rhinocrisy Hedgehog makes an oft-repeatable point about the amount of money we've spent on this war and occupation compared with most Iraqi's annual income.

The U.S. has spent enough money there that it could have given everyone their per-capita income for each of the last four years and still had enough on hand to keep paying those people their salaries for another 57 years.

Chemical weapons expert Armchair Generalist notes an LAT about how Iran's alleged desire for "weapons of mass destruction" might have something to do with the weapons used on them by a US-backed Saddam Hussein. Both AG & Phil Carter note that the army has been forced to adopt a just-in-time state of readiness; according to a recent NYT article the 82nd Airborne does not have a division ready brigade on standby. Carter:

The American military is a tremendously powerful and flexible instrument, but it must be employed skillfully and with great care. If we blunt its edge in Iraq, or break it, we may suffer terrible consequences down the road.

Sigh.

As far as I can tell, there are about three modes in which one supported the invasion of Iraq and might still support the war in Iraq. I address this to to those people.

1) Perhaps you honestly thought that Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction, and was bent on harming the U.S. or harming U.S. interests in an untenable way. You see the invasion as a pre-emptive act of self defense, protecting your life and liberty and way of life. You are defending you and yours against this regime, having decided that the consequences are worth it.

2) Perhaps you honestly thought that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were powerfully enough linked, and that Iraq either had some responsibility for 9/11 and/or was conspiring to cause more of the same. Again, you saw your support of the invasion as defending you and yours, and you also perhaps saw it as a kind of revenge. You decide the consequences are worth it.

3) Perhaps you believed that it is the place of the United States to topple oppressive dictatorships and bring freedom and democracy to Iraq. You have decided that the consequences are worth it.

Alright. Have you understood which position or combination of positions you are in? Good. Now imagine a scenario where you are in a crowded street. Suddenly one man,A, goes swinging, with a giant pole, at another, B, who is next to you. A bashes B 's head in. He also manages to break your knees in the process--it's just a very long and unwieldy pole. A is very rich. You are very poor.

Everyone knows B was about to kill A, and A was acting in self-defense. Or everyone knows that B killed A's mother, and A was acting in justified revenge. Or everyone knows that B was murdering his toddlers, one by one, and also slapping you around, and A just had to make it stop. Fine. Since A just decided the consequences were woth it, didn't ask you or give you an opportunity to get out of the way, or put much effort into getting the shortest, unwieldy pole---doesn't A owe you some help with the knee surgery?

One of my favorite movies as a child was Superman II. A disempowered Clark gets beat up at a truck stop by a jerk. Later he gets his powers back. He goes back to the truck stop and beats up the jerk. In the process he messes up the truck stop. Hre hands them a huge wad of cash to more than pay for the damage. It's a stupid, stupid example, but I think it's an accepted principle in America. Good guys accept responsibility for their actions.

I'm not going to comment here on the politics, policy, and strategy of sticking around when most Iraqis want us to leave and many, many people agree things would get better if we did leave, except to note it. I am, however, going to note that $50 Million is a paltry amount to dedicate to addressing the needs of civilians we are directly responsible for hurting--the consequences that we have so self-importantly decided are worth it. (pdf.) I'm just going to assume that the best-intentioned supporters of the war want to break the cycle of destruction, want to accept the consequences they politically supported, and don't mind spreading peace and goodwill through means other than bombs. Right? Right. So:

--UNHCR
--CIVIC-WORLDWIDE
--World Vision

Those who are against the war--hopefully you don't need reminding that peace is not cheap. Good, I'm glad we found something we can all agree on.

Yesterday a golden full moon ran a commemorative victory lap around the earth, greeted by a joyful noise in many towns and villages. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam. The whole universe is one family. May there be good fortune throughout the universe, and may all envious persons be pacified. Yesterday was Gaur Purnima, and today is the feast celebration--if you are so inclined, I hope you have a joyful weekend of feasting. (Yesterday the paintings on one wall were all carefully straightened before the party. Afterwards they were all crooked and akilter, dizzy with the dancing.) If not, Happy Holi.

Sarmad Ali is a young Wall Street Journal reporter. I have been hearing about him for two years now, because he is a classmate and very good friend of my friend Cyrus Farivar. They both went to J-school at Columbia right after me; Cyrus went to Berkeley and came back to the bay after he graduated. Cyrus bubbles over with enthusiasm and regard for his friends, and even though I've never met Sarmad, I feel some warmth towards him--it has just rubbed off from Cyrus.

Sarmad is Iraqi. Today he wrote in the WSJ about the disappearance, two months ago, of his father. He still does not know where his father is; it seems to have been a while since he has heard from any of his family. The war has taken a great toll on his family. It is a difficult piece to read, but I think it is important. War is eating at our lives, our friends' lives, the lives of the friends of our friends: acid waves propagating through our single, shared world. We cannot ignore the flood, however high we seem to stand. You can read Sarmad's piece on Cyrus's blog; at the Wall Street Journal site. I hope he gets some message of relief soon.

So there's this new song out by The Killers that makes my brain go to the strangest place. It's called "Read My Mind," (lyrics here), and it doesn't make me think of killing or mind reading or Main Street USA, or anything like that. Instead it makes me think of . . Sanjay Leela Bhansali's .Devdas.
Yeah that's right. These guys:

make me think of this:

What the hell? This has been bugging me for days, perhaps weeks. It's specifically the main choral chord of the Killers song which reminds me of Devdas. (Killers YouTube video here.) And I've been convinced that it's the same as a specific chord or theme that runs throughout the soundtrack of Devdas, which I haven't heard in months or weeks--so much so that when I heard it on the radio tonight I wanted someone to make a mashup of the two. But when I dug out my copy of the soundtrack, I realized I couldn't quite find it--it was in neither of the spots in the movie I thought it was in, though something slightly similar is. (YouTube videos after the jump.) Now maybe it's somewhere in the movie in some form more similar to the Killers song. Or maybe they really are different but still deeply similar. Or maybe they are similar in only that superficial and common way that musical amateurs are often overly impressed by, as described in this New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell. Maybe the Killers use a major version and Devdas uses a minor version? Or maybe I'm totally crazy. But even though the Killers' chord isn't in any of the clips I've found, it still reminds me of Devdas. Is there a term for this kind of auditory confusion? Anyone have a similar experience with some other odd pairing of musical sources? And is there any hope for a decent mashup? (The lyrical themes are not totally contrary.)

Click the jump to see all three videos.

Continue reading "Music Lessons" »