august philippic

A brief word about Tibet (not intended as support for any particular side).   Tibet was not “part of” China before the twentieth century.  Understanding the relationship between Tibet and China requires understanding the Qing Dynasty, which lasted from 1644-1911.

The emperors of the Qing were from Manchuria, and they engaged in conquest southward into China and westward into central Asia.  Once China was conquered, the Qing were primarily concerned with westward expansion to defeat an ethnic group of Mongols called the Zunghars.  The Zunghars, like many central Asians, practiced Tibetan Buddhism, and for this reason they sought to depict themselves as defenders of the Dalai Lama.  In the course of defeating the Zunghars, Qing emperors sought to take over that role.  The important relationship was not between “Tibet” and “China” — it was between emperor and the Dalai Lama.   There are differing accounts of the nature of that relationship, but basically the Qing was committed to prevent any rival power from gaining influence over Tibet by means of the Dalai Lama.  And again, as there was little danger of anybody sending an army over the Himalayas, the primary strategic problem for the Qing had to do with Mongolia, not control over Tibet.

The Qing did not have “sovereignty” over Tibet, not in any ordinary sense of the term.  The Qing did not collect taxes, nor did Qing law apply in Tibet.    The Qing depicted the entire world as subject to various zones of control, and Tibet was one of those zones.  We can blame Qing leaders and Tibetans for not having the foresight to see that in the future the world would be organized into nation-states, but we can’t claim that the Qing-Tibet relationship has any obvious parallel in modern international law.

The basis of China’s claim to Tibet is the same as the U.S.’s claim to New Mexico.  We can be sympathetic to the sufferings of the Apache, but we’d be suspicious if Vladimir Putin began to champion their cause.  And if an Apache leader took refuge in Tijuana, I can’t imagine that American public opinion would be swayed to reparations or to New Mexican autonomy.    I don’t defend the way that Tibetans are being treated, but I’m also not a fan of Tibet’s champions abroad.  The Chinese government acts like a colonial power largely because it itself emerged in response to colonialism.  Making sense of that history seems to me crucial to figuring out what kinds of policy will promote the greater good in China and elsewhere.  I hope to be writing more about it soon.

Tags: China, philippic by august
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I mentioned Adam Langer’s Crossing California in a previous post. One of the many interesting things about that book is that it’s central theme is a street – California Avenue in Chicago – that was a border for a Jewish neighborhood. It’s a familiar kind of border – anybody who has lived in a city (or in suburbs, or in rural areas) will recognize a variety of borders that have nothing to do with political boundaries. If you talk to people, they can usually point to a line (sometimes corresponding to a street, an overpass, or the clichéd railroad track) that separates rich from poor, or race from race, educated from non, safe from un. Part of the specialized knowledge of place is to understand the shifting nature of these borders (they may emerge only at night, for example. They may even be marked by, for example, gang symbols or neighborhood watch signs).

That much everybody knows. So why am I  blogging about it?
What do I have to add? Well, the way the borders change – they are contingent on collections of impressions, shifting landscapes of shops, schools, apartments, transportation. We recognize that the borders of daily life are impermanent, however meaningful they may be in any moment.

Is that part of the reason for the ever-recurring immigration debate in America? We all know that a border is a fake thing, and thus we pour money into policing, wall-building, legislation, caricatures of immigrants in order to make this fake thing seem real, urgent, permanent, safe. When really no border can be any of those things.

I know that the observation doesn’t solve the problem, or even address what most consider to be the issues, but over and over in the immigration debate my sense is that the actual lives of immigrants are totally marginal to the fears that people have about losing jobs, low wages, security, a breakdown of established rules. Like terrorism, immigration is a debate about our own neuroses. I just wish we once again had political elites willing to insist that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. Instead, we get “FEAR! FEAR! FEAR!” Which in turn makes me rather afraid, just not about immigration or terrorism.

Tags: cities, philippic by august
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Taiwanese identity is one of the world’s more complicated, volatile, and undiscussed issues. This article only hints at the depth of feeling about mainland China, and particularly Chiang Kaishek’s army, which took over the island in 1945 and retreated there in 1949 (with branches winding up in Korea and Southeast Asia). Even when Chiang ruled the mainland, the links between government, military, and organized crime were rather too close for comfort, and nothing changed when he arrived in Taipei. Taiwan’s current ruling Democratic Progressive Party leaders, including Chen Shuibian, cut their teeth as political prisoners and targets of what amounted to gangland-style violence. It explains a lot, including the tendency of legislators to get in fistfights.
Still, it is a democracy now. Seems like there are fewer and fewer of those…

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April come she will
When the floods subsided
When streams are ripe and swelled with rain;
We sacrificed a lamb, then cooked it in a pit.
May, she will stay,
The flames reflected in the bottoms of the leaves.
Resting in my arms again.
Dancers in the glen circled the maple
June, she’ll change her tune,
Then leapt upon our altar.
In restless walks she’ll prowl the night
We ate meat with bare hands.
July, she will fly
Our priests poured wine into the stamped earth,
And give no warning to her flight.
then affixed our prayer to the leg of a finch,
August, die she must,
Who flew west, who flew
The autumn winds blow chilly and cold;
To find another finch, another glen, anywhere
September I’ll remember
But this place, where, fat with lamb,
A love once new has now grown old.
We could not sleep for the incessant rain.

“April, Come She Will”, by Simon and Garfunkel.

Tags: philippic, august by august
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I’ve been reading Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks. I just finished a chapter about a blind man who had surgery removing cataracts, and was thus able to see. His sight was limited, in part because his retinas were damaged, but mainly because his brain had not since birth developed to process visual imagery. Some desultory thoughts:

I’ve been reading it while keeping in mind the criticisms of the doctor in The Echo Maker. Is Sacks invading this man’s privacy? At times the account feels quite intimate, and it is not at all clear that Sacks has helped the man. “Virgil,” the blind man who can see, descends back into blindness when he gets a terrible case of pneumonia that deprives him of oxygen. All that being said, Virgil is clearly capable of making decisions about his own life, and the account would not have been possible without Virgil’s consent. I’m seconding an earlier point by TK that this aspect of the portrayal of Weber doesn’t ring true.

The story (”To see and not see”) gave me great insight into the tendency of the deaf community to reject the hearing, especially to oppose technologies that might enable them to hear. As Sacks points out, seeing for Virgil was disorienting; the experience was one of losing blindness rather than gaining vision. In a footnote, Sacks adds for the deaf, the sense of isolation is doubled – one loses deafness and an entire community. For Virgil, who loses his vision after gaining it, the sense of isolation and rage is far more damaging than the constraints of blindness.

The tale of Mark and Karin got me thinking about our use of “blindness” as a metaphor. It means not merely “not being able to see,” but “not recognizing,” and “not understanding. Mark is blind to Karin. The reader blind to the writer of the note (I write the sentence and it sounds funny to me… why?). It’s not a semantic slippage that I had thought about prior to now, but it must affect the way we treat the blind. It also makes me wonder about Powers’ premise. Sure, the mind can come undone. But it is also remarkably resilient, and I remain not fully convinced (intellectually or emotionally) of the particular kind of undoing that transpires in The Echo Maker.

The paragraph I found most interesting (pp. 135-136) in hardcover edition:

In these episodes Virgil was treated by his family as a blind man, his seeing identity denied or undermined, and he responded, compliantly, by acting, or even becoming, blind – a massive withdrawal or regression of part of his ego to a crushing, annihilating denial of identity. Such a regression would have to be seen as motivated, albeit unconsciously – an inhibition on a “functional” basis.

Thus there seemed to be two distinct forms of “blind behavior” or “acting blind” – one a collapse of visual processing and visual identity on an organic basis (a “bottom up” or neuropsychological disturbance…), the other a collapse or inhibition of visual identity on a functional basis (a “top-down”, or psychoneurotic disturbance), though no less real for him. Given the extreme organic weakness of his vision – the instability of his visual systems and visual identity at this point – it was very difficult at times to know what was going on, to distinguish between the “physiological” and “psychological.” His vision was so marginal, so close to the border, that either neural overload or identity conflict might push him over it.

If Sacks is right, it means our very consciousness is visual. Except when it isn’t. I feel that’s a far more powerful insight into my own mind than anything I read in The Echo Maker.

Tags: philippic, august by august
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Dire Wolf

I have been clattering through my world of late, and also through the archives, thinking there must have been something I missed while ducking my cheek into my collar to hold up against the wind. Sorrows, like a gathering of dire wolves, come in packs. It’s a question of loss, how it blinds, how the absence of someone can seem to extinguish the history of their presence. To you I am not speaking anymore. I return to journals and find… nothing. Who was the person that wrote that? How did I feel that way? And now, whom should I address.

Take, for example, my friend who reversed the intended direction of a shotgun (now that you have gotten these things off your barrel chest) – afterwards I felt weirdly unaffected Sorry to fill my prose with so many words of others, but here’s Rilke on the subject, “I’ve had my dead and let them go, and been astounded to find them so peaceful, so at home in their deaths, so different from their reputation.” There is of course a “but’ coming –

“Except for you. You turn back. You hit against me.” It is time for you to merge into the sobbing rain. When grief hits, it’s shocking to me how I feel at once totally lost and totally self-indulgent. I am not me and yet I am alone and only me, it’s all like a one room scene in Appalachia, smeared (like graffiti, like some damn vandal has snuck into my house and smashed my plates and my tables and painted obscenities on all the walls) by fog.

There are some people I turned to as naturally as I walk in space, as if I went to them for a cup of water I adored you as much as an aluminum bucket of storm after a great unlovely silver thirst. I carried them within me like language, like words that I don’t think about until they appear on my computer screen how nice for me. One or two are still with me. Others have become scar tissue somewhere in my liver.

To be clear: I most emphatically do not know how you feel. To gain even an inkling I have to crack open my Homer, or venture into deserts like the English Patient (”We die in a forest of lovers and tribes”) with his Herodotus, or seek some appropriate epic of loss . In the Pleistocene, the wild wolves roamed in scattered sorrows over everywhere, prodigious in appetite, howling at the hollow of everything empty yes everything, and their packs devoured all sorrows and made them a throat covered with a bolt of red.

Again, this is a pain I do not know; I own my pain (”appropriation“), I hold it and make it me, and write in first person — that’s what makes it self indulgent. Even when I lose it I keep a record, something to point to and say – “here once was me.” And in this way perhaps I can see (but not know or feel) that there are things which can dismantle entirely
A spirit, such as the pathetic maledictive fear of loss.

You’ve asked us to pray, and that seems right – that words should be found and given to you. (Of loss:you get to speak of it, once you are its intimate…) I can offer you only the hope of blessings, the bare outline of speech (…and not before). But I hope my words can find you, and you can make something of them, and while I continue to clatter through my own whatever-it-is, you can find something in the snow of your computer screen, and that a blessing for you can be that

in the great white rendezvous, where

I was brooding
Just a while, you get to speak of dire love.

For Isonomist.

Tags: philippic by august
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Patrick Ewing receives the ball in the low post. He puts his jaw back where it’s supposed to go. He scowls at all comers, and dunks. That’s Knick basketball.

Being a Yankee hater, I can live with the Mets. I dislike the Giants, the Jets, the Rangers, the Devils, and the Islanders. I can live with the Nets. But the only team I love, the only team I care about in this, my adopted city, my new found regional center, is the New York Knicks.

So naturally, I’m rooting for them to lose. I want Isiah Thomas to no longer be my neighbor. I want Madison Square Garden to be more aesthetically appealing than Penn Station. I want basketball.

In any normal conference, this is a team that would be a doormat. It doesn’t deserve to exist. It’s laughing at Darwin, sneering at any kind of logic, they kind of hang around despite their remarkable suckiness.

I just want them to lose. Lose, lose, lose. As long as Isaiah Thomas is in the building, I want them to lose. I want humiliation. I want the Garden to be Artaudian in its theater of cruelty. I want Isaiah gone.

Because if you don’t have a team, are you at home?

Tags: philippic, New York by august
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1. For most of the twentieth century, if you really wanted to kill a lot of people, you did it with the nation-state. The great evils of the century were perpetrated by governments and their leaders: Mao, Stalin, Hitler. Inversely, the hopes of millions of people lay in nation states. The response to the Holocaust? A state. The answer to colonialism? Nationalism.

I think the shift away from states began around 1970. The Biafran War and the oil crisis showed new frontiers for big business. The Cambodian genocide showed how badly states could fail. The United States didn’t get the memo until September, 2001, and it’s still not clear how many people have read it.

2. The logic of the surge is the idea that the “Iraqi people” must take over. Fucking idiocy – as if the institutions and actions of so many could be summed up so neatly, as if the nation state was the primary means of identification. The phrase “Iraqi people” makes unity appear where there is none. That the United States is somehow deeply respectful of the sovereignty of the so-called Iraqi people is one of the great lies of the war, and the pipe dreams of those who believe this lie are what continue the carnage. What is happening now is a predictable and logical result of U.S. policy, and the phrase “Iraqi people” little more than a scapegoat to clear the consciences of conservatives.

The United States never had any idea what it was up against, still doesn’t, and continues to ask for endorsement of what can charitably be described as malign incompetence and more accurately labeled complicity in genocide. This complicity will fuel the very movements George Bush claims he is intent on destroying.

3. Democracy begets crime. It does so because the majority will inevitably insist on laws that don’t make sense, and black markets will be necessary to get things done. When ethnicity is added to this mix, when gangs divide on ethnic lines and define their enemies in ethnic terms, the possibility for horror is great. Violence is then perpetuated both by the criminals and the state, which uses the gangwar (the term is from Maximum City, a very good book about Bombay) as pretext for atrocities.

The idea that democracy will save Iraq is absurd. It’s as absurd as the idea that the men who have been utterly clueless for six years have suddenly discovered the answers to everything.

4. The time to recognize mistakes would have been before Israel invaded Lebanon. The move would have been – we screwed up, and we need the help of Europe, Saudi Arabi, and Iran. We give up any claims on Iraq, let other powers take over. This course of action is now impossible.

5. The hope in early 2002 had been that the United States, by creating successful Islamic democracies, could defuse the threats to American cities. The threats are now greater than they ever were. Dealing with them will require people in power who are capable of looking beyond domestic concerns when formulating foreign polity. People who recognize that hagiographies of troops or paeans to the flag are not policy decisions.* The most dangerous of all statist nationalism in the world is that of the United States, not least of which because it leads to such rank stupidity on both the right and the left.

The world has a new geography. Until we can find leaders who recognize that geography, the threats to the United States will get much, much worse.

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1. The way you look at me funny.

2. That sound the neighbors make when cleaning their oven.

3. Hopping on my motorcycle, getting all set to leap 42 VW Beetles, and realizing in mid-air that Jeb lined up 44.

4. Tsunamis.

5. I really hate it when you wear those shoes with that outfit.

6. W. (hotel, president).

7. Tom Hanks (permanent member of this list).

8. Where’s that damn hotel?

9. Constipation.

10. Indiana. But Montana rocks.

Tags: philippic by august
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