Left Behind: Ralph Nader

review
Friday, October 24, 2008 www.thenational.ae
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TheNational
Art Amman gets to
know Mona Hatoum
Books ‘A Mercy’:
Toni Morrison’s
slave new world
World 25 years after
the Marine barracks
bombing in Beirut
Saloon Just one
word: plastics
Matthew Power
goes on the road
with the neverending presidential
campaign of Ralph
Nader, where
futility is in the
eye of the beholder
On the day after the United States congress
passed an unprecedented $700 billion bailout of the collapsing financial industry, Ralph
Nader – tireless consumer advocate, scourge
of both Wall Street and K Street, scapegoat of
the American Left, quadrennial presidential
candidate – held a campaign rally in the echoing lobby of an abandoned bank in Waterbury, Connecticut. It was his fourth official
run for the presidency in as many elections. A
large banner, reading Nader-Gonzalez 2008,
was hung before the empty vault, and a sign
marked “safe deposit boxes” pointed unreassuringly down a darkened stairwell. A dusty
chandelier hung over the lectern, and a single
red balloon had drifted up from its blue and
white mates tied to a chair, resting against the
peeling paint of the ceiling.
The rally’s setting may have been an unintentional allusion to America’s worst financial
crisis since the Great Depression, or perhaps
a clever piece of low-budget political stagecraft, but there were few present to appreciate
such subtleties. Fifty or so people filled half of
the folding chairs set up by campaign volunteers, or picked at the fruit and pastries laid
on a table to one side. There were a few families, a clutch of college students, a scattering
of geriatric hippies. After a few independent
candidates for state and local offices took
their turns stumping for votes, Nader himself
walked to the lectern – at 74 a stooped, greying figure in a dark suit, with a voice so slow
and deep it sounds like a 45rpm record played
at 33. Half the room stood to give him an ovation; even among those who would come out
on a Saturday morning to hear him speak, it
seemed sentiment was divided.
Nader spoke forcefully, without a teleprompter or notes, infuriated at the current
bailout plan, which he calls “Socialism coming to the rescue of capitalism.” “I warned
of this for 20 years. It was deregulation that
started it. And you can thank Bill Clinton,
working hand in glove with the Republicans.
Washington had Wall Street over a barrel.
They could have gotten them to agree to anything.” There was scattered clapping, hoots
of approval, most vociferously from his own
campaign volunteers manning a table at the
back.
Left behind
Nader, continued on 4 →
02
The National
Friday, October 24, 2008 www.thenational.ae
saloon
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review
Operissimo
Live from New York, it’s a night at the opera in Dubai!
Last week, the New York Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday matinée
performance of Richard Strauss’s
Salome began at one in the afternoon in New York – and nine at
night in Dubai’s Madinat Jumeirah
Theatre.
Dubai has joined the ranks of
Sydney, Halifax and Tokyo: cities
that broadcast select Met performances in real time and high definition. Last year, more than 920,000
people from 17 countries attended
these broadcasts. Here, the screenings are put on by the Dubai Event
Management Corporation (DEMC),
the company launched by Sheikh
Ahmed bin Mohammad Al Maktoum to organise live cultural events
in the emirate.
Seeing opera on the big screen, in
high definition and with frequent
close-ups (plus peeks backstage)
highlights the fact that it is one of
the few remaining performance arts
that totally ignores harsh contemporary standards of beauty. Qualified opera singers can reasonably
expect to exce – unlike television
or the top 40 pop market – even if
they might not belong on the front
of a glossy fashion magazine. Since
opera singers portray their stories
through song, a singer’s appearances fall a far second to his or her
vocal character, if they are even considered at all. The women tend to be
heavy, the men more so.
At the actual Met, unless you’re in
the ampitheatre’s front-most section you are probably far enough
away that the bodies onstage do indeed become peripheral to the soaring voices carrying the story. But it’s
different up-close.
The Met’s current staging of
Salome features Karita Matilla as
the titular beautiful princess who is
lusted after by her stepfather, Herrod, played by Kim Begley. Both de-
Since opera singers
portray their
stories through
song, a singer’s
appearances fall a
far second to his or
her vocal character,
if they are even
considered at all.
The women tend to
be heavy, the men
more so
liver dazzlingly powerful vocal performances, but Matilla in particular
does not look the part. “She looks
older than him,” my viewing companion can’t help but point out.
When Salome gives in and agrees
to perform the “Dance of the Seven
Veils” for Herod, she does so quite
seductively, and ends up straddling
him. “Haram aleyou” (poor guy), the
man on my left exclaims. Matilla is
hardly lithe.
Salome is a thematically complex
one-act opera based on a play by
Oscar Wilde. Love, lust, jealousy,
vengeance: it’s a complicated story,
more so when sung and even more
so when sung in German. But, like
any film in a European language, it
came to Dubai complete with English subtitles.
“The subtitles help a lot,” said Richard Attias, the CEO of DEMC. “Especially if you don’t speak Italian or
German.”
Though the Morrocan-born Attias is perhaps best known for being
the husband of Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz, the former wife of the French
President Nicolas Sarkozy, he is also
a seasoned events organiser. He has
orchestrated the World Economic
Forum in Davos, the Islamic Conference in Dakar and the Petra Conference of Nobel Laureates in Amman. He moved to Dubai (which he
describes as having “the energy of
New York, the safety of Geneva and
Karita Mattila, Juha Uusitalo and Keith Miller in Salome. Marty Sohl / Metropolitan Opera
more and more culture and lifestyle
like Paris”) to run the DEMC, which
launched in March.
The DEMC has already signed on
for the entire rest of the Met’s 20082009 broadcast season, which will
last until May 2009. According to Attias, the goal of these live transmissions is to educate the population
of Dubai about opera so that people
will be excited to attend Dubai’s
own opera house when it opens. It
has been announced that the spaceship-looking structure, designed by
Zaha Hadid, will sit on an artificial
island in the Dubai Creek and have
room for 2,500 opera fans, an arts
gallery, a performing arts school
and a six-star theme hotel. No one
is sure when it will open. Attias estimates it will take a “few years”.
Erminha de Marco, an Italian
mezzo-soprano in the audience
who gives private opera lessons in
Dubai, told me that opera is already
catching on here. “There’s a lot of
interest and much more students
than you think.”
Attias claims that opera is becoming more popular and less elitist.
Perhaps screenings like these help
by lowering the price tag. Tickets to
the Dubai screening of Salome were
100 dirhams. On that budget, operagoers in New York would be confined either to the “Family Cirlce”,
the seating area farthest from the
stage, or the Met’s “balcony boxes”,
regarding which the Met’s website
cautions: there’s only a “partial
view”.
The Madinat theatre was filled
almost to capacity, and there was a
buzzing energy in the air as the audience – mostly middle aged, married
and well dressed expatriates – left
the theatre. “It’s fantastic to have
New York in Dubai,” said Christian
Perdier, an elegantly dressed man
who attended the screening with his
wife Jocelyne and their equally crisp
friends Ken and Patria Palmer.
Ken eagerly concurred. “It’s a hell
of a lot easier than flying to New
York.”
*
Maya Khourchid
Do the robot
At the Robot Olympiad, Legos clean up trash
and maybe even take you with them to Japan
I have seen the future of the science
fair, and it can be summed up in one
word: plastics. Legos, to be exact.
Throw in robots and a bit of espionage for good measure, and the days
of baking soda volcanoes and mathletes may be behind us forever.
On a Monday morning not long
ago, more than 140 young men
– many dressed in smart navy blue
blazers, others wearing crisp dishdashas – gathered in the auditorium
of the Al Mawaheb Model School
for Girls for the third ever UAE Robot Olympiad (though it was at a
girls school, no girls competed, and
fewer than two dozen were present).
The competition was organised by
the Abu Dhabi Education Council
(ADEC), a private education technology firm called EduTech and
Lego Education, a division of the
Danish plastic-block empire.
After everyone stood for the national anthem, which played over
the loudspeaker just after 9am, the
robots took centre stage – Lego robots of all sizes and shapes, rolled
round on hundreds of tables. Teams
competed in either the “open” competition, which involved preparing
a robot ahead of time, or the “regular” competition, which involved
building a robot from scratch in
two-and-a-half hours.
The competition was downright
ferocious. Sixty-one teams participated, but one school, Our Own
High School, Al Warqa’a, a Dubai
Indian boys school, dominated
the event, taking first place in both
competitions. The prize? Gold trophies – made of LEGO bricks, naturally – and the honour of representing the UAE later this month in the
World Robot Olympiad in Japan.
The sight would have probably
raised the hair on the back of Ole
Kirk Christiansen, the carpenter
and joiner who in 1932 set up shop
in Billund, Denmark, where he
made ironing boards, stepladders,
stools and wooden toys – all of which
were eventually eclipsed by his company’s iconic interlocking plastic
blocks. Today there are 62 Lego
bricks for each person on earth,
which will come as no surprise to
any parent who has ever traipsed
barefoot into a room booby-trapped
with bits of a destroyed Lego castle
scattered across the floor.
Christiansen died in 1958, three
Domo arigato, Mr Legoto Andrew Parsons / The National
years before the creation of the first
programmable robot, the Unimate,
a primitive device built for GM that
lifted and stacked hot pieces of metal from a die casting machine.
By 1998, the company had expanded beyond its legacy product,
and was seeking a future in robotics. A partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) culminated in Lego Mindstorms, a new line of products that
allowed children to create and then
program robots; an update in 2006
(called Mindstorms NXT, reflecting an apparent vowel shortage in
Denmark) made basic robot-construction so simple it can be accomplished in half an hour.
“It was my first experience with
Lego,” said Vignesh Karthik, a serious 16-year-old from OOHS, who
hopes that his victory in the open
competition will eventually help
win him a place in an engeneering
programme at university. “We had
a look at various robots on the net,”
he said, adding that his team took a
cue from friends who won the competition last year. “They are masterminds. We saw them working and
we gained inspiration from them.”
“The Olympiad is a very big deal at
our school,” Vignesh added. “We
are all competing against each other and there is a lot of spy work.”
While robotics isn’t so popular
everywhere, a sandy-haired young
man from the Dubai International
Academy said that the “sport” is
slowly gaining momentum at his
school. But a survey of the auditorium suggested that robotics is
not for everyone. “A lot of the girls
do not find robots as interesting as
shopping or shoes,” one boy noted.
“The girls find it a bit harder to assemble a robot.”
At OOHS most boys work in the
school’s robotics lab, but some
young inventors keep their creations at home. “We try to keep our
models as secretive as possible,”
Vignesh confided with a wink,
adding that his team spent weeks
on their prize winning creation,
Poseidon: a Bluetooth-controlled
robot (named for the Greek god of
the sea) that moves through the water at 3.2 kilometres per hour, eating trash along the way. The team
worked in Vignesh’s bedroom to
shield Poseidon from the eyes of
their classmates. “We wanted to do
something different,” he said.
The event always has a theme; and
this year it was “saving the global environment”.
“Recycling is a big problem in Dubai,” said Connor Mundie, a young
contestant from the Dubai International Academy, adding that hardly
anyone he knows recycles. He and
his partner, Corentin Feys, built a
self-sorting recycling bin. JSB Robotics, another team from OOHS,
constructed a paper recycling plant
manned by three robots.
“It’s fascinating to work with robots, it’s kind of fun,” concluded
Vignesh. “The best thing is that it
does all the work with just the press
of a button.
“If it’s possible we could actually make a robot that finishes our
homework. That would be great.”
Kathryn Lewis
The National
Friday, October 24, 2008 www.thenational.ae
review
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the week
03
!!! the big idea
Can stage directors make opera and
popular culture ‘equal’?
Although new operas are being written and performed, most contemporary performances are of operas by Verdi, Mozart, and Puccini.
This means that audiences see the same works repeated many times,
but in different interpretations. Perhaps this is why Sutcliffe contends, “since the 1970s it is the actual productions that have had the
novelty value grabbed by the headlines. Singing no longer predominates.” If then, as Sutcliffe argues, “operatic fashion through history
may be a desire for novelty, new formulas displacing old,” then the
contemporary practice of changing the original settings is simply the
latest “new formula” that is replacing the old ones. If there are no new
words or new music, then what remains are new methods of performance, hence the practice of changing time and place.
Opera is a complex art form that has evolved over the past 400 years
and continues to evolve, but will it survive? The underlining motives
for directors changing the time and place of opera performances
are at least three: for aesthetic/artistic purposes, financial purposes,
and to reach an audience from many cultures, who speak different
languages, and who have varied tastes. These three reasons are interrelated. In 1996, Sutcliffe wrote that there has been one constant in
all the arguments about opera productions during the preceding two
decades: “the producer’s wish to relate the works being staged to contemporary circumstances and passions.” Although that sounds like a
purely aesthetic reason, making opera relevant to new, multicultural
audiences and thereby increasing the bottom line seems very much a
part of that aesthetic. It is as true today as it was when Sutcliffe made
the observation twelve years ago. My own speculation is that opera
needs to attract various audiences, and it can only do so by appealing to popular culture and engaging new forms of media and technology. Erickson concludes that the
number of upper status people who
are exclusively faithful to fine arts is
declining; high status people consume a variety of culture while the
lower status people are limited to
what they like. Research in North
America, Europe, and Australia,
states Erickson, attest to these
trends. My answer to the question
can stage directors make opera
and popular culture “equal” is
yes, and they can do it successfully.
Ligia Toutant
M/C Journal
journal.media-culture.org.au
Welcome to the faith-based economy
Brother, can you spare several trillion dimes? Chinese President Hu Jintao greets US President George W Bush at the start of the Olympics. Guang Niu / Getty Images
Loan rangers
As China prepares to help bail out a “friend”, Peter Kwong wonders
how long Beijing’s special relationship with the US economy can last
Chinese leaders are in a quandary
about how far they should go to help
stabilise the current global financial
crisis. For more than a decade, the
economies of the United States and
China have been tied in a symbiotic
relationship, due to the fact that
the United States imports the vast
majority of Chinese manufactured
goods.
Not only do Americans consume
what China produces, the Chinese
government recycles the accumulated trade surplus back to the United States in the form of loans that
help Americans keep purchasing
Chinese goods.
China currently holds $2 trillion
worth of US Treasury bonds and
other government-backed debt
securities, including almost $500
billion worth of mortgage bonds
from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Thanks to this hefty cash influx,
Americans have enjoyed years of
low interest rates and cheap mortgages, enabling them to live beyond
their means.
At the same time, American corporations engaging in trade with
China have made huge profits from
low-cost Chinese labour. In the last
few years, the combined economies
of China and the United States have
accounted for a third of the world
output and 60 per cent of global
growth. Together, the dynamic duo
has been the driving engine of the
global economy.
But it has now come to light that
American financial institutions
have been repackaging borrowed
funds, including those borrowed
from China, into fraudulent pyramid schemes. When the sandcastle
of the American real estate market
collapsed, the financial institutions
that backed it crashed too, dragging
all of Europe and Japan into a crisis
‘ the tangled web
that is beginning to look like the
worldwide depression of the 1930s.
China, on the other hand, with
banks and financial institutions
tightly controlled by the state, has
been largely immune to the upheaval. As the only major economy with
large currency reserve and no debt,
it stands as the most likely power to
help ease the global crisis.
US authorities certainly believe
that China’s help is indispensable.
One of the main reasons for rescuing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
was to reassure the Chinese government that US securities really were
secure.
In the last few
years, the combined
economies of
China and the
United States have
accounted for a
third of the world
output and 60
per cent of global
growth. Together,
the dynamic duo
has been the driving
engine of the global
economy
And frankly, the success of the
$700 billion rescue plan does not
depend on bankers from Wall
Street. The US recovery depends on
investors from China and the Middle East. One of the first things US
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson
did after the Congress approved his
rescue plan was to prepare a “roadshow” to explain it to Beijing.
Most economists believe that it is
in China’s own interest to keep the
US economy healthy, so it can keep
recycling its export dollars and keep
creating business opportunities.
But should it decide to dump its
existing dollars, or not to buy any
more of the new US debt, the United
States would be in a pickle.
For now, the signs are that Chinese
government plans to be co-operative. It even joined with American
and European partners last weekend, under President Bush’s urging,
in lowering interest rates to kickstart global economy.
Meanwhile, on the main streets of
China, there is plenty of scepticism.
Millions of Chinese have worked
in sweatshops to produce billions
of dollars worth of American consumer goods in exchange for US
Treasury bonds. And these bonds’
value keeps depreciating along with
the continuing devaluation of the
US dollar.
At Shanghai’s Tongji University,
economics professor Shi Jianxun
has warned in the People’s Daily
that Washington’s rescue plan
compels the United States to issue a
new wave of government bonds and
pump more cash into the banking
system. This will cause the dollar to
fall, exacerbating global inflationary pressures. “The rescue plan can
only play a temporary role and not
resolve the fundamental financial
problems of the United States,”
Shih cautions.
Chinese bloggers are less restrained. “According to your view,”
a critic chides a co-operative type,
“the United States can never fall.
The rest of the world should just
foot the bill so she could forever
be the most powerful. Do they ever
need to pay back their debts?”
Most Chinese believe that China’s
long-term interest lies in boosting
domestic spending on education, a
social safety net for senior citizens
and the poor, and on infrastructure.
The problem is that such wholesale
reallocation of resources would lead
to serious dislocations and an economic slowdown.
The Chinese government cannot
afford to take this risk. It needs to
maintain a high rate of economic
growth to generate enough jobs for
millions of Chinese who enter the
labour market each year, or face the
prospect of high unemployment
and social disorder.
The Chairman of the China Construction Bank, Guo Shuqing, says
that “the US financial market is the
world financial market,” and that
“what is good for the US is also good
for every country, including China.”
And this echoes the Chinese government’s official view.
But the problem will surely arise if
the global crisis continues to deteriorate even after Chinese leaders
play the good-guy, saviour role. Who
then will take the blame for wasting
good money on bad US assets, when
it could have been used for China’s
domestic needs?
Peter Kwong, a professor of Asian
American studies at Hunter College,
is co-author of Chinese America: The
Untold Story of America’s Oldest New
Community, and Chinese Americans:
An Immigrant Experience.
Last week as I listened, along with many other Americans and others around the world, to President Bush’s most recent effort to reassure us about the current economic meltdown I had a “Road to
Damascus” moment. It happened as I heard Bush repeat the word
“faith”: faith in America’s institutions, faith in its workers, faith in
capitalism, faith in our capacity to survive other disasters (such as
1929 and 2001). And, of course, the faith we needed to weather the
recent crisis and get to the other side, such faith, in Bush’s rhetoric, being not only the need of the moment but the fulcrum for the
journey to recovery.
I instantly saw that a great feat in reverse discourse engineering had occurred: we had moved into the era of the “Faith-Based
Economy”. Many of us had already developed a certain worry about
the place of “faith” in the Bush administration’s weird form of
ecumenical evangelism, which had used the idea of faith-based
organisations to allow the covert infiltration of a certain brand of
religion into American civic life, with a definite bias towards white,
Protestant, evangelical forms rather than say, to Muslim, Catholic,
Jewish, Hindu or Rastafarian forms.
But now we are in a new Weberian moment, where Calvinist ideas
of proof, certainty of election through the rationality of good works,
and faith in the rightness of predestination, are not anymore the
backbone of thrift, calculation and bourgeois risk-taking. Now
faith is about something else. It is faith in capitalism itself, capitalism viewed as a transcendent means of organising human affairs,
of capitalism as a theodicy for the explanation of evil, lust, greed
and theft in the economy, and of the meltdown as a supreme form
of testing by suffering, which will weed out the weak of heart from
those of true good faith.
Arjun Appadurai
The Immanent Frame
ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame
Nawakille: a squash town
The small village of Nawakille (pop. few thousand) outside the frontier city of Peshawar in Pakistan boasts something that no other in
the world can. Over the last half century, the village that does not
have a single squash court, has produced six world number ones in
the sport. In fact, since 1950 the six between them have won 29 British Opens (the Wimbledon of squash) and 14 World Opens (which
started only in 1975).
This is an incredible story that just happens to be a sport story. If the
sport of squash had a bigger profile in world sport, there would have
been movies made on this subject. For now, a write-up in this blog
will have to suffice. While the British whiled away their time guarding
the Khyber Pass, they decided to relieve their boredom by building a
few outdoors roofless squash courts. In the heat and direct sunlight,
it was difficult to play a game with one of the highest cardiovascular
work rates. But try telling that to the Pathan warriors.
Hashim Khan, the first of the lot, become a ball-boy at the Peshawar British Army Officers club and practised with the broken balls
tossed out by the officers. When the officers would retreat indoors
in the 100 degree heat and the squash court was empty, it would be
“Hashim vs Hashim” in the court, according to his biography. He got
good enough to be the Pakistan champion by 1949 and somehow got
enough sponsorship to get to the British Open in 1951. He was 34
years old at the time (Borg retired from Tennis at 26). In the warm-up
tournament he beat the four
time British Open champion
Mahmoud El Karim conceding just six points. The British press called it a “flash in
the pan”, expecting for order
to be restored, but Hashim
went on to beat Mahmoud
in the Open final 9-5, 9-0,
9-0, and then continued to
win the tournament six out
of
the next seven years.
Faisal Irfan Mian
Sportz Insight
sportzinsight.blogspot.com
Illustrations by Sarah Lazarovic for The National
04
The National
Friday, October 24, 2008 www.thenational.ae
review
th
284,000
Amount, in dollars, that General
Motors had to pay Nader after being
caught tapping his phone
An Aaron Sorkin moment: Ralph Nader strides down a corridor – but not in the West Wing – alongside campaign aide Matthew Zawisky.Jessica Hill for The National
Nader has become a pariah in the truest
sense of the word: abandoned by allies,
ignored by the press, a world away from
the enormous rallies that cheer his rivals
→ Nader, continued from 1
Nader laid the blame equally on
Wall Street and the government –
two villains, in Nader’s view, whose
unholy alliance represents everything wrong with contemporary
American life. Instead of using the
crisis as a chance to extract concessions from the finance industry,
Nader argued, the government
has used “Chicken Little” tactics
to scare Americans into approving the publicly-financed bailout
with no public hearings. “Instead
of 13 colonies under King George
the Third, we’re 50 colonies under
King George the Fifth. And this is
taxation without representation!”
Nader’s voice echoed off the empty
bank’s high ceilings, like a prophet
of economic doom.
In 2000 Nader was derided as a
spoiler by angry Democrats; in 2004
he was treated as an enemy and a
traitor. Now he is running again,
wandering the ravaged wilderness
of American electoral politics. He
has become a pariah in the truest
sense of the word: abandoned by
many allies, ignored by the press, a
world away from the enormous rallies that cheer Obama and McCain.
The lifelong champion of liberal
causes is loathed today by many on
the left (if they think of him at all).
But he won’t stop running.
The winner of this election will inherit two wars, an economy in tatters and a looming environmental
crisis. At 89 per cent, the number
of Americans who think the country is on the wrong track has never
been higher, and America’s standing abroad has rarely been lower.
President Bush, who has all but
disappeared from the nation’s airwaves, has some of the lowest approval ratings in history. All signs
– barring unforeseen events – point
to an expansion of Democratic congressional majorities and a decisive Obama victory: he may be the
first Democrat since Jimmy Carter
in 1976 to win the White House
with more than 50 per cent of the
popular vote.
What can a third-party candidate
achieve in such a climate, with no
hope of winning and little chance
to meaningfully alter the dynamics
of the race? Nader cites polls that
show him winning more than five
per cent of the vote in some swing
states, though he has not polled
more than three per cent in national surveys for more than a month
– and the Democrats evince not
a whiff of concern for his impact
on the race. With Barack Obama
filling stadiums and galvanising
Democrats like no one since John
F Kennedy, what keeps Ralph running? I set off to follow his campaign as it swung through the
Democratic strongholds of New
England, hoping to find out.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
As the Green Party candidate in
2000, Nader pitched his campaign
as a real alternative to the “oligarchy” of two parties he claimed
were merely flip sides of the same
coin; “The biggest difference between the Republicans and Democrats,” Nader was fond of saying,
“is the speed at which their knees
hit the floor when corporations
come knocking.” To his critics on
the left, however, the campaign
was little more than an exercise in
ego and stubbornness, and they
claimed Nader was risking a legacy
he had spent decades building as a
consumer advocate who could take
credit for reforms like the creation
of the Environmental Protection
Agency and the passage of the Freedom of Information Act. The New
York Times editorial page went so
far as to plead for Nader to abandon his campaign.
But Nader stayed in the race, seeking to garner five per cent of the
vote nationally, a figure that would
qualify the Green Party for federal
matching funds and a guaranteed
ballot line in future elections. He
fell short, taking 2.75 per cent,
while in Florida, the 97,000 votes
for Nader dwarfed Bush’s razorthin 537-vote margin of victory.
When a Supreme Court decision
handed Bush the Presidency, many
Democrats blamed Nader and his
supporters, and his bid to lay the
foundations for a viable third party
in America tarnished the idea for
years to come.
Nader’s frequent argument in
2000 was that Bush and Gore
(“Gush and Bore”, as he quipped)
were indistinguishable. It was his
unique misfortune that the tide of
history could not have made this
argument appear more specious.
The disasters of the last eight years
– the war in Iraq, the erosion of civil
liberties, torture scandals, the deregulation that led to the collapse
of the financial markets, the loss
of American standing in the world
– could be laid at the feet of Ralph
Nader, whose quixotic campaign
had let Bush win.
Even among his fiercest supporters there was an unspoken sense
in 2000 that Bush was the much
worse option. On election night, I
was at the National Press Club in
Washington, where Nader held a
series of press conferences as the
returns came in. One of the telling
moments of that surreal evening
was the moment that the election
was first called for Bush: a gasp and
audible moan rose from his collected volunteers gathered around
the television, as though they had
just witnessed a violent car crash.
But Nader himself never retreated
from his claim of equivalence, and
it would cost him dearly.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
From the bank in Waterbury, Nader and his aides piled into an old
Volvo station wagon (another comically apropos campaign prop), and
drove to the domed State House
in Hartford to hold a press conference. When they arrived, they discovered that a wedding party had
already staked out the front steps
to take photographs. The bride
and groom weren’t interested in
a photo op with the candidate – it
Nader, who is critical of Obama’s internet fundraising, has had to resort to more
traditional means of gathering campaign monies. Jessica Hill for The National
was unclear whether they even recognised who he was. “Tell them I’m
in favour of weddings,” Nader said
to an aide.
So Nader held the press conference in the car park, an easy enough
thing as only three journalists were
in attendance, huddling with Nader in a circle against the brisk wind.
A reporter with the Hartford Courant prefaced his question with an
apology. “I’ve got to ask the spoiler
one,” he said.
Nader dismissed the question
with an impatient wave. He knows
that despite his accomplishments,
his role in 2000 will be the first sentence of his obituary, though he has
claimed frequently that he does not
care about his legacy. But the question is always asked, and Nader lays
out a meticulous – and no doubt
well-rehearsed – rebuttal.
“First, it’s just factually wrong.
It’s been widely documented by
your profession that the election
in Florida was stolen by the Republican state government. And there
were eight other candidates on
the ballot in Florida that had vote
totals that exceeded the margin between Bush and Gore. And most of
all, 250,000 registered Democrats
in Florida voted for Bush.” All valid
points, but simple arithmetic and
exit polls make it hard to deny that
had Nader not been in the race,
Bush would have lost the state and
thereby the country.
Despite his factual certitude,
Nader’s first impulse in discussing
2000 is a sort of moral indignation.
“No one owns votes,” he says, frustrated. “I should say that Gore stole
those votes from me.”
The other reporter in the State
House car park was Antoine Faisal,
a Lebanese journalist with the ArabAmerican paper Aramica. When he
introduced himself, Nader replied
in fluent Arabic, then turned to the
other reporters and laughed, saying: “They don’t have the word in
Arabic for ‘interview’.” Nader, the
son of Maronite Christians from
Lebanon, is the first Arab-American presidential candidate, and
he calls for a reversal of the United
States’s current policy in the Middle East: a rapid timetable for complete withdrawal from Iraq, a twostate solution for Israel-Palestine
negotiated by peace movements on
both sides, less militaristic bluster
in dealing with Iran and complete
American energy independence
from the region.
It is unclear whether Nader’s
unelectability frees him from the
need to compromise his positions, or whether his refusal to
compromise is what makes him
fundamentally unelectable. If the
positions of McCain and Obama
have been carefully tailored to appeal to broad majorities, Nader
has no such problem. He is technically running for president, but he
has no chance of ever enacting the
policies he espouses. So his candidacy is not about politics as such,
but is in a way an extension of his
life’s work as a public advocate. He
hopes airing his ideas in the theatre of presidential politics will influence policy, and that the threat
of losing voters to the left will prevent the Democrats drifting to the
centre. Nader’s run is good political theatre, but Obama – while not
the socialist McCain imagines him
to be – does not seem cut from the
same cloth of hesitant moderation
that made Al Gore and John Kerry
so uninspiring to left-wing voters.
Still Nader’s position affords him a
frankness that one rarely sees from
major party candidates – perhaps
nowhere more so than in his discussion of Arabs and Muslims in
the United States.
In an electoral season that has
turned the words “Arab” and “Muslim” into slurs, with an increasingly
less discreet Republican campaign
to depict Obama as a dangerous
outsider because of his Muslim
roots, Nader is the only presidential candidate to have made an appearance at a mosque.
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Friday, October 24, 2008 www.thenational.ae
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5
05
Number of times Ralph Nader has appeared on Saturday Night Live
told an interviewer that he thought
Obama was “talking white” to win
the election. The Obama campaign
condemned the remark as divisive,
but Nader was unapologetic. He
claims that Obama is trying to “not
threaten the white power structure”, to appear as a safe choice in
order to get elected. “I didn’t mean
that he should ‘talk black’,” says
Nader. “I meant that he should talk
justice.” That is the role Nader has
set for himself, to be the unbending goad of the liberal politician’s
conscience, to push them toward
his notion of “justice”. But his own
inflexibility is precisely what has
driven them away.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Nader is increasingly determined to run precisely because he cannot win, as if to demonstrate the futility of the thing he insists is not futile.Jessica Hill for The National
“I was in front of the Grand
Mosque [in Washington DC] because millions of Muslim Americans have been marginalised by
Obama and McCain,” Nader explained. “McCain because he’s so
belligerent toward Islamic countries, Obama because he doesn’t
want to have any association with
Muslims, because he had a Muslim father and he thinks that it’s a
negative in America to be associated with Muslim Americans. Even
George W Bush stood in front of the
Grand Mosque after September 11
because of the bigotry and hatred
toward totally innocent Muslim
Americans. He went to the mosque
to express the proper sentiments of
tolerance and understanding. But
not Obama, not McCain. What’s
the message to Muslim Americans,
who already suffer indignities and
racial profiling? The message is
‘you’re a second-class citizen.’”
Faisal asked Nader what he would
do if elected – at which point Nader
interrupted him to say inshallah
– to empower the Muslim community? Nader did not equivocate. “I
would repeal the elements of the
Patriot Act that have been used so
discriminatorily. I would not snoop
on them without judicial approval.
I would reach out to them.” This
would include elaborating for the
American people the genius of Islamic civilization, its art and music. Even hummus. “When I was a
kid, if my mother offered hummus
to a friend of mine, they would have
said ‘what is that gooey stuff?’ – now
people love hummus.”
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The next stop on the campaign
was a fundraiser at a nearby restaurant that offers supporters a chance
to have an “intimate conversation”
with the candidate for $100. Nader
leaned against a pool table, the
sounds of a baseball game coming from the restaurant’s bar, and
talked to the dozen or so support-
ers who turn up. Matt Zawisky, Nader’s campaign staffer, tells me that
they are on track to raise $3 million,
which seems like a lot of money until you consider that the Obama juggernaut raised $5 million per day in
September. Between them Obama
and McCain will spend well over a
billion dollars on their race to the
White House. Nader has no such
resources, so he has to make do
with what’s available. A handful of
reporters, invariably local, show up
at his campaign events. He’s gotten
only a single article in The New York
Times all year, when he announced
his candidacy.
As the donors mingled, Zawisky,
in a blue suit and trainers, was
given the difficult task of trying
to wring a little more money from
Nader’s supporters. He began by
asking if there was anyone in the
room who could donate the maximum amount allowable: $2300. In
return they would get the satisfaction of helping spread the word
about the campaign, along with a
signed copy of Unsafe at Any Speed,
the 1965 book that assailed the lax
safety standards at General Motors
and launched Nader to national
fame. Nobody raised a hand, and
there was an awkward silence in
the room. Zawisky dropped the
figure to $1000, conducting what
he called a “reverse auction”. Still
nothing. For $500, a donor gets a
copy of the Nader documentary An
Unreasonable Man. Again, nothing.
He asked if anyone would bid on a
game of pool with the candidate.
Zawisky peppered his pitch with anecdotes from the Life of Ralph, and
worked his way downwards, finally
selling several “Nader 08” T-shirts
emblazoned with the campaign’s
mascot, the buffalo (a symbolic
counterpoint to the elephant and
the donkey) for $50 each.
Zawisky had the harried, exhausted look one might expect of someone who has volunteered to give the
exact same fund-raising speech at
hundreds of events in all 50 states.
(Connecticut is number 42.) Zawisky met Nader over a decade ago,
and has been working with him ever
since on political campaigns and
advocacy projects. He does not have
the glaze-eyed credulity of the zealot, but he believes deeply in Nader’s
message, and believes that a presidential campaign is the best way to
bring their cause into the national
spotlight – even if very few rays of attention fall on their efforts.
It may be political jealousy – or
simply disappointment that the
Democratic nominee isn’t farther
to the left – but the widespread
adulation of Obama seems to have
gotten under Nader’s skin, and he
reserves his harshest words for the
Democratic candidate. “He’s got
a great speech and it can be summarised this way: ‘Hope. Change.
Hope. Change. Hope. Change.’”
Nader swung his head from side to
side like a metronome. “Am I hypnotising you yet?”
Obama’s impressive internet
fund-raising – his campaign claims
3.1 million individual contributors – doesn’t impress Nader, who
points out that big money donors
still make up the bulk of Obama’s
record haul: “Obama has raised
more corporate money, by far, than
McCain. He’s outspent him two to
one.” But perhaps Nader resents
the cold shoulder he’s received
from the Democratic campaign: 20
times in 2007 he tried to meet with
Obama, but was rebuffed. “They
don’t want to hear what I have to
say,” says Nader. “Like why are you
so against impeachment of a president you think has committed high
crimes and misdemeanours? You
were a Constitutional Law lecturer
at the University of Chicago!” But
the impeachment of Bush and
Cheney, like much of Nader’s platform, is political poison to mainstream candidates. When Nader
announced his candidacy, Obama
told reporters, “my sense is that
Mr Nader is somebody who, if you
don’t listen and adopt all of his
policies, thinks you’re not substantive. He seems to have a pretty high
opinion of his own work.”
Nader didn’t do much to close
that rift over the summer, when he
“Tear down this wall before the American people do it for you”: Nader at a rally on
Wall Street earlier this month. Chris Hondros / Getty Images / AFP
Nader’s deep anger at the Democratic Party animates that evening’s
rally, at a high school auditorium
near the University of Connecticut.
In his view, Democratic candidates
have taken the votes of progressives
for granted for decades, because as
long as a Democratic candidate is
slightly better than the Republican,
he’ll get their votes. “He doesn’t
have to give you anything. Every
four years they shave off some from
the right and get more money from
the corporations. Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry. It hasn’t been
a very good winning strategy. The
Democratic Party has become very
good at electing very bad Republicans,” an audacious taunt that suggests Nader, at least, has no regrets
about Florida.
When Nader finishes he calls Zawisky up to drum up donations, the
same pitch as earlier that day. Their
routine is a political campaign
as travelling medicine show, and
whether the ideas Nader offers are a
cure-all for the body politic or snake
oil sold by a huckster may depend
on the listener. Nader is not charismatic in any traditional sense, but
the vision he has for a just society,
however impracticable, is deeply
attractive to certain people. His
friends and associates speak with
reverence about his monastic determination and unwavering moral
compass, and it is these qualities
that have made his advocacy so successful and his political career such
a failure.
The crowd thinned out as volunteers walked around with red buckets, collecting pocket change. During the wide-ranging question and
answer session after his speech an
angry questioner took the microphone. “Bush is the worst president
ever,” he declared, “and Gore is an
environmental activist. How do
you reconcile that with your claims
from 2000?” But Nader never gives
ground on 2000, and he’s not about
to concede now that things might
have been very different. He ran
against Gore as he was then, Nader
said, not the man he’s become.
“Unlike you,” he shot back acidly,
“I am not possessed by retroactive
clairvoyance.”
But he has tried to mend fences
with Gore, in his own way. When
Gore’s global warming exegesis An
Inconvenient Truth was published,
Nader stopped by a bookstore
where his former opponent was doing a reading, and stood in line to
get a copy of the book signed. One
can only imagine the expression
on Gore’s face when he looked up,
pen in hand. As Nader tells it, “he
was very cordial. He knows why he
lost. He wrote a very nice inscription. I congratulated him, and said,
‘How does it feel to be free?’ He said
‘wonderful.’ So basically he was
a better person. It does show that
people when they have the power to
get something done, they’re more
cowardly, and when they are free
they can speak out.”
Nader, in fact, feels he did Gore
a favour of sorts: “He’s become
very rich, on the board of Google.
They gave him stock options, and
he’s done very well.” When Gore
lost to Bush, he had a net worth of
$800,000. Today his personal fortune is estimated to be well above
$100 million. “I don’t get credit for
that, though,” Nader added.
After the rally, David Haseltine,
a student volunteer with the campaign, prepared an empty classroom
to meet with new recruits. It’s not an
easy time to be a campus organiser
for Nader: “The Obamamania is pretty fervent,” Haseltine told me. “When
people say Nader is unelectable, I tell
them we’re working on something
bigger, long term, to build an opposition to the two-party establishment.
They don’t understand why anyone
would want to do that.”
Whether Nader’s is the strategy to
build that opposition, or whether
such opposition is even possible,
is far from clear. If anything, the results of the 2000 election have made
the two-party system even more entrenched. No third-party candidate
has received 10 per cent of the vote
since Ross Perot, a billionaire who
financed his own campaign, won
19 million votes in 1992 and helped
put Bill Clinton in the White House.
The electoral system makes it all
but impossible for a third party to
compete, which seems to be one
rationale for Nader’s perpetual
campaign. The Nader candidacy
becomes a negative feedback loop:
Politics is about winning. A third
party can’t win under the present
system. And therefore Ralph Nader
becomes increasingly determined
to run precisely because he cannot
win, as if to demonstrate the futility
of the thing he insists is not futile
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ten days later, Nader was in New
York City, standing on the steps of
Federal Hall on Wall Street. There
are few places in America more
symbolically freighted. Federal
Hall was the nation’s first capitol,
where George Washington was inaugurated and the Bill of Rights
was passed. A 12-foot statue of
Washington stands on the steps,
looking directly across the street at
the flag-draped façade of the New
York Stock Exchange. The two institutions from which Nader has
spent his entire career demanding
accountability, framed in a single
streetscape.
It was another day of chaos and
fear in the stock market, the Dow
whipsawing 800 points. General
Motors stock was trading lower
than it had when a young Ralph
Nader hitchhiked to Washington to
testify about the company’s safety
record 40 years earlier. “Hercules
teams”, NYPD paramilitary squads
with machine guns and body armor, stood guard by the subway
entrance. Floor traders in mesh
jackets stood outside the security
gates, smoking. Tourists stopped
and gawked, snapping pictures of
the scene on the steps. A Fox News
camera crew set up below Washington’s statue.
A brass band finished up. There
was a giant inflatable pig on the
steps, and someone held a placard with another pig on it, this one
behind bars. A huge banner read
“Socialism Saves Capitalism”, and
a group called Billionaires for Bailouts, dressed in tuxedos, top hats
and evening gowns, held signs that
said “Thanks a Trillion” and “Just
Give Us The Cash”. A man wearing a
striped prisoner’s costume and the
giant papier mache head of the secretary of the treasury, Henry Paulson,
stuffed fake money into his mouth.
Subtle it was not. At a podium in the
middle of all this stood Ralph Nader,
and he wasn’t smiling.
“What we are witnessing,” he
shouted in his deep, slow voice, “is
the corporate destruction of capitalism on the backs of taxpayers.”
He proposed a tax on stock derivative speculation that could raise
$500 billion a year. “They could
pay for their own bailout!” Nader’s
voice grew louder. “Wall Street divides the American people from
control of their own wealth!” And
then, in an ironic echo of Reagan’s
entreaty to Gorbachev: “Tear down
this wall before the American people do it for you!”
The small crowd, almost all of
whom were wearing costumes or
holding banners and signs, erupted in cheers. But this was an event
without an audience: the Nader
supporters there were all participants in his demonstration, and
everyone else – tourists, cops, media, stockbrokers – were watching it like any other sort of street
performance. The traders on their
smoke breaks, many of whom had
just endured the worst few weeks
of their careers, shook their heads
and glowered. One went back
through the security gate into the
stock exchange, and then turned
around, pumped his fist in the air
and screamed “Free Market!”
It was a moment tailor-made for
Nader, but it seemed to capture
a tragic turn in his career: all his
warnings about the collusion between government and corporations had come to pass, as global
markets collapsed and belated government intervention failed. But
what’s the point of saying “I told
you so” when there’s no one willing
to listen?
Political campaigns are about one
thing only: winning. And politics, at
its core, is about the art of compromise. In that sense, Ralph Nader
could never be a politician. He has
framed his life as an epic battle
against any sort of compromise,
and this has made victory impossible. “Pessimism,” Nader likes to
say, “is a vain indulgence of quitters.” But whoever wins on November 4 – and no matter how few votes
Nader receives – one thing seems
certain: he has no intention of quitting anytime soon.
Matthew Power’s work has appeared
in Harper’s, The New York Times,
Wired and many other magazines
and newspapers. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
06
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Friday, October 24, 2008 www.thenational.ae
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review
Beirut, 1983: “There were some guys who stayed on rescue and recovery almost constantly for days, without food or water… but after a couple of days the smell got to be pretty bad so nobody was real hungry.”Courtesy Pierre Sabbagh
Into the crossfire
Twenty-five years ago this week, a shocking suicide attack on the US military compound in
Beirut reshaped the future of the Middle East. Alasdair Soussi talks to the men who were there
As First Lieutenant Glenn Dolphin
slowly opened his eyes, he strained
to focus on the figure of a Marine
captain standing over his bunk in the
Marine Amphibious Unit headquarters at the United States military compound in Beirut. It had just turned
5:45am, and the West Virginia-born
Dolphin was relishing a moment of
stillness and serenity in a city that relentlessly rained bullets and bombs.
Aware, however, that the officer was
calling round in a bid to rouse his
fellow Marines for an informal early
morning exercise session at the Battalion Landing Team (BLT) headquarters, the 25-year-old leatherneck
instinctively rose out of bed.
“I actually sat up, and was ready to
go,” recalls Dolphin, then a member
of the communications section of the
24th Amphibious Unit. “And then I
suddenly thought, ‘you know, I am
tired, I think I’ll just lay back down.’”
The decision saved his life. At
6:22am, on Sunday October 23 1983,
as Dolphin and several hundred of
his comrades slept soundly in their
bunks, the US Marine Corps compound at Beirut International Airport was rocked by an explosion that
scaled new heights in unconventional warfare and decisively reshaped
the future of the Middle East – and
America’s role here – for the next
quarter-century.
“I was sleeping next to a door – a
steel door – which was a supply closet,” recalls Dolphin. “Behind it were
filters for gas masks, hoses and tubing – stuff that used to be for the firefighters at the airport. The blast blew
the steel door through the doorjamb,
hitting me in the back, on the left
side.”
The ferocity of the explosion, centred just 100m away at the Battalion
Landing Team headquarters, almost
sucked the oxygen out of Dolphin’s
lungs. With little time to shield
himself from the hot rush of air that
enveloped his sleeping quarters,
he watched in horror as everything
around him violently sprang to life.
“Everything in our building went
airborne,” remembers Dolphin. “The
glass came out the skylight, concrete
and plaster off the interior – anything
that wasn’t nailed down just took off.
And then, just like magic, and all of a
sudden because of the vacuum, it all
came back again.”
A19-ton lorry laden with explosives
had struck the entrance of the battalion building, seamlessly crashing through the compound’s weak
defences before detonating in the
lobby of the Marine headquarters.
The force of the explosion ripped the
structure from its foundation, levelling its four stories; trees located 370
feet away were shredded and completely exfoliated. 241 US servicemen
died in the rubble.
In 1982, the United States had sent
troops as part of a multinational
peacekeeping force (MNF) meant to
oversee a fragile ceasefire after negotiations ended the siege of Beirut.
Peacekeepers from Italy and France
joined the American contingent in
the unenviable task of keeping order in a land already torn apart by
seven years of war. As Lebanon’s various Christian and Muslim factions
fought a relentless campaign on the
country’s blood-soaked streets, and
Israel laid siege to hostile Palestinian forces following its invasion of
Lebanon in June 1982, the MNF was
dispatched to Beirut to oversee the
evacuation of the PLO and to protect
the inhabitants of Muslim West Beirut from both the Israeli army and
their Lebanese Christian Phalangist
allies. After the successful evacuation of PLO leaders and fighters, the
Marines redeployed to their ships on
September 10. But following the assassination of the Christian Maronite
President-elect Bashir Gemayel – an
ambitious man who used his good
relations with the State of Israel to get
himself elected – an Israeli push into
West Beirut and the Phalangist massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and
Shatila refugee camps, the US sent
the Marines back into Beirut – right
into the middle of Lebanon’s warring
factions.
The American presence in Lebanon
was rife with contradictions. Alexander Haig, Reagan’s first secretary of
state, tacitly gave his approval to the
Israeli invasion of Lebanon – and
the role sought by the US, as the cus-
todian of order in Lebanon and the
promoter of peace in the region, was
severely undermined by the American alliance with Israel; Lebanon’s
Muslim population increasingly
saw Washington as the backers of a
Christian-led government pursuing
American-Israeli interests.
The new government headed by
Gemayel’s brother Amine sought a
formal peace treaty with Israel, the
so-called May 17 Agreement, with
the backing of the US. Syria, the other
country occupying Lebanese territory, vehemently opposed the accord,
and mobilised its allies – both Muslims and anti-Gemayel Christians
– to destroy it. Suddenly, the United
States was faced with an increasingly
volatile political landscape, which
took a rapid turn for the worse in
September, when US warships supporting Lebanese army operations
shelled villages home to Druze,
Shiites and Sunnis, deepening the
American involvement in the war.
As Colonel Timothy J Geraghty, the
commanding officer of the Marine
unit in Beirut, who objected to the
shelling at the time, wrote in a recent
article for Proceedings, the monthly
journal of the US Naval Institute:
“American support removed any lingering doubts of our neutrality, and I
stated to my staff at the time that we
were going to pay in blood for this
decision.”
The American embassy had already
been struck by suicide bombers in
April 1983. But even Geraghty surely
could not have imagined the extent
to which he would be proved correct
in October.
Bloodied, bruised and battered,
Dolphin staggered out of his sleeping
quarters and into a scene of unthinkable carnage. He was unaware that
his spine was fractured. “I looked
down the street towards the BLT,
and it was all smoky, and there was a
lot of wreckage laying about,” he recalls. “And then I saw these Marines,
and they were walking around aimlessly, some completely naked – their
clothes blown off … three Marines I
saw, one with his eye hanging on his
cheek, who were being taken to an aid
station were all torn up. They looked
like they had been sandblasted …
another Marine was on the ground.
His arm was broken and it was just
hanging there. I tried to get a hold of
him, but my back was killing me, and
I said ‘listen kid, you’re going to have
to walk’. And I watched as he walked
barefoot through all the glass.”
Randy Gaddo, a US Marine photojournalist and editor of the forces’
newsletter, the Root Scoop, was just
about to leave for his photo lab on the
third floor of the Headquarters when
the blast tossed him several feet into
the air.
“The BLT was about a minutes
walk from my [sleeping quarters],”
remembers the Wisconsin-born
Gaddo, then a Staff Sergeant in his
late twenties. “As I got ready to leave
my tent, I heard and felt this thud followed by an explosion, which picked
me up threw me back like I was a
After sustaining the
largest loss of life in
a single action since
Vietnam, the United
States limped on for
the remainder of the
year before withdrawing their 1000strong detachment
on February 26,
1984 – an ignoble
end to a muddled
and conflicting
campaign
rag doll…I thought we’d been hit by
a rocket or artillery, so after I got up
I ran outside to check it out, and expected to find a large crater. But as I
looked over towards the barracks, I
saw this big mushroom cloud rising
up…and then as I looked down, I saw
human remains, and that’s when I
knew that something really bad had
happened.”
Both men joined others in the
painstaking rescue and recovery operation that began almost immediately, but, as Gaddo points out, it was
a grim task: “There were some guys
who stayed on rescue and recovery
almost constantly for days, without
food or water…but after a couple of
days the smell got to be pretty bad so
nobody was real hungry.”
Joe Ciokon, a US Navy broadcaster
who was little more than 50 yards
away from the battalion building at
the time of the bombing, also found
rescue and recovery emotionally
draining and not a little disconcerting. “I remember one horrible sight,
of one Marine who was half in and
half out of the building,” recalls
Ciokon. “We couldn’t do anything
– he was on the second deck and the
building had fallen on top of him. We
would see his arm and leg hang out
every morning as we walked by.”
After sustaining the largest loss of
life in a single military action since
Vietnam, the United States limped on
for the remainder of the year before
withdrawing its 1000-strong detachment on February 26, 1984 – an ignoble end to a muddled and conflicting
campaign. Reagan termed the move a
“redeployment” but it was, for many,
nothing less than a retreat. When the
rest of the MNF pulled out shortly
thereafter, the country’s Christianled government was forced to bow
to Syrian pressure and renege on the
May 17 agreement. The Shiite faction
responsible for the bombing, which
formed the beginnings of the powerful resistance movement that is now
Hizbollah, found fertile ground – as
did its regional backer, Iran. Lebanon remained as fractured as ever ,
its territory divided between armed
Shiites, Druze, Maronites, Syrians
and Israelis, .
The bombing marked a critical
turning point for Lebanon and for
America’s position in the region.
Though many Americans now regard
the attack as “the first shot in the War
on Terror”, many political analysts
insist it must be considered in the
context of Lebanon’s bloody civil war
– in which the Americans had found
themselves deeply involved. “The
US troops were viewed by the new
Lebanese resistance forces as part
of the occupation regime and thus a
legitimate military target,” says Karim Makdisi, an Assistant Professor
of Political Studies at the American
University of Beirut. “So, I would say
that in reality this event should be
contextualised as part of the occupation and resistance to occupation;
not a random attack against US interests out of the blue.”
But what the Americans regarded as
a terrorist outrage emboldened the
Iranian-backed Shiite militia, which
could claim to have vanquished the
Americans (as, decades later, they
would claims victory over Israel in
South Lebanon). They had not only
hastened the departure of the MNF,
but had perfected a deadly innovation in asymmetrical warfare: turning the Ammonium Nitrate Fuel Oil
car bomb used to devastating effect
by the Irish Republican Army into a
kamikaze weapon – a car bomb piloted by its suicidal driver through
the gates of lightly-guarded installations.
Stung by his experience in Lebanon, Reagan placed Lebanon on the
political back burner. This, Air Force
Major Raymond L Reyes has written,
“arguably contributed to the Lebanese state’s demise in the 1980s and
the prolonged civil war.”
“The war ended (in 1990) with Syria
entering Lebanon militarily and exercising hegemony over political leaders,” he wrote. “Allowing preferred
violent groups such as Hizbollah to
continue in existence or flourish.”
Alasdair Soussi is a journalist specialising in Middle Eastern affairs. Based
in Beirut and Cairo, he is writing a
book entitled Lebanon: A Land of Consequences.
08
The National
Friday, October 24, 2008 www.thenational.ae
art
th
review
Site
specified
Mona Hatoum’s first retrospective in the Middle East
showcases her genius for making art from and about
the everyday, writes Kaelen Wilson-Goldie reports
Ali Maher is a jovial man with a
booming voice and the physical
presence of a bear. He traces his ancestry back to the Circassians, the
first residents of modern Amman,
who were pushed south into Ottoman lands after being expelled from
the Caucasus. The self-styled “Mayor of Amman”, Maher is a fixture of
Jordanian cultural life – an artist,
architect, member of the Royal Film
Commission and former director of
the Darat al Funun arts foundation.
This term, he is also teaching courses at the University of Jordan. At the
end of a class in mid-October, he
thundered to his students “Go see
Mona! She’s like Zaha Hadid!”
The Mona in question is the artist Mona Hatoum – and “like Zaha
Hadid”, in this case, means a very
big deal indeed. From now until January 22, Hatoum’s work is the subject of a major exhibition at Darat al
Funun. This is not, in and of itself,
noteworthy: since the beginning of
her career in London in the 1980s,
Hatoum has averaged four museum
and gallery shows a year, to say nothing of her ubiquitous presence on
the international biennial circuit.
She has published six monographs,
each packed with essays, and her
press file is the size of an encyclopaedia set. She has won a slew of
awards, honorary degrees, fellowships and residencies.
Hatoum, who was born in Lebanon
to Palestinian parents in 1952, is incontestably the most famous living
artist from the Arab world – yet the
Amman exhibition is important
because Hatoum has had few solo
shows in the Middle East, and she
has never done anything resembling
a retrospective in the region.
The current exhibition features 18
works in a range of media and materials, including videos, sculptures,
textiles, maps, paper cut-outs, ceramics, a chair, a bed, a rug, a spinning brass lantern and a barrier of
sandbags sprouting shoots of grass.
Hatoum often toys with the notion
of the uncanny, and she has mastered the art of making the familiar
strange. Warfare and conflict loom
large in the show, but the delicacy
and softness of the works – some
made from tissue paper, cotton fabric or the dainty branches of a willow
tree – upends one’s encounter with
the kind of hardware typically associated with invasion, occupation
and regime change.
Many of the works are new and
were created either alone or in collaboration with local artisans during Hatoum’s one-month residency
in Amman. The artist spent much of
September producing new pieces
in the run-up to the exhibition, but
a few of the works also date back to
Untitled (Cut-Out 1), by Mona Hatoum
the 1980s and 1990s, culled from the
permanent collection of Darat al Funun, which has been actively acquiring Hatoum’s work since 2004.
The show is only Hatoum’s third
solo outing in the Middle East – following a 1996 exhibition in Jerusalem and a show in Cairo in 2006. It
is the first to put her career in perspective. And with the forthcoming
publication of a bilingual catalogue,
it is also the first to be accompanied
by Arabic texts.
But the real importance of the exhibition has little to do with who she
is (a famous artist of Arab origin)
and much to do with what she does
(produces ruthlessly contemporary artworks that create meaning
as powerfully through their physical presence and material form as
through their intellectual or theoretical content). One can make a list
of Hatoum’s major works and divide
them into certain themes – such as
the body, intimacy, confinement,
domesticity, Palestine and the horrors of war – but this doesn’t really
tell you what her work is like. One
can categorise Hatoum’s pieces by
type – maps, kitchen utensils, furniture, small-scale models of institutional structures, weaponry, toy
soldiers and hair, lots of hair – and
this might give you a slightly better
sense of how she works. But most
telling are her tactics – the way she
translates an object into an artwork
and at the same time thoroughly
destabilises its meaning. (You, the
viewer, are likewise unsettled.)
Hatoum once made a welcome mat
out of thousands of stainless steel
pins, a wheelchair with knife blades
instead of handles, two suitcases
tied together with locks of hair, a
string telephone set where the paper
cups are replaced by carved marble
versions labelled “east” and “west”
in Arabic, the deep difficulty of communication between them quite
clear.
Hatoum also plays with space and
manipulates the senses. One of her
most famous works, The Light at the
End, from 1989, looks like an ode
to minimalism – a neat grid of light
rods arranged at the end of a passage
whose perspective is exaggerated.
Only as you approach do you realise, as your body suddenly warms,
that the lights are in fact bare heating elements that would burn you
severely if you got too close. She
has made a map of the world out of
marbles arranged on a floor, which
makes you feel childlike, then monstrous. As you step toward the piece,
your movements inevitably wreck
the contours of entire countries and
continents.
Still, in many ways the critical
reception of Hatoum’s work over
the past 20 years – largely positive
but overwhelmingly preoccupied
with the artist’s origins – has been
symptomatic of the art world’s increasing fascination with identity
politics in general and with Middle
Eastern art after September 11 in
particular. Countless reviews and
interviews have tried to use the facts
of Hatoum’s biography and background to make sense of her work,
despite her forceful insistence that
this approach is misguided.
“I dislike interviews,” Hatoum told
the artist Janine Antoni in a conversation for the New York-based
magazine Bomb in 1998. “I’m often
asked the same question: What in
your work comes from your own culture? As if I have a recipe and I can
actually isolate the Arab ingredient,
the woman ingredient, the Palestinian ingredient. People often expect
tidy definitions of otherness, as if
identity is something fixed and easily definable.”
Even when Edward Said praised her
work by writing that “no one has put
the Palestinian experience in visual
terms so austerely and yet so playfully, so compellingly and at the same
moment so allusively,” Hatoum responded by telling the BBC: “People
interpret these works depending on
their own experience, so his experience of exile and displacement is
that of the Palestinians, so he read
specifically the Palestinian issue in
my work, but it’s not so specifically
to do with the Palestinian issue.
It could be related to a number of
people who are exiled, who are displaced, who suffer a kind of cultural
or political oppression of any kind.
The language of art is slippery and
cannot speak in very direct terms.
You cannot say this equals that. The
meanings are never fixed.”
Early in her career, Hatoum focused on performances and videos
that were often either overtly political or extremely intimate in tone.
Two of the works on view at Darat
al Funun – Road Works, from 1985,
‘
The language of
art is slippery and
cannot speak in
very direct terms.
You cannot say this
equals that. The
meanings are never
fixed
Untitled (Cut-Out 2), by Mona Hatoum
Mona Hatoum’s Still Life, a collection of some 50 pastel-coloured ceramic grenades. Images courtesy Darat al Funun
and the mesmerising Measures of
Distance, from 1988 – exemplify this
stage in her work. The first is a video
that follows Hatoum as she steps
barefoot through a crowded street
dressed in military gear with a pair
of army-issue boots tied by the laces
to her ankles. With each awkward
step, she drags her boots behind
her, a reference, perhaps, to the burden of a country’s wars being carried
by its citizens.
Measures of Distance consists
of old colour photographs that
Hatoum took of her mother taking a
shower in Beirut in 1981. Laid over
these pictures, which are washed in
a warm glow of pinks and blues, are
the Arabic-scripted, handwritten
lines of letters that her mother sent
her when she moved to London. As
these evocative and elusive layers
mesh and mingle on screen, one
hears Hatoum’s mournful voice as
she narrates English translations
of her mother’s missives. Beneath
this audio track is another: the original conversation in Arabic that took
place in the bathroom seven years
earlier. The primary narration and
secondary conversation fade in and
out, occasionally intersecting when
the letters refer directly back to that
day. Strangely beautiful and beautifully strange, Measures of Distance
palpably influenced a generation of
artists who came into their own in
the 1990s.
“When I encountered Mona’s
work, it was the only modern reference coming from somewhere close
to where I wanted to be,” says Akram
Zaatari, an artist from Lebanon who
included Measures of Distance in a
series he programmed for the Oberhausen film festival in 2006. “The
impact of the encounter was huge,”
he says, “particularly with a work
such as Measures of Distance, where
the issue of the body, the personal,
intimate banality and the medium
that is video were all being challenged equally.”
Reflecting briefly on her work while
speaking among the ruins of a sixthcentury Byzantine church on the
grounds of Darat al Funun, Hatoum
says: “I was trying to work through a
string of metaphors.” She ended up
with the body as a metaphor for society – in one live performance, viewers
pulled on a seemingly disembodied
ponytail and heard Hatoum scream;
another, titled Under Siege, from
1982, involved her spending seven
hours squirming naked in a vat of
clay. Such works, which depend on
viewers empathising with the artist
or on seeing themselves substituted
in the body of someone else, had
their moment in the 1970s, but they
have rarely been effective, beyond
producing shock value, since then.
In her last major video installation,
Corps étranger, from 1994, Hatoum
inserted an endoscopic camera into
her own body and recorded its passage through her intestines, as if she
had reached an extreme but logical
endpoint to a line of artistic inquiry.
Hatoum rarely makes videos
anymore, and performances have
dropped out of her practice completely. Her work now involves a
seemingly endless schedule of residencies in which she immerses herself in a context and makes entire
bodies of work informed by the local materials she discovers and the
local artisans and craftsmen with
whom she collaborates. In Jerusalem, she worked with soap manufacturers to produce a map of the
Palestinian territories according
to the interim Oslo agreements. In
Cairo, she sought the expertise of
carpet-makers and metal-smiths.
Such efforts give Hatoum’s work a
restless and nimble, yet also rooted,
quality. Moreover, they seem to feed
her desire to escape the art world on
occasion and enjoy a more hands-on
approach to her work.
“I much prefer these situations,
which are not fantastic for my career, for instance, like going to an
obscure little gallery is Cairo is not
going to sort of advance my career in
any way, but that is the kind of situation that inspires me and maybe will
make me carry on making new ideas
and new works,” she told the BBC
in an interview. “I have to show my
work in museums and I have to be in
those big touring shows [but] I find
those residencies in obscure little
places much more exciting.”
This approach has also given
Hatoum the means to reconnect
with the Arab world. “The first time
I showed in an Arab country, after I
went to England and really became
an artist there, I sort of felt like I had
alienated myself from the context of
art in the Arab world,” she says. “In
Jerusalem in 1996, this was my fear:
How were people going to react?
Were they going to say: ‘You call this
art?’”
In Amman, Hatoum worked with
the Iraq al Amir Women’s Co-operative Society – a 10-year-old community development and economic
empowerment project in Wadi Seer
that encourages women to make,
package and promote their own
handicrafts – to create “Witness,” a
small-scale ceramic replica of two of
the four Martyrs Square Statues located in the heart of Beirut, and Still
Life, a collection of some 50 pastelcoloured ceramic grenades.
Hatoum’s exhibition at Darat al
Funun explores the imagery and
iconography of war – toy soldiers
in the installation Misbah, the tiny
sculpture Round and Round and two
untitled paper cut-outs; grenades
in Still Life and Medal of Dishonour;
barbed wire replacing bedsprings
in the ghostly installation Interior
Landscape; and bomb sites delicately replicated on maps of Beirut,
Baghdad and Kabul in the series 3-D
Cities.
But it is her stirring evocation of
Palestine that probably gripped
Hatoum’s viewers in Amman most.
The work Keffieh displays the iconic
scarf, dramatically draped, with
waves of a woman’s hair woven
into the pattern. Interior Landscape
features a well-worn, slightly soiled
pillow tossed onto that barbed wire
bed, the map of Palestine stitched
gingerly into the surface with more
threads of hair, lending the work an
aspect of extreme fragility.
“Millions of Palestinians have no
hope of returning to Palestine anytime soon,” says Ala Younis, an artist
from Jordan who is also part of Darat
al Funun’s core creative team. “Yet
still this dream of going back lives in
our minds. Hair, tears and dreams
are what we leave on our pillows,
and I loved how she linked these
things together in the hair-embroidered map.” More than biography
or background, personal experience
or exploration of her own history, it
is Hatoum’s empathy as an artist,
her ability to reach outside of herself
and engage with others, that gives
her work its power.
Before this exhibition, Younis
notes, “few people knew Mona’s
work in Amman.” A few days after
the show opened, a young woman,
possibly a student, poked her head
into Darat al Funun’s office and
asked if there was any writing on
Hatoum’s work she could read.
Younis looked up from behind a
barricade of books and smiled.
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie reports from
Beirut for The National.
The National
Friday, October 24, 2008 www.thenational.ae
review
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books
Of human
bondage
In Toni Morrison’s new novel,
17th-century America plays host to
the same oppression as left-behind
Europe, writes Philip Weinstein
It has been five years since Toni Morrison’s last novel, Love, appeared to
a chorus of mixed reviews. No living
writer arouses greater expectations
than Morrison, and ever since she
won the Nobel Prize in 1993, none is
more scrutinised. Love struck many
as a bewildering departure. Lacking
both the majestic historical sweep
of Paradise (1999) and the searing
analysis of slavery in Beloved (1987),
the barely 200 pages of Love seemed
more like a virtuoso extension of
the hyper-cool, self-consciously
arch narrative voice Morrison first
employed in Jazz (1993). It read
as a weave of brilliantly arresting
sentences, embroidering a plot of
1940s Jersey shore hotels and affairs
that no reader could easily follow.
Now appears Morrison’s much
awaited new novel, A Mercy – both as
slender as Love and historically ambitious as Paradise. Set at the end
of the 17th century in a plague and
weather-ridden American northeast that ranges from Maryland
(Catholic but king-owned) to Pennsylvania and further north, A Mercy
delivers a multi-voiced mediation
on the beauty and brutality of the
entire New World experiment.
The novel asks the same questions
Morrison first posed in her 1992 essay collection, Playing in the Dark:
what did it mean to flee Europe for
America’s quasi-savage shores?
What catharses or disasters occurred when the different players in
the New World drama encountered
each other? Catholics, Baptists,
Anabaptists and Presbyterians edgily negotiate with each other here,
but these differences are nothing
compared to the four cardinal ones
dominating this novel: those between natives and “Europes”, indentured and wealthy, women and
men, enslaved and free.
To make these differences indelible for the reader, Morrison renders
them in the untranslated vernaculars of the players involved. Thus the
novel opens abruptly, without even
a chapter title: “Don’t be afraid. My
telling can’t hurt you in spite of what
I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark – weeping perhaps
or occasionally seeing the blood
once more – but I will never again
unfold my limbs to rise up and bare
teeth.” A cryptic sentence: violence
has occurred (the details of which
will not become clear until novel’s
end), and the character responsible
for the violence – a creature with human limbs but bared, animal-like
teeth – is granted (so far) neither
The beleaguered
characters of A
Mercy emerge as
damaged but not
necessarily undone
name nor motive.
This opening typifies the most
striking dimension of A Mercy’s
narrative procedure: its insinuated
logic always lodges ahead of you,
operative yet unexplained. You read
continuously a step behind – yet
compelled by patterns increasingly
in play, tantalisingly on the verge
of legibility. Rather than use one
narrator to co-ordinate and clarify
her materials, Morrison tells her
story through the perspective of six
different characters. The novel unfolds entirely by way of their localized takes on things. We register, in
their own accents, only what each
of them knows, feels, fears, remembers or desires.
The 12 chapters follow one another harshly, without transition,
as though the passage from one
individual’s inner world to another’s were untranslatable – as indeed
it is. Thus the reader is pressed to
engage A Mercy as the New World’s
17th-century populace had to engage each other: as impenetrably
different beings thrown together in
a common space. This arrangement
becomes all the more disturbing
when the empowered abuse (rape,
beat, imprison, or torture) the powerless, unconcerned with differences in human orientation, with how
it feels to be on the receiving end.
Here is Lina, the native American
servant, terrified that, now that her
master (Sir) has died of the pox, Mistress might perish as well:
“Don’t die, Miss. Don’t. Herself,
Sorrow, a newborn and maybe Florens – three unmastered women
and an infant out here, alone, belonging to no one, became wild
game for anyone. None of them
could inherit; none was attached to
a church or recorded in its books.
Female and illegal, they would
be interlopers, squatters, if they
stayed on after Mistress died, subject to purchase, hire, assault, abduction, exile.”
Lina grasps the New World’s
masculine prerogative, the ways
in which its organising institutions – ecclesiastical and civic
– blind themselves to the existence
of women like her. The word “unmastered” denotes the opposite of
what it first suggests: not gloriously
free, but lamentably deprived of the
protective “master”. “Freedom” is
the worst thing that could happen
to these women; “freedom” leaves
them legally exposed to repurchase,
rape, kidnapping. Morrison uses a
different single word to make a similarly ironic point elsewhere. When
the possessor of an indentured
male decides to “re-lease” him,
the servant is not freed, but leased
again. To a degree that few readers
will anticipate, the New World of A
Mercy emerges as vertical and stratified, not horizontal and open. It is a
classed, gendered and racial world
of the encumbered and the unencumbered – a place disturbingly
similar, in its bleakly rigid demarcations, to the Old World that had supposedly been escaped.
It is a man’s world, and even the
most sympathetic of Morrison’s
men – Jacob Vaark, Sir, the main
The New World of A Mercy is disturbingly similar, in its bleakly rigid demarcations, to the Old World that had supposedly been escaped. Corbis
male character – is unable to avoid
the corruptions that unfetteredness
dangles in his path. Determined to
pursue the American dream, Jacob
advances from orphanhood to unanticipated inheritance, from Jeffersonian farming to slave-exploiting
rum production in Barbados and
finally to building his third house
– this time, the big house. His wife
Rebekka begs him to desist. “What
a man leaves behind is what a man
is,” he rebukes her. It comes as no
surprise that Morrison has Jacob
die of the pox before setting foot inside his mansion.
A Mercy resembles Paradise in its
intent to explore the darker consequences of the American dream of
beginning anew, becoming free. But
the shaping novel here is Morrison’s
masterpiece, Beloved, the haunting
story of Sethe, a slave mother who,
under unbearable pressure, murders her own daughter rather than
allow her to be returned to slavery.
Beloved brings slavery to the fore as
the American tragedy lodged at the
core of Morrison’s imagination, and
supplies the uncanny voice Morrison needed to probe it. Here is the
ghost-child Beloved, speaking the
almost unspeakably mutilated history of her people:
“my face is coming I have to have
it I am looking for the join I am
loving my face so much . . . I want to
join she whispers to me . . . I reach
for her chewing and swallowing
she touches me . . . she chews and
swallows me I am gone now I am
her face my own face has left me I
see me swim away . . . a hot thing I
want to be the two of us I want the
join”
This prose – the most lyrical Morrison has ever produced – conveys an
unhealing trauma of abandonment.
In floating phrases, free of syntactic
bounding or logical sequence, it
intimates something of slavery’s
extraordinary damage to black psychic cohesion. The black child has
lost its mother – by violence, suicide, or sale – and cannot surmount
this scarring. Faceless, her mother
trapped in the waters with her reflected face, Beloved seeks only
“the join”, a renewal of the parentchild fusing that was burst asunder
before individuation could occur.
Orphaned inexplicably, she is unhinged – and dangerous.
The orphaned daughter in A
Mercy is named Florens. Her narrative launches the book and gives
it its rhythm (six of the 12 chapters
belong to her). Gradually we learn
that, under pressure similar to what
Sethe endured in Beloved – unable to
protect both her infant boy and her
older daughter – Florens’s enslaved
mother encouraged a white trader
(Jacob Vaark) to take Florens away in
payment for her owner’s debt. This
disowning emerges as early as the
first page, when Florens imagines
her mother “standing hand in hand
with her little boy.” It is a wound to
Florens’s psyche that cannot be
borne, and Morrison makes sure
that it replays – as memory, menace
and dream – throughout her chapters. Here is the dream:
“I dream a dream that dreams
back at me ... I notice I am at the
edge of a lake. The blue of it is more
than sky, more than any blue I know
... I am loving it so, I can’t stop. I
want to put my face deep there ...
I make me go nearer, lean over ...
Right away I take fright when I see
my face is not there. Where my face
should be is nothing ... Where I ask,
where is my face.”
Though the spacing here is normal, the syntax and style unmistakably reprise Beloved’s uncanny
mode of speech. Florens thus lets
us glimpse (as Beloved did) an immense history of racial wounding.
Through her we encounter another
of Morrison’s most abiding concerns: the plight of traumatically
abandoned children. In A Mercy,
the act of orphaning occurs repeatedly. It darkens the past of the native woman Lina, the crazed girl
Sorrow, Jacob’s bought white wife
Rebekka, as well as the plight of the
indentured and enslaved. Someone
originary, parental, has disowned
them all – had to or chose to – and
they cannot bear the injury, nor
their own helplessness when made
to re-enact it as mothers surviving
the death of their own infants. “Sorrow never forgot the baby breathing
water every day, every night, down
all the streams of the world.”
Lest you think this novel is relentlessly lyrical or poetic, let me assure
you it is also suffused with Morrison’s no-nonsense vocal authority. Here is Rebekka, Jacob’s wife,
reflecting on her husband’s sexual
timidity and his incapacity to imagine what she went through as an
impoverished child in Europe, then
in the hold of a ship with other indigents and prostitutes, making her
way to her proprietor/husband:
“He seemed shy at first, so she
thought he had not lived with eight
people in a single room garret; had
not grown so familiar with small
cries of passion at dawn that they
were like the songs of peddlers. It
was nothing like what Dorothea
[a prostitute on the boat] had described or the acrobatics that made
Lydia [another prostitute] hoot, nor
like the quick and angry couplings
of her parents. Instead she felt not
so much taken as urged. ‘My northern star’, he called her.”
The beleaguered characters of A
Mercy emerge as damaged but not
necessarily undone. “Whatever obstacles they faced,” Rebekka muses
about the prostitutes encountered
in the hold of the ship, “they manipulated the circumstances to their
advantage and trusted their own
imagination.” “The only grace they
could have,” Baby Suggs tells her
congregation in Beloved, “was the
grace they could imagine.”
Glimpses, not plenary vision; an
occasional measure of human generosity, not godlike deliverance.
At novel’s end, one of the indentured men, fearing worse troubles
to come as Jacob’s family splinters
after the master’s death, reflects on
something said to him by a preacher of his childhood. “Remembering how the curate described what
existed before Creation, Scully saw
dark matter out there, thick, un-
knowable, aching to be made into
a world.” Primordial dark matter,
there before the Creation: much
of A Mercy explores the texture and
tensions of 17th-century America
as a dark region in several senses
pre-Independent. Against such
darkness Morrison envisages nothing so grand as divine mercy, but instead, now and then, the unpredictable human gesture of “a mercy” – a
shoulder to lean on, a home to sleep
in, a master stirred to care. This
slender novel of 167 pages, laden
with characters whose stories are
launched but not fully developed,
frustrates and compels. Its promise
is immense: gestures aching to be
made into a world.
Philip Weinstein is a professor of
English at Swarthmore College and
the author of What Else But Love?
The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and
Morrison
A Mercy
Toni Morrison
Chatto & Windus
Dh102
09
10
The National
Friday, October 24, 2008 www.thenational.ae
review
th
98.2
Percentage of Yes votes in Iran’s 1979 referendum
on the creation of an Islamic republic
Chaos theory
Olivier Roy’s latest challenge to
conventional wisdom demolishes
the myth of a monolithic Islam
united against the West, writes
Fawaz Gerges
At the peak of the Islamist revolutionary moment in the early 1990s,
many western pundits warned that
the Islamic tide was unstoppable
and likely to sweep away failed
socialist and nationalist Arab or
Muslim regimes. One of the few
dissenting voices was Olivier Roy,
a French sociologist and an authority on religiously-based social movements. Challenging the
prevalent conventional wisdom,
Roy published a sensational book
in 1994, The Failure of Political Islam, which argued that the Islamist revolution was already a spent
force and, more important, an intellectually and historically bankrupt one.
According to Roy, Islamist movements offered neither a concrete
political-economic program nor a
new model and vision for society:
the slogan “Islam is the solution”
could not resolve Muslims’ developmental crises. Nowhere was the
Islamists’ failure more blatant,
noted Roy, than in their inability to
go beyond Islam’s founding texts,
be self-critical and overcome traditional divisions and narrow sectarian loyalties.
Roy asserted that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolutionary Iran,
often celebrated as a pioneering Islamist project, made two key mistakes. Rather than reaching out
to the entire ummah, or Muslim
community, it immediately locked
itself into a Shiite ghetto by limiting its appeal to coreligionists, and
it quickly reverted to an ultraconservative social model that echoed
Saudi Arabia’s own brand of Sunni
puritanism. The only remnant of
Khomeini’s vision of a new pan-Islamism was the rhetoric. The radicals hoped to create a new regional
order based on Islam, but the hard
logic of history, power, states, sectarianism, ethnicity and borders
proved much more enduring than
Islamists acknowledged in their
propaganda.
Although Roy was wrong about
the failure of political Islam, his
hypothesis engendered a big debate among scholars, activists
and policymakers. He was right to
point out that efforts by militant Islamists like Egyptian Islamic Jihad
and the Egyptian Islamic Group,
along with their Algerian counterparts, to foment widespread revolution were a failure. But he underestimated the durability of political Islam as a social and political
force to be reckoned with in many
Arab and Muslim societies.
A decade later, in Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah,
Roy sought to understand and explain how conservative “neofundamentalism” – which aims primarily at Islamising society from the
Three traumas mark
the contemporary
history of the
Middle East, and
none of them has
anything to do with
Islam as such
bottom up – superseded revolutionary Islamism, whose goal is to
capture political power and Islamise society by autocratic fiat from
the top down. Roy documents how
versions of this neofundamentalism have been spreading among
uprooted Muslim youths, particularly the children and grandchildren of Muslims who migrated to
the West. These new fundamentalists advocate multiculturalism,
but only as a means of rejecting
efforts to integrate into western
society. And like their coreligionists living in the West, even Muslims in the Middle East and parts
of Asia may feel like members of a
besieged minority because of the
sweeping changes brought on by
westernisation and globalisation.
Sometimes, you really can’t go
home again.
In Globalised Islam, Roy addressed two main issues: post-Islamism and the global dispersion
of Islam across modern nationstates. Roy’s “global Muslims”
are those who have settled permanently in the West, and the
neofundamenalists who distance
themselves from a given national
Muslim culture and stress their
membership in a worldwide community of believers.
Once again Roy turns received
wisdom on its head. He argues
that, despite the backlash by radicals, the Muslim world itself is going through a process of transformation and secularisation, parallel to the re-Islamisation of daily
life in countries like Saudi Arabia
and Iran. “The real secularists,”
Roy writes, “are the Islamists and
neofundamentalists, because they
want to bridge the gap between religion and a secularised society.”
“Islam is experiencing secularisation,” he concludes, “but in the
name of fundamentalism.”
For Roy, the root causes of the
social upheaval roiling the Muslim world and the jihadist revolt
against the West lie in the spreading and deepening westernisation
and globalisation of Muslim societies, particularly in the past 30
years. Many Muslims are anxious
about the loss of their Islamic identity and the encroachment of alien
western ideas about education,
pop culture, and women’s rights.
The tactics of al Qa’eda, Roy asserts, are grounded not in Islamic
tradition but in more recent European radical, leftist and ThirdWorldist movements: bin Ladenism, in this sense, represents both a
rupture with mainstream Islam and
an import from the West. Roy’s analysis of these revolutionary Islamists
parts ways with the lazy western perception that these people are simply
deeply traditional types who seek
to impose a centuries-old Islam on
modern societies.
But Roy greatly exaggerated the
role of uprooted Muslims living
in the West as the driving force behind jihadism. To support his thesis, Roy cites the case of al Qa’eda’s
jihadists, expatriates who choose
to fight for an imaginary ummah
rather than their homelands. He
suggests that the Egyptians, Algerians, Yemenis and Saudis who follow bin Laden’s siren song made a
conscious decision to wage jihad
against the West, not their local
rulers. But throughout the 1970s,
1980s and 1990s militant Islamists
launched a fierce assault against
their own rulers. It was only when
their onslaught ran out of steam
that they decided to target the
United States and its allies. These
local jihadists, like Ayman al Zawahiri, paid lip service to the ummah,
but their first aim was to capture
power in their native lands; the
same is true of bin Laden.
Now, in a slim volume titled The
Politics of Chaos in the Middle East,
Roy convincingly argues that there
is no “geostrategy of Islam” that
The Politics of Chaos in the
Middle East
Olivier Roy
C Hurst & Co
Dh78
The only remnant of Khomeini’s vision of a new pan-Islamism, Roy contends, is the rhetoric. Sygma / Corbis
would explain all present conflicts,
from Palestine to bin Laden to the
riots in Paris suburbs: it is a “selffulfilling prophecy for it transforms an imagined situation into
a policy and therefore gives substance to this essentialist dogma.”
It is a policy-orientated book that
lacks the analytical and scholarly
depth of his previous texts. But it
offers a critical commentary on the
current debate raging in western
capitals about the War on Terror,
Iraq, and the weight of Islam in the
political process.
Roy’s goal is to demolish the
myth of a monolithic Islam united
against the Christian West. The
claim that the Muslim world is
at war with the West is a fantasy,
writes Roy. This “Muslim world”
does not exist except as an ideological construct: most of the conflicts raging in the Middle East pit
Muslims against Muslims.
Roy stresses the importance of local contexts and internal tensions
and cleavages in fuelling instability
and chaos in the Middle East. In an
elegant survey of the various local
conflicts destabilising the region,
he demonstrates that each has its
own history and dynamics, independent of Islam or great power
intervention: “Each local conflict
has it own history and follows its
own course, the most striking examples being the rivalry between
Iran and Iraq, which echoes the
border battle between the Persian
and Ottoman empires, or Pakistan
in its endless quest for legitimacy
and territory, the Palestinian and
Israeli peoples’ difficulty in making the transition from existential
to territorial conflict.”
The driving force behind the
spread of social and political chaos in the Middle East is not Islam,
notes Roy, but deeper undercurrents of national, ethnic, and tribal rivalries and uneven processes
of state-led modernisation in poor
and traditional societies. The critical question in Roy’s work is the
role of Islam in a newly global context, and the relationship between
Islamic publics and notionally Islamic states. What lies at the centre of Roy’s writing is this very relationship between Islam and the
state, and the problematic nature
of many constructed Middle Eastern states, with their lines drawn
haphazardly by colonial Britain after the end of the First World War.
In his view, three fault lines, or
traumas, mark the contemporary
history of the Arab Middle East,
and none of them has anything to
do with Islam as such; rather they
arise from the translation of the
Arab identity into political terms:
the first trauma, in 1918, was the
collapse of the project to build a
pan-Arab nation out of the ruins of
the Ottoman Empire, as promised
by the British; the second is the establishment of the state of Israel
in the heart of the Arab world and
the subsequent Arab defeats at the
hands of the small Jewish state;
and the third the destruction of
the balance between Shi’ism and
Sunnism and the Shia revival.
Although Roy is correct to draw
attention to the internal and local
roots of chaos in the Middle East,
he underestimates the role of great
powers in fuelling regional con-
flicts and fighting wars-by-proxy.
Time and again external players
have internationalised local disputes and exacerbated tensions.
While local conflicts do have their
own independent dynamics, it is
misleading to neglect their interconnectedness: the Palestine-Israel conflict intrudes on and intersects with other regional problems, producing further social and
political chaos, and the war in Iraq
has had the same effect.
It is also surprising that in his effort to situate the conflicts in the
Middle East in their own context,
Roy falls into the trap of dismissing
Islam as a key factor in the grammar
and sociology of Arab politics. He
has little to say about why Islam is
the only viable discourse of opposition and an effective mobilisational
tool against both western influence
in the Middle East and authoritarian Arab and Muslim rulers. Obviously, Islam matters and matters
greatly; it resonates with Muslims.
Islamists or religiously-orientated
activists are the dominant force in
several key Muslim countries.
But Roy’s broader argument
makes sense: the American “global war on terror” erased distinctions, nuances, differences and
conceptual boundaries between
al Qa’eda-style terrorists, Islamists proper (those who try to build
Islamic political institutions),
fundamentalists who want to live
under sharia law, and cultural
conservatives who advocate communal autonomy under multiculturalism. These latter groups, as
Roy observes, do not represent an
existential threat to their societies
to the West.
Driven by ideology and a messianic zeal to restructure Arab and
Muslim societies and politics,
the Bush foreign policy team lost
sight of ends and means, and ignored the self-limiting nature of
al Qa’eda, which remains a fringe
element and not a viable social
movement: it does not possess the
capacity for large-scale social and
political mobilisation.
Despite its bloody tactics, Roy
reminds readers that al Qa’eda’s
violence has no strategic orientation to give political direction to
its activities because the group
possesses no lasting institutions
or political roots: “al Qa’eda is in
essence a deterritorialised, global
organisation, relatively distanced
from the Middle East issues, with
no political roots in the Muslim
populations.”
Similarly, according to Roy, although moderate Islamist movements have more political traction, they also run up against their
limits: the failure of the Islamist
political model in Iran, Sudan and
Afghanistan, and the fact that they
must consistently push beyond an
Islamist agenda in order to maintain political momentum in any
national arena.
Western states’ inability to distinguish between different types
of Islamised politics leads directly
to impotence and compounds failure. According to Roy, America’s
enemies, like the Taliban and al
Qa’eda, have been the beneficiaries of these shortsighted and
sweeping policies. “It is Washington’s bitterest enemy, Iran, that
has gained the most from this new
situation, which is likely to lead to
further confrontations. Presented
as the precondition for the eradication of the causes of terrorism,
the military intervention in Iraq
has proved to be a fiasco, which
and has played into the hands of
America’s designated enemies.”
The only intelligent way out, Roy
notes, is for western diplomacy
to engage serious Islamist political movements such as Hizbollah
and Hamas, and to treat them as
rational interlocutors and legitimate representatives of sizeable
segments of their publics. “The
refusal to distinguish between
movements which are primarily
political,” he writes, “and others
which are purely terrorist makes
action impossible.”
For while Roy argues conclusively
that chaos in the region cannot be
blamed on some mythic clash between Islam and the West – and
that Western interventions have
often worsened matters, The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East
presents rational choices that the
West can take to arrest the spread
of further disorder. We can only
hope that future American administrations will heed them.
Fawaz A Gerges is professor of International Affairs and Middle Eastern
Studies at Sarah Lawrence University, New York. His most recent books
are Journey of the Jihadist: Inside
Muslim Militancy and The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global.
12
The National
Friday, October 24, 2008 www.thenational.ae
out now
th
review
" paperback of the week
A book of evidence
If you’d any doubt that genre snobbery
remains alive and kicking in English-language literature, the hoo-ha surrounding
this year’s Man Booker Prize longlist announcement would have been confirmation enough. Hidden among the 13 nominees, sandwiched between Salman Rushdie’s latest and Aravind Adiga’s debut, was
Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44, a tale of exile and
idealism set against the petrified backdrop
of Stalinist Russia. At its heart is a brutal
child murder, and this is what made its inclusion so controversial: not only is it gripping and impressively well crafted, it also
happens to be a thriller. In the end, Child 44
did not make the final cut, but the debate it
whipped up turned out to be the high point
in an otherwise dull contest.
John Banville, who won the 2005 Man
Booker Prize for The Sea, has published
three novels since collecting his award. All
have been thrillers and none, unsurprisingly, has appeared under his own name.
Instead, their spines bear the catchy nom
de plume Benjamin Black.
The Silver Swan features his reluctant
sleuth, Quirke. A rumpled pathologist in
1950s Dublin, Quirke is burdened with
all the emotional baggage that you expect
from the hero of a crime novel. Having
lost Sarah, the woman he loved, to another
man, he married her sister, Delia. When she
died in childbirth, he handed his daughter,
Phoebe, over to Sarah and her husband,
letting the girl grow up believing them
Black’s Dublin is a rainy,
soulful metropolis in which
violence lurks in unlikely
places. A bunch of violets,
for instance, looks like
‘some small, many-headed
creature that had been
accidentally strangled’
!
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on television
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*
The Silver Swan
Benjamin Black
Picador
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make you catch your breath, so deft is their
beauty, stuff does actually happen. Two
people are murdered, punches are thrown,
blood is spilt and romance flares up. The
protagonists seem mystified to find themselves ensnared it in all, questioning each
new twist and turn as if they had wandered
into the wrong novel.
Black’s Dublin is a rainy, soulful metropolis in which violence lurks in unlikely places. A bunch of violets, for instance, looks
like “some small, many-headed creature
that had been accidentally strangled.” And
though its visuals are sepia-toned, it is a
place of vivid scents.
Ultimately, it is not Quirke who solves the
crime but a deceptively plodding policeman named Hackett. Once revealed, the
answer seems stunningly obvious. But by
that point, Black has reeled you into a far
larger drama – the drama of a man and his
city – such that the novel’s close feels less
an ending than a pause. Here’s hoping that
Black doesn’t let Banville back to his writing desk just yet.
2
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to be her parents. Now that Sarah is also
dead and 22-year-old Phoebe has learnt
the truth, Quirke is trying on the role of father. Meanwhile, his former mentor, a man
whose career he once tried to wreck, is on
his deathbed. As if that weren’t enough, he
is also struggling to stay on the wagon, having finally given up drinking.
The novel opens with a young woman’s
body being fished from the sea – an apparent suicide. Deirdre Hunt was a beautiful redhead who married one of Quirke’s
old college acquaintances. Using the alias
Laura Swan, she also ran a thriving beauty
salon. When Quirke performs the autopsy,
he spots a tiny puncture mark on Deirdre’s
arm. Possessed by an “itch to cut to the
quick of things, to delve into the dark of
what was hidden – to know,” he eventually
unearths blackmail, addiction and the truth
behind a mysterious “spiritual healer.”
Banville’s writing under his own name
is distinguished by a linguistic luminosity
that is rivalled only by its stasis. At its best,
the prose is so rich that the lack of event
barely registers. Still, this would hamper a
whoduni. While there are phrases here that
NBA Preseason TBD (22:00-00:00)
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The National
13
Friday, October 24, 2008 www.thenational.ae
review
th
25
Number of the 27 moons of Uranus that are
named after characters from Shakespeare’s plays
" paperbacks
Diary of a Bad Year
JM Coetzee
Vintage
Dh52
Will
Christopher Rush
Beautiful Books
Dh58
My Sister, My Love
Joyce Carol Oates
Fourth Estate
Dh82
The general consensus is that
literature’s Nobel is not what it
once was. But could it be that
as well as honouring the wrong
authors, the prize puts a hex on
creativity even when the judges
get it right?
Doris Lessing claims to have hit
writers’ block since her 2007 victory, and JM Coetzee, a popular
winner back in 2003, has not published anything stellar since. Not
that his latest novel is bad, exactly, but readers may well conclude
that it isn’t worth the effort.
A tricksy blend of essays and fiction, it centres on a 72-year-old
novelist named JC, who lives in
Australia and has been commissioned to write a collection of
non-fiction pieces covering everything from Guantanamo Bay to
JS Bach.
These essays fill the top half of
each page; his diary extracts unfurl down below, chronicling an
unseemly infatuation with his
typist, Anya, a black-haired beauty from South America. Eventually, Coetzee lets Anya speak for
Shakespeare scholars have published exhaustively on every aspect of the Bard’s life.
You can read books about his
wit and his wife, about his coded
politics and his apparent rivalries. With the shelves already so
overcrowded, Christopher Rush
has taken a more unusual, not to
say audacious route. Rather than
producing yet another biography,
he presents us with Shakespeare’s
supposed autobiography, a bawdy
deathbed monologue in which
the world’s most famous writer
looks back over his years.
An intimidating task, you
might think, putting words into
the mouth of the mighty Shakespeare. But Rush barely flinches,
approaching his task with a devilmay-care bravado. In an endnote,
he excuses his decision to embrace anachronisms, explaining
his desire to “impart a modern
feel to the language, allowing Will
to speak directly to the third millennium reader.”
Generally, his approach pays off,
resulting in a garrulous account
Joyce Carol Oates is a writer of thrilling ability and range, yet neither is
quite as awesome as her prolificacy.
Unfortunately, quantity seems to
have begun trumping quality.
Last year’s novel, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, drew on haunting material from her own family
tree but read like several books
bound needlessly together as
one. This latest, her 35th novel,
weighs in at almost 600 pages
– and feels longer.
Though an opening disclaimer
denies it, the book appears to take
its cue from the notorious unsolved murder of JonBenet Ramsay, the American child beauty
pageant queen. In Oates’ tale, an
ethereal six-year-old ice-skating
prodigy named Bliss Rampike
is found bludgeoned to death in
her family’s New Jersey home. A
decade later her brother, Skyler,
now 19, looks back on the murder
and its aftermath, hoping to make
peace with his own feelings about
his late sister and her macabre celebrity. In the years since, he has
had to deal with the acrimonious
herself, adding a third element
to the novel and enlivening a tale
reminiscent of George Bernard
Shaw’s Pygmalion. “Why do you
write this stuff?” she complains
of the essays. “Why don’t you
write another novel instead?”
And though the essays contribute to an elaborately constructed
riff on creativity and love, it’s
hard not to agree with her.
*
HA
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of child stardom and ends with a
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The National
Friday, October 24, 2008 www.thenational.ae
review
th
last word
2008AD
Dhows ‘
Dhow yard, Abu Dhabi, 2008 | Photograph by Galen Clarke
This was actually my first time in a helicopter. They removed the doors and harnessed
me in, so most of the time I was hanging outside, taking the photographs straight
down. They warned me that if I dropped my camera it might hit the tail rudder and
cause a serious accident, so I was more worried about that than about hanging out
of a helicopter. I had this idea in my head before we took off, since I had been to the
dhow yard before and wondered what it would look like from the air, with all the boats
tied together. I was surprised at how green the water was.
Some
distractions
The difference
should
is inbe
theencouraged.
debate.
more to think about
www.thenational.ae
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