John Z. Komurki

Suggest, don't tell

2010-11-21T10:37:00.001-08:00

Orwell condensed his approach to writing good English prose into the following elementary rules:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

(from Politics and the English Language [1945]. Full text available here: http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/index.cgi/work/essays/language.html)

I follow Orwell in believing that good writing is always defined by its clarity, concision and coherence. Further to this, I believe that the best way to demonstrate an understanding of a subject is to write about it in a robust, comprehensible way. Of all the major, global, English-language publications, I feel that The Economist most closely adheres to Orwell's vision of good writing (indeed, The Economist Style Guide opens with the rules quoted above). Despite the complexity and variousness of its subject matter, The Economist's analyses are almost always couched in terms with which the non-expert, the weekend economist, feels at home.

The editorial style of The Economist demonstrates another virtue of this sort of rigourous writing. The laconic touches which it occasionally permits itself derive their effectiveness from the objective neutrality of the rest of the text. Likewise, if you want to advocate a particular viewpoint (or sell a particular product), the best way to do so is by writing clearly and logically on the subject in question. In other words: suggest, don't tell. Prove your expertise, and people will want to know your opinion.

Having worked as an English teacher, I am very aware of the effects of the growing global hegemony of English. It is crucial, I believe, to make a distinction between English as it is lived and spoken by native speakers (which term is in itself a false construction) and the version of English which is used globally as a kind of business-Esperanto. I have heard many anecdotes which illustrate this theme: a bilingual French man once told me about a meeting he had attended, alongside a Russian, a Brazilian and a Chinese person, all of whom were communicating perfectly happily in an English which the French man himself could not follow.

The great strength of English is the way in which it can be used to express ideas precisely and concisely. This is why a Spanish or Italian novel translated into English will invariably be substantially shorter than the original. This is also, in part, the reason for its expansion as a global lingua franca. However, the proliferation of English necessitates more than ever an adherence to Orwell's famous principles; if English is to cement its position as a genuinely progressive tool for inter-cultural communication, we must not lose sight of those qualities which enabled it to reach that position in the first place.

Bolaño - Your Far Off Heart (trans JZK)

2010-09-19T13:45:00.000-07:00

Don't listen, Gaspar, don’t listen
To the voices of your dead friends, don't listen
To those unknown voices which died
In the fleeting afternoons of alien cities.

Shadowy hills far beyond what you dream of.
Those castles a wanderer dreams.
To die at the close of a day like any other.
To escape the violence, impossible.
Impossible, to think of anything else.
Lean gentlemen praise poetry and rifles.
Castles and birds from another imagination.
That which is still without form will protect me.

Death is an automobile
two or three friends in the distance

With the immigrants in Distrito Quinto:
Still reading the troubadours? Yes
I want to say: I try to dream
castles and markets Stuff like that
but afterwards I go back to my flat and sleep
There's nothing wrong with this
Life slipped away long ago
In the bars of Distrito Quinto.
Quiet people, hands in their
pockets And lightning

No one writes to you anymore
Beneath the lighthouse
in the afternoon
Lips parted by the wind
In the East they are staging
the revolution A cat
sleeps in your arms
At times you are immensely happy

Bolaño - the pulsations of your heart (trans JZK)

2010-09-17T04:10:00.001-07:00

[this is probably illegal or something, so dont tell anyone ok george?]

The Pulsations of your Heart

The theme is: beauty.
A girl opens her eyes, gets up, opens the window,
steps out onto the patio.
On the patio: grass, dew, trash,
punctured tyres corroded by acid,
bicycle skeletons,
great rotten bars strewn on the ground.
Beauty. The theme of the composition.
The girl steps out of the darkness
onto the patio, she takes
three or five paces towards
the fence, lifts
her arms, a shiver
shakes her, she raises
her eyebrows in disgust,
brushes the back of her hand
across her face, turns
towards the house. Beauty.
Theme for a cartoon strip.
A piece of something
lit up by something like light.
But it isn't light.
Something like grey
always assuming that grey was light,
that the girl was
a little quieter,
that we could organise
the granite and sacking
into blocks.
Beauty is the theme.
A bucolic moment.
All the disorder strains
against a fissure we'll call girl.
There are two innegotiable objects -
two or three islands -
inside her. But not
reason or disappointment.
A solid landscape,
despite all the inconveniences.
The girl fills the kettle
with water, turns on the gas,
sets it to boil,
sits in a straw chair.
While she waits
perhaps she thinks
about the light that moves,
gaining and ceding floortiles.
Beauty will not sigh: it will want to see
everything. But presents
and patience are its
inevitable channels.
Theme. Space where eyes struggle.
Space, word, where eyes
impose their will.
The girl steps out onto the patio.
The girl drinks tea. The girl
looks for the sugar cubes.
She gazes through this mirror,
searches for hills with crusts
of green forest, dark,
those in the distance almost blue.
The theme is. Oxygen.
She arranges some sacking. Sits.
There are rocks round as chamber pots.
She drinks tea. Soaks
the cup in a porcelain basin
atop a wooden bench
without drying it.
She drinks water.
Then she drinks tea.
Looks into the distance: clouds.
Next to her emerges the skeleton
of a bike, rusty, but with the frame intact.
The theme is. A bicycle
that is beauty and not death.
Not that savage love
- death -
running through dreamed streets
simply because
there's nothing left to do.
Not a knocking at the door
of an abandoned cabin.
The girl drinks tea, washes
the cup in the basin, throws
the water out onto the patio.
Then she goes into the house
and after a second steps out,
a wool jacket on her shoulder.
Like a saint
across the fence
and she begins to dissolve
among the thistles and tall grass.
This is the theme:
beauty appears, is lost,
reappears, is lost,
appears once more, dissolves.
At the end all you can hear
are the pulsations of a well
which is your heart.

2010-07-04T15:04:00.001-07:00

a man in secret and openly
(Thomas Mofolo - Traveller to the East)

On December 12th, Marconi sent the first transatlantic signal, the letter "S", from Cornwall, England to Newfoundland.

January 10 1660
Went out early, and in my way met with Greatorex, and at an alehouse he showed me the first sphere of wire that ever he made, and indeed it was very pleasant.
(Pepys)

And the gray-green sky came down in breaths to my lips and sipped me.
(Kazim Ali)

from 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica: British Empire

2010-07-02T14:19:00.000-07:00

BRITISH EMPIRE, the name now loosely given to the whole aggregate of territory, the inhabitants of which, under various forms of government, ultimately look to the British crown as the supreme head. The term "empire" is in this connexion obviously used rather for convenience than in any sense equivalent to that of the older or despotic empires of history.

...The native population of the empire includes types of the principal black, yellow and brown races, classing with these the high-type races of the East, which may almost be called white.

...The aboriginal races of South Africa were the Bushmen and Hottentots. Both these races are rapidly diminishing in numbers, and in British South Africa it is expected that they will in the course of the twentieth century become extinct.

Becoming extinct?

The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. defines concentration camp as: a camp where non-combatants of a district are accommodated, such as those instituted by Lord Kitchener during the South African war of 1899-1902; one for the internment of political prisoners.

During the Second Boer War (1899-1902), the term "concentration camp" was used to describe camps operated by the British in South Africa.[6] Ostensibly conceived as a form of humanitarian aid to the families whose farms had been destroyed in the fighting, the camps were used to confine and control large numbers of civilians as part of a scorched earth tactic.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camps#Concentration_camps]

MACARONIA

2010-06-26T10:57:00.000-07:00

This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text. Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously, anything other than alphabet?

Georges Perec (Species of Space and Other Pieces p.13)

MACARONIC

–adjective
1.
composed of or characterized by Latin words mixed with vernacular words or non-Latin words given Latin endings.
2.
composed of a mixture of languages.
3.
mixed; jumbled.
–noun
4.
macaronics, macaronic language.
5.
a macaronic verse or other piece of writing.

Origin:
1605–15; < ML macarōnicus < dial. It maccarone macaroni + L -icus -ic

[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/macaronic]

24th July 1944

Last week a nobleman in our street was lifted by his servants from his deathbed, dressed in evening clothes, then carried to be propped up at the head of the staircase over the courtyard of his palazzo. Here with a bouquet of roses thrust into his arms he stood for a moment to take leave of his friends and neighbours gathered in the courtyard below, before being carried back to receive the last rites. Where else but in Naples could a sense of occasion be carried to such lengths?

Norman Lewis (in The Assassin's Cloak p. 366)

IMPORTANT ADVICE

2010-06-23T04:21:00.000-07:00

Dear Pilgrims/Tourist

As Tourist's season approaching fast and also because of precious experience, we request you to take all precautionary measures...

OUR ADVICE IS

8. Try to avoid friendship with unknown persons, if it is not normally requested.

9. Keep watch on the suspects who hand around you in the pretext of tourist guide etc.

10. Your are requested to notice the photographs of suspects i.e. burglars, pickpoketors and vehicle lifters

13. Try to avoid your movements in long lonely road after sunset, which approaches the beach where there is a poor light.

20. Politely answer the questions asked by policeman on duty for your sefety.

23. Look Smart in full dress

Contact Nose:

2010-06-23T04:07:00.001-07:00

But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still forever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve around me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.

MOBY DICK p425

POUR TOI MON AMOUR

2010-06-23T03:58:00.001-07:00

Je suis allé au marché aux oiseaux
Et j'ai acheté des oiseaux
Pour toi
mon amour
Je suis allé au marché aux fleurs
Et j'ai acheté des fleurs
Pour toi
mon amour
Je suis allé au marché à la ferraille
Et j'ai acheté des chaînes
De lourdes chaînes
Pour toi
mon amour
Et puis je suis allé au marché aux esclaves
Et je t'ai cherchée
Mais je ne t'ai pas trouvée
mon amour

(prevert)

AMOR

2010-06-23T03:56:00.000-07:00

Mujer, yo hubiera sido tu hijo, por beberte
la leche de los senos como de un manantial,
por mirarte y sentirte a mi lado y tenerte
en la risa de oro y la voz de cristal.
Por sentirte en mis venas como Dios en los ríos
y adorarte en los tristes huesos de polvo y cal,
porque tu ser pasara sin pena al lado mío
y saliera en la estrofa —limpio de todo mal—.

Cómo sabría amarte, mujer, cómo sabría
amarte, amarte como nadie supo jamás!
Morir y todavía
amarte más.
Y todavía
amarte más
y más.

(Neruda)

from the book of disquiet by fernando pessoa

2010-06-21T10:21:00.000-07:00

Your hands are captive doves. Your lips are silent doves (that come to coo before my eyes).
All of your gestures are birds. You're a swallow when you stoop, a condor when you look at me and an eagle in your disdainful lady's ecstasies. I look at you and see a pond full of clapping wings......
You are nothing but wings.....

2010-06-17T13:01:00.001-07:00

Moreover night is now upon us, and it is well to yield obedience to night's behest

But night is already at hand; it is well to yield to the night.

(Iliad Book VII, line 318)

2010-06-17T08:35:00.000-07:00

Não tenho ambições nem desejos
Ser poeta não é uma ambição minha
É a minha maneira de estar sozinho.

Alberto Caeiro - O Guardador de Rebanhos

de Siete Poemas Breves

2010-06-17T07:10:00.000-07:00

II
Se ríen los trovadores en el patio de la taberna
La mula de Guiraut de Bornelh El cantar oscuro
y el cantar claro Cuentan que un catalán prodigioso...
La luna... Los claros labios de una niña diciendo en latín
que te ama Todo lejos y presente
No nos publicarán libros ni incluirán muestras
de nuestro arte en sus antologías (Plagiarán
mis versos mientras yo trabajo solo en Europa)
Sombra de viejas destrucciones. La risa de los juglares
desaparecidos La luna en posición creciente
Un giro de 75o en la virtud Que tus palabras te sean fieles

[...]

VI
Nadie te manda cartas ahora Debajo del faro
en el atardecer Los labios partidos por el viento
Hacia el Este hacen la revolución Un gato duerme
entre tus brazos A veces eres inmensamente feliz

VII
En la sala de lecturas del Infierno En el club
de aficionados a la ciencia-ficción
En los patios escarchados En los dormitorios de tránsito
En los caminos de hielo Cuando ya todo parece más claro
Y cada instante es mejor y menos importante
Con un cigarrillo en la boca y con miedo A veces
los ojos verdes Y 26 años Un servidor

Bolaño - Siete Poemas Breves (1981)

an ancestor

2010-06-17T05:53:00.000-07:00

JAGO, CHARLES TRELAWNY - (2 son of Edward Jago by Ann Darell dau. of Edward Trelawny). b. 9 Nov. 1829; entered R.N. 1843, lieut. 23 Oct. 1849; 3 lieut. of the Enterprise, Capt. R. Collinson, in the Arctic Expedition 1850-4 in search of sir John Franklin; in the sledge travelling in the spring of 1852 he was away from the ship 49 days; spent 3 winters on the ice; arctic medal; captain 11 April; good service pension 30 Jany. 1880; rear admiral 20 March 1883, retired 27 Dec. 1886; retired V.A. 14 July 1889. d. at res. of his brother, general John Jago Trelawny, Coldenrick, Menheniot, Cornwall 15 Nov. 1891.

F. BOASE - MODERN ENGLISH BIOGRAPHY (Frank Cass 1965)

The French Republican Calendar

2010-06-13T03:58:00.000-07:00

Vendémiaire
Brumaire
Frimaire
Nivôse
Pluviôse
Ventôse
Germinal
Floréal
Prairial
Messidor
Thermidor
Fructidor

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar):

In Britain, people mocked the Republican Calendar by calling the months: Wheezy, Sneezy and Freezy; Slippy, Drippy and Nippy; Showery, Flowery and Bowery; Wheaty, Heaty and Sweety. The Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle suggested somewhat more serious English names in his 1837 work The French Revolution: A History, namely Vintagearious, Fogarious, Frostarious, Snowous, Rainous, Windous, Buddal, Floweral, Meadowal, Reapidor, Heatidor, and Fruitidor. Like the French originals, they suggest a meaning related to the season but are not actual words.

dinosaur

2010-06-11T06:27:00.000-07:00

Monterroso is perhaps most famous for his short story “The Dinosaur,” which is said to be literature’s shortest story. It reads in full:

When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.

In an 1996 interview with Ilan Stavans for the Massachusetts Review, Monterroso recalled some early reviews of “The Dinosaur”: “I still have the very first reviews of the book: critics hated it. Since that point on I began hearing complaints to the effect that it isn’t a short-story. My answer is: true, it isn’t a short story, it’s actually a novel.”

[http://mhpbooks.com/mobylives/?cat=12&paged=11]

if tonight

2010-06-08T16:43:00.000-07:00

And if tonight my soul may find her peace
in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,
and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower
then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created...

D H LAWRENCE

the I project. by liv

2010-06-08T03:03:00.000-07:00

Bit by bit birds finish singing
Pink tints my twilight
Night is in sight
I sit, think
It spins in, twinkling, icy
Sky lit by mighty things
Which hint my living is trifling, childish
I sink, fighting, I’m tiny
Hit by my thinking, my mind spinning
My limbs split, my wits rip
I try climbing, rising
Bright sights in mind
I try with my might
Tiring, spliffs I light
It lifts my spirit
Bliss I find
I’m high

Goats on the Roof

2010-05-25T03:29:00.000-07:00

In the village on Lake Van where Gorky was born and raised, goats could disturb a night's sleep by jumping onto the flat clay roof to steal the precious drying apricots. Gorky used this phrase to describe the feeling of waking up at odds with the world.

ARSHILE GORKY - GOATS ON THE ROOF

Buñuel

2010-05-25T03:28:00.000-07:00

To provoke, or sustain, a reverie in a bar, you have to drink English gin, especially in the form of the dry martini...Like all cocktails, the martini, composed essentially of gin and a few drops of Noilly Prat, seems to have been an American invention. Connoisseurs who like their martinis very dry suggest simply allowing a ray of sunlight to shine through a bottle of Noilly Prat before it hits the bottle of gin. At a certain point in America it was said that the making of a dry martini should resemble the Immaculate Conception, for, as Saint Thomas Aquinas once noted, the generative power of the Holy Ghost pierced the Virgin's hymen "like a ray of sunlight through a window - leaving it unbroken."

MY LAST BREATH: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LUIS BUÑUEL p. 44

the glamour of perfection

2010-05-22T13:23:00.001-07:00

North American culture glorifies the young, and boys and girls dream of a happy world of their own; in Europe it's the affair of the young man and his older mistress that has the glamour of perfection.

STEPHEN VIZINCZEY - IN PRAISE OF OLDER WOMEN p.1

utterest fleshliness

2010-05-12T03:08:00.000-07:00

Is it not well done that our language has but one word for all kinds of love, from the holiest to the most lustfully fleshly? All ambiguity is therein resolved: love cannot but be physical, at its furthest stretch of holiness; it cannot be impious, in its utterest fleshliness. It is always itself...The meaning of the word varies? In God's name, then, let it vary. That it does so makes it living, makes it human...

Mann - The Magic Mountain 599f.

big ugly fat-necked wombat headed big bellied magpie legged narrow hipped splaw-footed sons of Irish Bailiffs

2010-05-10T04:11:00.000-07:00

[http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Jerilderie_Letter]

She was a chestnut mare white face docked tail very remarkable branded (M) as plain as the hands on a town clock. the property of a Telegraph Master in Mansfield he lost her on the 6th gazetted her on the 12th of March and I was a prisoner in Beechworth Gaol until the 29 of March therefore I could not have Stole the mare. I was riding the mare through Greta Constable Hall came to me and said he wanted me to sign some papers that I did not sign at Beechworth concerning my bail bonds I thought it was the truth he said the papers was at the Barracks and I had no idea he wanted to arrest me or I would have quietly rode away instead of going to the Barracks.

I was getting off when Hall caught hold of me and thought to throw me but made a mistake and came on the broad of his back himself in the dust the mare galloped away and instead of me putting my foot on Halls neck and taking his revolver and putting him in the lock up. I tried to catch the mare. Hall got up and snapped three or four caps at me and would have shot me but the colts patent refused. This is well known in Greta Hall never told me he wanted to arrest me until after he tried to shoot me when I heard the caps snapping I stood until Hall came close he had me covered and was shaking with fear and I knew he would pull the trigger before he would be game to put his hand on me so I duped, and jumped at him caught the revolver with one hand and Hall by the collar with the other.

I dare not strike him or my sureties would loose the bond money I used to trip him and let him take a mouth ful of dust now and again as he was as helpless as a big guano after leaving a dead bullock or a horse...

...Next day Williamson and my mother was arrested and Skillion the day after who was not there at all at the time of the row which can be proved by 8 or 9 witnesses And the Police got great credit and praise in the papers for arresting the mother of 12 children one an infant on her breast and those two quiet hard working innocent men who would not know the difference a revolver and a saucepan handle and kept them six months awaiting trial and then convicted them on the evidence of the meanest article that ever the sun shone on it seems that the jury was well chosen by the Police as there was a discharged Sergeant amongst them which is contrary to law they thought it impossible for a Policeman to swear a lie but I can assure them it is by that means and hiring cads they get promoted I have heard from a trooper that he never knew Fitzpatrick to be one night sober and that he sold his sister to a chinaman but he looks a young strapping rather genteel more fit to be a starcher to a laundress than a Policeman.

For to a keen observer he has the wrong appearance or a manly heart the deceit and cowardice is too plain to be seen in the puny cabbage hearted looking face. I heard nothing of this transaction until very close on the trial I being then over 400 miles from Greta when I heard I was outlawed and a hundred pound reward for me for shooting at a trooper in Victoria and a hundred pound for any man that could prove a conviction of horse-stealing against me so I came back to Victoria knew I would get no justice if I gave myself up I enquired after my brother Dan and found him digging on Bullock Creek heard how the Police used to be blowing that they would not ask me to stand they would shoot me first and then cry surrender and how they used to rush into the house upset all the milk dishes break tins of eggs empty the flour out of the bags on to the ground and even the meat out of the cask and destroy all the provisions and shove the girls in front of them into the rooms like dogs so as if anyone was there they would shoot the girls first but they knew well I was not there or I would have scattered their blood and brains like rain I would manure the Eleven mile with their bloated carcasses and yet remember there is not one drop of murderous blood in my Veins.

...I shot him in the arm pit and he dropped his revolver and ran I fired again with the gun as he slewed around to surrender I did not know he had dropped his revolver. the bullet passed through the right side of his chest & he could not live or I would have let him go had they been my own brother I could not help shooting there or else let them shoot me which they would have done had their bullets been directed as they intended them. But as for handcuffing Kennedy to a tree or cutting his ear off or brutally treating any of them, is a falsehood, if Kennedys ear was cut off it was not done by me and none of my mates was near him after he was shot I put his cloak over him and left him as well as I could and were they my own brothers I could not have been more sorry for them this cannot be called wilful murder for I was compelled to shoot them, or lie down and let them shoot me it would not be wilful murder if they packed our remains in, shattered into a mass of animated gore to Mansfield, they would have got great praise and credit as well as promotion but I am reconed a horrid brute because I had not been cowardly enough to lie down for them under such trying circumstances and insults to my people certainly their wives and children are to be pitied but they must remember those men came into the bush with the intention of scattering pieces of me and my brother all over the bush and yet they know and acknowledge I have been wronged and my mother and four or five men lagged innocent and is my brothers and sisters and my mother not to be pitied also who has no alternative only to put up with the brutal and cowardly conduct of a parcel of big ugly fat-necked wombat headed big bellied magpie legged narrow hipped splaw-footed sons of Irish Bailiffs or english landlords which is better known as Officers of Justice or Victorian Police who some calls honest gentlemen but I would like to know what business an honest man would have in the Police as it is an old saying It takes a rogue to catch a rogue and a man that knows nothing about roguery would never enter the force an take an oath to arrest brother sister father or mother if required and to have a case and conviction if possible.

the shadow of his language

2010-05-09T08:15:00.000-07:00

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

Joyce – Portrait Of The Artist p.215

hunger

2010-05-09T08:14:00.000-07:00

What is important, it seems to me, is not so much to defend a culture whose existence has never kept a man from going hungry, as to extract, from what is called culture, ideas whose compelling force is identical with that of hunger.

Artaud

the yowling and barking of dogs

2010-05-09T08:13:00.000-07:00

After dinner, ‘Stalin played the gramophone, considering it his duty as a citizen. He never left it’ said Berman. He relished his comic records, including one of the ‘warbling of a singer accompanied by the yowling and barking of dogs’ which always made him laugh with mirth. ‘Well, it’s still clever, devilishly clever!’

Simon Sebag Montefiore - Stalin: in the Court of the Red Tsar p.242

chaste hardness

2010-05-09T08:07:00.000-07:00

He who is not malign does not live serenely but with a peculiarly chaste hardness and intolerance. Lacking appropriate objects, his love can scarcely express itself except by hatred for the inappropriate, in which admittedly he comes to resemble what he hates. The bourgeois, however, is tolerant. His love of people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.

ADORNO - MINIMA MORALIA (para 4.)

brute contingency

2010-05-09T08:06:00.001-07:00

It seems to cry out for explanation when there is no explanation to be had. It will distress a rationalist to hear such cries go unanswered; whereas to someone like me, inured to brute contingency, it seems only to be expected.

DAVID LEWIS - ON THE PLURALITY OF WORLDS p.129

DEAR SIMON

2010-04-29T05:29:00.000-07:00

MADRID
4th January 1992

(7 month to go for your birthday)

Dear Simon:

Yesterday I received your letter and as usual it made me so happy. It is always good to have news from you and is even better when news are as good as this time.
Since the day you phoned me I've been waiting for your letter. Every morning and afternoon I've been checking the mailbox but the only thing I found was publicity. It took 15 days to arrive and the waiting drove me crazy. Have you received my letter, the pants + my Christmas card. I hope so.
Well i don't know where to start from. to many things to tell you.
I still without a job. I've been to a couple of interviews. Nothing exciting, just for waiteress in restaurants. They told me "we'll phoned you". I still waiting. You know? lately I don't even feel like looking for a job. I don't know why but I haven't go motivation. It's gone. Thanks to God I still having the money that I earned working in the Peace Conference. Do you remember that I told you I was saving that money to buy something nice for my self. Well I never did becouse I don't fancy anything, I don't even fancy to look pretty. What for?
I know that I must buy a suit just for interviews, If I want to get a job as a secretary or receptionist, but again I haven't got motivation. I've been having problems at home. My sister, basically. I told you before about helping my parents to buy a flat. Well my sister is the only person at home who works and as you can imagine she gets nuts just seeing that the days go by and I don't do anything. We had a cuple of arguments, and is always the same history, Money. to eat costs money. to be honest I know perfectly how she feels, but right now I can help it although I will. Definitly. I just need more time.

Simon, since last December I've been Thinking of going to New York for a cuple of weeks. Just holidays. There is an offer to fly there for people under 24 years. It costs only $120 return flying before the 31st March. I really fancy going. It's a bargains and you know how much i like bargains. I will be staying at my sister's boyfriend house. Hopefully I will be going in February. I hope you understand. I've been thinking it over and over again. I thought that I should go to London and visit you instead. But...it won't do me any good right now because I know I'll have to come back.
Perhaps I'm being selfish but I really need to get away. Have a holiday and be on my own for a while. I've lost my independency, and that's horrible. Living with my paren'ts can drive me crazy. I am not use to. That's why I think, going for a cuple of weeks on holidays will make me good. A time without worries, a time for putting myself together without having to justify to anybody. I hope you understand what I mean.
I am sure I will come back much better and perhaps with motivation.
I knew there was going to be a time when you where going to ask me this questions. God! How could I possibly answer you when I don't even know it myself.
I know that you won't take an 'I don't know' for answer and I do understand.
I don't want to hurt you.
God knows well that that is the last thing I want to do. I love you Simon. A lot. I miss you as you can't imagine (Do you believe me?) It is truth and that's the way I feel about you.
Well I am not going back to London just yet and I don't think I will go back this year to stay. But to be honest I don't know because in this life things change in days.

I guess you must be asking to yourself Why?
Well Simon, there are many reasons. The most important is "my parents" and especially my dad. After his heart attack I love him much more. I saw death so fucking near and is scary. He is quite sweet lately and is taking life easy. He is the only person at home that doesn't moan about the things that I do or I don't. I want to really help them to buy that fucking flat.
Other reason is that I am scare to go back to London. I love you but I must admit that living with you was sometimes hard. I think it was becouse I loved you so much that I wanted to have you all the time. I was happy with you next to me. I didn't need anything else.
I think it will be good for both of us to be apart for a while. I hope you will grow up a bit more and perhaps you will start taking your life more seriously. You have your life and you MUST try to have fun.
I know you love me. that's something that I felt in my heart during the time I lived with you. you can be sure too, that nobody will love you as much as I do. you are especial man!
I will go to see you in a cuple of month's time. that is if you want me to. of course.
But Simon there are thousands of women out there how are a hundred times better than me,
I don't want to end our relationship, but...it is hard to keep it when I don't even know when I will be back.
Simon, please don't get ungry and try to understand my situation.
My head is a mess and my heart absolutely broken. I miss you (love) so much but I have to be strong if I don't want to end up crazy.
Don't wait for me. Live your life and please try to be happy. you desserve the best. I'M SORRY TO BE LIKE THIS.
All my love
Lenar

[writtten around the margin of the final side:]

I WILL BE A FRIEND FOREVER - YOUR FRIEND.
I LOVE YOU

Good luck with your new job.

I WILL WRITE TO YOU SOON. I AM QUITE UPSET TO KEEP WRITING YOU NOW.

I AM SO GLAD TO KNOW THAT YOU ARE SEEING YOUR FAMILY. YOU SEE. EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE.

KISSES

PLEASE SIMON KEEP GOING OK?
I am not unique!

eye

2010-04-28T14:29:00.001-07:00

One night, we were awakened, my mother and I, by vehement words that the syphilitic was literally howling in his room: he had suddenly gone mad. I went for the doctor, who came immediately. My father kept endlessly and eloquently imagining the most outrageous and generally the happiest events. The doctor had withdrawn to the next room with my mother and I had remained with the blind lunatic, when he shrieked in a stentorian voice: "Doctor, let me know when you're done fucking my wife!" For me, that utterance, which in a split second annihilated the demoralizing effects of a strict upbringing, left me with something like a steady obligation, unconscious and unwilled: the necessity of finding an equivalent to that sentence in any situation I happen to be in; and this largely explains Story of the Eye.

2010-03-07T05:30:00.000-08:00

...lo mas humano (esto es, lo menos mineral, vegetal, animal, y aun angelical) es precisamente la gramática...

[Borges - El idioma de los argentinos, p.11]

The evolution in human speech...of subjunctives, optatives, counter-factual conditionals and of the futurities of the verb (not all languages have tenses) has defined and safeguarded our humanity...Hope is grammar. The mystery of futurity and freedom - the two are intimately kindred - is syntactical. Optatives, the grammatical modes of desideration, open the prison house of physiological necessity, of mechanical laws...

[Steiner - Erratum, p.94f]

2010-03-05T14:23:00.000-08:00

In Moscow, stray dogs are known to take the subway from the suburbs into the city during the day to search for food and to take the subway back home at night.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-ranging_urban_dog]

2010-03-05T07:32:00.000-08:00

Columbia University
in the City of New York

March 28, 1921

Dr. Moises S. Bertoni
Purto Bertoni
Paraguay

My dear Sir:

Your pamphlet on the Influence of the Guarani Language, addressed to Dr. Haeberlin, arrived here today. I am sorry to say that Dr. Haeberlin died more than three years ago.

Yours very truly,

[illegible]

[display at the Palacio Legislativo, Asuncion, Paraguay]

2009-09-05T05:07:00.000-07:00

The 'my brother is a green parrot' problem...

(Gell - Art and Agency p.10)

My mother is a fish.

(Faulkner - As I Lay Dying p.76)

Orientalism at the movies

2009-07-04T04:48:00.000-07:00

A glance at the Citations Indexes for the Social Sciences and Humanities (or five minutes watching Fox News...) show the extent to which, thirty years on, Edward Said's Orientalism remains absolutely essential to an understanding of global politics.

A cursory recap: the keystone of Said's analysis is a Foucaultian truism, that knowledge is power and power knowledge - basically, to possess information about something is, in a certain sense, to have control over it. This is of course the guiding principle of the police state, in all its forms, but it can easily be applied to any type of power relationship. Said argues that the most representative example of this principle at work is the relation of the coloniser to the colonised, specifically, between the European colonial powers and their 'oriental' territories. The entire discipline of Orientalism, according to Said, was an attempt to constitute the oriental subject discursively, to know him 'better than he knows himself', and thus provide a culturally sanctioned rationale for his exploitation. Even the notion of 'The Orient' ultimately serves this end. How could it be possible to conceive of, and respond to, the Japanese and the Algerians, say, as if they belonged to the same basic ontological category? (Think about the North American who announces he has come 'to Europe' for a week's holiday.) Put simply, it is easier to treat humans like fauna when they are lumped together in a vast, formless mass, with no will, logic or history of their own.

As this reading suggests, the 'knowledge' that orientalists held about the Orient had very little basis in social reality. Said demonstrates how the Western image of the Orient was largely dreamed up by the West itself, starting with Aeschylus but taking in everyone from Dante to Napoleon, as part of a myth about its long-term significant Other, the Arab world. The West was posited as the norm from which the Orient deviated, and every encounter between the two sides simply reinforced this perpetual equation: my limited understanding of him has confirmed my superficial stereotyping. This both validates the initial, cursory stereotyping, and gives me license to stereotype further, and in depth...thus contributing to and sustaining a corpus of ideas I hold in common with everyone I don't consider 'them'. Ideology serves power, power produces ideology.

I take as uncontroversial the assumption that it is a valid and useful exercise to consider how parts of Said's theory could be removed from their broader framework, and applied to contemporary international culture. As he himself points out, the Orientalist mode is far from dead, and if its scope has been reduced, or at least problematised, there remains plenty of work to do. With this in mind, a choice selection of recent Hollywood films are addressed below, all of which prove amenable to a Said-ish reading of aspects of their artistic effect - although in this case the 'Oriental' is European, and the 'Orientalist' the Hollywood film industry, similar processes of rendition are at work. (I will not attempt to address, however, of what socio-political tendencies this effect may be indicative, whether it is deliberate or unconscious, or even what it may achieve.)

Consider, to begin with, Modigliani (2004, dir. Mick Davis), a 'creative re-imagining' of the artist's life, set in 1919, and focussed on an entirely fictitious feud between Modigliani and Picasso.

At one point early on in the movie - in 1919, therefore - the central character walks down a cobbled street, arm in arm with his lover. But the street has been carefully stripped of any visual reference to industrial modernity, and Edith Piaf, who is playing on the soundtrack, was only four in 1919. This juxtaposition of diverse and incongruent historical signifiers only jars with a European audience: to someone less steeped in recent European history, this scene only serves to establish its innate 'Europeanness' - cobbles? Check. Young lovers? Check. A gravelly voiced chanteuse? Check. So we must be in Europe - which is, one suspects, little more than 'an atmosphere' for a significant part of the USA's population.

This scene makes use of a 'textbook' Orientalist technique - the cramming together of clichéd tropes from very different time frames and geographic locales, through disregard or ignorance of their actual placement in history: invert the lens, and imagine a movie scene in which a blacked-up 'Apache' scalps hippies at Woodstock, whilst F. Scott Fitzgerald looks on impassively...

Said observes that Orientalists, particularly in the field of cultural production, generally employ a tense that could be called 'the timeless present'. Historical accuracy is irrelevant compared to the 'ambience', the ladling on of easily digested and conventional symbols: belly dancers, snake charmers, a grand vizier twiddling his mustachios, palm trees, Baklava...(Terry Pratchett, incidentally, is a particularly effective caricaturist of the 'Orientalist' mode - see his Pyramids! or Jingo.)

There are many similarities (or, rather, few differences) between this effect and one achieved in Luhrmann's earlier Moulin Rouge! (2001) (As the reader will probably be aware, this movie is a boisterous homage to the Paris of Toulouse Lautrec and Erik Satie, only camper.) Luhrmann depicts Fin-de-Siecle Paris with a soundtrack drawn from late Twentieth Century pop music, enabling him to play on this orientalist tendency ('the timeless present') - without, however, subverting or escaping it. Moulin Rouge! also contains a 'play within a play', a musical called 'Spectacular Spectacular' which the film's protagonists write and rehearse. This musical is set in an unabashedly 'orientalist' setting, British India, and could be read as a typically 'post-modern', box-within-a-box comment on some of those tendencies under discussion.

Returning to Modigliani: throughout the movie the eponymous hero comports himself in precisely the manner one has come to expect from a bohemian painter: mysterious, hard-drinking, unfaithful, sensitive, mercurial, stubborn. From this depiction of the exotic European par excellence, it is not too big a step to Said's observation that the 'oriental' , the colonised, is always constituted within Orientalist discourse as a negative inversion of the coloniser - 'The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, "different"; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, normal.' Now, although Modigliani is presented as a flawed but essentially sympathetic character, the above list of attributes could equally as well be applied to him: irrational and volatile, certainly, as all artists surely are; his drunkenness and treatment of the love interest suggest his depravity and general amorality, and his 'Italian' mannerisms (i.e. periodic exclamations of 'bella' or 'bravo') mark his 'difference', in the most obvious sense of the word.

Another recent Hollywood movie which deploys a similarly reductive, misleading conception of the European, and Europeanness generally, is Woody Allen's Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008). The New York Times described the film in terms which scarcely differ from imperialist depictions of the Orient: "[Despite] the beauty of its locations and stars — and all the gauzy romanticism those enchanted places and people imply — it reverberates with implacable melancholy, a sense of loss."

The film details the emotional convolutions of two young American girls who spend a summer in Barcelona. They become involved with a Spanish artist, Juan Antonio Gonzalo (Javier Bardem), who drinks, seduces and spouts pop-philosophy, as all artists surely do. He and his psychotic, suicidal ex-wife, played by Penelope Cruz, constitute flimsy caricatures of 'hot-blooded' Latin types, who make love and art with a studied abandon. It would be tedious to relate how most aspects of their 'characterisation' are founded on an utterly two-dimensional (mis-)representation of the 'Mediterranean temperament'; suffice to say that they exist in the film only as a foil to the innate North Americanness of the two main characters. Juan's sexual freedom, for example, borders on the amoral, and is presented as a practically self-evident fact, by which the far more nuanced moral perspectives of the girls are threatened.

It is germane to our theme that the Vicky in question is in Barcelona to work on her masters on 'Catalan Identity'. As anyone who knows anything about Catalonia will gladly tell you, the idea of someone with a minimal grasp of Spanish, let alone Catalan, presuming to understand the culture, history, language and values of an entire society is as absurd and arrogant as....the attempts at knowledge of those armchair Orientalists that Said deconstructs so incisively.

***

As these brief sketches suggest, the analytical framework provided by Said is to some extent applicable to an understanding of the ways in which Hollywood, and North American culture generally, try to make comprehensible that mysterious creature, The European. It remains to rephrase Said and stress that this manifestion of a disctinctly orientalist perspective is not necessarily an index of any lack of artistic integrity on the part of the films' makers - or even of a conscious adherence to hegemonic, establishment norms. Rather, it is 'an indication of how streamlined a general doctrine had become by the time they put it to use - how streamlined and effective.'

As indicated above, it is beyond the scope of this consideration to attempt to understand what, in effect, all this really means. It may point to the fact that, as Said suggests, Orientalism is a hyper-realised manifestation of the default setting for all forms of inter-cultural contact, for the encounter with the Other which is the bread and butter of the social sciences. In other words, it could be that all societies relate to Others in a profoundly alienating, denigrating way, and it could be that all societies want to dominate, literally and metaphorically, their neighbours. It is only that the English and French colonialists were actually in a position to do so. Of course, the USA itself a post-colonial society, and their brand of 'Orientalism' may stem from a later twist in the spiral. Alternatively, it could represent the fundamental ambivalence of the younger, ascendant culture towards its forbears: consider the Roman perspective on Greek civilisation, for example, or even the ambiguous relation that the modern Indian elite has with the West.

For an approach to these questions we could turn perhaps to Homi K. Bhabha, or the economist Amartya Sen, whose magisterial The Argumentative Indian represents a continuation of Said's struggle to expurgate ethnocentricism and racism from the 'West's' view of the 'East'.

join the dots...

2009-05-23T06:27:00.000-07:00

'"Our assessment was that there was not the political will to pass the anti-corruption law," Erin Soto, who heads the Cambodian office of the U.S. Agency for International Development, told me. "When political will does not exist, it must be built."'

in Joel Brinkley - Cambodia's Curse: Struggling to Shed the Khymer Rouge's Legacy
(Foreign Affairs, March/April 2009, p118)

'A fundamental principle appears to have been forgotten or overlooked in our system of colonial dependence - that of colonial policy. To give a colony the forms of independence is a mockery; she would not be a colony for a single hour if she could maintain an independent station.'

Sir Edward Cust, 'Reflections on West African Affairs...addressed to the Colonial Office' (1839)
(in Bhabha - The Location of Culture [2008: 121])

The elegant escape from reality

2009-03-30T10:13:00.000-07:00

'[O]ur most prestigious form of fraud, our most elegant escape from reality...' This was how J.K. Galbraith characterised the idea that a central bank has any ultimate control over the vicissitudes of a modern economic system. His argument is simple, and even verges on the self-evident: interest rates have no discernible effect on the fluctuations of the economic cycle; when times are good, firms borrow money to satisfy demand, reasonably assured of making a significant profit, whereas in a slump or recession, no matter how 'cheap' money is, firms will not borrow it to expand an output for which there is simply no demand. Likewise, although lower interest rates take the edge off a recession for mortgage holders, the amount of capital thus released is effectively negligible, as is the consumption it enables.

He cites as example the inability of the FED, since its inception just before the First World War, to effect any serious change in the financial cycle. Recessions come and go according to their own elemental logic, and at the end of each one the FED claims praise for once again saving the economy; this despite the fact that, for Galbraith, its actions rarely transcend a profound inconsequence.

It could be argued that this case is overstated. But the central point is one worth making: the idea that anything as complex and inscrutable as the financial system can be 'managed' by a small group of establishment academics is absurd, and belongs 'not to the real world, but to that of hope and imagination'. With an ironist's flourish, Galbraith concludes that the FED's impotence is, in fact, so irrelevant that we could simply tolerate it as a comforting mythology.

Galbraith's arguments are given considerable weight by the instrumental role he played in American economic and political life for much of the Twentieth Century, not least as president of the American Economic Association. Another insider turned apostate who raised his voice against the economic establishment is Joseph Stiglitz, onetime head of the World Bank. In his Globalisation and Its Discontents ('Over 1 million copies sold worldwide!') he attacks the idées fixes of the so-called Washington Consensus, particularly as they are forcibly applied by the IMF in developing countries.

These ideas basically constitute an overzealous emphasis on liberalisation, privatization and fiscal austerity. Stiglitz' key argument (by now well known) is that the deployment of a 'one-size-fits-all' approach, as exemplified by IMF policy, is inevitably destabilising, particularly for developing countries in the grip of recession.

Stiglitz and Galbraith both foreground the dual consequences of a centralised, universalising tendency in economic policy. The first of these is the sense of security, if not arrogance, generated by the idea that a small group of experts are capable of controlling and understanding how money works. For Galbraith, in the example of the FED, this is a more or less harmless predilection: if the FED can't do anything anyway, then where is the problem if people give its pronouncements credence? For Stiglitz, however, this feeling of omniscience is the root of the deeply damaging effects of the IMF. He cites example after example of countries whose financial situations have been worsened by the IMF's bullying demands for 'reform'. He makes the point that the IMF is so steeped in a particular vision of economic success (i.e. that of America and Europe) that it cannot envision other possible factors or approaches to development: in fact, it denies developing countries the sort of possibilities (such as import tariffs or government control of banks) which were the sine qua non of the West's own development. This leads us to the second key criticism of over-centralised economic policy: it simply doesn't work. In the case of the FED, this results in a marked inconsequentiality. The IMF, however, is arguably the most powerful and influential global financial institution, and it has a concomitant capacity to do profound damage. Thus, if its policies 'don't work' - as they didn't during, say, the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s - they can affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

The failure of the Doha Round of trde talks amply illustrated both of these tendencies. The talks failed to effect any meaningful reform of global trade precisely because the richer countries would not put in place the same changes as they were demanding of developing countries. It is ironic that in the context of the current crisis, protectionism is being cited as the greatest possible economic evil, when the Doha Round and its predecessors furnish copious examples of the most craven, self-interested protectionism since the 1920s. Perhaps it is acceptable when what are protected are the interests of the developed world against those of poor countries.

Stiglitz' recommendations for reform are, again, more or less self-evident. The IMF (not to mention the World Bank) should devote more time and attention to tailoring its prescriptions to the country in hand. It needs to explicitly acknowledge the failure of the doctrine of 'shock therapy', and accept that for some countries development must be gradual, and based on individual sectors - in a word, bottom-up. It needs more people on the ground. As the volume of calls for reform of the IMF increases, and a reformulation of the Washington credos seems increasingly likely, it remains to be seen whether world leaders will take meaningful steps in this direction.

************************

But don't hold your breath. In advance of next week's G20 meeting the finance ministers of participating countries produced a joint statement (http://www.g20.org/Documents/2009_communique_horsham_uk.pdf) in which the usual calls are made for co-ordinated action to resuscitate the world economy through interest rates cuts and increased government spending, and a strengthening of international banking regulations urged (cue Private Eye headline: 'G20 - BROWN PROMISES NEW STABLE DOOR').

The notion of a global reform of banking regulations is manifestly unworkable, and will result in nothing more than such cosmetic, crowd-pleasing gestures as the abolition of tax havens. The USA would never accept an external body dictating its most intimate financial policy, any more than, say, China would. And consider the EU: in recent months, the majority of EU leaders have taken to making deadpan assurances of fidelity in front of the cameras and one another's faces, whilst shamelessly instigating protectionist measures behind the European Commission's back (Sarkozy's offer of subsidies to homecoming French car makers being not even a particularly egregious example). Clearly, each of the 'old' European states hopes the others will subsume their autonomy to centralised control, leaving them free to pursue their individualist course.

If such a homogenous and well-established grouping as the EU cannot agree on a common ground at the first whiff of a recession, then to think that the global finance system could be brought to heel is, to repeat, absurd. And here we come to the second main thrust of the ministers' manifesto: the amplification of the IMF's funding and influence. This is something that can be achieved relatively painlessly, and with a semblance of unanimity. What it won't do, however, is change anything. Just ask the Russians.

No-one would argue that a globally coherent financial system is not desirable, or that trade should be ghettoised, or protectionism allowed to run riot. But as world leaders clog the front pages with talk of 'a new financial order', lessons learnt from previous failures of totalising economic reform programs should not be forgotten. The Asian crisis, and the IMF's manifest failure to prevent or alleviate it, or even to identify its causes, must be at the front of every leader's mind; pumping money at the IMF does not constitute a vision of reform, and will fool no-one.

The present crisis was provoked by a monumental failure to see beyond the shiny surface. If the G20 is to do anything meaningful, it must avoid another such escape from reality, however elegant it may seem.

The banality of violence, the violence of the banal

2009-03-17T01:41:00.000-07:00

'Mainstream' filmmakers sustain a semblance of verisimilitude through the deployment of ordinary, believable details that make improbable or impossible events comprehensible. These details could come from the dialogue or the geographical setting, but most typically they are embodied in the common trope of the ordinary individual who finds herself - generally through no fault of her own - in a fantastical world. This is, of course, the dominant technique employed by Hollywood directors to facilitate the suspension of disbelief. In Tarantino, however, this opposition is amplified, distorted and made grotesque. Rather than reinforcing, the mundane and the supermundane subvert each other in ever wider spirals of irony and self-reference, until neither element is able to fulfill its essential function: the humdrum takes on a fantastic, unbelievable air, and the 'action', the fantasy, appears obscenely normal and unremarkable. (Considered in this light, Pulp Fiction's famous tagline "[Y]ou won't know the facts till you've seen the fiction" becomes increasingly resonant.)

Consider, for example, the famous dialogue between two of the central protagonists of Pulp Fiction, the mobsters Vince and Jules, in which they discuss the differences between USA and European outlets of the same fast food chain. A more tedious, uninteresting discourse it is hard to imagine; moreover, significantly, it is one which most people will certainly have had, in some form or another. What is horrific is that the two men are more or less psychopathic hitmen. This intercourse thus constitutes a (somewhat facile) reflection on the sheer banality of evil, to coin a phrase, and, more obliquely, the inherence of the potential for violence in the everyday. After the profoundly unsettling effect of this realisation (even if the conscious mind does not acknowledge it as such) the actual onscreen violence when it comes is, inevitably, cathartic: it strikes us as laughably overworked, almost cartoonish (as it is clearly meant to) and somehow familiar. This familiarity, this 'at homeness', is all the more disturbing in light of the fact that most people sitting in a cinema watching a Tarantino movie have never seen anyone killing anyone else in the flesh, and would be deeply traumatised were they ever to do so.

What is the source of this familiarity? Why does extreme violence constitute a sort of comfort zone in his work, something that can be consumed with pleasure and wry amusement but without any complex reflection? The glamourous, amoral sheen which Tarantino imparts to violence is part of a cynical strategy to effect precisely this reaction. In what now seems a clichéd 'postmodern' technique (but let us not forget who pioneered it), brutality is rendered meaningless, unambiguous. The moral conundrums in his work rarely stem directly from violence itself. Vince's accidental murder of the young boy in the back of the car is treated by the characters involved as irrelevant in and of itself. They barely respond at an emotional level. The conflict and the crisis is provoked not by his death but by the logistics of concealing it. To reiterate: insofar as there exists an overt moral dimension to the film, it lies not in the violence itself, but in the way that the characters involved rapidly resume their lives, which are quantifiably little different to those of anyone else.

Equally, the anal rape scene in Pulp Fiction is both a homage to and a subversion of a similar scene in Deliverance. Whereas in the earlier film it is deeply upsetting to watch and yet more disturbing to reflect on later, in Pulp Fiction it merely constitutes part of the 'wierdest day' of Butch's life. The extravaganza of ludicrous violence that it occasions effectively absolves the viewer from any complex or disturbing evaluations.

Again and again, such inversions provide the impetus to the plot. Violence is normal, unremarkable, and everyday actions and concerns provide the foci for moral tension and development. This subversion of a common cinematic referential axis is more fully - and, in itself, more effectively - realised in the later Deathproof. In this film, Tarantino is able to use his reputation, his brand, to heighten its effect. Aware that people expect risible excesses of violence in his movies, he establishes this violence as the given, as the norm, as the familiar - in a sense, as the 'real' against which the fantastical is typically judged. Thus, again, by a process of inversion, what is unsettling in Deathproof is not the gore, but the astonishingly banal dialogues that comprise the body of the film.

In parallel to this partial reversal of classical cinematic values, Tarantino's movies problematise and play with a more specific referential ambit: that of cinema itself. Tarantino is evidently gripped by a profoundly ambivalent relation to the idea of cinematic authenticity, and he addresses it repeatedly in his films. He is famously obsessed with authenticity, in the technical sense of the word: authentic music, authentic clothes, authentic cars (in this as in so much else he has all the hallmarks of the video rental shop geek he once was.) In this sphere as well, we find him using diametrically opposed poles to reverse each other's influence. If a fundamental source of tension and effect in his movies is the axis of the real/the fantastic, a second, more subtle but possibly more significant axis is that of the cinematic real, the authentic, in dialectic opposition to the fantastic potential of cinema.

Interestingly, paradoxically, this fixation with the authentic results in a kind of pastiche, with little relation to actual history. What is important is that these symbols are true to themselves, not to a broader, more consistent vision of culture: apart from concrete references, generally technological, that anchor a film in a specific era, it is hard to place a Tarantino film in a definite time, so imbued are they with perfect reproductions of 'period' touches (often juxtaposed to the point of absurdity: Jack Rabbit Slim's being a representative example). These details thus reproduce the (a)moral logic of the movies - they are only required to have integrity with themselves.

Deathproof again provides the as yet most fully worked-through visual articulation of the consequences of this fixation with authenticity. The central character, a psychopathic ex-stuntman who preys on implausibly attractive groups of women, drives a 'death-proofed' stunt car. Towards the end of the film, one group of women test drives an exact replica of Kowalski's Dodge Challenger from the cult classic Vanishing Point, and, in the final scene, both of the cars erupt onto the freeway, and chase each other through the traffic. The other cars on the road are modern and anonymous, and clearly represent the 'ordinary' world, as opposed to the vehicles of the protagonists, both of which are steeped in pure celluloid charisma. The violence of the sudden juxtaposition of the two modes of reality (their symbols) reminds one of an earlier, inferior movie, the Schwarzenegger vehicle Last Action Hero, in which the eponymous crime fighter literally bursts from the screen into reality. The climactic showdown in Deathproof similarly depicts the explosion of the unreal, the superreal, into everyday reality. What is remarkable is that it is the latter that seems strange and out of place, so immersed are we in Tarantino's own fantasy world. This fantasy, however, is one of authenticity, of cinematic veracity, so perfectly realised that it alienates itself from what could be considered as actually authentic: that is, real life.

The crucial irony here is that the more he strives after authenticity, the more he distances himself from it: the more effects he digitally imposes on the film to make it seem like a 'real' 1970s splatterfest, the more we are aware that it isn't. He is aware of this inevitability himself, and acknowledges it with knowing gestures, such as the fact that the characters listen to MP3 players and send text messages (even if, in keeping with the general aesthetic of the movie, these almost seem like continuity errors.)

Exploring these paradoxes also provides a platform for Tarantino to grapple with his status as a leading and influential film maker, and the ways in which his work has an influence on the culture as a whole. At one point in Deathproof, the mobile phone of a protagonist plays the famous whistling motif from Kill Bill I (which was ubiquitous for some years after the film's release, predominantly through exactly this 'medium'). Thus the earlier movie, evoked metonymically by its signature theme, has seeped out of the fantastical world into the real world, become part of culture, become canonical, and consequently is now a 'real' referent and source of authenticity in the current work. Further to this, the flippant self-referential gesture of having a character in a subsequent film have this music as her ringtone is partly a resigned acknowledgment that, the more the man tries to challenge and disrupt, the more he is recognised as the embodiment of cinematic achievement.

The incestuous coupling of the authentic and the ersatz, Tarantino's thematic sign-ature, gives rise to bizarre, distorted formulations of meaning, both stimulating and provocative. But there is little here that the Benjamin of Illuminations would have found surprising. So far, Tarantino has yet to transcend canonical postmodern dialogues - dialogues the framework of which he himself helped to define, in the world of movies if not that of cultural production generally. Nevertheless, films such as Adaptation or Dogville explore the usual postmodern/deconstructionist problems more coherently and, ultimately, interestingly.

Despite this, Tarantino's movies remain supremely good to think with, to paraphrase Levi-Strauss. Perhaps as a result of their unabashed enthusiasm for the medium in and of itself, their seemingly impenetrable carapace of referential closed-circuits ends up making the films more or less blank slates, onto which it is possible to project any range of concerns and questions. And, like all the best 'postmodern' products, they'll never tell you you're wrong, either in your assumptions or in your projecting of them onto the work.

Vaclav Klaus: unlikely symbol of EU unity

2009-03-09T11:37:00.000-07:00

Can Vaclav Klaus be dismissed as an embarassment? The answer, clearly, is yes: there can not have been a single serious newspaper in the EU which hasn't in the past months run an article expressing (at best) misgivings about the Czech' assumption of the presidency, particularly in light of the bellicose pronouncements made by Klaus upon filling the post. Although it is officially Czech PM Mirek Topolanek who will be president of the EU, Vaclav Klaus will be the most visible member of the Czech contingent; this is, in fact, partly what people object to. The facts are clear. President Klaus is an avowed eurosceptic (no matter if he prefers the term "eurorealist") who has been booed on several occasions in the European Parliament, most notably for comparing the EU to Soviet Russia. He resists the notion of the 'inevitability' of European expansion, and does not even consider it to be a democratic organisation. He has been accused, largely unfairly, of cosying up to Russia. Furthermore, he is one of the world's foremost climate-change deniers, and is appearing this week at a conference in New York to propagate a perspective on the issue which is diametrically opposed to that of the EU. Add to this the furore over the sculpture the Czechs installed at the entrance to the European Parliament on their arrival, and it is easy to see how commentators and eurocrats alike might want to take a sabbatical until a more reliable, more conventional - in a word, more normal - incumbent steps up.

Following the French and their brilliant, mercurial M. Sarkozy as was always going to be tricky. Sarkozy, the world's most prominent ADHD case, in many ways constitutes the definition of a European statesman: a Willy Brandt or Jaques Delores for the youtube generation. His involvement in global politics, if not always perfectly pitched, was generally well recieved and effective, and his charisma provided a useful focus during the early stages of the crisis. Crucially, he is young, fresh and more or less eurorthodox. Klaus, on the other hand, invites accusations of cantankerousness.

The opposition of Sarkozy and Klaus is, however, a false one. There is no one correct way to handle the presidency of the EU, not least because it is, of course, essentially an administrative role. Sarkozy was in fact overly fervent and frenetic, and had a Zapatero or a Brown followed him, they would clearly have been made to look inadequate, if not ridiculous, in trying to maintain his momentum. The cynical, eccentric, crypto-ascetic Czech is, as it turns out, one of the few current EU leaders who could have slipped into Sarkozy's loafers without seeming absurd.

This sequence of presidents reinforces a quintessentially European vision of inclusivity. The fact that Klaus, its putative leader, can rail against the lack of democracy and failure of representation in the EU, is a telling irony, and one that he probably relishes himself, even if he wouldn't admit it. As Pascal famously observed, even to reject philosophy outright constitutes a philosophical postion, and it is clearly a testament to the (ideological) strength of the EU that someone who has criticised central tenets of its structure and function can, without contradiction, assume a prominent role in its administration. Far more subversive has been the recent resurgence of protectionism, gestatated most notably by Sarkozy himself. Likewise, Gordon Brown's overt support for communitarianism, as a smokescreen for the backdoor imposition of individualist state control, is far more dangerous to the European project, and a far more likely impetus to the breakdown which both The Economist and Newsweek have heralded in the past fortnight.

This breakdown will not come to pass. A few striking parallels aside, we are not re-living the 1930s. Despite opinion page asseverations to the contrary, there is a coherent and effective response in the process of being forged, and a centralised European government has a uniquely important role to play. What is, perhaps, most different today, is that a character such as Vaclav Klaus can have a speaking part, and can, in his role of officially sanctioned dissident, reinforce and rectify the system. Indeed, by engaging with the terms of the dialectic, even from a relatively extreme position, one cannot help but reinforce its central premises. Far from being an embarassment, Vaclav Klaus is one of the EU's greatest assets.

Zimbabwe: negotiations continue despite Mugabe's obduracy

2009-03-09T02:22:00.000-07:00

[20th October 2008: a key moment in the power-sharing negotiations between Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai, when it still seemed that despair wasn't the only viable response. See The Zimbabwean 05/03/09 (http://www.thezimbabwean.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19362&Itemid=107) for a description of the situation as it currently stands; that is, unchanged, except for the tragedy that has befallen Tsvangirai in the past week.]

Morgan Tsvangirai has described the power-sharing negotiations between the MDC and Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF party as 'a dialogue of the deaf'. Reports suggest that the talks are approaching total collapse.

This breakdown of discussions revolves around Mugabe's refusal to allocate important posts within the government to opposition politicians. He has assigned the ministries of defence, home affairs, justice, media and ten others to his own party, leaving 16 less influential positions to the opposition coalition. The MDC insist on a more balanced distribution of power. They are demanding in particular that they be given the ministry of home affairs (which oversees the police force), in part to offset Zanu PF's control of Defence.

Reports in the local press suggest that it is this insistence on being allocated home affairs that has provoked Mugabe's refusal to proceed. Senior members of Zanu PF say that Mugabe might be prepared to cede the finance portfolio to the MDC, but will not give them home affairs under any circumstances.

The role of finance minister will be crucial if Zimbabwe is to extricate itself from its present state of meltdown. The wrangling over cabinet positions is impeding the flow of foreign aid and investment, without which the country will continue on its path to total social implosion (Zimbabwe's inflation rate is currently 231,000,000%, the highest on the planet). It is imperative that an MDC member assume this role, because in light of Mugabe's record of corruption and expropriation of aid, many donors, rightly, will not give to the country if it is thought that the Zanu PF will have control of the funds.

However, now as throughout the entirety of his involvement in Zimbabwean politics, Morgan Tsvangirai must play a careful game of concession and intractability. If he is too weak, and submits to Mugabe's bullying and cronyism, then he will have both failed in his mission, and given the Mugabe regime a veneer of authenticity: they will be able to pronounce themselves a pluralist, power-sharing government, in which all the power is nonetheless held by Mugabe. This will also make it harder for the MDC to consolidate their role and extend their influence. If they start from a deeply marginalised position, it is hard to imagine Mugabe doing anything other than eroding it further.

On the other hand, if Tsvangirai is too overbearing, and mirrors Mugabe's stubbornness and arrogance, the Zanu PF will simply discontinue the talks and everything, for Tsvangirai, will be lost. As Tsvangirai himself has already observed, "Mugabe does not negotiate". It is thus essential that he judge very finely exactly how far he can push Mugabe. He must also evaluate whether a gesture similar to his withdrawing from the second round of presidential elections, in response to the Zanu PF's campaign of intimidation and violence, would be useful at this stage. Indeed, looking at the feeble response of the African Union (AU) to his principled and pragmatic decision to withdraw, it is reasonable to assume that another similarly principled gesture (in this case withdrawing from the 'power-sharing' government altogether) would achieve precisely nothing.

The AU's involvement in Zimbabwe's crisis has further cemented its reputation for impotence and complacency. In the meeting of the AU after Mugabe 'won' the presidential election in June (through the simple expedient of removing any opposition and threatening the populace with death were they not to vote for him) very few voices were raised in condemnation. Omar Bongo, ruler of the Gabon, even congratulated him on his victory. The demands of African statesmen such as Kofi Annan and Nelson Mandela, that the AU acknowledge the election's illegitimacy, were ignored. This, perhaps, is unsurprising. A majority of AU leaders hold power as a consequence of at least somewhat questionable processes, and a minority are clear dictators. And there evidently exists an unspoken sympathy for Mugabe's rabidly anti-Western, anti-colonial discourse, which at times echoes even Idi Amin in its extremity ("Down with the British, down with the thieves who want to steal our country" was his rallying cry on Zimbabwean independence day). Just as with Amin, there is a sense in which Mugabe articulates what many other African leaders think, but feel too constrained by their reliance on foreign aid to say themselves.

For these reasons, then, the AU cannot be relied on to take decisive action, or even do anything which might upset one of its members. Its one attempt at resolution was to delegate to Thabo Mbeki, then president of South Africa, the task of negotiating a settlement. Notwithstanding an increasing retrospective tendency to talk about Mbeki's 'success' in this matter, it is clear that he achieved very little for a long period. For some time after the election, Mbeki continued to assert that Zimbabwe was not undergoing any sort of crisis: this at a moment when it was well known that at least two million of its inhabitants were facing starvation. Tsvangirai called for his dismissal, without success.

Now Mbeki, having been forced to resign the presidency of South Africa, is continuing as a private individual in his role as mediator of the talks, and continues to make characteristically upbeat pronouncements. It is clear that he has only ever had limited influence on Mugabe, and perhaps it would be wrong to place excessive blame at his feet: he was facing exactly the same almost implacable opposition between assertion and concession as Morgan Tsvangirai is currently trying to resolve, and it is possible that there was in fact no course of action he could have taken which would have resulted in situation radically different to the present one. It is to be feared, however, that having lost his power in the most ignominious way, he will sink in Mugabe's estimation to the point where the dictator will no longer pay him even lip service.

There is some cause for optimism in the fact that other African nations are taking action, however equivocal, not least because it shifts attention and responsibility away from Mbeki's inconsequentiality. Members of the Southern African Development Community's security panel are to meet today (Monday 20th) in Swaziland to discuss ways around the deadlock. Tsvangirai remains optimistic, as, of course, does Mbeki, who will report at the meeting. The Zanu PF, however, continues to refer to the allocation of ministries as 'a small matter', and is unlikely to accept direct intervention from the SADC.

This is yet another in a long series of pivotal moments for benighted Zimbabwe. The most important player at this stage is clearly Morgan Tsvangirai. He must decide whether to continue with the negotiations, and if he does so, what concessions he can make without invalidating both the talks and his own party's role in the government. Decisive involvement, be it direct or indirect, from other African nations is a fundamental necessity at this stage; regrettably, it may prove, yet again, to be too much to hope for.

911 conspiracy theories and 'the foreign hand'

2009-03-09T02:01:00.000-07:00

1.)

The internet is, and has been for a number of years, awash with arguments for and against a US government conspiracy to blow up the World Trade Centre on September 11th, 2001. Ten minutes on google will reveal the staggering volume of sites dedicated to this theme, which range from the familiar incoherent ranting to highly academic discussion. What reasoned debate exists on the matter is, however, vastly outweighed by the frenzied polemic which it (understandably) generates.

The basic position of the 'conspiracy theorists' is remarkably uniform: the destruction of the Twin towers was organised and orchestrated by the US government. What varies are the details. The website www.911truth.org offers a well presented and relatively controlled compendium of the various theoretical strands; they keep their options open, choosing to include virtually all possible positions or theories, but do downplay those which have been most fully disproven, such as that the WTC was, in fact, blown up using explosives secreted somewhere within the buildings (see http://www.freedomfiles.org/war/awtc.htm for a fuller exposition of this theory.) They also steer clear of fringe attempts to relate other putative conspiracies (from 'the New World Order' to the existence of UFOs) to the WTC bombings.

Few 911 conspiracy theorists who are interested in a somewhat bigger picture, as is 911truth.org, fail to mention what are generally recognised as indisputable truths, at least by the 'left wing' media:

that, until a relatively short time before 911, Osama bin Laden and the Afghani resistance movement were funded, trained and lionised by the US administration, ostensibly as a bulwark against Communism. This is known to be true (see e.g. http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html, but evidence abounds) as is the fact of the connections between the American corporate-military structure and the bin Laden family in general;

that, after the event, 911 was used as a 'Pearl Harbour' style justification for increased aggression abroad and more overt repression at home (as it was in almost all of the world's nation states, many of them basing their own post-911 'anti-terrorist' legislation on the USA's: India's POTA act, for example, or consider the shift in Putin's rhetoric on Chechenya following the bombings);

that, following the attacks, there was a craven scramble by everyone from the New York Port Authority to the White House to deflect blame and obscure their own failings, giving rise to a wave of finger-pointing and a general climate of oblique mistruth.

Considerations such as these must form part of any post-911 understanding of world, and American, politics. Within the WTC-conspiracy oeuvre, however, they are often used to support wilder, more reactionary polemic and speculation. This is most clearly illustrated in the recent 'documentary' Zeitgeist (available gratis online: http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/) the section of which covering September 11th uses the above observations as a base for classic conspiracy theorising. The film itself is a risibly meretricious concoction of (at best) half-truths, edited and narrated in the emotive style of Fox News. It has been resoundingly exposed as such by internet 'debunkers', the most articulate and comprehensive of which can be found at http://www.conspiracyscience.com/articles/zeitgeist/: a website which distinguishes itself from the movie, and conspiracy theorists in general, by repeated injunctions to return to primary sources.

The 911 conspiracy movement is matched in profligacy and sheer volume only by its counter-movement, known collectively as 'debunkers' . Although both sides are characterised by strongly emotive and academically negligible diatribes, an unbiased observer would be forced to conclude that the debunkers are by far the more objective and rational of the two. The above website is in fact centred around collating many of the refutations of the claims made by the conspiracy theorists; as such, it constitutes the diametric opposite of 911truth.org.

It can and has been argued that the 'debunkers' task is the easier – rather than present and defend new positions and analyses, they simply have to prove that the original theorist's position is objectively untenable. True; but they fulfill a function which an impartial observer would expect the initial methodology to perform automatically, as it would in, say, a scientific experiment. The fact that there is a manifest lack of conscientious self-criticism within the conspiracy theorist camp undermines further their position as analysts, however much it may appear to buttress their polemic weight.

Noam Chomsky, marching as always in an army of (almost) one, even among the 'left wing', regards the 911 conspiracy theorists' position as 'completely worthless', an 'internet industry' (interview posted on youtube). He makes the point (which, as with so many of his observations, should be self-evident) that even in a scientific experiment, conducted according to rigourous standards in a controlled environment, there will always emerge more questions, more anomalies, than answers. Thus, in a 'real world' event on as massive a scale as the WTC bombings, there will always be factors that appear to elude rational explanation. This does not, however, constitute a basis for a comprehensive theory.

These are points that have been made again and again, and show little sign of dampening the theorists' enthusiasm (by definition, perhaps). They do, however, foreground a far more crucial issue, and suggest the reason that counter-cultural analysts from Chomsky to Roy to Klein, are simply not interested in the murky, rabidly self-defeating world of internet speculation. Focusing on specious conspiracy theories diverts attention from much more pertinent debates: on US foreign policy, particularly in relation to Israel; on the way 911 was used to abrogate, shamelessly, fundamental civil liberties across the world, not just the West; and on the influence and effects of the neoliberal project generally, in particular the way it has used 911 to strengthen its global hegemony. These, amongst many others, furnish us with issues that demand to be debated and assumptions that must be problematised (see Stiglitz' Globalisation and Its Discontents [2002] as a starting point, if you need one). As Chomsky puts it, provocatively: who cares? The picture is much, much bigger than one atrocity. There is no time to waste, and the 'system' is only too happy if potentially critical intelligences pour it into fruitless and divisive chat-room bitching. In this sense, then, the 'truth' about 911 is comparatively irrelevant, even if it may contradict the official version of events.

There is, furthermore, a tendency at play which does not seem connected to a real commitment to political change, or even understanding. It is clear from all but the most cursory of readings of much of the material positing the US government as the main perpetrator of 911, that the more rabid the conviction of it author, and the more total the conspiracy he argues for, the more profound the psychological necessity he is responding to. In this case, one could well argue that this psychological necessity is partly to avoid admitting the fallibility and weakness of the USA. The bottom line of any conspiracy theory is that, good or bad, the US government is still responsible; still in control. In short, if the bombing of the Twin Towers was indeed perpetrated by terrorists with no direct connection to the US, then it would constitute a grievous, unthinkable weakness on that country's part. The theory that the US government in fact organised the bombings, that Bush himself pressed the button, offers an understanding of events which requires far less reformulation of fundamental assumptions, many of which assumptions are essential to an abiding sense of security, in the broad sense. It is not too fanciful to compare the thinking of the more emotionally-inclined conspiracy theorists to that of a young son who sees his father humiliated in public: an overt display of outright denial or apathy, combined with inner turmoil and horror at seeing the most important and powerful man alive humbled by the world he should have been controlling.

It is more or less axiomatic that the young child's relations to his parents (and family group generally) form the basis of his relation to broader social groupings later in life. Indeed, certain types of nationalist ideologies explicitly take this initial relation to the parents and develop it into a comparable dedication to the country in question: the fatherland, the mother country etc. As a rule of thumb, the more authoritarian the power structure, the more it will draw on pre-existing familial relations as a base for a subservient and unquestioning position vis-à-vis the state: it is, of course, no co-incidence that the Twentieth Century's most egregious dictator was known as 'Father'. Leaving aside the question of the extent to which the USA could be considered an 'authoritarian state', it is nonetheless not too fanciful to consider the emotional dimension of most Americans' responses to 911 as being, at least to a small degree, explicable in light of fundamental, pre-adult affective propensities.

2.)

There is a parallel to the 911 conspiracy theorists' fundamental premise, that the USA simply could not have been so weak, arrogant and disorganised as to let a handful of Arabs effect its symbolic castration. This parallel could in fact be characterised as an inverted manifestation of the same tendency. Whereas the 911 conspiracy movement in general is unable or unwilling to acknowledge the fallibility of their parent/nation, and thus seeks to explain it as an extreme example of the government's ultimate coherence, its parallel, to be considered below, achieves the same effect in precisely the opposite way. It explains the weakness and fallibility of its parent/nation as being the result of external influence: although the state is effective and conscientious, it is prevented from doing its duty, which is all it wants to do, by intervention from outside powers. In both cases, although there is some truth in the 'conspiracy', its essential 'deep function' (whether or not its proponents are aware of it) is to mask the real failings of the state in question.

The political tendency here considered as a counterpart to 911 conspiracy theories is one which has its origins some forty years ago, but continues to infect Indian political and social discourse: it is the notion of the 'foreign hand'. This quasi-doctrine was first propagated by Indira Ghandi, on/off prime minister of the Republic of India for fifteen years, from the late 'Sixties until her assassination in 1984. She was a profoundly authoritarian politician, under whom the already constrained civil liberties of the Indian people were continually eroded, most notably during the 'State of Emergency' (1975-1977). In mid-1975 , when she was on the brink of being impeached for electoral malpractice, Ghandi (no relation, by the way) declared a state of martial law and arrested the majority of the leaders of the opposition party.

This period is amply documented (see, for example, Brass' The Politics of India Since Independence [1995]). It was characterised by Ghandi's increasing emphasis on a 'foreign hand', influencing internal politics, stirring up discord and preventing her government from effecting change. Dissenters were put on a black list drawn up by her 'Truth Minister' (a splendidly Orwellian post), and dealt with.

Generally understood as a euphemism for the CIA (which is now known to have been deeply inimical to the Indian establishment, and extremely active on the subcontinent at this time: see Chomsky's Understanding Power [2002], pp 172-4), Gandhi and her ministers used the 'foreign hand' as justification for any possible failing of the government, and the necessity of reducing its influence as the reason for any infringement of basic liberties.

Indira Gandhi's legacy is still felt in contemporary Indian politics. The BJP, a Hindu national party that was in power during the first part of this century, drew on many ideas gestated during her period as leader (despite a purported rejection of her ideals). Characteristic of their policies is an emphasis on the need for a greater sense of India as a Hindu nation (a perspective that has been widely exposed as jingoistic and racist propaganda, with no real basis in history or, indeed, geography: see economist Amartya Sen's illuminating The Argumentative Indian [2005]). Fundamental to this policy is a presentation of India's Muslims (who constitute 13.4% of the population) as a virulent, subversive fifth column. The still-unpunished massacres of Muslims (echoing the massacres of Sikhs under Gandhi) in Mumbai in 1993 and in Gujarat in 2002 were condoned, not to mention applauded, by the BJP.

Concurrent with this repression and slaughter of the Muslim population is a renewed emphasis on an invisible 'foreign hand' in Indian politics. This time, however, the hand is supposed to be controlled not by the USA but by Pakistan, whose agents are seen to be at the root of any internal discord or violence. The BJP's senior leader, L. K. Advani, repeatedly blamed Pakistan for impeding the Indian nation in its process of development, and the habitually subservient Indian media was only to happy to espouse this position, even after the BJP lost power. The Mumbai atrocities of November 2008 provided ample scope for speculation about the involvement of the 'foreign hand', which served to divert attention away from the manifest failings of the Indian government in general and intelligence services in particular. Thus one can observe that the events which many (predominantly in India itself) began to refer to as 'India's 911' gave rise to renewed and energetic attempts to exculpate the government. (See http://www.boloji.com/myword/mwna055.htm
for an even more recent example of the foreign hand cited as the cause behind a terrorist atrocity, in this case the Assam bombings of early 2009.)

The pervasive influence of the notion of the foreign hand is here considered in a light which, in a sense, renders irrelevant the degree of veracity it may or may not represent. Just as with the 911 conspiracies, the 'truth' is less important than the social function which the theories perform, that is, to absolve the government in question from blame.

It remains to be highlighted that, despite many parallels and inversions suggestive of a profound, structural homogeneity, these two tendencies are not manifestations of the same dialectic process. Rather, they display similarities of approach and response which are illuminating precisely because they emerge from radically diverse socio-political and analytical milieu.

The theory that the American government is directly responsible for the 911 bombings, and the conviction in the Indian media that an invisible foreign hand is constantly meddling in their internal affairs, both constitute attempts, conscious or unconscious, to obscure the failings of the dominant power structure, oppose accusations of weakness or failure, and divert attention away from issues that could provide far more fertile ground for analysis, debate and criticism. It is crucial that the potentially insidious and obfuscatory effects of this type of 'analysis' are guarded against. Only in this way is resistance to, or even criticism of, those power structures able to develop into an effective and insightful force for change.