Waiting for Antar

Friday, December 19th, 2003

In Waiting for Antar, Charles Paul Freund explains how Saddam presented himself as a courageous Arab redeemer, but he did not live up to the standard set by heroes like Antar:

The historic and cultural model of the courageous Arab redeemer could hardly stand in greater contrast. That figure is fearless, whether in face of the enemy or of death itself. He is magnanimous in victory, pious before God, noble, generous, and just to his own people. His soul is as filled with poetry as his sword is stained with the blood of the unworthy. There is a long line of fictional and historical figures who embody this role in Arab cultural artifacts, both traditional oral epics and modern TV serials, from Abu Bakr to Haroun al Rachid to Saladdin. For that matter, the fearless but noble Arab warrior even turns up in medieval European literature, appearing, for example, in Boccaccio. The original model, however, appears to be a black pre-Islamic Bedouin warrior known as Antar.

Note to self: read Boccaccio.

Antar is a remarkable character; his saga was recited in Arab squares and coffeehouses for centuries, absorbing Islamic values despite predating the coming of Islam. Among the rousing adventures of this poet-warrior was saving the Rome of the Caesars from attack by Byzantine Greeks, enemies of the Arabs. He was so noble that even the Prophet Muhammad is reported to have expressed a wish to have known him. When Westerners first encountered the Antar epic in the 19th century, they swooned, proclaiming the work to be the Arabic Iliad. The saga itself has shrunk in recent years; Westerners have nearly forgotten him, and Arabs now are likely to treat Antar’s adventures as children’s literature. Antar’s monomythic shadow, however, is a long one, and has fallen across the shallow myth of Saddam repeatedly.

Note to self: read Antar epic too.

Antar’s own death, by the way, is worth pausing over, because in one bizarre detail it actually overlaps Saddam’s ignominious capture. Here’s Antar’s death: Antar is killed by an old enemy whom he long ago blinded, but who has learned to shoot arrows by sound. This enemy attacks Antar when the hero is vulnerable: when Antar exits a feast to urinate. Though severely wounded, Antar silently tracks his blind enemy and kills him. As Antar is leading his band to safety, however, they are again attacked. To save his men, he asks to be set one last time on his horse, with his lance in his hand. The enemy attackers, spying him, don’t dare approach. At length, however, they come near, and seeing that Antar is dead, they bury him respectfully.

The screenplay practically writes itself. Hmm…

Here’s where that story ties in with Saddam’s capture:

What has this to do with Saddam? Time magazine has published a report about Saddam’s first interrogation, and it reveals the one thing that Saddam might have picked up from the whole Antar saga: a concern about urinating. According to Time, “When asked ‘How are you?’ said the official, Saddam responded, ‘I am sad because my people are in bondage.’ When offered a glass of water by his interrogators, Saddam replied, ‘If I drink water I will have to go to the bathroom and how can I use the bathroom when my people are in bondage?’”

How can I pee when my people need me? You’ll find a way, Saddam.

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Cookie Sale Shutdowns

Friday, December 19th, 2003

Ouch. On her Dynamist Blog, Virginia Postrel mentions some harsh satire by conservative students at SMU:

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, on whose board I serve, is shaming college administrators over their latest anti-satire campaigns: shutting down conservative students’ bake sales, at which cookies cost less for blacks and Latinos than for whites and Asians.

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Cats Try to Eat Incapacitated Owner

Friday, December 19th, 2003

I don’t trust cats. From Cats Try to Eat Incapacitated Owner:

A group of hungry cats began to eat their 86-year-old owner after she suffered an apparent stroke and couldn’t get up for nearly a week, officials said Thursday.
[...]
The cats, apparently without food for that time, also tried to eat Lowrie’s small dog, said Jackie David, a spokeswoman for the city Animal Services Department. The terrier showed signs of hypothermic shock, severe dehydration, respiratory illness and was later euthanized, she said. One of the cats, a kitten, was found dead.

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275-Pound Prostitute Strips Attacker

Friday, December 19th, 2003

275-Pound Prostitute Strips Attacker:

A 140-pound rapist met his match in an angry, 275-pound prostitute, police said.

Adrian Castillo Ramirez allegedly tried to sexually assault a 24-year-old Bakersfield prostitute who was nearly twice his weight.

But she took his knife, stripped him naked and paraded him in front of other prostitutes, after asking how many of them had ever been forced into sex at knifepoint. Then she tried to take him — still naked — to the police station, reports said.

Castillo was charged with failing to register as a sex offender, and with committing forcible sex acts on the 24-year-old and on a 37-year-old woman in a previous incident. He was convicted of four counts of rape in 1988.

Castillo pleaded innocent Wednesday, and is being held on $250,000 bail, police said.

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McLanguage Meets the Dictionary

Thursday, December 18th, 2003

McLanguage Meets the Dictionary:

McDonald’s wants Merriam-Webster to take its McJob and shove it. McDonald’s CEO Jim Cantalupo is steamed that the latest edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines ‘McJob’ as low-paying, requiring little skill, and providing little opportunity for advancement. Three years ago The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language ran a similar definition, and The Oxford English Dictionary includes ‘unstimulating’ in the mix of descriptors branding McJobs as dead-end.

McCEO isn’t a McJob — but asking “Would you like fries with that?”…yeah, that’s a McJob.

Jim Cantalupo isn’t the first person to object to what he feels is bad language in the dictionary, nor is he the first to tell lexicographers how to define their words. For example, in 1872 A.S. Solomons protested G. & C. Merriam’s definition of the verb “jew” as “to cheat.” And in 1997 a grass-roots protest insisted that Merriam-Webster drop the word “nigger” from the dictionary. The NAACP joined that protest, calling for the dictionary to remove any reference to race in the word’s definition.

Remove race from the definition?

Wildly successful business phenomena like McDonald’s have a way of working their way into our language as well as our culture. In the early 20th century, Coca-Cola sued to prevent the marketing of other drinks with “cola” in their name, winning judgments against upstarts like Chero-Cola, Clio-Cola, and El-Cola but losing against Cherry-Cola, Dixie-Cola, and Koke, all of them long gone. Coke also lost its bid to prevent 7-Up from calling itself “the Un-Cola.” One result of Atlanta-based Coke’s domination of the cola industry is that “coke” and “co’ cola” have become generic terms in the South for any soft drink. Another soft drink, Moxie, won a suit against the competitor Noxie, only to see “moxie” enter the language as an ordinary word meaning energy, guts, or chutzpah. Shredded wheat, thermos, and zipper all began as trademarked terms that morphed into everyday words as well.

I always wondered where “moxie” came from.

When I crawl into the airport early Saturday morning, I plan on asking the girl behind the McDonald’s counter for Eggs McMuffin:

Ever eager to burnish its public image, the McDonald’s Corporation once hired a public-relations firm to ascertain the correct plural of the Egg McMuffin. Perhaps they were hoping to gain approval for Eggs McMuffin, on the analogy of the more upmarket eggs Benedict. But that quest went nowhere. As far as I know, the company never ruled on what eaters of the Egg McMuffin should order if they want more than one.

Baron makes a point: “Dictionaries don’t tell us how to use our words, they describe how we use them.”

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Q: What will happen when a national political machine can fit on a laptop? A: See below

Thursday, December 18th, 2003

In Q: What will happen when a national political machine can fit on a laptop? A: See below, Everett Ehrlich applies one of economist Coase’s insights to modern, Internet-era politics:

Back in 1937, an economist named Ronald Coase realized something that helped explain the rise of modern corporations — and which just might explain the coming decline of the American two-party political system.

Coase’s insight was this: The cost of gathering information determines the size of organizations.

It sounds abstract, but in the past it meant that complex tasks undertaken on vast scales required organizational behemoths. This was as true for the Democratic and Republican parties as it was for General Motors. Choosing and marketing candidates isn’t so different from designing, manufacturing and selling automobiles.

But the Internet has changed all that in one crucial respect that wouldn’t surprise Coase one bit. To an economist, the “trick” of the Internet is that it drives the cost of information down to virtually zero. So according to Coase’s theory, smaller information-gathering costs mean smaller organizations. And that’s why the Internet has made it easier for small folks, whether small firms or dark-horse candidates such as Howard Dean, to take on the big ones.

For contrast, Ehrlich shares this anecdote:

Consider, for example, the first “modern” political campaign — the Whig campaign for William Henry Harrison in 1840. Apart from some success as an Indian killer, Harrison had minimal credentials, but the Whigs figured out how to use the tremendous organizational apparatus of their party to promote him. They fabricated the image of Harrison as the “log cabin and hard cider” candidate, despite his more patrician roots, and used the party organization to enforce discipline around the fabrication — to get everyone to say the same thing at the same time. In America’s first political mass media stunt, they constructed a 10-foot-high ball of twine, wood and tin, covered it with Whig political slogans, and rolled it first from Cleveland to Columbus and then from town to town across the country (hence the expression “Keep the ball rolling”).

Posted in Economics, Policy, Technology | No Comments »

Commonwealth Club Speech

Wednesday, December 17th, 2003

Michael Crichton’s Commonwealth Club Speech may make up for Congo:

I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can’t be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people — the best people, the most enlightened people — do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

It gets better:

There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?

And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed up, to accelerate the process. And what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly: the early peoples of the New World lived in a state of constant warfare. Generations of hatred, tribal hatreds, constant battles. The warlike tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche, Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide, and human sacrifice. And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were exterminated, or learned to build their villages high in the cliffs to attain some measure of safety.

How about the human condition in the rest of the world? The Maori of New Zealand committed massacres regularly. The dyaks of Borneo were headhunters. The Polynesians, living in an environment as close to paradise as one can imagine, fought constantly, and created a society so hideously restrictive that you could lose your life if you stepped in the footprint of a chief. It was the Polynesians who gave us the very concept of taboo, as well as the word itself. The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true. That anyone still believes it, 200 years after Rousseau, shows the tenacity of religious myths, their ability to hang on in the face of centuries of factual contradiction.

This reminded me of a friend of ours who got DEET “burns” in Malaysia:

And if you, even now, put yourself in nature even for a matter of days, you will quickly be disabused of all your romantic fantasies. Take a trek through the jungles of Borneo, and in short order you will have festering sores on your skin, you’ll have bugs all over your body, biting in your hair, crawling up your nose and into your ears, you’ll have infections and sickness and if you’re not with somebody who knows what they’re doing, you’ll quickly starve to death. But chances are that even in the jungles of Borneo you won’t experience nature so directly, because you will have covered your entire body with DEET and you will be doing everything you can to keep those bugs off you.

Definitely read the whole article.

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Annals of Homosexuality: From Greek to Grim to Gay

Wednesday, December 17th, 2003

In Annals of Homosexuality: From Greek to Grim to Gay (note: annals, two ns), Edward Rothstein reviews Louis Crompton’s Homosexuality and Civilization:

It begins in the gladness of early Greece, where homosexuality had an “honored place” for more than a millennium and concludes with the madness of 19th-century Europe. In between is what Mr. Crompton calls a “kaleidoscope of horrors” lasting more than 1,500 years. In the 13th century, a French law stated: “Whoever is proved to be a sodomite shall lose his testicles. And if he does it a second time, he shall lose his member. And if he does it a third time, he shall be burned.” Beginning in 1730 in the Netherlands, 250 trials of “sodomites” took place, followed by at least 75 executions. Between 1806 and 1835, 60 homosexuals were hanged in England.

I guess those first two punishments make it clear what role the “criminal” plays in his third offense…

But what led to this “kaleidoscope of horrors”? In ancient Greece, homosexuality was philosophically praised and institutionally sanctioned, associated with virtues of courage and mentorship. In ancient Rome, it was primarily cultivated in relationships between masters and slaves, but homosexual behavior was common to Pompey, Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavius. “Of the first 15 emperors,” Gibbon pointed out, “Claudius was the only one whose taste in love was entirely correct.”

I’m having trouble looking beyond my 21st-century American worldview.

Mr. Crompton argues that Christianity created the most radical change in attitudes toward homosexuality. “The debt owed by civilization to Christianity is enormous,” he writes; but so, he believes, have been Christianity’s sins. In Japan, for example, before the mid-19th-century Western influence, homosexuality was “an honored way of life among the country’s religious and military leaders so that its acceptance paralleled, and in some respects even surpassed, ancient Athens.” It was common among Buddhist sages, part of samurai culture and an accepted aspect of the Kabuki theater world.

Homosexuality common in monasteries, the army, and the theater? No! Christianity demonized homosexuality? Seriously, I find it hard to consider Crompton’s theory groundbreaking.

Mr. Crompton traces Christian hostility to Leviticus, which may have been written around 550 B.C., at the very time that homoerotic poetry was thriving in Greece. It mandated death for homosexual acts. Mr. Crompton suggests that this law was an attempt to differentiate the Jews from Mediterranean cults in which transvestite priests, eunuchs and sexual activity played a central role in ritual and worship.

At least church was entertaining back in the Mediterranean cults…

Here’s some history I never read in high school:

Judging from this history, though, prohibition seems to have been unable to quash the practice in any social class; in the European aristocracy, at any rate, it flourished. In 1610, when Louis XIII came to the French throne, Mr. Crompton notes, “one `sodomite,’ James I, ruled England, Scotland, and Ireland; another, Rudolph II, presided over the Holy Roman Empire; and France had its second homosexual king within a generation.”

I suspect the French and English have been saying that about one another’s rulers for a long, long time.

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Tanzania Rats Learn to Detect TB Bacteria

Monday, December 15th, 2003

I have to admit, I love these trained-animal stories. From Tanzania Rats Learn to Detect TB Bacteria:

The giant pouched rats that have been trained to sniff out land mines in Africa are now learning to detect tuberculosis bacteria in human saliva with the help of a grant from the World Bank.
[...]
In his proposal, Weetjens said the rat, whose Latin name is Cricetomys gambianus, can sniff 120-150 human saliva samples in lab dishes in 30 minutes compared to the day’s work it takes for a human technician to analyze 20 samples. The rat stops in front of samples that smell like TB and waits to be rewarded but walks past samples where TB is not present.
[...]
The first batch of 12 rats trained to detect land mines are now at work in neighboring Mozambique and so far have sniffed out 20, Weetjens said.

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Pretty women scramble men’s ability to assess the future

Sunday, December 14th, 2003

Guys take stupid risks when they see a pretty woman? Pretty women scramble men’s ability to assess the future:

Both male and female students at McMaster University were shown pictures of the opposite sex of varying attractiveness taken from the website “Hot or Not”. The 209 students were then offered the chance to win a reward. They could either accept a cheque for between $15 and $35 tomorrow or one for $50-$75 at a variable point in the future.

Wilson and Daly found that male students shown the pictures of averagely attractive women showed exponential discounting of the future value of the reward. This indicated that they had made a rational decision. When male students were shown pictures of pretty women, they discounted the future value of the reward in an “irrational” way — they would opt for the smaller amount of money available the next day rather than wait for a much bigger reward.

Women, by contrast, made equally rational decisions whether they had been shown pictures of handsome men or those of average attractiveness.

“We have not elucidated the psychological mechanisms mediating our results,” says Margo Wilson. “But we hypothesise that viewing pictures of pretty women was mildly arousing, activating neural mechanisms associated with cues of sexual opportunity.”

Tommaso Pizzari, an evolutionary biologist at Leeds University, offers another possible explanation: “If there’s the prospect of getting a very attractive partner it may pay a man to take more risks than if an average partner was available.”

He told New Scientist: “If this is a response to sexual selection then you would expect men who are less attractive to take more risks. If you have many attractive potential partners then it does not pay to take risks. If you are less attractive, with few potential partners, then it pays to take risks.”

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Advise to a liberal-arts major

Sunday, December 14th, 2003

Alex Tabarrok, in his Advise to a liberal-arts major, answers this letter (originally written to Marilyn vos Savant, Parade, Dec. 7, 2003):

Many of my friends and I are intelligent, liberal-arts graduate who, due to an economic system that glorifies science, medicine, business, and law, are toiling as secretaries and retail clerks. Is there any hope for the philosopher, writer, dancer, poet or sculptor to find paying work in Western society? Or are we doomed to relegate our talents to hobbies while working in drudgery until we die, just to pay the bills?

Tabarrok’s response:

First, stop whining. You had a choice of poetry or business and you chose poetry. If your love for the subject is not enough to make up for the loss in income then go back to school. Two, stop blaming ‘an economic system’ that glorifies science etc. and notice that these jobs pay highly because the skills they require are rare and people are willing to pay for the product of these jobs. If you produce something that people want you will be paid highly also but don’t expect other people to pay so that you can fulfill your dreams of writing poetry that no one wants to read. Third, what do you mean by it’s difficult to find work for the philosopher, writer, dancer, poet or sculptor in ‘Western society.’ Do you know of any society at any time or place that has offered more for the arts? A retail clerk who does sculpture on the side has a far higher income than does your typical sculptor working in India. Try visiting most of the rest of the world — where science and business are not glorified — if you want to truly understand ‘drudgery.’

Posted in Business, Economics, Education, Science | No Comments »

The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick

Saturday, December 13th, 2003

The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick examines how Philip K. Dick’s science fiction stories have practically taken over Hollywood:

Like the babbling psychics who predict future crimes in Minority Report, Dick was a precog. Lurking within his amphetamine-fueled fictions are truths that have only to be found and decoded. In a 1978 essay he wrote: “We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives. I distrust their power. It is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”

It didn’t start off quite so auspiciously:

Dick’s career in movies did not begin with a bang. It was 1977, and a small-time actor named Brian Kelly wanted to option the 9-year-old novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? For a mere $2,500, he got it. “The works of Philip K. Dick were not exactly in demand,” recalls the writer’s New York literary agent, Russell Galen, “and for Phil” — then 49 and living in suburban Orange County — “that was enough to make the difference between a good year and a bad year.” Kelly’s partner wrote a screenplay and shopped it around. Eventually it landed on the desk of Ridley Scott, who’d just directed Alien. Scott brought in a new writer and sent it to Alan Ladd Jr., one of the top players in Hollywood.

Just a few months before [Blade Runner]‘s release, Dick suffered a massive stroke. [...] Before Dick died, Shusett bought the film rights to “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” a story about a nebbishy clerk with dreams of going to Mars. He retitled it Total Recall and took it to Dino De Laurentiis, who put it into development.

This part is pure Hollywood:

Total Recall languished for years before all the elements — producer, director, star — came together. At one point, Richard Dreyfuss was attached. At another, David Cronenberg was going to direct and wanted William Hurt for the lead. “I worked on it for a year and did about 12 drafts,” Cronenberg recalls. “Eventually we got to a point where Ron Shusett said, ‘You know what you’ve done? You’ve done the Philip K. Dick version.’ I said, ‘Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing?’ He said, ‘No, no, we want to do Raiders of the Lost Ark Go to Mars.’” Cronenberg moved on. Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted to star, but De Laurentiis refused: Even in an overamped Hollywood bastardization, he couldn’t see Schwarzenegger in the part. Instead, it went to Patrick Swayze, with Bruce Beresford directing. They were building sets in Australia when De Laurentiis’ company went bankrupt.

This gave Schwarzenegger his chance. He got Carolco, the high-flying mini-studio behind the Rambo series, to buy the property, and Paul Verhoeven to direct it. The henpecked clerk named Quail became a muscle-bound construction worker named Quaid, and a new ending was written to make up for what many filmmakers see as the problem with Dick’s short stories: their lack of a third act that will take a movie to 90 minutes or more. But while Verhoeven’s film was an interplanetary shoot-’em-up that bore little resemblance to Dick’s story, it did retain the tale’s essential ambiguity: At the end, we’re not sure whether the main character actually went to Mars or only thought he did, thanks to some memory implants he bought. “This was extremely innovative, coming from a Hollywood studio,” says Verhoeven. “To dare to say, Everything you see could be a dream, or everything you see could be reality, and we won’t tell you which is true — I thought that was pretty sensational.”

It sounds like Verhoeen hasn’t seen a little cult classic from the late 1930′s…called The Wizard of Oz.

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Jonathan Yardley on Nero

Saturday, December 13th, 2003

Jonathan Yardley reviews Edward Champlin’s Nero and quotes this “dossier” of the emperor:

“Nero murdered his mother, and Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Nero also slept with his mother. Nero married and executed one stepsister, executed his other stepsister, raped and murdered his stepbrother. In fact, he executed or murdered most of his close relatives. He kicked his pregnant wife to death. He castrated and then married a freedman. He married another freedman, this time himself playing the bride. He raped a Vestal Virgin. He melted down the household gods of Rome for their cash value. After incinerating the city in 64, he built over much of downtown Rome with his own vast Xanadu, the Golden House. He fixed the blame for the Great Fire on the Christians, some of whom he hung up as human torches to light his gardens at night. He competed as a poet, a singer, an actor, a herald and a charioteer, and he won every contest, even when he fell out of his chariot at the Olympic Games. He alienated and persecuted much of the elite, neglected the army, and drained the treasury. And he committed suicide at the age of 30, one step ahead of the executioner. His last words were, ‘What an artist dies in me!’”

So at least the Neronian legend tells us.

It seems that no one explained to Nero that Christmas wouldn’t be special if it came every day:

What are usually scornfully referred to as bread and circuses were in fact immensely important to the Roman people. December’s Saturnalia, in which the people recreated “for a brief time the happy Golden Age when Saturn had ruled Italy,” was enjoyed by all, and its “potential appeal to the leaders of society as a form of social control is clear: along with one or two other similar festivals in the Roman calendar it could offer a safety valve, a time when the normally unthinkable was possible, a time of leisure and amusement for everyone.” Nero, who loved the Saturnalia, enlarged it: “by freeing saturnalian behavior from its strict seasonal confines, by redefining it, by introducing it deliberately into other parts of Roman life, Nero not only amused himself, he drew emperor and people, ruler and ruled, closer together. Saturnalian behavior made him popular.”

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War After the War

Saturday, December 13th, 2003

War After the War, by George Packer, reports on the situation in Iraq. I enjoyed this description of CPA headquarters:

The Coalition Provisional Authority, or C.P.A., is headquartered in the Republican Palace, about a mile beyond the Assassin’s Gate, down a road of eucalyptus trees, past bombed state buildings and concrete barriers. The palace, protected by a high iron gate and sandbagged machine-gun positions, is a sprawling two-story office building in the Babylonian-Fascist style favored by Saddam, with Art Deco eagles spanning the doorways. Evenly spaced along the top of the façade are four identical twenty-foot gray busts of Saddam, staring straight ahead, his eyes framed by an imperial helmet. Beneath these Ozymandian tributes, twelve hundred officials of the C.P.A. go about the business of running the country. Getting in to see one of them, a senior adviser to Bremer acknowledged, “is like a jailbreak in reverse.” Though it is in the geographical heart of ochre-colored, crumbling Baghdad, the C.P.A. sits in deep isolation. There are legitimate security reasons for this: on November 4th, the compound was hit by mortar fire, and four people were injured.

This scenario sounds like it’s out of a spy novel:

In Ramadi, a man who speaks broken English around other Iraqis suddenly pulls Prior aside and whispers in flawless English, “I am an American, take me with you.” When Prior tries to learn more, the man reverts to broken English and then clams up. Another man on another day approaches a soldier and, speaking perfect English, warns him not to trust Iraqis — that things are not what they seem. He disappears before the soldier can get more information. Prior and his first sergeant, Mark Lahan, track down the man at home with his family. Now using broken English, the man tells them that everything is fine.

In another mysterious incident, an Iraqi approaches Lahan and abruptly asks, “How are things in Baghdad? Have there been any suicide bombings? Have any Americans been killed?” Soon afterward, the guerrilla war starts.

This is a very small sample of the full article.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

Enjoyment

Friday, December 12th, 2003

Enjoyment examines a number of writers and the drugs they used — and concludes with this:

Drugs provided a marvellously adaptable and popular subject matter for authors — as sexy, sensational or sordid as they wanted. It has been a more mixed story for literary drug users. Although authors who took drugs for pure pleasure were the most criticised, they usually did the least harm to themselves. Druggy authors trying to turn themselves into transcendental voyagers virtually always made fools of themselves. And some writers who used substances both to cope and to unwind, found they couldn’t handle the stuff, and did themselves harm. Others took the pills and went on working fine. Overall, then, authors were pretty much like everyone else.

I’ll stick to caffeine. In small doses.

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