donkey o.d. too

Here is the central truth about Iraq today: This country is so broken it can’t even have a proper civil war.

There are so many people killing so many other people for so many different reasons — religion, crime, politics — that all the proposals for how to settle this problem seem laughable. It was possible to settle Bosnia’s civil war by turning the country into a loose federation, because the main parties to that conflict were reasonably coherent, with leaders who could cut a deal and deliver their faction.

But Iraq is in so many little pieces now, divided among warlords, foreign terrorists, gangs, militias, parties, the police and the army, that nobody seems able to deliver anybody. Iraq has entered a stage beyond civil war — it’s gone from breaking apart to breaking down. This is not the Arab Yugoslavia anymore. It’s Hobbes’s jungle.

Given this, we need to face our real choices in Iraq, which are: 10 months or 10 years. Either we just get out of Iraq in a phased withdrawal over 10 months, and try to stabilize it some other way, or we accept the fact that the only way it will not be a failed state is if we start over and rebuild it from the ground up, which would take 10 years. This would require reinvading Iraq, with at least 150,000 more troops, crushing the Sunni and Shiite militias, controlling borders, and building Iraq’s institutions and political culture from scratch.

Anyone who tells you that we can just train a few more Iraqi troops and police officers and then slip out in two or three years is either lying or a fool. The minute we would leave, Iraq would collapse. There is nothing we can do by the end of the Bush presidency that would produce a self-sustaining stable Iraq — and “self-sustaining” is the key metric.

In his must-read new book about the impact of culture on politics and economic development, “The Central Liberal Truth,” Lawrence Harrison notes that some cultures are “progress-prone” and others are “progress- resistant.” In the Arab-Muslim world today the progress-resistant cultural forces seem to be just too strong, especially in Iraq, which is why it is so hard to establish durable democratic institutions in that soil, he says.

“Some may hark back to our successful imposition of democracy on West Germany and Japan after World War II,” adds Mr. Harrison. “But the people on whom democracy was imposed in those two countries were highly literate and entrepreneurial members of unified, institutionalized societies with strong traditions of association — what we refer to today as ‘social capital.’ Iraq was social capital-poor to start with and it now verges on bankruptcy.”

On Feb. 12, 2003, before the war, I wrote a column offering what I called my “pottery store” rule for Iraq: “You break it, you own it.” It was not an argument against the war, but rather a cautionary note about the need to do it with allies, because transforming Iraq would be such a huge undertaking. (Colin Powell later picked up on this and used the phrase to try to get President Bush to act with more caution, but Mr. Bush did not heed Mr. Powell’s advice.)

But my Pottery Barn rule was wrong, because Iraq was already pretty broken before we got there — broken, it seems, by 1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism, three brutal decades of Sunni Baathist rule, and a crippling decade of U.N. sanctions. It was held together only by Saddam’s iron fist. Had we properly occupied the country, and begun political therapy, it is possible an American iron fist could have held Iraq together long enough to put it on a new course. But instead we created a vacuum by not deploying enough troops.

That vacuum was filled by murderous Sunni Baathists and Al Qaeda types, who butchered Iraqi Shiites until they finally wouldn’t take it any longer and started butchering back, which brought us to where we are today. The Sunni Muslim world should hang its head in shame for the barbarism it has tolerated and tacitly supported by the Sunnis of Iraq, whose violence, from the start, has had only one goal: America must fail in its effort to bring progressive politics or democracy to this region. America must fail — no matter how many Iraqis have to be killed, America must fail.

This has left us with two impossible choices. If we’re not ready to do what is necessary to crush the dark forces in Iraq and properly rebuild it, then we need to leave — because to just keep stumbling along as we have been makes no sense. It will only mean throwing more good lives after good lives into a deeper and deeper hole filled with more and more broken pieces.

donkey o.d.

2006-11-29T00:10:00.000-05:00

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Turning on the Puppet

2006-11-29T00:05:00.000-05:00

Here is Maureen Dowd's column for today. I have added a photo of Nick Rapavi that I found.

November 29, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

The pictures show a handsome blond kid. Nick Rapavi’s family and friends described him as a tough guy with a selfless streak. He’d wanted to be a marine since high school, and his dress uniform had a parade of medals for heroism in Afghanistan and Iraq, including a Purple Heart. He was on his third overseas deployment, and planned to go to college when he finished this stint in the spring.

The 22-year-old corporal, the oldest son of a dentist, grew up in Northern Virginia in the shadow of the Pentagon. The kid described as being “full of life” died Friday in Anbar Province, the heartless heart of darkness in western Iraq, the hole-in-the-desert stronghold of the Sunni insurgency and Al Qaeda fighters.

His mother told The Washington Post that her son’s squad had approached a gate on patrol, and Nick told his men to “stay back while he went through.” He was shot in the neck by a spectral enemy that melted away, one of 2,874 brave Americans to die fighting in Iraq.

In Latvia, President Bush vowed yesterday that “I’m not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete.” But his words about Iraq long ago lost their meaning. Especially the words “mission” and “complete.”

At least in Anbar, the Pentagon may be about to pull troops off the battlefield. In another article yesterday, The Post, reporting on a classified Marine Corps intelligence report, said that “the U.S. military is no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency in western Iraq or counter Al Qaeda’s rising popularity there.”

The Post went on: “The report describes Iraq’s Sunni minority as ‘embroiled in a daily fight for survival,’ fearful of ‘pogroms’ by the Shiite majority and increasingly dependent on Al Qaeda in Iraq as its only hope against growing Iranian dominance across the capital.”

ABC Nightly News went even further last night, reporting that the Pentagon is “writing off” Anbar and will send the 30,000 marines stationed there to Baghdad. “If we are not going to do a better job doing what we are doing out there,” a military official told Jonathan Karl, “what’s the point of having them out there?”

President Bush is still playing games, trying to link the need to stay in Iraq with Al Qaeda. “No question it’s tough,” Mr. Bush said at a news conference. “There’s a lot of sectarian violence taking place, fomented, in my opinion, because of the attacks by Al Qaeda, causing people to seek reprisal.”

Never mind that W. dropped the ball on Osama, and that his own commanders have estimated that Al Qaeda forces represent only a fraction of the foe in Iraq. Al Qaeda wasn’t even in Iraq until the Bush invasion.

The administration still won’t admit the obvious, that our soldiers are stuck in the middle of a civil war and that it’s going to take more than Dick Cheney powwowing with the Saudis to get us out of it. Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, gingerly talks of “a new phase” in the conflict.

But reality does break through at moments. As Mr. Bush and Mr. Hadley head to Jordan to try to tell Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki not to go all wobbly, a stunning secret memo from Mr. Hadley has surfaced, expressing severe skepticism about whether our latest puppet can cut it.

Michael Gordon reveals in today’s Times that in a classified assessment, Mr. Hadley wrote that the Iraqi leader, who is getting pushed around by Moktada al-Sadr, was having trouble figuring out how to be strong.

“The memo suggests that if Mr. Maliki fails to carry out a series of specified steps,” he writes, “it may ultimately be necessary to press him to reconfigure his parliamentary bloc, a step the United States could support by providing ‘monetary support to moderate groups,’ and by sending thousands of additional American troops into Baghdad to make up for what the document suggests is current shortage of Iraqi forces.”

Just what the election said Americans want: More kids at risk in Baghdad. (W.’s kids, of course, are running their own risks, partying their way through Argentina.)

Mr. Hadley bluntly mused about Mr. Malaki: “His intentions seem good when he talks with Americans, and sensitive reporting suggests he is trying to stand up to the Shi’a hierarchy and force positive change. But the reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action.”

It’s bad enough to say that about the Iraqi puppet. But what about when the same is true of the American president?

How to Fight Poverty: 8 Programs That Work

2006-11-21T00:33:00.000-05:00

November 16, 2006

Talking Points

By TINA ROSENBERG

Ask Americans whether they want to spend taxpayer money to educate girls abroad, and 80 percent say yes. Do they want to give food and medical assistance in poor countries? Eighty four percent do. Prevent and treat AIDS? That’s 79 percent.

But ask them whether they favor foreign aid, and only a bare majority does.

This disconnect occurs because a lot of Americans are concerned about how foreign aid is spent. Most Americans think Washington should help the needy abroad. But they worry the money will be wasted.

There are too many stories about taxpayer funds winding up in the Swiss bank accounts of dictators, financing dams and highways that never get built or paying exorbitant salaries to American consultants. Americans also wonder when they hear about how miserable life in some countries continues to be: why doesn’t foreign aid seem to be doing any good?

One reason is that not much money goes to combating that misery.

When pollsters ask people in the United States to guess how much their government spends on foreign aid, the median response is 25 percent of the federal budget – and Americans think that it should be 10 percent. The real number is less than 1 percent. And only a tiny percentage of that goes to fight poverty.

That percentage was even smaller during the Cold War, when a large chunk of American foreign aid went into dictators’ pockets or to their helicopter fleets. Its purpose was not to help people, but to buy friends.

But even today, 39 percent of the State Department's foreign aid budget goes to military aid, supporting congenial governments like Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan, and to fighting drugs.

Of the money that is marked for development – to help poor countries get richer – a lot goes to programs to help a nation’s central bank become more independent or to train congressional staff. This is important work, but it does not fight poverty. And a lot of what remains goes to help people in emergencies – feeding the hungry after crop failures, or rebuilding after a tsunami.

Not much is left for preventing crop failures in the first place. President Bush has proposed to give $23.7 billion in aid grants to poor countries in 2007. But even by the most generous calculations, only $3.7 billion is actually anti-poverty aid.

If antipoverty efforts do not help as much as Americans would like, one reason is that their government is spending far less than they think it is. This is unfortunate because there are programs out there with a proven track record of working — of lifting poor people out of poverty, and keeping them out — some run by governments, some by charity groups, and a few by businesses.

Here are some particularly effective ones.

I. The Gold Standard: Universal Vaccination

Universal vaccination is cost-effective foreign aid at its best. It is so successful, so widely considered essential, that many people today do not realize that it began only 20 years ago.

When Unicef and the World Health Organization started a global effort to vaccinate children against common childhood diseases in 1985, they were met with widespread skepticism. Vaccination rates for children in many countries were appalling – only 20 percent of the world's children in 1980 had gotten their third shot of D.P.T. (diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus) on time, the conventional measure of vaccine coverage.

But the program has had stunning success. By 1990, 75 percent of children had completed their D.P.T. shots on time. Bangladesh went from 9 percent D.P.T. completion in 1987 to 98 percent five years later. Worldwide, children were being immunized against polio and measles as well.

The logistics are heroic. Wars are routinely halted for inoculation campaigns. Entire countries get vaccinated in two days. Measles vaccines are successfully kept cold during day-long journeys by bicycle and canoe.

A full course of immunization, including everything in the supply chain, costs only $30. In the last 20 years this campaign has saved 20 million lives. It has given hundreds of millions of children a better start.

In the 1990s, however, the world’s attention turned to other problems, and vaccination rates slipped backwards. Bangladesh fell back to 66 percent in 1999. Every year 27 million children — a quarter of the world’s children — go unvaccinated against the basic diseases. Two to three million of these children die. Even for those who survive, these diseases can be crushing, forcing children to drop out of school, and parents to spend time and money they cannot afford on doctors and care for their sick children.

The challenge today is two-fold: to improve basic vaccine coverage, and to put new vaccines into global use. Vaccines now exist to protect children against common diarrheal and pneumococcal killers, against hepatitis B and a common influenza. But they are mainly in use in wealthy countries. Soon there may be a malaria vaccine as well. All these must become part of the universal vaccine package.

Help has come from an organization launched in 2000, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization. Financed by governments, organizations such as the World Bank and Unicef and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, GAVI gives poor countries money to improve their infrastructure and logistics – and then gives them more if they actually achieve improved vaccination rates. It also helps assure a predictable market for new vaccines, which encourages drug makers to produce them in large quantities. It has helped expand both basic and new vaccine coverage – because of GAVI, for example, 90 million children have been immunized against hepatitis B(pdf).

Immunization became a victim of its success, but close attention and new partnerships are now reviving vaccines. It is a lesson that eternal vigilance is needed, even to protect a program that became venerable practically overnight.

II. Give Poor People an Ownership Stake

Look around the edges of any large third world city and you will see vast settlements built by the residents themselves. Migrants from the countryside claim empty plots in nighttime land invasions, put up a blanket with a pole or a cardboard roof and begin stockpiling bricks. Their livelihoods are similarly jerry-rigged. A man will nail together a booth, at which he can sit and repair his neighbors’ shoes. A woman will open a window to the street to turn her living room into a mini-bodega, selling cooking oil and rice.

Most people surveying these kingdoms of dust and hope see only poverty. But Hernando de Soto saw something else – untapped wealth. Mr. De Soto, a Peruvian economist, realized that the world’s poor own trillions of dollars’ worth of assets. But their houses, plots of land and businesses lacked formal title – and so could not be used to do all the things that people in wealthy countries do to turn a little money into a lot of money.

Without title, people can not sell stakes in their businesses, use their homes as collateral for loans, buy insurance, or form limited liability corporations to reduce their personal risk. They cannot get credit in banks. They do not improve their businesses because their investment may suddenly vanish at any moment. They must spend money and time bribing the police to keep from being kicked off their land. In many cases they cannot even get electricity and telephone service.

Mr. De Soto’s crusade, which has now marched to El Salvador, Egypt, Mexico, Honduras, Tanzania, El Salvador, the Philippines, Haiti, Albania and elsewhere, attempts to turn these dead assets into living capital. All countries, of course, have ways to register property. But in most poor nations, they involve so much red tape that they are essentially useless for the poor. Mr. De Soto had tried an experiment in Peru – he established a two-sewing machine garment factory in a Lima slum and hired five college students to get all the necessary permits to legalize it. He claims it took them 289 days and cost them 31 times the average monthly minimum wage.

Mr. De Soto likes to say that when he walks through the rice fields in Bali, a different dog barks whenever he crosses from one farm to another. The dogs recognize the assets under their masters’ control. But the legal system does not.

To change this, Mr. De Soto founded an organization in Lima called the Institute for Liberty and Democracy. It carries out research on the informal sector. But the governments of Peru and El Salvador have also hired the I.L.D. to run registries that give poor people simple, quick ways to get title for their land, homes and businesses. It also helps them use those titles productively. In other countries, I.L.D. is helping governments design such agencies or train government officials to do this work.

The I.L.D.’s work in Peru means that legalizing a business can now be done in a day, by visiting a single desk. The cost dropped from $1,200 to $174. The group says that between 1990 and 1995, 300,000 titles were registered in urban Lima (pdf), and the value of the underlying land doubled by 1998. Hundreds of thousands of new businesses have been legalized. Poor people saved millions in administrative costs, and Peru raised millions of dollars in new taxes.

Getting title, of course, does not mean that poor people can necessarily turn it into higher incomes. To use newly legal assets, the poor must still contend with banks that won't lend to them, and courts that require bribes and put up other hurdles. Tackling these issues may help solve one of the most vexing drawbacks of globalization and the market economy – in much of the third world, they have tended to benefit only the wealthiest. But establishing property rights is a necessary first step.

III. Microcredit: The 62-Cent Solution

In 1976, a Bangladeshi economist named Muhammad Yunus came upon a group of 42 artisans – but perhaps the more appropriate word is “slaves.” They made crafts such as chair seats, and used materials lent to them each day at exorbitant rates of interest by the buyer of their work. They were forever in debt, unable to turn enough profit to buy their materials in advance at market prices. Mr. Yunus gave the group a loan from his pocket that averaged 62 cents per person. With that, they bought their freedom.

Twenty years later, the Grameen Bank, the organization Mr. Yunus founded, has lent small sums of money to 6.7 million people in Bangladesh, almost all of them women, many of whom had never before touched money. It offers savings, insurance, home mortgages, pension funds, scholarships, credit for families to buy fertilizer, build latrines or dig wells, and a program of no-interest loans for beggars, so they can offer candy or dried chiles for sale as they go house to house.

Microcredit now reaches nearly 100 million clients in more than 100 countries. The World Bank has found that microcredit accounted for 40 percent of the entire reduction in moderate poverty in rural Bangladesh —and that it had an even bigger impact on extremely poor borrowers.

Microcredit raises an entire village’s standard of living – even non-borrowers’ lives improve. (Lending to men, by contrast, proved not to affect poverty at all.) Studies of microcredit programs all over the world show that it produces higher incomes and better-fed children, and improves a family’s ability to survive illness or drought.

To many people, the name Grameen is synonymous with microcredit. But the Grameen Bank is not even the largest microcredit lender in Bangladesh – that is the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee. Nor were Mr. Yunus’s 62 cent loans the first – the earliest documented microloan took place in 1973, in Recife, Brazil, lent by Accion International , a group that has now lent over $10 billion.

But what Mr. Yunus and Grameen did – why they are sharing the 2006 Nobel Prize for Peace -- was show how an idea helping a few hundred people could be expanded to help millions. Grameen has also struck the proper balance – it is sustainable and profitable, with $600 million in savings from borrowers as capital. At the same time, it has never forgotten that its mission is to fight poverty, not maximize profit. It charges interest rates far lower than other commercial microlenders.

Grameen developed a model now in use globally. Although it is a bank, in many ways it is the opposite of a bank. Traditional banks in poor countries do not lend to the poor — administrative costs are too high, and the poor were thought to be bad risks. Normal banks stick close to business districts, require collateral, and lend mainly to men.

Grameen turned this on its head. Instead of collateral, Grameen depends on social pressure to guarantee loans. Women form borrowing groups of five, and must pay back their loans regularly for others in the group to be able to get one; borrowers must pledge to eliminate dowry, eat vegetables, have small families and educate their children — requirements not likely to be found at conventional banks.

It has been a decade since Grameen Bank accepted any donations or took loans. But hundreds of newer microfinance groups still look for donors. Accion International, for example, creates new microfinance institutions in 22 countries, which stop needing help once they become profitable. It also trains traditional banks in how to lend to the poor.

Microcredit started as an antipoverty program, but continues as a business. That is one reason it has grown and grown while other forms of aid fight for governments’ dollars and attention.

IV. Bribe the Poor

In 1995, the Mexican peso crashed and the economy contracted by 6 percent. At the time, Santiago Levy, the deputy finance minister, realized that the country’s antipoverty programs were going to fail its poor. The programs were a hodgepodge of food subsidies, adopted in response to powerful food producers. They were inefficient because they targeted foods everyone ate, rich and poor. Some even targeted foods the poor don’t eat, such as bread – poor Mexicans eat tortillas.

Mr. Levy saw a looming disaster – but also an opportunity to build political support for an antipoverty program that worked. Stealthily, he organized a pilot project to test a new idea in Campeche, far away from the capital so it would draw little notice. He began a program to pay poor mothers to keep their children in school and take their kids to the health clinic. He compared the results to poverty figures in a group of similar villages without the program. It was a great success. Data in hand, he persuaded President Ernesto Zedillo to phase in the new program and phase out the food subsidies.

Oportunidades, formerly called Progresa, is now embraced by all parties in Mexico and, with financing from the World Bank, is helping virtually every poor family. It not only focuses antipoverty spending on those who really need it, it does so in a way that encourages families to break the cycle of poverty for their children.

The average family in Oportunidades gets $35 a month – about a quarter of the rural family income. Families with many children in school can get up to $153 a month, a ceiling imposed to avoid providing incentive to have more children.

From the beginning, Oportunidades built in rigorous evaluation. Those studies have shown that it does focus its help on Mexico’s poorest people, and that the money is producing good results. Children are bigger and healthier. Oportunidades has also cut child labor and led to more schooling – in rural areas, for example, the number of children starting high school increased 85 percent. Moreover, by paying women, Oportunidades has augmented their power inside the family without increasing domestic violence.

There are fashions in foreign aid, and Oportunidades is hot. The World Bank sings its praises (pdf). So far 25 countries have adopted some version. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg just announced he is looking for donors to finance a pilot program to test whether New Yorkers, too, can be bribed out of poverty.

V. Link Up the Villages

When Shenggen Fan, now 45, was growing up in a village in China, it could take two days to get to Shanghai by motorboat and then bus. It took him an hour to walk to high school. Farmers grew only products they could eat or sell to their neighbors.

Now when he lands in Shanghai, he can drive to his family’s home in three hours. The high school is a 10-minute bike ride from his house. Farmers now buy animal feed and fertilizer from trucks visiting the village, and sell other visitors the cereals, watermelons and pigs they raise. The village has grown much more prosperous.

What has changed? Roads. Dirt trails were first replaced with all-weather roads made of broken bricks mixed with dirt, with drainage. Then the road to town was paved.

Almost everything people need to be able to live decently requires a road. A good dirt road with ditches is fine, or one built by villagers themselves with local stones or locally-made bricks. It just needs to be a road that allows a farmer to push his products to market in a hand cart, and that lets buses and trucks get from the village to the main trunk roads. The villagers themselves can maintain it.

Roads allow farmers to market their products, and bring in fertilizer and seeds. They let rural residents take non-farming jobs in nearby towns. Sick people can get to the hospital in time. Roads make it easier for the government to bring in water and electricity. Children can get to school faster, which means more will go. “With roads, people travel out and bring in new knowledge,” says Mr. Fan. “They change their behavior. Roads are a window to the outside world. In extreme cases, roads are life-saving – in the Ethiopian famine of 1984 and 1985, thousands of people died because they could not be reached by food aid.”

Today Mr. Fan is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington. The studies he and his colleagues have done on how poor governments should spend their money show that building small feeder roads is one of the single most effective ways to fight poverty (pdf). In India, it would be the single most effective antipoverty program, the group concluded. Feeder roads would also be among the best ways to spend money in Africa and China.

Rural roads are not glamorous. Government officials want to build highways, not feeder roads. China, for example, has expanded its national highway system by 44 percent a year since 1988. But rural roads have expanded only 3 percent a year. In Africa, fewer than 10 percent of feeder roads are currently passable during the rainy season, effectively cutting off villages for months at a time.

Thirty years ago, the World Bank concentrated on infrastructure. But many of its projects to build dams, highways and electrical plants were plagued with corruption and waste, or ended up hurting poor people. Building infrastructure, including roads, got a bad name. What's needed today is the infrastructure equivalent of microcredit – small projects for villagers that are a necessary first step out of poverty.

VI. Target the Decision-Makers

Suppose you are a parent in rural India, or parts of Africa, or China. You are poor. School is available for your children. But you may have to pay school fees, and you must buy uniforms and books. The nearest school is in the next village – a dangerous walk for a young girl.

Besides, you need your daughter at home to fetch water and take care of her younger siblings. You know that education is important – but it is your sons who will support you when you are old, while your daughters will become part of their husbands’ families. Your decision is easy – the boys, and only the boys, go to school.

Gene Sperling, formerly President Clinton’s national economic advisor, now at the Council on Foreign Relations, likes to talk about the central paradox in girls’ education: Going to school is good for girls. Educated girls make more money. They are more productive farmers and have smaller, healthier, better-educated families of their own. They are even less likely to catch the AIDS virus. Educating girls is also great policy for a nation. Closing the educational gender gap boosts economic growth.

But educating girls is not necessarily good for parents – and they make the decisions. Most poor people in the world live in societies in which the girl marries into her husband’s family. Educating a daughter, these cultures say, is like watering a neighbor’s garden. Parents will send their girls to school only if the costs are very low.

That’s one reason why far fewer girls than boys go to school. Of children in primary school today, 150 million will drop out before they finish – two thirds of them girls. In Africa, the majority of girls do not finish primary school.

School is often very expensive. School fees in some countries, such as the Congo, are more than the national per capita income. When Tanzania abolished school fees in January, 2002, school attendance doubled overnight – and most of the new students were girls. There are other costs. Parents must buy books and uniforms. When Kenya tried abolishing fees for uniforms, books and school construction in some places, students stayed in school 15 percent longer.

The other cost to parents is the lost value of the girls’ work at home. To solve this problem, many countries now pay families to send children, especially girls, to school. It is a central feature of Oportunidades-style cash payments, for example. Bangladesh's government provides 15 to 20 kilograms of grain, mainly wheat, per month to families of poor boys and girls if they maintain 85 percent attendance in primary school. The government also pays a stipend to all girls in rural areas in grades 6 through 10, covering the cost of tuition, exams, books, supplies, uniforms, transportation and even kerosene for lamps to study by. The girls must keep up minimum grades, attend classes and not get married until out of school. This program has boosted girls’ enrollment from 27 percent to 60 percent.

Bangladesh is also home to the schools run by BRAC, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee. BRAC's community schools have doubled the completion rates of government schools by overcoming the hidden obstacles to educating girls.. BRAC runs more than 30,000 schools for poor students, many in places where the nearest government school is far away. Teachers are women – often local high school graduates given training by BRAC. These features reassure parents that their daughters will be safe on the way to school and while in class. School schedules work around harvests and allow girls to be home during peak chore times. BRAC schools are run in close consultation with parents and do everything possible to help parents give their daughters the gift of learning.

VII. A Green Revolution for Africa

What was probably the single most effective antipoverty program in world history began in northern Mexico in the 1940s. Test plots showed that new varieties of dwarf wheat resisted many plant pests and diseases, and doubled or tripled the usual yields. Similar improvements followed in corn and rice. The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations spread the seeds to India and Pakistan, and parts of Asia, Latin America and North Africa, along with irrigation techniques, pesticides and fertilizer.

The Green Revolution is not yet over – productivity continues to increase, and even faster than in the early days. It has prevented famine and brought improvements in income, health and survival to hundreds of millions of people.

But few of them are in sub-Saharan Africa. Africa’s farmers get less than half the amount of grain per acre that Asian farmers get. From 1980 to 2000, India’s agricultural yields rose 28 percent. Africa’s dropped by 7 percent.

A Green Revolution for Africa is a challenge. Africa’s climate is much more varied than south Asia’s, so what crops need varies from place to place. Africa’s infrastructure is worse than India’s was, the soil is more degraded and AIDS is killing off the continent’s labor force.

But while a single Green Revolution benefiting all of Africa may not be possible, a patchwork of Green Revolutions is. Indeed, this is happening.

The Earth Institute at Columbia University is working with 78 villages across Africa to help them improve crop yields, part of a demonstration project trying to attack several different causes of poverty at once. Each village gets help with crops, clean water, nutrition, schools and health, for a total cost of no more than $110 per person per year. The Millennium Village project hopes to show that conquering poverty is possible for very little money. In agriculture, the project provides appropriate seeds and fertilizers to farmers who pledge to contribute part of their surplus to local schools for their lunch program. The subsidies diminish as farmers become able to buy the seeds and fertilizers themselves, and after three years the farmers are on their own.

Even after just one year, success has been notable. Farmers are growing a minimum of 3.5 times as much grain as before, with one village in Rwanda increasing its output 62-fold.

Can this be done on a large scale? The evidence says yes.

Ethiopia – a country once emblematic of crop failure and hunger – has doubled food production in the last 10 years and the government says it will double again by 2010. Malawi’s harvest this year was double that of last year. Ethiopia’s strategy was to provide farmers with better seed, more fertilizer, and hundreds of extension agents to spread good techniques. Malawi began to pick up 75 percent of the cost of farmers’ fertilizer and seed. Many farmers are now able to feed their families and sell surplus crops for the first time. Part of the advance has been luck – good rains. But success today will give farmers a cushion and better tools for withstanding the next drought.

The initial costs of improving crop yields is daunting for many governments in Africa. But if the Millennium Villages and countries like Ethiopia and Malawi can show success, they will make a strong case that farmers mainly need a one-time boost and that the benefits are great for Africa’s poorest and most vulnerable to drought.

VIII. Hold the Patient’s Hand

Tuberculosis is curable. Millions of people alive today can personally attest to the power of antibiotics. A simple course of four antibiotics, which costs as little as $11, can now vanquish a dreaded killer.

So why do nearly 2 million people a year still die of it? Because these antibiotics must be taken daily for six to nine months. That means that the local health clinic must have a steady supply. Patients must continue to take the full course even though they stop coughing, and the medicine causes nasty side effects. TB strikes mostly the poor, especially those living in crowded conditions. Many of them are migrants, who may be lost to the health system when they move.

If they don't finish the course, terrible things can happen. Patients stay sick, but now with a form of TB resistant to the basic drugs. Medicines that can cure this form of TB can cost $10,000, and the course of treatment is two years. Because of poor adherence, resistance has reached the point where some forms of TB are incurable. South Africa is battling an outbreak of this extremely resistant TB, and no doubt many other places are as well – they just don’t know it yet.

The solution is a strategy invented in Tanzania in the 1970s and now in use all over the world, called DOTS, for Directly Observed Treatment, Short-course.

DOTS has several components – among them good supply management and diagnosis – but what is key is what it is named for. Someone becomes a pill pal, with the job of watching the patient swallow the medicines. This can be a neighbor, a family member, or a community health worker.

DOTS is now widespread – it covers about 60 percent of the world’s diagnosed TB cases. It greatly improves the chance of cure. DOTS gives patients a social incentive to take their pills. But sometimes other layers of incentive are necessary as well. In her book “Millions Saved ,” Ruth Levine, the director of programs at the Center for Global Development in Washington, writes about China’s TB program. In 1990, TB in China was the leading cause of death in adults, killing 360,000 people that year. The next year, China switched to DOTS.

China found a way to make DOTS even more effective – by relying on the market. With help from the World Bank, China’s government pays village health workers to find TB patients, get them to the lab for periodic sputum checks, and see them through the full treatment course. The pill pal gets a bonus, too, as does the health center. China’s TB cure rate went from 52 percent to 95 percent, which prevents 30,000 TB deaths per year. Rates of resistant TB are far lower in the parts of China where DOTS is used.

DOTS is one of the most cost-effective health programs around. Each cure costs just $100, and brings a return of $60 for every dollar spent. It works because the drugs are cheap and it relies on community workers instead of doctors. The DOTS strategy recognizes that the promise of being cured is not always enough to change the way people behave. It uses social – and occasionally monetary – incentives to get the community and the patient working towards health.

These are not the only good programs. There are many more out there – family planning, provision of small amounts of nutrients such as Vitamin A, agroforestry to restore the fertility of soil, to name a few. But the above eight are some of the best.

A few common threads link these eight programs.

Many of them rely on the market. Microcredit and property legalization help poor people to start businesses. Other programs pay people for desired behavior.

Another common element is a focus on women and girls, who tend to be poorest of the poor and use help more efficiently than men.

A lot of these programs got their start when one individual looked at a familiar landscape in a fresh way.

The most important things these programs share, however, is that they work -- and with more money they could be working on a grander scale. Financing them, and others like them, is the kind of foreign aid Americans say they want, and should have.

The Opinionator: Pelosi’s First Big Mistakes

2006-11-15T14:03:00.000-05:00

November 15, 2006, 10:40 am

Which is worse: Nancy Pelosi’s embrace of Alcee Hastings as a potential chairman of the House intelligence committee, or her endorsement of John Murtha’s candidacy for House majority leader? The New Republic appears to vote for Hastings by publishing a special Web-only editorial that calls Pelosi’s signals toward Hastings “both substantively foolish and politically tone-deaf” and “based on petty personal and identity politics.”

Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, on the other hand, seems to vote for Murtha. She writes:

I wrote a few weeks back that Pelosi’s first test as speaker would be whether she picks Florida’s Alcee Hastings — who was removed from his federal judgeship for agreeing to take a bribe — to head the intelligence committee. As it turns out, I was wrong. Pelosi’s first test was how to handle Murtha. Whatever happens tomorrow, she flunked. Whether she’ll get another failing grade on Hastings remains to be seen.

Marcus condemns Murtha’s conduct in the Abscam scandal (“disqualifying” on its own) as well as “the back-scratching, dealmaking style” that Murtha has demonstrated in the quarter-century since then. She writes:

In a story last month, the New York Times described how Murtha has operated “a political trading post” in a back corner — the Murtha corner, it’s called — of the House floor, where Democrats and Republicans alike come to get Murtha’s blessing for earmarks or his help on close votes. As Pennsylvania Democrat Paul Kanjorski told the Times, “nobody ever leaves completely disappointed.”

Murtha is one of 12 Democrats who voted against the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill. He’s one of four who killed a strong Democratic ethics package earlier this year. He is a one-man earmarking factory whose beneficiaries have included a lobbying firm that employed his brother and another founded by a former top aide.

The biggest puzzle, and biggest disappointment, in all this is Pelosi, who was pitch-perfect in her first several days as speaker-elect. Now comes this lose-lose move.

The (Fictional) Triumph of the Conservative Democrats

2006-11-15T13:50:00.000-05:00

November 14, 2006, 10:30 pm

Two narratives have begun to emerge from the 2006 Congressional elections. The first is that Democrats didn’t win so much as Republicans lost. The second is that the Republicans who lost were beaten by a bunch of conservative Democrats.

There’s some truth to the first one: The election was a negative referendum on President Bush and the Republican Congress, specifically their mismanagement of Iraq, their ethical problems, and their inability to balance the federal budget or refrain from trying to distract Americans public with noisy wedge issues rather than provide solutions to more pressing problems.

But the second narrative is a fiction. And it is puzzling that Republicans and conservatives are the ones peddling it.

The poster boy for the Democrats-won-as-conservatives theme is Heath Shuler, a 34-year-old former University of Tennessee football star from western North Carolina. Just hours after the results came in last Tuesday, The Times’s David Brooks wrote in this space: “Many moderate Republicans survived, despite my pessimistic expectations … Furthermore, many moderate Democrats won, like Heath Shuler in North Carolina.” Charles Krauthammer echoed the point in his Washington Post column on Friday: “Democratic gains included the addition of many conservative Democrats . . .Hence Heath Shuler of North Carolina, anti-abortion, pro-gun, anti-tax — and now a Democratic House member.”

But take a closer look at who actually won — and lost — last Tuesday.

As of this writing (a few recounts are pending), Democrats captured 6 Senate seats and 28 House seats, and they are also expected to unseat Republican Representative Rob Simmons of Connecticut.

Based on the National Journal’s ideological ratings of Congress, the majority of defeated House Republicans were purged from the liberal third of the G.O.P. caucus. Ten of the 28 most liberal Republicans lost, including four of the top 12: Jim Leach of Iowa (No. 1), Nancy Johnson of Connecticut (No. 3), Simmons (No. 7), and Charlie Bass of New Hampshire (No. 12). Sherwood Boehlert of New York, sixth on the list of most liberal Republicans, is retiring from Congress, and the Democratic candidate won the race for his seat.

As for the new class of Congressional Democrats, sure, it includes a few self-described “pro-lifers” and opponents of gun control. But the vast majority of House candidates in competitive races ran as Iraq war critics who support reproductive choice and embryonic stem cell research, want to raise the minimum wage, and oppose privatizing Social Security. A pack of blue-dog Zell Millers this is not.

The Senate results are similar. Much attention has been paid to the flattop haircut and heartland personality of farmer Jon Tester, Montana’s Senator-elect; the way former Reagan Navy secretary and Vietnam veteran Jim Webb used his son’s combat boots to kick out Virginia’s George Allen; and the anti-choice position of Bob Casey, the newly elected Catholic Democrat from Pennsylvania.

These biographical nuggets obscure the fact that these men and the other three new Democratic senators ran as strong economic populists and thundering critics of the war. Republican Conrad Burns of Montana closed the gap during the late stages of his campaign by criticizing Tester as a big-government tax-and-spender. Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse beat the most liberal Republican incumbent senator, Lincoln Chafee, by running to his left. And in Ohio, Republican moderate Mike DeWine fell to Sherrod Brown, who promptly was named heir to the late Paul Wellstone, the über-progressive senator from Minnesota.

What we witnessed last week was the final stage of a regional realignment, one that began four decades ago, in the wake of the civil rights movement, and slowly but steadily converted most southern Dixiecrats into Republicans. Until this year that transformation was incomplete, as many Ford- and Rockefeller-style Republicans continued to represent blue districts or blue states in the Northeast and Midwest.

The Rust Belt realignment of 2006 provided a corrective: Now (presuming Simmons is defeated), Chris Shays of Connecticut will be the sole surviving Republican among the 22 Representatives from New England. Although Maine and New Hampshire each have two Republican senators, should any of them or retire, Democrats will be poised to take their places.

The great irony of the 2006 midterms for Republicans is that the conservatives who pulled the party to the right survived, while the liberal wing was decimated. Because the Democrats who beat those liberal Republicans ran even further left, the notion that conservative Democrats carried the day is plainly absurd.

Conservative talking heads usually rush to paint Democrats as a pack of tin-eared, out-of-the-mainstream liberals. That’s why it’s so surprising that some of these same voices are now cherry-picking the results in an effort to perpetuate the fiction that Republicans lost, but conservatives somehow won. It suggests that this year’s defeat so stunned the conservative movement, it lost its messaging mojo, too.

For liberal Democrats, that may be the biggest victory of all.

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EARLIER BLOGS:

November 10, 2006, 9:37 pm

More Power to Them: Democrats Win Beyond Congress

Amid the hoopla and historical analogies following the Democrats’ capture Tuesday of both chambers of Congress, an equally dramatic story is unfolding at the state level, where Democrats also re-established themselves as the majority party among governors and state legislatures.

Democrats elected six new governors among the thirty-six chosen this week, giving them a 28-member majority for the first time since 1994 — the same, fateful year they lost control of both chambers of Congress. Democrats netted almost 300 state legislative seats, snapping up nine new state legislative chamber majorities to just one for the Republicans.

These new governorships and legislative majorities will, of course, have direct implications for policy and politics in their respective states. But the national implications of these shifts in power has great portent for national politics in the 2008 presidential race and, especially, the redistricting battles in the coming decade.

Craig Gilbert, a keen national reporter for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, noted this startling fact: Of the 11 states decided by five percentage points or less during the 2004 presidential contest, 9 now have Democratic governors.

Democrats were re-elected or maintained control in Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Washington. In addition, the Democrats captured new governorships in Colorado and Ohio — and came close to making it a full sweep of those 11 states, losing the Minnesota and Nevada races narrowly.

Historically, the party that holds the governor’s office is neither more nor less likely to win that state in the presidential election. Still, it can’t hurt Democrats that these newly-elected or, in most cases, comfortably re-elected chief executives will be on the ground when the 2008 battle for the White House moves into the final, crucial stages.

In fact, their influence may be felt sooner: A key problem for Democrats across the country in recent decades has been the deterioration of their state party machines, particularly in Colorado, Ohio and Wisconsin, where a string of popular Republican governors left of-out-power Democrats scratching their heads. For instance, the Ohio state Republican party and its longtime state party chairman Bob Bennett had been getting the best of state Democrats since the mid-1990’s. Governor-elect Ted Strickland’s landslide victory Tuesday in the Buckeye State thus gives the once-dormant Ohio Democrats a needed booster shot in the most coveted state in presidential politics. The build-up to 2008 will commence soon after Strickland’s inauguration in January.

In Colorado, the race for governor also proved significant. Denver district attorney Bill Ritter’s defeat of Republican Congressman Bob Beauprez capped an almost complete reversal — within the span of the past two election cycles — of the two parties’ fortunes in the state.

Prior to 2004, Republicans held Colorado’s governor’s office, both chambers of the state legislature, both U.S. Senate seats, and a majority of the state’s seven-member U.S. House delegation. Now, the situation is almost exactly the reverse: Democrats have the statehouse, the state legislature, four of those seven U.S. House seats, and one of the two U.S. senators — and if incumbent Republican Senator Wayne Allard isn’t careful, he might get shown the door in 2008.

With its nine electors, Colorado is the most precious of the Interior West states Democrats will need to start winning to capture the White House. After Bill Clinton won it in 1992, it slipped back into Republican control. But even before Tuesday, Colorado seemed to be trending back: Despite spending little time or resources there, John Kerry’s 2004 losing margin of 4.6 percent was almost half Al Gore’s 8.4 percent defeat in 2000.

The larger significance of these gubernatorial victories, especially in tandem with state legislative gains, will be seen in state and Congressional redistricting battles that will follow the 2010 Census.

Because governors enjoy generally high re-election rates, the new governors will find themselves in the preferred incumbent’s position in 2010. And those winners will have great input in the battles conducted in 2011 to draw the legislative maps that will go into effect for the 2012 elections. Given all this, it is probably safe to say that the war for control in the U.S. House of Representatives and state legislatures for January 2013 also commenced this week, and that Democrats won the first major battle of that war.

The results of the state legislative elections are too numerous to recount here, but a few notable trends deserve mention.

As in the Democratic victories in Congress and among governors, more than 80 percent of net gains in the state legislatures came outside the South. The party added nine new chamber majorities and lost only one. Most of their new Democratic chamber majorities came in the Midwest, home to five of the presidential swing states.

What happened further down ballot this week could provide the boost Democrats needed as they now set their sights on 2008 and the very top of the ballot.

November 3, 2006, 10:30 pm

Haunted on the Hill

The midterm elections are just days away, and we find ourselves showered by a virtual cascade of numbers — poll results, Congressional and gubernatorial seats in play, presidential approval ratings, and campaign finance totals.

One number stands out from the rest as most indicative of what will happen Tuesday. But we’ll come back to that later.

Released Wednesday, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll surveyed Americans during the last four days of October. For Republicans, the results are scary even by Halloween week standards. Public approval for the president’s handling of Iraq, terrorism and the economy is low. Approval ratings for Congress are even lower.

In 2004, President George W. Bush won a narrow re-election, and Republicans made small increases in their Congressional seats and no gains among state governors. On the eve of that election, voters were far from ecstatic about Bush, the situation in Iraq, and the general direction America was heading.

The 2004 pre-election situation, however, looks positively rosy compared to the outright hostility Americans feel as they head into voting booths this year. A comparison of the numbers from the Times/CBS poll taken in the last week of October 2004 with the results from this past week reveals a startling downturn in the mood of the electorate.

Heading into his re-election, Bush had a net approval margin of 5 percentage points. Now, he’s at minus 24. In 2004, 55 percent of respondents said the country was on the wrong track, compared to 43 percent who said it was on the right track. Today, that 12 percentage point margin has widened to 35, with 64 percent of respondents saying the country is on the wrong track.

In 2004 the president had a net approval of minus 4 percentage points on foreign policy and minus 5 on Iraq; the latest figures are minus 27 and minus 35, respectively. There’s no way to spin it: The war is tanking Bush’s presidency.

The one place where the president’s slide has not been as precipitous is on the economy. But even there, Bush’s net disapproval has doubled from minus 8 percentage points in 2004 to minus 16 now.

Looking at these numbers, one might ask, How did Bush manage to get himself re-elected?

The quick answer to that is that, two years ago, the president still had a strong, net approval on “handling the campaign against terrorism” — 15 percentage points. But even that strength has turned into a liability: Bush is now at minus 4 in handling terrorism.

Republicans in Congress should not feel cheery either.

Historically, public approval ratings of Congress tend to be lower than for the other two branches of government. But even by these standards, this Congress is disliked by most Americans.

Though overall approval was actually lower last spring (23 percent approving, 64 percent disapproving), and again a month ago in the wake of the Mark Foley page scandal, the slight correction in the last few weeks still leaves only 29 percent approving and 56 percent disapproving, or a net margin of minus 27.

The numbers driving these poll results are more gruesome, because they involve body counts, disfigurations, losses of limb and other unpleasant realities in Iraq. According to ICasualties.org, a Web site that tracks U.S. State Department press reports, 2,829 American service personnel and at least 146 contractors have been killed in Iraq. That’s more than the combined number of Americans and foreign nationals killed in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

What’s more telling, if under-reported by the media, is the rate of fatalities and casualties, which has increased rather than declined following so many of the key moments the administration predicted would become “turning points.”

Prior to Saddam Hussein’s capture in December 2003, and including the bloodiest days en route to capturing Baghdad, there were 459 American fatalities in 269 days, or 1.7 per day. In the 1,039 days since that “turning point,” the fatality rate is 2.3 servicemen and -women per day. How about the much-touted “handover” of sovereignty to Iraqis on June 28, 2004? No better: Average daily fatalities were 1.8 before the largely symbolic transfer of control, but have jumped to 2.3 fatalities per day since. That’s an extra 15 soldiers or Marines per month.

These figures show neither progress nor safety and stability. The casualty figures for non-fatal woundings of American troops is too depressing to recount, but also rising.

As for the one key statistic that supersedes — or, rather, encapsulates — all of the numbers above, well, that’s simple: Heading into the 2004 presidential election, the post-war occupation of Iraq was in its eighteenth month, but two years later that occupation is now 42 months old.

Put another way, the war today is more than twice as old now as it was when Americans last voted. In effect, Bush and Republicans are asking for twice as much patience with a war that’s going half as well as predicted.

Karl Rove has hinted that the G.O.P.’s vaunted 72-hour pre-election program will somehow save the Republicans’ Congressional majorities. The problem is that their field program will be no match for the administration’s 42-month program in Iraq.

October 30, 2006, 10:30 pm

Deflating the Myths of 2004

With the 2006 midterms around the corner, it’s worth pausing a moment to first clarify the story of the 2004 elections.

The national media has already arrived at a narrative about what happened two years ago. The abbreviated version of this story is that George W. Bush, on the strength of his leadership on terrorism and an evangelical booster shot from the gay marriage issue, won the sort of decisive victory that eluded him four years earlier, while helping expand his party’s majorities in Congress.

The post-election summaries of the state of the two parties were strikingly different. The Democrats and their less-than-inspiring presidential nominee, we were told, were out-smarted, out-strategized, and out-maneuvered by their opponents. President Bush and the Republicans, on the other hand, were blessed with sharper consultants, more agile candidates with firmer backbones, a more substantial political infrastructure, less party infighting, and delivered a clearer and simpler message about the ideals and issues the party represented.

But there were other, more concrete factors that had already tipped the scales in the Republicans’ favor. By 2004 the Republicans controlled all of both elected branches of the national government, the federal courts, and a majority of governors and state legislative chambers. They benefited as well from a media echo chamber driven by Fox News, 24-hour conservative talk radio, and a battalion of well-funded conservative think tank experts who were willing and able to repeat every talking point and focus group-tested phrase, from “cut and run” (Democrats) to “stay the course” (Republicans).

Thomas F. Schaller, an associate professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, is the author of “Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South.”

Bring in the Green Cat

2006-11-15T13:42:00.000-05:00

November 15, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

By Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed

Chongming, China

I’ve been a regular visitor to China since 1990, and here’s what strikes me most: Each year that I’ve come here, China’s people seem to speak with greater ease and breathe with greater difficulty.

Yes, you can now have amazingly frank talks with officials and journalists here. But when I walked out of my room the morning after I arrived in Shanghai, the air was so smoky — from the burning of farm fields after the harvest — that for a moment I honestly thought my hotel was on fire.

And that’s why, for the first time, it’s starting to feel to me like China is reaching its environmental limits. If it doesn’t radically change to greener, more sustainable modes of design, transport, production and power generation, the Chinese miracle is going to turn into an eco-nightmare.

For some three decades now, China’s economy has grown at around 10 percent per year, based on low-cost labor and little regard for the waste it pumps into its rivers and the air. When a country grows that fast, year after year, it can start to think that the laws of nature don’t apply to it.

Guess again. China has been doing the environmental equivalent of jumping from an airplane and thinking that it’s flying, argued Rob Watson, an expert on China’s environment who heads the green building services firm EcoTech International. “After you jump out of a plane, for about five miles you can actually feel like you’re flying,” he added. But then reality hits. “It’s not the fall that kills you — it’s the sudden stop at the end, and China may be approaching that sudden stop. ... When you stress a system to a certain point, it just stops working.”

China’s top leaders understand the crisis. But their response is complicated by so many Chinese flooding from the countryside to cities. In their view, political stability depends on finding those people jobs, and jobs depend on growth, and growth depends on China continuing to be the low-cost producer of everything — environment be damned.

But China can’t do what the West did: grow now, clean up later. Because the unprecedented pace and scale of its growth are going to make later too late. The China Daily reported this week that at least 24 million acres of cultivated land in China — one-tenth of the country’s total arable land — is now polluted, posing a “grave threat” to China’s food safety. More than half its rivers are also polluted, which is why less than 9 percent of “drinkable water” met government standards for bacteria in 243 rural supply stations recently tested. Many wells have excessive nitrates that can cause diabetes or kidney damage. No wonder some high-tech workers are starting to avoid China, because they don’t want to live in a dirty cloud.

Chinese officials fear that if they move to U.S.-level green production and environmental cleanup, “China will not be such a low-cost producer anymore, and that will affect jobs,” noted Dan Rosen, an expert on China’s economy and head of China Strategic Advisory. But what they are missing is that going green is not just a problem, but an opportunity. Pollution represents waste and inefficiency. Green companies are always more efficient, adds Mr. Watson, and China has a chance to become a major innovator of low-cost green solutions. When U.S. companies went green, they consistently overestimated the costs and underestimated the savings.

The other day, I sailed with Mr. Rosen from Shanghai up the Yangtze Delta to Chongming Island, the world’s largest alluvial island. There, Shanghai is trying to expand, by building the first eco-metropolis in China, based on eco-tourism, farming, wind and solar power. When you see the parklands created there, or when you stand in the protected wetlands and watch the water buffalo lounging in the mud, while peasants collect crabs, you can almost believe that China can change course.

But then, off in the distance, you see this massive bridge that is about to connect Chongming to central Shanghai, and you wonder what will happen to all the green plans here when all the overloaded trucks and consumers start rushing in. If Chongming is just a green ornament attached to Shanghai, it will never survive. If it is a model for a whole new kind of development, it, and China, have a chance.

Deng Xiaoping once famously said of China’s economy: “Black cat, white cat, all that matters is that it catches mice” — i.e., forget about communist ideology, all that matters is that China grows. Not anymore, said Mr. Rosen. “Now the cat better be green, otherwise it is going to die before it catches the mouse.”

The Responsibility Era Starts Now

2006-11-07T16:12:00.000-05:00

November 6, 2006, 6:30 pm

In the signature promise of his 2000 campaign, George W. Bush pledged to usher in a Responsibility Era. Once he got the job, the president forgot all about that promise, but on Tuesday, the American people are going to keep it for him.

After record budget deficits, repeated political scandals, rampant bureaucratic incompetence, and the president’s stubborn refusal to admit mistakes, hold anyone accountable, or level with the American people, we thought the Responsibility Era couldn’t begin until Bush left office. But Americans aren’t willing to wait that long. For most voters, the 2006 election is about holding the Bush administration and the Republican Congress accountable for failing to provide the new direction the country so desperately needs.

The new direction Democrats offer this year includes many new ideas, but the most important is to bring back an old one: responsibility. More than any other value, responsibility has the power to solve seemingly intractable problems. We saw that during the Clinton years, when reforming the welfare system and balancing the budget showed that a new direction made progress possible in areas where failure had once seemed inevitable.

Over the past six years, we’ve seen how much weaker our nation is in an era without responsibility. No one will ever forget the shocking image of thousands of poor people in the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina, trapped by neglect even more than by the weather. Corporate shams at Enron and elsewhere rattled faith in free enterprise. If Americans had any faith left in politics, the parade of scandals led by Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, and Mark Foley shook that, too.

Responsibility begins at the top. That means living up to the highest standards of public service. It means putting the nation’s books in balance, not running the country into debt. Above all, it means doing right by the future by making honest, good-faith efforts to solve the country’s problems, at home and abroad.

Citizenship is not an entitlement program. It’s not about giving people a program for every problem; it’s about establishing the tools and conditions that will enable them to make the most of their own lives.

Our best leaders have always understood this. The Founders set out “to form a more perfect Union.” Abraham Lincoln appealed to “the better angels of our nature.” F.D.R. rose from his wheelchair to show Americans how to look past their own pain, and to see how the fight would make us stronger in the end.

Americans understand it, too, and are bitterly disappointed that their president does not. Bush should have fired Donald Rumsfeld long ago. All four leading military newspapers just demanded the defense secretary’s resignation. But only last week, the president pledged to give Rumsfeld two more years to keep failing.

If the president won’t hold his own administration accountable for letting America down, the American people will have to do it for him. That’s a message they’ll send loud and clear on Election Day.

In a real Responsibility Era, we’ll set a new direction for America and hold Washington accountable for results. For the last six years, there has been a fundamental disconnect between the people and their government. At every turn, George Bush tried to make reality fit his ideology. To no avail: From Iraq to Katrina to the deficit, he saw his ideology mugged by reality.

A dose of reality and responsibility is exactly the medicine our ailing political system needs. The more we focus on the hard realities of the war on terror, the more we will do to build a world that looks up to America with respect and wants to emulate our way of life, not destroy it. The more seriously we take the real threats to our culture, the harder we will work to raise our children right, and the prouder we will be of what they become.

And the sooner we restore accountability to our political system, the sooner the American people will get the new direction they deserve and our country needs. At every turn, President Bush and the Republicans have failed to deliver the Responsibility Era they promised. If the voters have their way, the new era of responsibility will start at last on Tuesday.

Vote As You May, Bush Will Still Decide Foreign Policy

2006-11-07T16:07:00.000-05:00

November 6, 2006, 10:30 pm

By Matthew Continetti

If you are one of those people — and there are a lot of you — who think today’s election is a referendum on President Bush’s conduct of foreign policy, in Iraq in particular, you are right. But if you are also one of those people — and there are some of you — who think that Tuesday’s results will have an impact on that foreign policy, then you are probably wrong.

If the Democrats win either the House or Senate (or both), there should be little doubt as to the reason for their victory. In a time of war, the conduct of American foreign policy becomes the electorate’s chief concern. Recently pollsters for ABC News / Washington Post asked respondents which issue will be foremost in their minds when they cast their vote. Iraq topped the list at 31 percent. Add to this the percentage of respondents who said terrorism would be foremost (11 percent), and a plurality of those surveyed named foreign affairs as the most important issue in this election. Last week pollsters for Newsweek asked respondents the same question. In the Newsweek poll, Iraq also topped the list at 32 percent, and terrorism came in third at 12 percent. That’s 44 percent of respondents who named matters dealing with foreign policy as the most important issue of the 2006 election.

This is the third election since the war on terrorism began, for the United States, on September 11, 2001. In the previous two elections, the prominence of national security issues has helped the Republicans. But times have changed. National security and American foreign policy still dominate our politics, but the Republican advantage on those issues has almost been erased. And you most likely already know why. The lack of a clear victory in Iraq has soured the public on President Bush and his perceived enablers in the Republican Congress. Last week’s New York Times poll was especially revealing. Not only did respondents cite Iraq as the single most important issue in this election, they also seem to have repudiated Bush policy. Only 20 percent of respondents in the Times poll said the United States was winning in Iraq. Just under a third of respondents approved of the manner in which Bush has conducted Iraq policy.

All year long, Democrats have portrayed the midterm elections as a referendum on Bush while Republicans have emphasized the costs (in their view) of Democratic majorities in Congress. Because the electorate so strongly disapproves of the conduct of the war in Iraq, it looks as if the Democratic portrait of the election will most closely reflect Tuesday night’s returns. The problem for Democrats is that while they will almost certainly benefit politically from Bush’s failures in Iraq, they will also have almost no power to change things.

The structure of American constitutional government entrusts the presidency with primary authority over foreign affairs. The upper house of the legislature has the power to ratify treaties and both houses exercise power over the purse. In the past, Democrats have used that power to cut off funding for unpopular wars such as Vietnam. But the Democrats I talk to say it is unlikely Nancy Pelosi would choose to fight such a divisive battle with President Bush. It is more likely House Democrats would put to a vote a resolution proposing a timetable (without any specific times) for American withdrawal from Iraq. Let’s say it passed. How would Bush respond? He’d ignore it.

There are two ways Congressional Democrats might be able to influence American foreign policy. The first is that, if Democrats gain a majority in the House, they will begin to launch investigations into war contracts and waste in military spending. And they will also be sure to harangue administration officials whenever one shows up for a hearing. Democrats can be nosy, and they can be loud.

Second, if Democrats win big tonight, it will become more and more difficult for the administration to avoid the fact that its current policies in Iraq have brought it nothing but controversy and unpopularity. If Bush has any chance to rescue his reputation, it lies in adapting to realities on the ground — perhaps by sending more troops to buttress the Maliki government — and changing the cast of characters in Washington, perhaps by letting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resign.

In the end, though, voters hoping for change must recognize that in matters of foreign policy, it is the president, for better and for worse, who is the ultimate decider.

America's Laziest Man

2006-11-06T23:46:00.000-05:00

November 7, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Last year, Barry Diller took home a pay package worth $469 million, making him the highest-paid chief executive in America.

His shareholders didn’t do so well. Stock in the main company he runs, IAC/Interactive, declined 7.7 percent last year. For the three years ending in December 2005, the stock was up just 11 percent — compared with 49 percent for the S. & P. 500.

Just think! If you’re capable of running a company only a little worse than the average C.E.O., then Mr. Diller thinks you’re worth almost half a billion dollars!

So I’m delighted to announce that Mr. Diller is this year’s winner of my Michael Eisner Award, given annually to commemorate the former Disney chairman’s pathbreaking achievements in corporate rapacity. The winner of the Eisner award receives a shower curtain — this year it’s a lovely pink floral model costing $5 — in honor of the $6,000 one that Tyco’s shareholders purchased for their former C.E.O.

There’s nothing wrong, in principle, with a big pay package. Baseball players, movie stars and investment bankers often get outrageous pay, but after arms-length negotiations. That is capitalism at work, and nobody is getting ripped off.

In contrast, as John Kenneth Galbraith once noted: “The salary of the chief executive of the large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.”

Consider Mr. Diller. As my Times colleague Geraldine Fabrikant noted in an article about his pay, he owns 2 percent of IAC but controls 56 percent of the voting stock. In effect, he chooses the board — and thus the members of the compensation committee who decide his pay.

There are different ways of valuing compensation. A research firm called the Corporate Library calculated Mr. Diller’s as $295 million from IAC (not counting another $174 million from Expedia, an IAC spinoff). Most of these sums were in options that had been granted much earlier but exercised last year.

Another way to look at it is to focus not on the value to Mr. Diller but on the cost to the company. By that method — counting newly issued options but not the exercise of older ones — IAC paid him $85 million last year, according to a research firm called Glass Lewis & Company.

Each research firm said that by the method it used, Mr. Diller was the highest-paid chief executive last year.

“This is a grab fest,” said Jonathan Weil, managing director of Glass Lewis. “I don’t see any justification for this company paying him that.”

So how does the company justify it? In its proxy statement, IAC said that its aim was partly to align Mr. Diller’s interest with those of the shareholders. Funny alignment, since it meant that a sum equivalent to 9.8 percent of the company’s profits last year vanished into his pocket. In contrast, in the best-governed companies the chief executive takes home an amount equivalent to 0.2 percent of earnings.

IAC also said that the package was necessary to “motivate Mr. Diller for the future.” Goodness, this man needs a lot of motivation! He required about $150,000 every hour just to get motivated — suggesting that he may be the laziest man in America.

Mr. Diller spent 20 minutes trying to drum sense into me, but I’m not sure it was worth $50,000 worth of his time.

“It’s by any standard a great deal of money,” he said of his compensation, but he also advised that “it’s lazy and dumb” to focus on income from options that were issued years ago. His icy tone almost froze my telephone line.

As for the newly granted options, he noted that to be exercised the stock price must rise and he must stay with the company for five years. He initially insisted that they thus had no value, although he backed off when I cited Black-Scholes option pricing models that value his new options in the tens of millions of dollars.

Am I being mean to Mr. Diller? Perhaps. He is a giant in corporate America who has sometimes shown tremendous vision on behalf of shareholders (the same was true, early on, of Mr. Eisner).

But we have a broad problem in this country of C.E.O.’s reaching into the till and overpaying themselves at shareholders’ expense. The average C.E.O. earns 369 times as much as the average worker, compared with 36 times as much back in 1976.

Better governance and more transparency may encourage restraint, and so may a dash of ridicule. Let’s hope that Mr. Diller will shower behind his pink vinyl shower curtain and learn the concept of shame.

Maira Kalman - The Principles of Uncertainty: Paris

2006-11-05T22:16:00.000-05:00

November 1, 2006

Paris

The Bus Is Waiting

2006-10-10T23:37:00.000-04:00

October 11, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

The antipode of Sydney is the Azores.

As eras go, the post-cold war has been a pretty good one. The collapse of communism, the spread of free-market democracies and the general reign of stability bought and paid for by U.S. power all combined to create a world in which China and India have been able to rise peacefully, America has prospered, and Europe has become whole and free. Yes, there’s been 9/11, Bosnia, the rise of the petro-dictators and African wars — which are hardly trivial. But all in all, compared with the vast repression and nuclear standoff that characterized the cold war, the post-cold-war era has been much better for a lot of humanity.

Too bad it’s probably over.

Yes, one day historians may argue that the post-cold war started on 11/9 and ended on 10/9.

The Berlin Wall fell on 11/9 — Nov. 9, 1989, which ushered in the post-cold-war world. The apparent North Korean nuclear test went up on Oct. 9, 2006, which, may have ushered out the post-cold-war world and ushered in a much more problematic era — the post-post-cold-war world.

This post-post-cold-war era will be defined by three new features — if things continue as they are. First is a nuclear Asia, triggered by North Korea’s flaunting of its nuclear weapons. How long will Japan, Taiwan and South Korea remain nonnuclear with Kim Jong-il brandishing his bomb? Second is a nuclear Middle East. Iran is almost certain to follow North Korea’s lead, and once the Shiite Persians in Iran have the bomb, how long will it be before the Sunni Arabs in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, even Syria have one too? Third is a disintegrating Iraq in the heart of the Arab world, with its destabilizing impact on oil prices and terrorism.

Together these will add up to a much more dangerous and volatile post-post-cold-war world — unless ...

Unless, what? Unless China and Russia get their act together and understand that the post-post-cold-war world is a much bigger threat to their prosperity than a post-cold-war world in which U.S. power is pre-eminent. You read me right — the post-cold-war world can be preserved only if Russia and China get over their ambivalence about U.S. power and if the Bush team gets over its ambivalence about Iran and North Korea.

How so? The U.S. is sanctioned out when it comes to Iran and North Korea. We don’t have any more unilateral sanctions with which to pressure either regime to halt its nuclear adventure. The only countries that could have an impact on North Korea and Iran are China and Russia.

If China told North Korea that unless it dismantled its nuclear program and put its facilities under U.N. inspection, Beijing would cut off its energy and food, Kim Jong-il would relent. He is not suicidal. Anything less than such an explicit Chinese threat will mean a nuclear North Korea and eventually a nuclear Asia — which will certainly not be good for China’s growth prospects.

And if China and Russia told Iran that they would join in the toughest possible U.N. economic sanctions on Tehran if it persisted in its nuclear program, the ayatollahs would also back down. Because then the Europeans would have the spine to join in sanctions and Tehran would face a united front.

To be sure, both moves would be greatly helped by a declaration from the Bush team that it had overcome its infighting and decided to pursue changes in behavior instead of changes in regimes in North Korea and Iran, and would be prepared to give explicit security guarantees to both if they verifiably ended their nuclear programs. When an administration can’t make up its mind between regime change and change of behavior, it gets neither. And that is what the Bush team has gotten.

So, thanks to North Korea’s nuclear test, we’ve come to a moment of truth. Yes, we have to make up our minds, but so, too, must Moscow and Beijing. They constantly advocate “multilateral” solutions. Well, will they sign up for the kind of biting multilateral sanctions that would work vis-à-vis Iran and North Korea and make “unilateral” U.S. military options unnecessary? If Russia and China want to see the post-cold-war world continue, they can’t be free riders anymore — opposing both U.S. unilateralism and effective multilateralism that requires them to do something hard. They’ve got to start paying a price to preserve this world.

If they do, this relatively benign post-cold-war world might continue. If they don’t, if they keep trying to be free riders on our bus, we’ll all stall — because America can’t keep this bus moving alone any longer, especially when the road gets this dangerous.

The bus stops here.

Collecting Myself | Maira Kalman's The Principles of Uncertainty

2006-10-05T09:28:00.000-04:00

And They All Look Just the Same

2006-09-18T22:14:00.000-04:00

Allison Arieff: Living Design

September 17, 2006, 10:30 pm

Lately, I’ve been a little obsessed with the idea of neighborhoods. It probably has something to do with how much I enjoy my own. Glen Park, where I live, is part of the city of San Francisco, but it feels like a little village. There are people here in their 70’s and 80’s who were born in the homes they still live in, and there are families like mine, who are recent arrivals. There are some houses you’d never notice and others you marvel at — like the place around the corner that is being repainted in a palette of at least six different colors including hot pink, turquoise and yellow.

Or the one with stars cut out of the facade.

A few new houses are going up as I write (in fact, the drone of construction noise is a little too audible), but nearly every decade of the last century is represented in the architecture.

I’ve spent the last six years writing about modern architecture, and modern is still the vernacular I covet for my dream home. But having traveled to neighborhoods all over the country, from Milwaukee to Louisville, Fayetteville to Portland, Ore., what I’ve come to realize is that what makes a neighborhood a neighborhood is evidence of continual evolution and reinvention. Old houses, brand new ones and all those in between merge in a balance of past, present and future that makes a place feel vital. (This mix also helps guarantee a diversity of ages, ethnicities, income levels and backgrounds.) One architectural era isn’t necessarily better or worse than another — it’s the mixture of ingredients that makes a delectable dish.

And of course, having things you can walk to, like cafes, florists and markets, is key. It’s how you get to know your neighbors.

None of this is rocket science but it seems a tough nut to crack for planning commissions, homeowners’ associations and the building industry. New housing developments — urban, suburban and especially exurban — head way too far in the opposite direction, toward unforgiving homogeneity.

For the most part, developers are not much concerned with creating architectural complexity, and perhaps many potential homeowners aren’t all that interested in experiencing it either. In fact, the level of design differentiation I’ve witnessed in new housing, whether in Orange County, Calif., Forth Worth or Indianapolis, is limited to superficial flourishes like Craftsman facades or brick options on otherwise identical homes. The grating but oddly engaging tune “Little Boxes,” by Malvina Reynolds, bemoaned this impulse as far back as 1962. And now we’re even exporting it internationally: witness, for example, Orange County, China, an almost Disney-like recreation of a Southern California planned community, complete with manicured lawns and the option of French, Italian or Spanish styling. (McDonald’s hamburgers were served at the groundbreaking.)

Reynolds’s folksy ode to Levittown-like uniformity is used to great effect as the opening theme for the hilarious Showtime series “Weeds” — the absurdist tale of Nancy Botwin, a widowed housewife driven to pot dealing to keep her fractured family together under one pseudo-Mediterranean roof, in the gated community of Agrestic. In the show’s opening montage, the rapid evolution of Agrestic (which, by the way, means “rural or rustic”) is illustrated via a neighborhood map on which identical houses multiply at breakneck speed. Identical S.U.V.’s pull out of identical driveways, and men who look like hedge fund managers emerge one after another from the doors a strip-mall cafe, each carrying a vente something or other. The McMansions seem to give their inhabitants little pleasure, and it is fair to assume that the stifling sameness of these “dream homes” contributes to — even explains — Nancy’s career choice.

It was Levittown, the mass-produced suburban development built in the 1940’s and 50’s, that set the standard of sameness for future development. In the decades since, it is worth noting, nearly all of Abraham Levitt’s original 17,000-plus ranch houses have been renovated and remodeled. One might expect a similar evolutionary process in suburban and exurban developments today, but their codes, covenants, and restrictions have become so strident that everything aspect of their design — from mailbox placement to interior finishes— is predetermined. It would be next to impossible to find a development where the multicolored house in my neighborhood could exist. And that’s too bad, because while I may have no desire to live in that house myself, it makes for a far more interesting walk down the street.

For a discussion of one attempt at neighborhood planning that might just help set things on the right path, you may want to attend “Design Like You Give a Damn,” at the New York Public Library this Wednesday (Sept. 20), featuring Architecture for Humanity founders Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stohr in conversation with John Hockenberry. Sinclair and Stohr will be discussing their Model Home program, which pairs 12 architectural firms with families hoping to rebuild in Biloxi, Miss. This pilot program seems to have a lot of the right elements in place to create a model for future development.

Douglas Coupland: Time Capsules - Insects

2006-09-06T00:57:00.000-04:00

August 31, 2006, 10:05 pm

I guess my big issue with the book world is that only rarely does anybody address the physicality of books, as if to do so is somehow an insult to “words,” which is kind of corny, and seems almost willfully self-blinding. The extreme is in France, where most covers are blank with just the title and author’s name, which is actually not a bad idea, like school uniforms, but then what next — all books set in the same font at the same size? A war between the pro italics and the anti italics camp? I think you can go too far.

In 1996 there was a global paper shortage, and even Rupert Murdoch had to fly to Finland to ensure paper supplies for his publishing divisions. In second-hand book stores you can sometimes recognize the 1996 and 1997 books because they’ve turned yellow from the high acid content of the paper.

Thinking about this yellowness got me to thinking about pulp which got me to thinking about how precious we are about books. Books are central to the transmission of culture from one generation to the next. At least for now. Smart people have argued that we’re going to look back on paper (and the book) as intermediate technologies, stops on the road to the all-digital universe. This seems wacky right now, but in 1,000 years it won’t seem wacky at all. One way or another, books will cease to exist. They’ll either be supplanted or humanity will become extinct or — well, whatever scenario you envisage.

So back to pulp. Back to paper. My cousin in Ontario is an entomologist, and so I think about insects more than I might think about them otherwise. I got to thinking about how wasps and hornets make paper, too, and paper is, in its own way, just as vital to the survival of their species as it is for us. What if you could trick wasps into using human paper to make their own paper? What if you took a stack of Finnegan’s Wakes and pulped them with hot water and corn syrup and left the whole thing in a pasture and let wasps come and gather the cellulose to make nests? What if you added pigment to the chopped up paper, and tricked the wasps into making nests in designer pastel shades — in candy stripes or tie-dyed patterns?

I had lofty plans to try this but geography and scheduling prevented it — for the time being. We simply don’t have many wasps or hornets where I live in Vancouver. But in the meantime I did a few things. I began looking for nests, found exactly one, and then put an ad in the local shopper paper reading, “Wasp and hornet nests required for science project. Will pay $10 apiece.” (BTW, one lesson I’ve learned in life is that there’s very little you can solicit to buy in a shopper paper that can’t quickly be explained by saying it’s needed for an art or science project.) I was able to buy three dinky little nests this way, so I then visited (where else?) eBay, where I was able to buy some huge nests for $20, mostly from Texas and Florida.

Nests are beautiful objects — the inner combs in Koolhaasian layers, the striations of pulp that resemble avant garde Japanese fabrics. You can easily meditate on one for hours. (BTW, here’s another thing about nests: they can really stink after being in a shipping box for two weeks. Each day we learn something new.)

So after my nest meditations I took copies of my own novels and began pulping them myself, chew by chew, a slow, laborious process. Have you ever chewed a book? I doubt it. The first thing you need to know is that doing so really trashes your saliva ducts, and it takes about a week to get through one average-size book. The second thing to remember is to drink lots of water and spit regularly or your teeth will turn gray. Usually I’d chew while watching “Law & Order.” (I’m an addict.)

“Generation X,” paper and magnolia branch, 2004.

“Generation X,” detail.

To look at my own complete wasp nests raises odd issues in my head and, I hope, in the minds of observers. Is our bunkered mentality about the sanctity of books more genetic than cultural? Are we no different than wasps defending against intruders when we force students to read Henry James or Nadine Gordimer? What would wasps make of books? How do wasps think of their role within evolutionary time? Do wasps have any sense of culture? Why does it feel so strange to see a book removed from our own sense of history and culture and inserted into a non-cultural slot where art or music or any other art form don’t exist?

“Girlfriend in a Coma,” paper and vine maple branch, 2004.

“Royalties,” one dollar bills and witch hazel branch, 2004.

This past month has been a pleasure. It’s helped me clarify in my mind my experience with society and how books have shaped it. It’s made me clearer about my call to anyone involved in teaching or within institutions to try to broaden their thinking about what books are or can be. Since 1991 I’ve witnessed the triumph of the superstore, the near death of the independent bookseller, the rise of Amazon, the rise of the Internet, the comings and goings of the e-book and the rise of the P.D.A. Books are not under siege, but they are evolving and mutating. The more this process disturbs you, the more necessary it might be to try and engage with these changes. Right or wrong, they are inevitable, and the choice for anybody is whether they want to be able to live fully within the future, or whether they want to become a recluse and vanish into the past. The only way to go is forward. It’s all there is.

Douglas Coupland: Time Capsules - Things I’ve Learned from Touring

2006-09-06T00:56:00.000-04:00

August 29, 2006, 10:34 pm

• It’s not a good idea to hold readings on Academy Awards night.

• You can never have too many earplugs in your bags.

• People who phone in to listener phone-in shows are invariably nuts, but the show’s producers always say, “No, we always get really nice, smart callers on our show,” and are so shocked when only whack-jobs call.

• People will walk up to you with an X-ray of their skull and say, “I don’t have a brain. See? Here’s my evidence.” And it turns out they really don’t have one. It happens, apparently … instead of brains they have a thin tissue lining their skull’s interior that is, it would seem, all one really needs to get along in the world.

• Try to memorize your interviewer’s name. Don’t write it down on a sheet of paper and refer to it. I did this once at an AM radio station in Ottawa during an early morning interview (which I shouldn’t have done in the first place), and the interviewer was so insulted that he’s made a career out of telling people about that one dumb interview in 1991, still, nearly a decade and a half later. Remember: one interview you don’t even remember can become the pivotal anecdote in a stranger’s life.

• Germans refuse to stand in line for anything, and if you tell them to line up at, say, a book signing, they start taunting you and calling you a fascist. This is true. Ask any author who’s ever read there.

• Europeans ask the rudest questions, with bad punctuation and grammar (“Douglas, what do you think if I say to you, that you be the failure of the universe?”) When you tell them they’re being rude, they play dumb.

• The factory that made Tums mints in St. Louis was kitty-corner from the world’s biggest, Barton-Finkiest hotel with half-mile-long hallways, and it also sold Red Skelton clown paintings in the lobby.

German Language Tour Diary from 2001

Hamburg Day One

I went to feed the ducks and birds on the Alster lake just off the Kennedybrücke. None of them came, but when I took a Polaroid, the flashbulb attracted them as if it were bread. I used to think that the future was California, but now I think the future is Germany.

Lots of press and not much time to walk around.

European book tours are so odd because they happen so many years after you write THE END on a manuscript. In one sense your book is so totally in the past that you find yourself going crazy having to discuss it. But then at the same time you have a distance that can also more clearly illuminate the motive behind the work. North American critics always assume fiction is thinly veiled biography. Europeans don’t do this. Americans ask, “What does this book tell us about the REAL Douglas Coupland?” In Europe they ask, “What does this book tell us about the world?” Either way, I am so sick of discussing myself, and I truly believe that answering too many questions over and over damages the soul.

I can see myself beginning to be obsessed with European TV towers. I wonder if Bernt and Hilla Becher have done a morphological study of them. Hamburg’s TV Tower has a bungee-jumping gangplank. If it weren’t so cold out, I’d be jumping in a flash. I love heights. Totems TV towers embody most everything about the 20th century that became archaic barely a year into the 21st. Little teeny cell towers won out in the end. I got into a discussion with a reporter about the future of Moscow’s Ostankino tower, and how, after its huge fire, it’s a useless piece of junk — yet at the same time, if it were torn down, the psychic damage to the Russians would be greater than if it were left alone. So it’s a Modernist ruin.

In Hamburg, they did one of those groovy/cool/hipster nightclub readings that everyone thinks is so hip, but they’re not, because everyone’s plastered and going to the bathroom all the time. They were doing construction on the other side of the stage walls — hammers and drills — and it was so bad it was good. I used to get stressed out when this kind of thing happened. Now I’m tranquil.

Hamburg Day Two

The letters Y and Z are reversed on German keyboards in relation to those in North America. Z is simply a more popular letter here. Still trying to find the @ symbol on the keyboard.

I found this great store that sells archival copies of German magazines from the 1950’s and 1960’s, and I went berserk on a buying spree. It’s so hard to find this kind of stuff in Canada, and the Germans are almost as bad as the Japanese when it comes to preserving their mid-20th century Pop legacy. I also found this street that sold mid-20th-century items, but it was closed, and then I realized I was the only person on the street neither selling nor buying drugs. It was a really cracky neighborhood.

Had an art opening at the Schauspielhaus and a good crowd showed up. This TV reporter asked me if I thought it was a bad thing that people were standing in front of the art, making it harder to see. The Germans are so Sprockets.

Cologne

The Rhine is flooding, and all I can think of is that time back in the 1970’s when a Swiss Sandoz factory burned down and they said the Rhine would be dead for the next 10 years. Is it still dead? Do fish live in the Rhine? I notice that the birds kind of avoid it, but maybe they’re picky cosmopolitan birds.

The sound system in the reading at the Museum Ludwig was so good, I got paranoid and wondered if it could read my mind as well as my voice.

I met Nick Hornby in the hotel lobby. His flight was canceled and so he had to kill the afternoon at the hotel, which is the most boring thing that can happen to you on a tour, so I commiserated. His new book is coming out in May. I think its title is, “How to Be Good.” His publisher told him he’ll sell thousands of copies unintentionally to people who’ll think it’s a self-help book, especially in the U.S. We then tried to think up names for novels that would sell thousands of copies based purely on the name. My best idea was, “Lose Weight Fast With Pictures of Kittens.”

Speaking of weight loss, I’m melting away the pounds on the Book Tour Diet, which is basically never getting enough to eat because interviews run long or there are too many people at the table making you talk, so that you can’t eat. Or back at the hotel in Hamburg, where the food was so absurdly overwrought and fancy, when all I wanted was a schnitzel. Anna from the publishing company says that any restaurant in Germany can whip up a schnitzel if you ask. I am going to hold her to this promise.

Found the world’s worst Internet café here. It had Russian computer equipment (whoa!). It was like 1992.

Berlin

I finally found out how to make an @ symbol on German computers.

There is a convention of people from the Copeland MEBM company at the hotel — different spelling from my name, but when the publisher ordered coffee to the press interview room, they accidentally ordered 400 coffees to the ballroom.

It was snowing, so it felt like last year.

I walked down to Checkpoint Charlie around the corner and started to cry because it made me remember how badly the Cold War messed me up, and I remember my parents’ faces when the Wall came down. They have beautiful Thomas Struth photos there … one of an East German border guard on one side, and an American guard on the other.

Did a lot of press, and the reading at the Roter Salon went well. It was an old socialist-designed theater, so the proportions were off-kilter to the capitalist sense of space — whatever that is.

Berlin Day 2

Went with a reporter to the Volkswagen showroom on Prinzenstrasse. Saw the new VW van prototype. I’m in love. We ate cabbage soup and it reminded me of that crazy-awful summer I had in 1980 working at the Daimler-Benz factory in Sindelfingen outside Stuttgart. Every day they served cabbage soup in the canteen. If I had any romantic Kraftwerk illusions about factory life, Daimler-Benz killed them for me.

Afterward we took a bus ride through East Berlin. I wanted to find old books and magazines, but there weren’t any, and in the end we went into this staggeringly depressing secondhand store off the Alexanderplatz, with what had to be the saddest, most depressing and ugly things I’ve ever seen for sale. And then in the basement at the end of the rack there was this T-shirt that said, “Official Shirt of Team Generation X” and I had an out-of-body experience, like when I was a Jeopardy! question.

Afterward, across the street waiting for the bus, I saw that the store is where the music store used to be — the one where I bought R.E.M.’s “Monster” album back in 1994 — the one I wrote about in “Polaroids from the Dead.”

Circles Within Circles Within Circles

The gold windows of the Palast der Republik have been smashed and spray-painted with graffiti. It’s beautiful in that ugly way. And the fact that it’s riddled with asbestos is such a good metaphor for life under oppression.

Frankfurt

Frankfurt reminds me of Chicago in that it doesn’t feel so much like a city as it does a business-class airline magazine folded up into three dimensions. It’s like that 1980’s song “Lawyers in Love,” by Jackson Browne. It was very hard to connect with the city.

We didn’t do a sound check before the reading event, and boy, did we pay the price. I had to wear this Madonna headset that turned everything I said into Darth Vader’s voice. The people in the audience knew it was a disaster, I knew it was a disaster, yet we all kept on going and it became a bonding experience in a way.

Munich

I was in a strange headspace all day because yet again I was flashing onto all of my horrible memories of summer 1980, the last months of which I spent in Munich after I bleached my hair and chopped half of it off with a Swiss Army knife. It was the final days of punk, and you could still do things like that, except that in 1980 Munich was still trapped in a disco time warp, and punk was nonexistent. But in September I went to art school, and all was well in the end.

Visited this traditional German clothing store called Eduard Kettner — all of this great loden green stuff made of boiled wool. It’s the most beautiful color in the world. Except Kettner’s has changed their clothes into an Eddie Bauer-clone style, so it’s not unique any more. Why did they do that? Globalization?

German women are really bizarre when it comes to walking on the street and standing in lineups, and I don’t know what it’s all about. If you pass them when they’re walking on the sidewalk, they make funny hissing noises at you, and if you’re standing in line at McDonald’s or anywhere else, they turn around and make you take their spot, but there are these nasty looks on their faces. I wouldn’t have mentioned this except it’s happened twice a day during this entire trip and I just can’t figure out what’s the deal.

The Muffathalle event was terrific, and I think people are happiest when I just sit on a stage and talk. I think they don’t mind reading, but talking seems to be best.

Vienna

The German train system is serving only a limited menu this month: “The Foods of Regione Emilia-Romagna,” which is all fine and well, except the only edible thing is the lasagna, and I’ve had it eight times this week and it’s driving me nuts. Out of desperation for something new I ordered the Porchetta, which I was informed was a traditional German dish — MISTAKE! It arrived at the table resembling a science experiment. It was like one of Damien Hirst’s cut-up animals in a glass vitrine. I had to cover it with a plate so I wasn’t reminded of dissecting fetal pigs in high school biology class.

We stayed in Vienna’s Fawlty Towers equivalent, The Hotel Regina. Everything was time-locked in 1901, and the staff was the rudest and most hostile I’ve ever dealt with. For no reason, and when I asked the people at the reading event what that was about, they all cheerfully said, “That’s just the way we are in Vienna!” [Note: I actually ended up using the hotel in my 2004 novel, “Eleanor Rigby.”]

The literary festival’s theme was money, so I talked about money for a half hour, and again. The big surprise-hit statement of the night was, “It’s a pleasure and an honor to speak tonight here in Vienna, the place where the subconscious was invented.” There was this big, “Ooooohhhhhh…” in the audience and then I said, “Excuse me, it’s a pleasure to be here in the city where the subconscious was discovered.” It is my personal belief that the subconscious is a lot like Antarctica. People only started going there in the early 20th century. It’s very difficult and expensive to make the journey, and even if you get there, you might not find anything interesting or helpful to you.

I stayed up all night to catch the 6:50 flight to Frankfurt, and walked through Vienna alone for a few hours, and it was like walking through a senior citizen’s subconscious. All the people were asleep and the cars were all gone and it was a dream.

Australian Tour Diary from 2005

Day 01

At a dinner many years back with Tyler Brule, we tried to figure out which airline and which flight would be the best ones to have drag queens as flight attendants. The answer was Qantas, Sydney/LA — and here I am on this very same flight with nary a bitter shriek, a half-drained martini glass or a tinsel wig in evidence.

* * *

It’s nice to visit Australia. After decades of watching backpacked, homesick Aussies milling about European train stations, I now get to see them on their home turf. Australian friends have told me that as a culture, Australians on their home turf enjoy “taking the piss out of people.” What will a culture of piss removal be like? Granted, I’ve been to Australia before, but for reasons I won’t go into, I don’t remember too much of it. My perceptions of this trip will be essentially dewy fresh.

* * *

Let’s get it perfectly clear right from the start: there is no way to fly to Australia without feeling as though you’re part of a science experiment. Time shrinks and expands according to an inscrutable equation. Passengers are asked to view a video entitled “Deep Vein Thrombosis” so that the 14-hour flight won’t kill them. An equator is crossed, and for those wishing to know what direction toilets flush when passing the equator in a 747-400, the answer is that everything gets sucked out of the plane directly downward with the force of 10 gravities. Thus, the mystery of clockwise/counterclockwise flushing will require a hotel toilet to achieve resolution.

* * *

Quick question: what is the very best thing about flying in a Qantas business-class seat? Yes, that’s correct — a personal A/C electrical outlet — my lifelong dream, and there it is. Finally airlines have heard my prayers. But as with any answered prayer, there is a dark side: 14 hours of Klondike Solitaire can leave your left hand feeling like a crab’s claw.

* * *

Just checked into hotel. The flushing system is vertical with no cyclone. The mystery continues.

* * *

Killer view of the harbor and Opera House, but the noise! There’s an elevated freeway 27 floors below and it might as well be two floors below.

Australia, Day 002

The hotel engineering staff fixed my noise-leaking windows that overlook my almost cartoonishly scenic view. The view almost looks fake, like on TV shows like “The Facts of Life Goes to Paris.” My room is a perfect, hermetically sealed bubble, which is just the way rooms ought to be. As an added bonus, it’s one of those hotels where everything, curtains included, is push-button. I am a rock. I am an island.

* * *

An astonishingly windy day. A group of school kids were pretending they were flying like Batman at the bottom of Macquarie Street.

Drove through the older part of town with a friend’s five-month-old chocolate lab on my lap, one of the happiest experiences life has to offer. Hugo.

The Canadian and Australian dollars are exactly equal, so shopping doesn’t feel foreign. Gas is $1.16 a liter.

* * *

As I go to sleep at 4 a.m. in Vancouver, here I go to sleep at a virtuous 10 p.m. I wonder how long my newfound virtue will last.

* * *

Have had some glorious walks, but 20 percent of my brain is always contemplating how much safer the Southern Hemisphere is in the event of airborne radioactive events.

* * *

Fashion note: not one single person here is wearing shorts. Nobody. It’s winter.

* * *

I had a bath but forgot to notice which way the drain emptied, so the clockwise/anticlockwise saga continues.

* * *

The Sydney Opera House is much smaller than one might think, and is a collection of buildings, not just the one. It took six years to build? Come on.

* * *

Visited with an architect friend doing a $6 million residence, except the people paying for it don’t collect art. What a waste. I mean what’s the point of being rich if you don’t collect art? Even people who make money from trash TV shows collect art. So …

* * *

Everyone in Sydney looks gay.

* * *

I wish I had one experience that became a haiku for the entire day, but I don’t. But being in this city makes me feel like a car just emerging from a rigorous carwash. Being here makes me feel good about the future.

Australia, Day 003

It’s toasty warm outside, yet everybody here is camping it up as if it’s deepest winter. Not just the absence of shorts as I noted yesterday — people here are wearing parkas and layers of sweaters. It is a society under an Antarctic siege. Or so one would be led to believe.

* * *

Saw a flock of sulfur-crested cockatoos in a jacaranda tree. It was so exotic and unexpected, as if I’d looked up into a tree and seen J-Lo and Gwyneth Paltrow bobbing their heads and foraging for nuts and berries.

* * *

I visited a hardware superstore, Bunning’s. It’s near the airport and the entire area there feels like the neighborhood around LAX, but there’s no graffiti here. None. I asked someone and they said, “Oh, graffiti’s over.” So I guess it is. I like visiting hardware stores in whatever country I visit. A hardware store is a comforting place, and all those raw materials give me all kinds of new ideas. And I’ve never seen a country with so many different types and colors of spray paints, which is weird, as they don’t do graffiti or tag here any more. I bought a few things, but they don’t use plastic bags in a lot of stores here now, as a way of reducing litter and landfill. Such a good idea. I hate white plastic bags. I look at them and all I see is the end of culture.

* * *

I think driving around Sydney feels the same way it feels for people driving around Vancouver for the first time. The same topography and the same kinds of roadways. And it’s all so clean. I had a three-minute bout of extreme homesickness and then it passed. That’s something about getting older I never expected, homesickness. I thought it left you forever once you passed 20, like zits. But no. I can barely even think about most parts of Europe now, let alone go there. I was so damaged by homesickness and loneliness in my 20’s and 30’s. I’m writing a short story right now called “Never Go to Europe Alone.” It’s good advice.

* * *

There’s a severe drought here that’s been going on for two years. Global warming, what else. And I’m told the summers are more humid than they once were. I remember in the 1990’s how some people were always trying to pretend global warming wasn’t happening and how it was a scam cooked up by alarmist think tanks. But now whenever you hear about yet another record-breaking heat wave or temperature, the room goes a bit quiet and everyone dies inside just a bit more. I think it’s all going to be truly ghastly by 2010.

* * *

Sydney seems to be the best parts of London, California and Canada all nested together. Hardly an original observation. But to look at the architecture here, I get the impression that after the 1970’s the country began to reject mother England and truly switched to American and continental European ways of doing things.

* * *

Met some Americans on the rooftop lounge. They were so gullible. We got to discussing how pretty Australian banknotes are, and I told them that Camilla Parker-Bowles-Windsor is already on the Canadian five-dollar bill.

“Really?”

“Oh yeah. Not only that, but it’s the first bank note in history to ever depict a person smoking a cigarette.”

“Really?”

But it does raise a very good question … WILL she be on the money? Sorry, but that’s where a lot of people may draw the line.

Australia, Day 004

Australians call the pound symbol on the telephone keyboard a “hash sign.” They seem to have a local word for just about everything, so I’m not going to fight it. Today I had to fly from Sydney to Melbourne, and on the way to Sydney’s airport there was some roadwork happening. Beside it there was a bored-looking woman in a safety vest and she was dawdling about with her SLOW/STOP paddle sign. The driver said to me, “Don’t those lollypop ladies take their bloody time or what?”

I thought I was being set up here. “Lollypop lady? Huh? What’s a lollypop lady? Did you just make that word up?”

“No, that’s what we call them here.”

I said, “Sir, every time you use that term to describe these hardworking roadside workers, you demean them.”

“Well then what do you call them?”

“The correct term, sir, is ‘flag hag.’”

* * *

* * *

I saw a kookaburra in a Canary Island date palm outside the Deutschebank tower. It’s a kingfisher! The bird life here is so amazing. I mentioned this to the guy beside me on the flight to Melbourne. He told me a ribald Aussie joke:

Q: What do you do if a bird craps on your window?

A: You don’t take her out again.

* * *

Here’s something weird: one in five Australian male children aged five to nine have asthma. Even if you factor in over-reporting of the condition, it’s quite an amazing number. Scientists have been working on it for decades, and what seems to be emerging now is that swimming-pool chlorine in tandem with the over-prescribing of antibiotics among pre-pubescents is the cause. Odd, as these were both socially liberalizing forces in their day.

* * *

Melbourne is just the sort of Southern Hemisphere dream city humanity will build itself after the Northern Hemisphere has died a slow radioactive death — glassy and sleek and progressive, with good botanical plantings and fresh air blasting in from all sides.

My hotel, unfortunately, is not a part of that dream. It’s a frumpy old grande-dame dump, and every commonwealth city with a population over 300,000 has one. No names mentioned. I suspect the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had a failed three-way with an aboriginal here during the 1956 Olympics, and it’s been downhill ever since. The hotel is like one of those movies where there’s a ghost cruiser line crossing the Atlantic during the Second World War. Attractive yet implicit in its essence is upper and lower class, and it’s ugly and mean.

* * *

I might also add “no high-speed internet connection” to ugly and mean, so I moved to a glass tower where everything works, and there are no hissing monarchical ghosts urging you to do things with your private parts that make you feel uncomfortable.

Australia, Day 005

I knew there was something superior and amazing about Australian culture, and now I know what it is — they’ve gotten rid of pennies — finally a country with enough guts to end the madness that is copper change. Not only this, but their five-cent piece is soon to be toast as well. As an added bonus, there’s also no sales tax, so whenever you get change, it’s always a large denomination coin or paper money, and you feel like you’re buying stuff at a lemonade stand. It all adds up to “Better Living Through Rejection of the Past.”

* * *

Gas is now $1.27 a liter here, an 11-cent jump in four days. I got it into my head that the air down here smells cleaner because it more closely approximates preindustrial carbon levels, but that’s just nonsense. Carbon levels are the same everywhere.

* * *

There’s a local politician here they call Mr. Windows because no matter what question you ask him, all he ever says is, “We’ll look into it.” Australians really hate politicians. For someone to enter politics down here is a brave thing to do. You’ll only be trashed and despised in the end.

* * *

The state of New South Wales uses British signage on their roads, but the state of Victoria uses American signage. This only blurs the never-ending California/England sensation of the place. If Melbourne has a twin, it’s San Francisco.

* * *

It rained today and I realize I haven’t seen rain anywhere in months, which made me homesick for Vancouver and homesick for the 1970’s, back when it still rained regularly. I’m wondering if my homesickness isn’t me being sick to be home, but instead it’s that I’m sick of what the world has become and sick of the way the world is going. I’m sick that people deny what’s wrong with our skies. I’m sick of pretending what’s happening isn’t happening. We did nothing to deserve this world and yet it was given to us and we’ve done nothing to honor this gift.

Tonight we walked out to the end of St. Kilda’s pier, and for the first time I felt like I was truly on the other side of the planet. The gannets and gulls and seabirds were snoring, and the nearly full moon mixed with Antarctic clouds tamed only slightly by Tasmania, and the sky was glazed with a color I’d never seen before — cold and white and very much indifferent to mankind. And then I thought of Antarctica and the sense of vertigo that comes from being so close to the edge of nothingness. And then Louise asked me if the sky looked different down here and I said yes, and then I asked how she was able to read my mind. She said that sooner or later everybody down here looks at the sky and realizes that they’ve come to a place that’s truly different. Sure, there are a lot of similarities down here, but somehow, in the end, the differences always win out.

Douglas Coupland: Time Capsules - Ann-Margret Swimming in Baked Beans

2006-09-05T23:40:00.000-04:00

August 23, 2006, 10:30 pm

Somebody sent me a case of champagne today — Freixenet, lovely! — but there was no card attached. The importer/distributor said there might have been one but, “It probably got lost in customs, and Bev can’t find the packing slip, so you’re out of luck.” Thanks. We should all have such problems, but the fact of the matter is there’s a person out there somewhere on the planet who’s sitting by their phone or e-mailbox waiting for a thank-you message, and I don’t have any idea who that person is. So I have to go through the next year knowing that with each passing day, someone is hating me more and more and more until it ultimately ends up in, yes, tears.

Champagne seems to be today’s theme. Here’s how: I’ve begun a new sculpture that came about in an odd way via champagne. An arts magazine interviewer and I had been began discussing the notions of safety and what makes you feel safe — with Joseph Beuys, gray blankets and fat kept him alive through the winters. With me, growing up, it was an old staircase, now gone, underneath which my father used to store his shotgun shells. Next to the shells was a massive case of baked beans that still exists somewhere in their house, a case so old the labels predate bar-coding. When I was growing up, that case of beans was going to get the family through a nuclear war — I come from a military family, remember. So today I really began to explore the notion that baked beans = safety, and tried to figure out some way of integrating it into my own domestic environment, and it dawned on me that I’d really like to make a sculpture recreating the scene in Ken Russell’s movie “Tommy” where Ann-Margret throws a champagne bottle into a TV set, and soap suds and baked beans come spewing out of the hole. Her character is drunk, and she begins swimming in the baked beans.

Ann-Margret as Nora Walker Hobbs in Ken Russell’s “Tommy,” 1975.

It’s a bizarre and compelling image that crystallizes so many disturbed sides of my youth. To make this image physical and three-dimensional and see it sitting in my living room would, yes, make me feel safe. Art is like that. So now the hunt has begun for a model in Vancouver who has Ann’s signature cheekbones, and that is going to be a very hard model to find. I met Ann several times in 1994 in green rooms across North America. She was on a tour, at the same time as I, with her autobiography, “Ann-Margret: My Story.” It was very glamorous the first time, it was pleasant the second time, and by the third time it was, “Hi. Do you have any gum?” Overlapping tours are common. Once I overlapped with Lynn Redgrave, who made me promise to keep my reading copy of my touring novel inside a Ziploc bag. My most exciting celebrity encounter of all time was in the lobby of a Midwestern ABC affiliate, where a guy sitting across the coffee table from me looked familiar in a didn’t-we-go-to-high-school kind of way — and then it hit me, It’s Jared from the Subway commercials! I’d just done the Subway diet as a summer novelty and had lost five pounds, and he’d just read one of my books, so it was a real love-in. He even had his old 645-inch waist jeans with him.

Attached to today’s column is a random selection of images from 2001. As a whole, they capture the continually battling forces of touring: boredom and fascination, the voice in the back of your head that asks, Is this the last time I ever visit this city? When does civil aviation finally come to an end? Will room service close five minutes before I get to the hotel, and will it be another club house sandwich?

Douglas Coupland: Time Capsules - What Is CanLit?

2006-09-05T23:39:00.000-04:00

August 22, 2006, 10:30 pm

“CanLit” is a contraction for Canadian Literature, and I’m often asked by writers from other lands, “Doug, what, exactly, is CanLit?” Basically, but not always, CanLit is when the Canadian government pays you money to write about life in small towns and/or the immigration experience. If the book is written in French, urban life is permitted, but only from a nonbourgeois viewpoint.

CanLit was invented in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s — the time when Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister and Canada was busy trying to decolonize itself from mother England and establish a stronger identity of its own. That same era also spawned Montreal’s Expo 1967, plus a wide variety of 16-millimeter films extolling the nation’s natural resources, courtesy of Canada’s National Film Board.

One could say that CanLit is the literary equivalent of representational landscape painting, with small forays into waterfowl depiction and still lifes. It is not a modern art form, nor does it want to be. Scorecards are kept and points are assigned according to how realistically a writer has depicted, say, the odor of the kitchen the narrator inhabited as a child, the sense of disjuncture a character feels at living in a cold northern country with few traditions versus the country he or she has left behind, the quirks and small intimate moments of rural Ontario life or, metaphorically, how well one has painted the feathers on the wings of a duck. CanLit is not a place for writers to experiment, and doesn’t claim to be that kind of place. CanLit is about representing a certain kind of allowed world in a specific kind of way, and most writers in Canada are O.K. with that — or are at least relieved to know the rules of the game from the outset and not have to waste time fostering illusions.

It must also be remembered here that Finland probably has FinLit, and Turkey probably has TurkLit, and that Canada isn’t at all unique in having CanLit. It’s just newer to the game.

To be a Canadian writer doesn’t necessarily make one CanLit, and sometimes CanLit will place its clasp on writers who are only tenuously, legalistically Canadian. Am I CanLit? No. I’m Canadian and write books — some even about Canada — but with fiction I’m way outside CanLit’s guidelines.

The cascade of money that initially fueled CanLit largely ran out in the 1980’s, and with it vanished the impetus and will to nurture writers younger than those established between 1965 and 1985. Every few years a new face emerges and sometimes manages to stick for a bit, but now that there is too little cash to fund the wheels of subsidization, many younger writers are left in the embarrassing position of having to kowtow to a CanLit orthodoxy with the knowledge that that orthodoxy is, literally, near bankruptcy, and is no longer able to fund or generate the prominence, self-sufficiency and posterity it pretends it can provide for young writers. This is cruel.

There is also a grimness around CanLit — the same sort of grimness that occurs when beautiful young adults are forbidden to leave home and are forced to tend to aging and dying family members, when they are forbidden to lead their own lives. And there is a specific brand of despair young Canadian writers feel at never being able to break the CanLit cycle. The grimness and despair are enhanced when these young writers must, for the sake of their careers, simulate a sense of rejoicing at the success of CanLit gatekeepers. In what has become a hollow ritual, every 18 months a certain number of magazines and newspapers within Canada tout an “explosion of CanLit stars shining abroad” or similar sentiments similarly phrased. By the next month the trend has rather joylessly vanished — but there is some shallow comfort to be had knowing the same trend will reappear 17 months down the road.

I’m a big fan of subsidization of the arts. Without subsidization, CanLit couldn’t exist for 10 minutes. Canada is an extravagantly huge and underpopulated country with no economy of scale. Maintaining an identity is expensive, period — thus the need for money in the arts. And I think the Canadian government ought to be hurling 10 times as much cash at literary arts in general, CanLit as much as anything else.

I also think CanLit is actually at a very dangerous moment right now, and I’m not sure if its boosters are quite aware of it. Last year I was flipping TV channels and, on channel 821, watched a live broadcast of CanLit’s annual award ceremony, the Gillers, piped in from a Toronto ballroom. It was as if I’d tuned into the Monster Mash — not a soul under 60, and I could practically smell the mummy dust in the room. This accidental peephole into that world really pinpointed just how lost in time and space CanLit has become, how its scope has narrowed, and how stingy it has been with the grooming of successors. CanLit needs money; it needs new blood; it needs to open its mind to ways of writing about the world outside its sacred doctrine. And this had all better happen quickly. It’s a cliché but it’s true: CanLit is about surviving inside a country’s unique landscape at a certain point in history. I hope CanLit’s instincts kick in.

Douglas Coupland: Time Capsules - Sleeping Pills

2006-09-05T23:38:00.000-04:00

August 21, 2006, 10:38 pm

Slide Show: Images From the Book

Yesterday morning I woke up, went to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, decided I needed to take my vitamins and then removed two sleeping pills from their prescription vials and downed them with a gulp of tap water. Two seconds later I realized what I’d done, walked to the toilet, stuck my finger down my throat and tried to puke my guts out. Nothing. I’m 44 and I’ve never had to induce vomiting before. The fashion industry makes it sound so easy, but it’s not. In the end nothing came up, and all day long I walked around wondering … What happens next?

Just why, you might ask, do I keep sleeping pills on hand? Three words: European book tours, these current pills being remnants of a June United Kingdom tour.

A bit of background. In the old days (pre-1998-ish), the American edition of a novel was published, and the Canadian edition followed maybe six weeks later. The U.K. pubbed nine months after that, all of which allowed for a leisurely touring schedule. But with the arrival of Amazon, all English-language editions come out at once, and there’s this truly dizzying need for authors to do press and touring for all markets simultaneously.

The thing is, with few exceptions authors are not robust, garrulous, travel-loving people. They are insecure, introverted, socially awkward homebodies — which is why they write, because they don’t want to travel or meet new people. Suddenly they’re tossed into this machine (described in earlier postings) and expected somehow to be witty, vibrant, erudite, charming and lucid. They’re expected to fly once a day (travel to and from airport; security nightmares; flight disasters; weird media escorts; terrible or nonexistent food) as well as check in and out of hotel rooms that are crapshoots regardless of expense, and then they have to do a bookstore event or a venue reading where they’re being judged relentlessly by hundreds of people who, in 2006, all have digital cameras with blinding flashes or cell phone cameras and who, during signings, all need 90 seconds to focus, botch the shot, take another, and then take another after that.

Add to this mix the usual piñata of stupidity that is Q&A, plus the fact that for the month prior to this tour they’ve been doing phoners and e-mail interviews. And also add to this the fact that whenever there are 10 free seconds to think, there’s a phone interview to be done at a chokingly crowded airport flight gate, and whenever you check your e-mail, there are people from all the different English language publishing houses who understand you’re really busy, but could you please squeak in just this one or two more interviews because it would really make a difference?

Do this for six weeks, add Euro jetlag to the mix, and you have a surefire formula for a meltdown.

Plus you also have to take into account each author’s quirks and peccadilloes. Me? I can’t adjust to time zones. Period. Never have been able to, and never will. I go to bed at 2:30 a.m. on the West Coast and wake up at 10:30, and that is what my body wants to do, and nothing else, and it’s been this way for almost 20 years. I’m always so shocked by people who can zip off to Europe at the drop of a hat, those people with bungee circadian rhythms who can function on three hours of sleep and be daisy fresh. My circadian rhythms have all the flexibility of the German railway system circa 1934. I think you’re pretty much born with your brain and you have to live with it. My brain wants to write but it doesn’t want to alter its cycles. How people with kids do it, I’ll never know. And it’s not like I can wake up after six hours if I have to but won’t. I can’t. Or if I am technically, legally, medically awake, I might as well not have bothered. I can’t concentrate, I can’t think, my body’s thermostat goes all wonky, I can’t focus my eyes, my hearing blurs, I can’t distinguish one person’s face or name from another, and I’m unable to function in the world. Again, I’m 44. After a while you spot the patterns and work with them.

So I take sleeping pills.

And this is a disastrous thing to do.

For most people this isn’t a big deal. In fact, a lot of people look forward to taking sleeping pills — they’re like a mini holiday, just like movie stars take! And don’t you sometimes look at George Bush and Condoleezza Rice and Vladimir Putin and all of them, bouncing off of planes, bursting with vim, ready to make deals, and wonder what the hell it is they’re doing that you’re not? My personal theory is that Air Force One is one great big anesthesiological device in which everybody gets conked out once the landing gear pulls into the plane, and from which they’re awakened only an hour before touchdown.

Sleeping pills: they turn me into a monster. I don’t like it, but it’s what they do to me. And I’ve tried them all — opiates, tricyclics, diazepams and all these weird new ones that have slick TV commercials. The first night they work great — the second night too. But then the third day arrives and I become paranoid, depressed, hypersensitive to all outside stimulus, unable to speak to strangers and profoundly homesick. I can’t concentrate; I can’t think; I can’t even differentiate between clean and dirty clothes in my suitcase.

But unless I take sleeping pills, I won’t be able to sleep or wake up or do anything at all — so there’s no choice in the matter. So I’ll be in, say, London and I’ll have slept, but it’s pretend sleeping-pill sleep, and when I wake up my brain turns to sludge. All of the predictable fear, paranoia, confusion, cultural dyslexia and diminished social skills appear as predictably and as unfailingly as Halley’s comet. When I was younger, I thought all of this was the result of emotional instability and part of the drama of travel. But as the years have gone by, the process has been deromanticized, and in the end, my personality outside my home time zone is an alter ego that has confused publicists, amused and horrified interviewers and pretty much ruined a lot of the enjoyment I might have had while traveling the world. At the end of 1995 I foolishly did a U.S., Canada, U.K., Benelux, Scandinavia and Germany tour that might well have been called “The Booze & Pills 1995” tour. On the final day in Geneva I was taken out to a fondue restaurant (such places exist), and I sort of remember chunks of melted gym-sock-malodorous Gruyere cheese being waved in front of my face. I’m unable to even look at Switzerland on a map anymore. It took my brain half a year to rebuild after that 1995 tour debacle. I can barely go to New York these days, and if I do, it has to be on my own circadian rhythm’s rules, not somebody else’s.

So that’s why there are leftover sleeping pills in my bathroom. I should just burn the damn things. They are toxic and evil and dangerous.

To bookend this rant, what happened to me later that day? I slept for five hours in the afternoon. Those suckers make you sleep. But at such a cost.

Douglas Coupland: Time Capsules - God Hates Japan

2006-09-05T23:35:00.000-04:00

August 17, 2006, 10:30 pm

In 2000, Mike Howatson, a gifted Vancouver animator, and I produced an illustrated novel called “God Hates Japan.” It was published only in Japanese — beautifully and elegantly, I might add — by Kadokawa Shoten in 2001. It’s the story of characters lost in a malaise that swept Japanese culture after the burst of the bubble economy in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. It also depicted the way some of these characters lived in the shadow of a death cult’s 1995 sarin-gas assault on Tokyo’s subway system.

That same year, an old friend of mine from Japanese business school (I know, it’s as random as it sounds, but I actually have a degree in Japanese business science from the Japanese-American Institute for Management Science, Class of 1986) owned a mobile phone advertising company in Tokyo, so we simultaneously published the book in a digital form that could be read via cell phone. Images from the book became animated and appeared on screen in between chunks of text as readers clicked their way through. It was kind of crazy, and maybe 11 people finished the whole thing (that’s a lot of clicking), but the illustration and themes lent themselves to the format nicely, and it was definitely some kind of first. Forget e-books and all that stuff. My hunch is that it’s all going to go mobile, but that’s eight years in the future and another conversation. And I just know I’m going to wake up one morning, and some putz down in Palo Alto will have invented whatever it is that’s going to replace books. But until then …

I’ve been asked to publish “God Hates Japan” in English, but I’ll do it only under one circumstance, which is that we find a novice Japanese-English translator, and then publish his or her first, uncorrected translation of the book. It would be such a wonderful piece of Japanglish, those weird contortions of English that the Japanese put on their shirts and products, mostly from the 1980’s into the mid 1990’s, but not anymore, really. These days the Japanese have pretty much the most sophisticated consumer culture on earth, and there’s probably a huge secondary market in vintage 1980’s Japanglish T shirts somewhere in Shibuya next to a boutique that sells Finnish shoe eyelets carved from reindeer bones that play Smashing Pumpkins remixes if you tap them the right way.

The artwork in “God Hates Japan” was a mixture of vector-based design, theoretical design (there’s a selection of color swatches for people with low self-esteem) and good old fashioned appropriated imagery. For example, Mike redrew old New Yorker cartoons with ridiculous fidelity, and then we slapped on new and disturbing punchlines. We also made our own in-flight safety cards and were really proud of them, and then someone said, “Oh yeah, they made some of those for the publicity for ‘Fight Club.’ ” Grrrrrr.

I think the book is almost more fun to read if you don’t speak Japanese or know any Japanese characters — you have to work really hard to figure out what’s going on, and what you come up with could well be better than the real story. I think that’s the beauty of art in general — a good work allows the reader or listener or viewer to fill in the blanks. The work isn’t passive — it’s interactive, but secretly so.

Douglas Coupland: Time Capsules - On Being Photographed

2006-09-05T23:30:00.000-04:00

August 16, 2006, 12:00 am

Photo by Todd Newfield. Honolulu, Hawaii, Feb., 1986

International drivers license photo, Vancouver, 1985; Art school, Sept., 1980

There are maybe five photos of me taken from age 20 to 30. This omission stems from a combination of poverty, youthful hubris and skinniness. Nobody ever believes me when I tell them how skinny I was up until about the age of 32. They always think I’m being coy or posing, and they see a photo and say, “Oh my dear God!”

I avoided cameras because they only meant embarrassment. But now I look at what photos remain from that era and wish I’d taken many more, because while I was never studly or matinée-idol material, I had flashes of that beauty only youth provides. My international drivers’ license photo, I hope, proves this.

Photo by Graham Law. Crime scene photo, 1993; Carmanah Valley, B.C., Jan., 1992

My art school ID card from 1980 adds new meaning to the term ‘pasty-faced.’ A photo taken in Honolulu in 1986 when I was studying there offers pure 1980’s proof of my Depeche Mode stage. (Which continues, it must be said, to this day. If you’re not too busy, please rent “Depeche Mode 101.”) During the period when I wrote “Generation X” — fall and winter of 1990 —only one photo was taken, by a neighbor: a hammy shot of me at the desk where I wrote the book. Even then I was packing my boxes (bottom left corner of the photo). All I remember of the shot is the temperature, which was 114 degrees Fahrenheit, and my eyeballs felt as if they were going to burst.

Photo by Marc Fischer. Brittania Beach, B.C., March 1993;
Photo by J. Rowe. Palm Springs, April, 1990

Into the 1990’s there was almost nothing until I began being photographed for newspapers and magazines — this started in February of 1991 for a shoot for the Los Angeles Times — lonnnnggg before the internet — and it’s never really stopped since.

Polaroid cropped with Post-its, summer, 1992?

I’m very difficult to photograph because I went to art school, studied photography theory, am good with a camera myself, and keep current with what’s happening in the visual world. A worst-case scenario was when I had to be photographed by someone who was ripping off

someone else’s idea and trying to pretend it was his or her own. I never called them on it directly, but if a photographer from that era ever labels me as having been difficult, there’s a very good reason why I was difficult, and I always tried my hardest to subvert things. I can almost always tell what a photographer’s plans are, and it they’re mundane or hokey, I emotionally withdraw and indeed become a tough cookie.

On the other hand, sometimes you get these photographers who know their stuff exactly, and who get to it, one-two-three. They’re usually Time or A.P. or Knight-Ridder stringers who’ve photographed Elvis in the coffin and know all the tricks. They’re never out to make you look bad. They give you simple instructions, tell you where to move your chin, take 10 snaps and leave. You know you’ll look great.

The best thing of all is when you have a good photographer with new ideas, who knows their business and who asks you to go along with a new idea. For those photographers I’ve stood naked in swamps (yes, literally), worn silver jumpsuits and T-Rex make-up, and stood in minus-five temperature for hours on end to nail the shot.

Photo by Spike Jonze. Vancouver, 1992

Photo shoot test Polaroid, 1992;Photo by D.J. Weir. Vancouver, 1996

The funniest shots are always the ones taken by college student photographers, because they’re so totally out of it and wouldn’t know a good shot if Annie Leibovitz drove over them with a truck. The image that remains in my mind most is of Madison, Wisc. —not during Sept. 11, but an earlier book tour — and of being in the lobby of the main hotel across from the state capitol. An election was going on, and there were, honestly, a dozen Boss Hogg politicians wearing makeup bibs surrounded by flacks and toadies, and there were TV cameras everywhere, and it was a scene that would cost a million bucks to reproduce in a movie, and this guy comes in from the University of Wisconsin newspaper and asks me to stand in front of a ficus tree because it’d make a good shot!!!

Seattle, 1992

The shots that actually have had emotional clout for me over the years are the ones that fell through the cracks, or the simple travel shots that any of us take on holiday: leftover Polaroids from shoot number 598, something a relative clipped and mailed, someone else’s holiday shots. There’s a shot I love of me discovering a stick of dynamite. I can see the happiness in my eyes. There’s a shot a pre-famous Spike Jonze took of me with a pencil in my ear. There’s a shot taken in Brussels at the absolute tail end of the World’s Longest Book Tour where I held a glass tabletop up to my face and made suction lips. And there’s a shot of me, author Bill Gibson and Michael Stipe taken in Tokyo in 2000. We’re all fresh off the plane and just so happy to be there.

Brussels, 1998;
Berkeley, Calif., 1994?

These days I’m scruffy, and being photographed is truly a waste of other peoples’ film or electrons. Digital cameras now rule, but the flashes on them are EVIL. I have a no-flash policy because after two flashes, I get a wicked headache. The potency of the lights has to compensate for the feebleness of the resolution. And people take cell phone photos and blog them and … God, I wish this had been happening 10 years ago when it might have made for something beautiful.

Photo by D.J. Weir. Tokyo, 2002.

Photo by Ken Mayer. Vancouver, 2004

Summer in the City - Rachel Marx’s Paris Journal

2006-08-28T14:14:00.000-04:00

Douglas Coupland: Time Capsules - I Luv Helvetica

2006-08-27T23:28:00.000-04:00

August 27, 2006, 10:33 pm

I Luv Helvetica

I think the most common set-decorating error in films these days can be reduced to one word: Helvetica. I’ll be watching a World War I drama, and there at a train station in the background is a sign saying ”Ypres” in 200-point Helvetica Bold. Movie over — at least for me. Once I see Helvetica in any pre-1957 movie, all I can think is that the art director was so clueless he either used Helvetica in a historical drama, or hired someone stupid enough to do so, and never double-checked the work.

In art school I studied typography for several years. This was pre-Macintosh, and we had to draw fonts by hand using gouache, including numbers and diacritical marks. In 1982 there were maybe 50,000 people in North America who knew what kerning is. Today, my 10-year-old nephew knows what it is.

Typography has been massively democratized and has now done more wonderful things in 10 years than in the hundreds preceding it. I remember my type instructor, Greg, moaning, “Typography is over. Nothing new will ever happen with type ever again. Why do we even bother waking up in the morning?” I note that the moment you hear somebody say something’s over, it usually means that something massive is about to happen. Francis Fukuyama, meet Osama bin Laden and discuss the end of history.

In the world of type, Helvetica was the supposed endpoint of design. It was designed to be 100-percent emotionally neutral (yes, how Swiss, the same country that brought us sleeping pills — Helvetica is the Latin name for Switzerland), and when it was marketed in 1961, it caused a revolution, because everything the font touched it modernized. Helvetica essentially takes any word or phrase and pressure-washes it into sterility. I love it. So does Panasonic, BASF, Bayer, American Airlines, PanAm, Lufthansa, BellSouth, Hapag-Lloyd and any number of other firms that use it for their logos and as their house font.

When I began writing fiction, I was naturally curious about the relationship of words on a page and how the words look on a page. By 1995 I began experimenting freely with the “lookfeel” of words in my novel, “Microserfs.” In it I had pages of words that did and didn’t correlate to the main narrative. I did these in Helvetica. The book dealt with people who work at Microsoft (who developed their own Helvetica clone, the cheesy wannabe Arial) and I was wondering, well, if machines daydream, what would their daydreams look like? And so I did these pages, an extended example of which I present here.

PS: Helvetica is even getting its own movie!

The Pi Room

Eleven years later in “JPod,” a follow-up novel to “Microserfs,” I began messing with type again in newer ways, one of which involved presenting 24 pages of random numbers courtesy of a Yale computer. Somewhere in these pages was a capital letter O substituted for a zero, and the reader was invited to find it. The winner received a Simpson’s Groundskeeper Willie coffee mug.

Working with a curator in at The Rooms Museum in St. John’s, Newfoundland, I took large portions of the text from “JPod” and blew them up and put them onto the walls of three connecting rooms — a way of connecting words and visual art and exploring the links between the two. I also had one little side room we called “the pi room,” because on its walls were 53,000 digits of pi, done in pale green on black, a “Matrix” homage. But a very funny thing happened once it was up — people would go into the pi room, and their brains would become quiet, and they would emerge relaxed — to the point where if someone was getting stressed about the installation deadline, we’d say, “Go stand in the pi room.”

I got to thinking about it, and it made a lot of sense. When you’re looking at nothing but numbers — a numerical field painting of sorts — an interesting thing happens in your brain. Its numerical center (wherever it is located) hums into operation, while the verbal and linguistic center shuts down. But the thing is, because you’re looking at numbers but not doing anything with them, your brain is essentially in the idle mode, and hence the relaxation. A very strange thing. And it always worked. There’s that urban legend about painting prison cells pink to lower the rate of aggression in inmates. They should actually use pi wallpaper.

I Also Luv Photoshop

A selection of eye candy created mostly around 2000 when I dove into the software’s deep end.

War on Daddy’s Dime

2006-08-17T23:38:00.000-04:00

August 18, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

I’m not sure yet who’s the winner in the war between Hezbollah and Israel, but I know who’s the big loser: Iran’s taxpayers. What a bunch of suckers.

Isn’t it obvious? As soon as the reckless war he started was over, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, declared that Hezbollah would begin paying out cash to the thousands of Lebanese families whose homes were destroyed. “We will pay compensation, a certain amount of money for every family to rent for one year, plus buy furniture for those whose homes were totally destroyed,” said Nasrallah. “These number 15,000.”

Nasrallah also vowed that his organization would help rebuild damaged houses and businesses, promising those affected that they will “not need to ask anyone for money or wait in queues” to get relief funds. To paraphrase the All-State commercial, “You’re in good hands with Hezbollah.”

But wait — where will Hezbollah get some of the $3 billion-plus needed to rebuild Lebanon? Last time I checked, Hezbollah did not have any companies listed on the Nasdaq. The organization doesn’t manufacture anything. It doesn’t tax its followers. The answer, of course, is that Iran will dip into its oil income and ship cash to Nasrallah, so that he will not have to face the wrath of Lebanese for starting a war that reaped nothing but destruction.

Yes, thanks to $70-a-barrel oil you can have Katyusha rockets and butter at the same time. When oil money is so prevalent, why not? Hezbollah and Iran are like a couple of rich college students who rented Lebanon for the summer, as if it were a beach house. “C’mon, let’s smash up the place,” they said to themselves. “Who cares? Dad will pay!” The only thing Nasrallah didn’t say to Lebanese was, “Hey, keep the change.”

In the cold war, Russian taxpayers were the suckers who rebuilt Arab armies every time they got crushed by Israel. Now Iran’s citizens will foot the bill with their oil income — assuming the ayatollahs actually put their money where their mouth is. (Iran was always happy to spend money on Hezbollah rockets. Let’s see if it will pay for schools and clinics.)

This is why I am obsessed with bringing down the price of oil. Unless we take this issue seriously, we are never going to produce more transparent, accountable government in the Middle East. Just the opposite — we will witness even more reckless, unaccountable behavior like Nasrallah’s and Iran’s.

Been to Syria lately? Why do you think it can afford to shrug off U.S. sanctions? It also is not making microchips. It is, though, exporting about 200,000 barrels of oil a day, and that is what keeps a corrupt and antiquated regime in power. The Syrian regime subsidizes everything from diesel to bread. As in Iran, almost half of Syria’s people are teenagers, and without real economic reforms, widespread unemployment and unrest are just around the corner — but for now, oil money postpones the reckoning.

Ditto Iran. Iran is OPEC’s second-largest producer, selling the world about 2.4 million barrels of oil a day and earning the regime some $4 billion a month — the government’s main source of income. To buy public support, Iran’s regime subsidizes housing, gasoline, interest rates, flour and rice.

According to an Aug. 2 report on Bloomberg.com, “Iran spent $25 billion on subsidies last year, or more than half the $44.6 billion it collected through crude oil exports.” But Iran actually has to import more than one-third of its gasoline, because it can’t refine enough itself. This became so expensive the regime wanted to ration subsidized gas but feared a public backlash. No wonder. Bloomberg reported that subsidized gasoline in Iran is 34 cents a gallon.

Repressive governments like Iran’s and Syria’s use oil money to buy off their people and insulate themselves from the pressure of political and economic reform. When oil prices get high enough, they can even buy a monthlong war in Lebanon. Why not? It’s like a summer sale: “Now, this summer only: 34 cents-a-gallon gasoline and a war with the Jews and new living room furniture for Lebanese Shiites! Such a deal!”

If we could cut the price of crude in half, it would mean that all of Iran’s oil income would go to subsidies — which would be unsustainable and therefore a huge threat to the regime. It would also make Iran’s puppets, like Nasrallah, think three times about launching wars with Israel that might ravage Lebanon again.

Too bad we have a president who tells us we’re “addicted to oil” but won’t do anything about it. That sort of hypocrisy just makes Nasrallah’s day.

Line of Fire - Hard Crossings

2006-08-17T11:03:00.000-04:00

August 15, 2006, 8:53 pm
By Daoud Kuttab, Ramallah, West Bank

Expressing its utmost concern at the continuing escalation of hostilities which has already caused hundreds of deaths and injuries on both sides, extensive damage to civilian infrastructure and hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons …

Calls on Israel and Lebanon to help ensure humanitarian access to civilian populations and the voluntary and safe return of displaced persons …

The above are two excerpts from the recently approved United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701. Due to the political and military situation, I feel rather confident that the displaced Lebanese (and certainly the Israelis) will be allowed to return to their homes (though the condition those homes will be in — if they are even still standing — is another matter).

Nevertheless, I thought of the issue of displacement as I was traveling across the Jordan River from Amman to Ramallah using an international crossing point that bears three names; Jordan calls it the King Hussein Bridge, Israel calls it Allenby Bridge and the Palestinians call it Al Karameh Crossing Point.

I am not going to talk about the 3.5 million Palestinians who, along with their children, are registered refugees since 1948, or the 770,000 Palestinians displaced in 1967. I am just talking about the Palestinians legally allowed to live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but have no access to the rest of the world except through two tightly controlled crossing points.

These border points are actually points of long and continuous suffering, especially during the hot summer days. Thousands of Palestinians spend long hours, often with their children, waiting to cross this temporary border between areas controlled by the Israeli army and Jordan. After the capture of an Israeli soldier in June, those living in Gaza can no longer use this location but are obliged to use the Rafah crossing point, which has been largely closed for over 50 days.

The Jordan River bridge is open for a few hours in the morning and afternoon, which adds to the overcrowdedness and sufferings of individuals and families. While a few cosmetic changes have occurred since 1967 to speed up the travel proceedings, the journey from Jerusalem/Ramallah to Amman or the return trip, which used to take a little over an hour, can now take up to 12 hours. No Palestinian is allowed to make the entire journey in his or her car or any other vehicle.

An improvement occurred during the first years after the Oslo Accords when Palestinian police along with Israeli officials were located at the Israeli-controlled point and the bridge was allowed to be open around the clock. But after the outbreak of the 2000 intifada, the Palestinian police were kicked out by the Israelis and the hours were reduced.

Now the crossing is run entirely by Israeli military and civilian officials and workers with little concern for or interest in the Palestinian people they have to process. The young male and female reserve soldiers at these posts, who are themselves not too pleased with being at this temporary job, often treat the ordinary Palestinians they encounter with arrogance, and even racism.

The expense of travel across this Israeli-controlled point is also unbelievable. The total amount, for permit fees and exit tax, can reach up to $80 per person. For a big family, this plus the cost of transportation easily tops $100 per person. Out of this amount at least $15 per person of the exit tax is earmarked for the Palestinian Authority, but these funds have not been turned over to the Palestinian Authority since last January’s parliamentary elections.

Those not wanting to wait for hours in the hot summer sun can use a special V.I.P. service that is nothing less than highway robbery. To be allowed to bypass the long lines of buses, a van service charges a hefty $82 per person to make the three-kilometer journey between the two banks of the Jordan. A family of five would have to pay up to $800 in travel costs, travel fees, exit tax, V.I.P. service and travel costs on the other side to make the entire 90-kilometer journey from Jordan to the West Bank. Of course, all this depends on having the acceptable travel documents and the Israeli border police permitting you and your family to enter or leave.

I certainly hope that our Lebanese friends will be allowed to return despite the presence of Israeli soldiers in areas south of the Litani. I would hate to think what would happen to them if the Israeli presence, God forbid, become permanent and they would have to go through what Palestinians, adter 39 years of occupation, have been going through.

-----------------------

Daoud Kuttab, a journalist and columnist, is director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al Quds University, in Ramallah and a founder of AmmanNet.net, the Arab world's first Internet radio station.

Summer in the City - Negotiations

2006-08-17T11:02:00.000-04:00

August 15, 2006, 10:36 pm

Negotiations

By Thomas Beller

“Seventy-eight years!” someone said, and there was that distinctive popping sound. I’d come for a tuna salad sandwich but now plastic cups of champagne were being poured and, in a democratic spirit, one was placed on the Formica counter in front of me.

Before I could ask what was going on, the waitress came up and said they were out of tuna salad.

I had wandered into Buffa’s, on Prince and Lafayette Streets, on a whim. I had been feeling a bit frazzled. I go there now and then to settle down. “Time pools,” Barry Lopez wrote in his essay, “On the Wings of Commerce.” He was traveling the world in cargo planes, spanning the globe in a day, but it’s also possible to be jolted out of time in the course of certain city blocks. Buffa’s is a time-pooling place; it provides the consolations of a sandwich on a plate whose only other adornment is a pickle.

The two proprietors, brothers named Augie and Jon, were behind the counter wearing Buffa’s T-shirts. Someone came in and asked for a straw.

“Straws I don’t got!” Augie said. “I timed it perfectly, down to the wire. Nothing left.”

“You closing?” I asked.

“Renovating,” said Jon. “We’ll be back in a couple of months.”

Jon and Augie are the grandchildren of the man who opened the place 78 years ago. Over the years Buffa’s has grown, replacing adjoining businesses. Now it’s an anomaly in Soho, a place where an egg salad sandwich, a Diet Coke and a Tootsie Pop cost $4.70.

In a couple of months they will return but, as Jon explained in a hushed tone, as “a different kind of place.” He named a very sleek restaurant on 17th Street and 7th Avenue. “Something like that,” he said.

“So this is it for you?”

“Oh, no, we’ll still be around. We’ll be partners, you know.”

My egg salad sandwich arrived. Jon was called away for a toast.

It was approaching 3 o’clock, closing time.

On the way out I grabbed a Tootsie Pop from a big glass jar full of them — I suppose you can’t time Tootsie Pops — and as I paid, Augie launched into a monologue about how much the neighborhood had changed since he grew up down the block.

“When I was a kid, I didn’t know who to be more afraid of, the wiseguys or the nuns,” he said.

“And which of those two groups are still around?”

“Neither!” he said. “They’re both gone. The wiseguys I don’t miss. The nuns …,” he shrugged.

Hello Wal-Mart

A few days later I drove up to the Bronx to attend a rally by the anti-Wal-Mart organization Wake-Up Wal-Mart. The rally, at Our Lady of the Refuge church, was to be the launch of a cross-country bus tour to get the message out.

There was a heat wave in action — Fordham Road was sweltering and chaotic, but open for business. I was on my Vespa, and when I pulled over to consult a map, a blast of air conditioning from an open-fronted store barreled into me with such force, I was surprised the entire Bronx power grid didn’t collapse on the spot. It felt good.

The other means of dealing with the heat wave involved a more tangible medium — water. The side streets were a festival of open hydrants.

A huge tour bus was idling outside Our Lady of Refuge. A giant smiley face with a frown had been painted on the bus, along with the words, “Wake-Up Wal-Mart!”

Inside the church — in a large concrete room, a community center of sorts — 60 or 70 people milled around and sat in chairs. Most of them seemed to be the event’s organizers. Or people wearing union T-shirts. Or reporters. The room buzzed with energy.

The Reverend Billy, a political performance artist, took the microphone and led his choir into a gospel song whose refrain was, “Back away back, Wal-Mart, back away!”

Next up was a Franciscan priest, the Rev. Bryan Jordan. He wore a brown robe and jogging sneakers. In a thick New York accent he delivered a brief speech against Wal-Mart that began “It’s nice to be home in the Bronx!” and ended, “They steal from Indians, Chinese, and expect the workers of this country to work for peanuts. Wal-Mart can [and here he used a figure of speech that involved Wal-Mart kissing a part of his body]. Get out of here!”

A union man followed, then a pair of local political activists who shared an anecdote about a Bronx-born soldier in Iraq who said he would rather risk getting killed than take a low-paying retail job in the Bronx.

Then it was time for the main event, the show-and-tell by Chris Cofinas and Paul Blank, former campaign officials for Howard Dean and Wesley Clark respectively, who set up the Wake-Up Wal-Mart campaign and who were going to be getting on the bus.

There was a slide show, and Cofinas did a good job of depicting Wal-Mart as a kind of retail version of the omniverous fish in the movie “Darwin’s Nightmare,” a kind of toxic rash spreading over the country, devouring other life forms. But the screen was very small, the PowerPoint slides malfunctioned, and Cofinas’ speech was flat. “Come on guys!” I thought. “You know what you are up against, you have to do better than this!”

I left before Cofinas finished his talk and took pictures of the idling bus double-parked outside. It was a two-way street, and now only one lane was available; cars squeezed by in impatient shifts.

“Probably Be a Good Thing”

The sun was in remission, the sky blue and pink. I cruised south in the heat-stricken dusk.

Back near Forham Road, smoke billowed from a pothole, water spouted from a nearby hydrant, and while police cars arrived with lights flashing, Con Ed workers huddled over a manhole and set up shop with their truck. I thought, blackout.

I stopped a man striding down Fordham Road with a backpack, muscles and a do-rag and asked him what he thought about Wal-Mart coming to the neighborhood.

Photo by Tom Beller
Demone Colhoun

“Probably be a good thing,” said the man, whose name was Demone Colhoun. “You have all these small stores going out of business around here. Maybe Wal-Mart could handle the rent.”

He said he had been to a Wal-Mart in Florida and liked it, and when I suggested that a lot of local stores might go out of business he said, “Me, as a customer, I want the most for my money.”

I asked the same question of an older woman walking by in a fantastic green dress and matching turban, who was carrying several bulging plastic bags. She moved warily and would answer me only from a distance of 10 feet. She, too, said that Wal-Mart coming to the Bronx would be a good thing. I told her that some people thought that their wages were unfairly low. (I didn’t want to proselytize, but Cofinas and company are definitely my team here.) She considered this for a moment. “Then I would be against it,” she said. “If the wages were unfair.”

She told me only her first name — Tonkya — and wouldn’t let me take her picture, but we parted cordially, and she walked away past a large police truck and a sign posted on a streetlight that read, “Area under NYPD video surveillance.”

City of Hydrants

It was full-on dusk now, and I wound my way home through festive if slightly apocalyptic night scenes of children playing in the fierce spray of open fire hydrants.

Video: City of Hydrants

My thoughts lingered on Wal-Mart in the city. And then moved to Demone Calhoun. And finally to Buffa’s. And I decided that I didn’t even like Buffa’s that much. I always found it a bit annoying. I once saw a couple of guys who looked very much like Demone Colhoun standing at the counter deliberating over menus until Augie, characteristically to-the-point, said, “Come on, guys, move it. You’re blocking the entrance!”

The two men said, “Rude!” and walked out the door to the fate of a much more expensive lunch.

Was that it?

Or was it a more abstract dissonance around Buffa’s? I drove along thinking about the contradiction: it was a slightly annoying place I was sad to see go. One of the complicated things about the city is that some of our annoyances are actually a kind of pleasure: the annoyance provides a friction, and that friction provides a kind of parameter to the self, a definition. The suburban big box store is all about no friction, no borders, economies of enormous scale, and no heightened sense of self. Maybe this heightened sense of self is unhealthy, overrated, but it is one of New York’s indigenous virtues, I think, and perhaps the reason it is so difficult to get any writing done in this town that is nevertheless full of writers.

The Decider

The car ahead of me slowed and stopped. Up ahead a child was straddling an open hydrant. He had a can in his hand. As each car passed, he pressed the can against the open mouth of the hydrant and turned it into a water cannon. Each car slowed as it approached the gauntlet. The kid had this great poker face. He would stand there with the water lapping peacefully out of the hydrant. The car would edge forward and then he would absolutely cream it, his eyes right on the driver, his expression unchanged.

This happened to the three cars in front of me, and then it was my turn. I sat there on my Vespa, with no window to roll up. The kid kept his mournful poker face as he stood hunched over the hydrant, can in hand.
Come on, I thought, give me a break. I waited for some sign from him that I had a pass. A horn honked behind me. The kid’s face, lit by the last traces of sky, a bit of street lamp and the headlights behind me, showed no expression. I put my feet up and rolled forward, waiting for the crushing blast. To my surprise, it never came.

Douglas Coupland: Time Capsules - September 11

2006-08-17T10:54:00.000-04:00

August 15, 2006, 10:30 pm

September 11

On Sept. 11, I was marooned in Madison, Wis., on the first day of a 52-day book tour. On the 12th, I was able to phone through to the Bloomsbury offices in New York’s Flatiron Building. Because a Verizon transmitter on the North Tower had been destroyed, Bloomsbury was able only to receive incoming calls, not to call out. There wasn’t much for the staff to do, really, and my publicist, Sara Mercurio, said that knowing I was out on the road gave them some sort of reason for coming in in the mornings, and this gave me a sense of mission. I’d been ready to pack the whole thing in.

By the fifth day in Madison, I was beginning to think, Hmmm … maybe if I’m stuck here for the rest of my life I could make a go of it. It’s a pretty little town — like TV’s “Happy Days” — nice houses and Mrs. Cunninghams all over the place making endless batches of cookies and cooling them on the ledges of Dutch doors.

On day six, I was able to board one of the first flights allowed back in the air and get to Los Angeles. I had a room at the Raffles L’Ermitage, in Beverly Hills, which had been fully booked for the Emmy Awards that then had been canceled, so the place was empty save for me, Claudia Schiffer and Salman Rushdie. Most of my TV and radio interviews — like much of the press schedule for that tour — was obliterated by the events of the month, and I spent four days on the hotel roof, poolside, looking at the skies over Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Pacific Palisades, marveling at how there wasn’t a single jet contrail to be seen (LAX had yet to open). Nor were there helicopters in the skies. Also, crime was down so there were fewer sirens, and I may as well have been sunning on the rooftop of a hotel in the middle of an Indiana cornfield.

The tour did press on, though, and over the next six weeks I kept a photo diary of the newly minted post-Sept. 11 world, focusing on airports, public situations involving media and electronics, and anything that smacked of surveillance. I look at them as a suite, and the whole tone of the tour comes back to me — the endless lineups to get through security, only to board a totally empty flight. Most of the flights those first three weeks were empty — and then suddenly every flight was chokingly full. There was never just a half-full plane.

Another thing I remember is empty hotels. I was always one of a handful of guests at any hotel, and I felt like a character in a J. G. Ballard novel — or in “Galapagos,” by Kurt Vonnegut. I was in the Marriott in San Francisco and they simply shut down one of its towers. The only thing that’s ever come close to this experience was in Toronto during the SARS outbreak, when I was at the Four Seasons and a North American oncology convention pulled out, and there I was alone in the lobby, with elevator banks shut down and the bar closed.

Big Talk, Little Will

2006-08-16T00:44:00.000-04:00

August 16, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

The defeat of Senator Joe Lieberman by the upstart antiwar Democrat Ned Lamont has sparked a firestorm of debate about the direction of the Democratic Party. My own heart is with those Democrats who worry that just calling for a pullout from Iraq, while it may be necessary, is not a sufficient response to the biggest threat to open societies today — violent, radical Islam. Unless Democrats persuade voters — in the gut — that they understand this larger challenge, it’s going to be hard for them to win the presidency.

That said, though, the Democratic mainstream is nowhere near as dovish as critics depict. Truth be told, some of the most constructive, on-the-money criticism over the past three years about how to rescue Iraq or improve the broader “war on terrorism” has come from Democrats, like Joe Biden, Carl Levin, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Bill Clinton.

But whatever you think of the Democrats, the important point is this: They are not the party in power today.

What should really worry the country is not whether the Democrats are being dragged to the left by antiwar activists who haven’t thought a whit about the larger struggle we’re in. What should worry the country is that the Bush team and the Republican Party, which control all the levers of power and claim to have thought only about this larger struggle, are in total denial about where their strategy has led.

Besides a few mavericks like Chuck Hagel and John McCain on Iraq and Dick Lugar and George Shultz on energy, how many Republicans have stood up and questioned the decision-making that has turned the Iraq war into a fiasco? Had more of them done so, instead of just mindlessly applauding the administration, the White House might have changed course when it had a chance.

Not only is there no honest self-criticism among Republicans, but — and this is truly contemptible — you have Dick Cheney & Friends focusing their public remarks on why Mr. Lamont’s defeat of Mr. Lieberman only proves that Democrats do not understand that we are in a titanic struggle with “Islamic fascists” and are therefore unfit to lead.

Oh, really? Well, I just have one question for Mr. Cheney: If we’re in such a titanic struggle with radical Islam, and if getting Iraq right is at the center of that struggle, why did you “tough guys” fight the Iraq war with the Rumsfeld Doctrine — just enough troops to lose — and not the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force to create the necessary foundation of any democracy-building project, which is security? How could you send so few troops to fight such an important war when it was obvious that without security Iraqis would fall back on their tribal militias?

Mr. Cheney, if we’re in a titanic struggle with Islamic fascists, why have you and President Bush resisted any serious effort to get Americans to conserve energy? Why do you refuse to push higher mileage standards for U.S. automakers or a gasoline tax that would curb our imports of oil? Here we are in the biggest struggle of our lives and we are funding both sides — the U.S. military with our tax dollars and the radical Islamists and the governments and charities that support them with our gasoline purchases — and you won’t lift a finger to change that. Why? Because it might impose pain on the oil companies and auto lobbies that fund the G.O.P., or require some sacrifice by Americans.

Mr. Cheney, if we’re in a titanic struggle with Islamic fascists, why do you constantly use the “war on terrorism” as a wedge issue in domestic politics to frighten voters away from Democrats. How are we going to sustain such a large, long-term struggle if we are a divided country?

Please, Mr. Cheney, spare us your flag-waving rhetoric about the titanic struggle we are in and how Democrats just don’t understand it. It is just so phony — such a patent ploy to divert Americans from the fact that you have never risen to the challenge of this war. You will the ends, but you won’t will the means. What a fraud!

Friends, we are on a losing trajectory in Iraq, and, as the latest London plot underscores, the wider war with radical Islam is only getting wider. We need to reassess everything we are doing in this “war on terrorism” and figure out what is worth continuing, what needs changing and what sacrifice we need to demand from every American to match our means with our ends. Yes, the Democrats could help by presenting a serious alternative. But unless the party in power for the next two and half years shakes free of its denial, we are in really, really big trouble.

Line of Fire - Christian Zionists and False Prophets

2006-08-15T16:09:00.000-04:00

August 11, 2006, 9:53 pm

Christian Zionists and False Prophets

By Daoud Kuttab, Ramallah, West Bank

As if we don’t have enough problems with Muslim and Jewish fundamentalists, we are now confronted with yet another -ist. Christian Zionists, mostly from the United States, are trying to throw their weight behind one of the parties, in effect calling for the continuation of the war and carnage in Lebanon.

A small minority of evangelical Christians have entered the Middle East political arena with some of the most un-Christian statements I have ever heard. The latest gems come from people like Pat Robertson, the founder and chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Network, and Rev. John Hagee of Christians United for Israel. Hagee, a popular televangelist who leads the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, ratcheted up his rhetoric this year with the publication of his book, “Jerusalem Countdown,” in which he argues that a confrontation with Iran is a necessary precondition for Armageddon (which will mean the death of most Jews, in his eyes) and the Second Coming of Christ.

In the best-selling book, Hagee insists that the United States must join Israel in a preemptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West. Shortly after the book’s publication, he launched Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which, as the Christian version of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he said would cause “a political earthquake.” With the outbreak of the war on Lebanon, he and others have called to their followers to pray for Israel, and for the continuation of the war on Lebanon. They have demanded that Israel not relent in what they call the need to destroy Hezbollah and Hamas. They seem to have completely forgotten the very core of the Christian faith.

I have been watching many American evangelicals trying to distance themselves from the calls in the name of the Almighty for the war to continue. As Christian leaders of all persuasions, including leaders of evangelical churches, are calling for Mideast peace and an immediate cease-fire, these Christian Zionists want their followers to pray only for Israel.

One e-mail message that was making the rounds came from a prominent U.S. evangelical Christian totally upset with an interview that Pat Robertson gave to the Jerusalem Post. In it, Robertson appears more pro-Israeli than the Israelis themselves and expresses anger at the notion that Israelis might not completely finish off Hezbollah — a task that he somehow sees as God’s will. The author of the above-mentioned e-mail message, Serge Duss of World Vision, a Christian relief organization, called the Robertson interview “a perversion of the Gospel of Jesus.” Duss writes that he is sure that many evangelicals strongly disagree and would gladly refute Robertson’s distorted theology.

Duss insists that American evangelicals are praying for 1) the people of Israel and Lebanon; 2) for a cease-fire, so that lives will be spared and 3) for peace with justice for all people in the Middle East.

The discussion has reminded me of so many calls I heard as a young Christian boy growing up in Bethlehem and Jerusalem: the false prophets that have predicted the end days and the presence of the anti-Christ are too numerous to list here. But I vividly remember the very same Pat Robertson in 1982 as he spoke on C.B.N.’s “700 Club.” He stood in front of a map of the Middle East, opened up a copy of the Old Testamant and claimed to know what a particular prophecy meant in geopolitical terms. As the Begin-Sharon army at the time was besieging Beirut, he pointed out exactly what he said would happen next. In particular he was keen to repeat that the P.L.O.’s leader at the time, Yasir Arafat, was none other than the anti-Christ himself.

Less than 13 years after that international broadcast, Robertson was filmed visiting Arafat in Gaza, delivering food and milk to Palestinians and applauding the peace agreement that Arafat had signed with Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin.

Christian Zionists who use religious rhetoric to justify political and military actions are no better than Jewish or Islamic fundamentalists who make similar outlandish claims. Peace in the Middle East should be about the liberty, independence and freedoms of all the people of the region, and not about whose promised land the Holy Land is.

For the time being, I, as a Christian Palestinian, prefer to follow the words of Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the sons of God.”

Line of Fire - An Existential Moment

2006-08-15T14:16:00.000-04:00

August 13, 2006, 10:01 pm
By Yossi Klein Halevi, Israel

I had to read the editorial in Haaretz twice to be sure I’d read correctly. “At this late and critical stage of the conflict,” wrote the voice of the Israeli left on August 8, “the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] must propose, recommend and indeed must demand political approval — public approval is clearly assured — for extensive operations that can snatch a victory from the jaws of looming defeat.”

Was Haaretz, which has always upheld the preeminence of Israel’s civil authority over its military authority and regards generals as potential Dr. Strangeloves, really urging the army to “demand” that the politicians back its battle plans? Had any other Israeli newspaper done so, it would have been accused — foremost by Haaretz itself — of advocating a soft putsch. Haaretz’s stunning militancy is indicative of the growing frustration and depression Israelis feel at the prospect of not winning the war against Hezbollah — which really means losing the war.

With the emerging cease-fire, it appears that is about to happen. And that’s why so many Israelis regard the prospect of a cease-fire as a disaster. Under the cease-fire terms, authority for securing the northern border will be transferred to an “augmented” U.N. force which has, in the past, proven not merely ineffectual but often appeared complicitous with Hezbollah. Almost certainly, Anan will link Hezbollah’s disarmament to an Israeli withdrawal from Shebaa Farms — thereby providing Hezbollah with a political victory, and enhancing the jihadist momentum within the Muslim world. One way or another, Hezbollah will be back on the border, and Israel will have to fight again.

Most Israelis perceive this war as existential. Even left-leaning journalists have compared it to the desperate battles of the 1948 War of Independence and to the weeks before the 1967 Six Day War, when Arab leaders threatened to drive the Jews into the sea.

The existential threat isn’t imminent, of course. But an Israeli defeat could trigger a process that would unravel our long-term prospects for surviving in the Middle East. As one friend put it to me: “If we lose, it’s the beginning of the end.” And in recent days I’ve heard variations of that comment from Israelis across the political spectrum.

Those anxieties begin with the nature of Israel’s jihadist enemy. What connects Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas is the theology of genocide — which sees the Jews as a satanic people and the destruction of the Jewish state as a divine imperative. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah once remarked that he doesn’t mind Jews immigrating to Israel, because gathering them in one place will make it that much easier to destroy them. And Hezbollah’s patron, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has called for Israel’s destruction so often that those genocidal pronouncements barely make news anymore — one more anti-Israel outrage that has been transformed from the inconceivable to the mundane. If Iran goes nuclear, Israel’s own nuclear force may not be much of a deterrence against apocalyptic leaders who apparently believe that the destruction of Israel will trigger the arrival of the Mahdi, the Shiite messiah. A nuclear Iran would be the ultimate suicide bomber.

For Israelis, this war is about restoring deterrence against the theologians of genocide. After Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, Nasrallah declared Israel a “spider web” — which seems from a distance durable but disintegrates with a single swipe. A Hezbollah victory, or even the perception of victory within the Arab world, will encourage terror attacks against our borders. And large parts of Israel’s periphery — especially the north and the southern area that borders Gaza — will become uninhabitable.

Finally, an inability to stop the most successful aggression against the Israeli home front since 1948 will result in widespread despair. Many Israelis, especially educated young people with options elsewhere, will understandably conclude that there is no hope for a normal life in a country that is an anomaly in the Middle East and that has lost the ability and perhaps the will to defend itself. The result will be widespread emigration. I know of one American-based high tech company with a branch in northern Israel that is arranging for its Israeli “brains,” as the president refers them, to be moved with their families to the northeastern United States. Will the “brains” want to return to the Galilee if Hezbollah hasn’t been uprooted from southern Lebanon?

Many Russian immigrants, who came here to escape a failed Soviet society, could conclude they made a mistake and that Israel is incapable of surviving in the long-term in the Middle East. One satirical TV skit showed an Israeli loudly proclaiming that there is no safer place for the Jews than “here” — which Israelis once said confidently about the Jewish state — but when the camera lens widens, we see he is seen speaking from London.

In a January 1996 speech in Stockholm before foreign ministers of the Arab League, Yasir Arafat laid out his vision of the long-term unraveling of the Jewish state: Extract territorial concessions from Israel, but without ending terror. When Israelis realize that not even a peace process will bring them security, then “a million rich Jews,” as Arafat put it, evidently meaning Israel’s middle class, will emigrate. Gradually, an impoverished Israel will lose its edge over the Arab world and collapse.

Hezbollah has taken us one step closer to realizing Arafat’s scenario.

Israelis see the war as a test case for our right to defend ourselves against terrorists. If the international community turns against Israel now, it will mean that we have no right to resist terrorists who hide behind their civilian population in order to attack ours.

This war is being fought on two fronts — Gaza as well as Lebanon. Those happen to be the two fronts from which Israel has unilaterally withdrawn to the international border. A recent “Dry Bones” cartoon by Yaakov Kirschen showed two Israelis discussing the war in Lebanon and in Gaza. “And the West Bank?” one asks. “Still quiet,” replies his friend. “We haven’t pulled back to the 1967 border there yet.”

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Yossi Klein Halevi, the author of "At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land," is a senior fellow at The Shalem Center, an academic research institute in Jerusalem, and a correspondent for The New Republic.

Summer in the City - No Spitting!

2006-08-15T14:11:00.001-04:00

August 14, 2006, 10:30 pm

No Spitting!

By Cathleen Schine

I feel the need to write about bodily fluids. Perhaps it is all this perspiration, as TV ads and well-mannered people used to call sweat. I don’t really know why they called it perspiration. Sweat has such an honest, hard-working, 1930’s ring to it. That’s why George W. pretends to sweat on his ranch, but he’s a perspirer if I ever saw one. I, on the other hand, am shvitzing. That’s Yiddish, of course, and therefore the best word in any language for this slippery situation brought about by heat and humidity.

And now that we’re on the subject of bodily fluids, I really, really hate spitting. When my sons were younger, they would arrive home from camp and spit, every few feet, like H.B.O. cowboys, on the sidewalk. It was disgusting. We would have loud arguments on every street corner. Haven’t you ever seen a sign that says “No Expectorating”? I would ask. They would shake their heads sadly at my quaint notions. Then I would begin jumping up and down. It’s unsanitary and spreads disease! Tuberculosis is making a comeback! I don’t want to step in someone’s spit, not even yours! It’s, it’s, it’s … low class! (That was their favorite.) What if you forget and spit in front of a girl? (But girls spit, too, they explained. And they were right — I see lovely, delicate creatures in their pretty dresses cocking their heads to the side and letting one rip. Oh, dear. It is, as my grandmother said throughout her 98 years, the worst era in the history of the world.)

My grandmother and grandfather used to give a good spit once in a while, when I was really little, but my mother would go crazy with revulsion and try to embarrass them. The times changed (even in the endless worst era in the history of the world), and eventually they pretty much stopped. My great-grandfather spat tobacco, but that was before my time. And now, my sons have pretty much stopped, too. Even after watching a baseball game. In fact, I think the Mets spit less now than they did a few years ago. That’s what a really good manager can do. It’s obviously why they’re winning. I will go further and say that on the streets of New York City in August, when I expected to see a staccato of spitting provided by all those cigar-smoking men who consider it a summer style statement to reveal their hairy shoulders, I have seen no spitting whatsoever. Is it fashion? The zeitgeist? Their mothers’ voices ringing in their heads—“Are you crazy? That is disgusting!!!” — ?

Or is it? … Yes, it is, I’m sure of it — it’s all the shvitzing. There are no bodily fluids left to expectorate!

Again, I say, God bless August!

Line of Fire - Cease-Fire: Dispelling Two Imminent Clouds

2006-08-15T14:11:00.000-04:00

August 14, 2006, 3:41 pm
By Chibli Mallat, Lebanon

The Lebanese are holding their breath. Will the cease-fire, which started this morning at 8 am, hold ? No one dares imagine what happens if it doesn’t, but an extraordinary phenomenon developed this morning as thousands of southern residents took to the road back to their villages, voting literally with their feet for a return to peace and normalcy. Another encouraging dimension was the announced withdrawal of Israeli troops, signaling that there is no Israeli desire to stay in Lebanon should the cease-fire hold under the terms of UNSCR 1701.

Two heavy clouds remain: one concerns the low threshold of a nervous Israel, which turns any incident into a risk for hell to break loose. Incidents are inevitable on an imbricate terrain where Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah militants form a fuzzy map. One or two Hezbollah militants were killed today, and the repetition of such incidents would quickly undermine the truce. Speaking to the Knesset this afternoon, the Israeli Prime Minister announced Israel’s intention to continue its pursuit of Hezbollah. War would be again inevitable if these threats were carried out against Hezbollah’s leadership.

This cloud is reinforced by the one cast by the ambiguity of Hezbollah, which professes support to the cease-fire, but considers it has the right to shoot at Israeli soldiers so long as they stay on Lebanese soil.

Both clouds should be forcefully dispelled, by lessening the zero-tolerance attitude of Israel and opposing a Hamas-like decapitation policy, and by working on removing Hezbollah’s ambiguity. I do not have the means to help on the first score, although I find the absence of open military preparations for foreign troops to move into the south a grave failure of the international community. The clause in Resolution 1701 requesting Israel to withdraw as early as possible should be taken seriously, and rapid withdrawal is contingent on foreign troops taking over. One does not yet see tangible signs of these troops, except for talk about the readiness of some countries to deploy them eventually. The Security Council had ample time to show such troops to be ready for immediate deployment in South Lebanon. Any delay brooks risk, and the dynamic of peace should be reinforced by far greater dynamism on this score.

On Hezbollah’s ambiguity, I expressed my opinion forcefully on Lebanese and Egyptian national television yesterday. There is no way armed Hezbollah militants can remain between the Litani River and the border. Should attacks be leveled against Israel, as the leadership of Hezbollah is trying to argue on the basis of a revival the so-called 1996 Israel-Lebanon Cease-Fire Understanding, peace will be immediately wrecked. That agreement was reached against a very different set of circumstances, as Israel was refusing to leave South Lebanon, and a stopgap modus vivendi developed to lessen civilian casualties on both sides. Today the peace plan introduced by UNSCR 1701 is based on the premise of a quick Israeli withdrawal and the parallel, exclusive deployment of international and Lebanese troops. There is no room for halfway measures that allow combat to resume in any form.

The ambiguous refusal by Hezbollah to vacate the South militarily already occasioned a serious crisis in the Council of Ministers, which failed to convene yesterday because the two Hezbollah ministers were reluctant to endorse that specific requirement of UNSCR 1701. This is not acceptable. Should Hezbollah boycott the Council of Ministers or refuse to conform to that clause, they should leave the government. Having been a year ago the first person in Lebanon to advocate the participation of Hezbollah ministers in government, against a decade and a half of a tacit understanding between Syria and the United States that they should be kept out, I feel morally compelled to speak out. When I suggested last year that Hezbollah should not be prevented from participating in government, I also insisted on the necessary quid pro quo: they could do not continue to operate as a separate armed force outside the law. Lebanon paid dearly for this weakness.

To protect the cease-fire, accelerate Israeli withdrawal and give a chance to a lasting peace on the border, the choice is clear: either Hezbollah ministers stay in government, and conform to UNSCR 1701, which was formally accepted by Lebanon; or they leave government and stay in opposition. Conforming to UNSCR 1701 means an end to Hezbollah’s military presence south of the Litani River and the recovery of all the land reoccupied by Israel since July 12 by the Lebanese army and an enhanced U.N. contingent. In a second stage, it includes the participation of Hezbollah in Lebanese political life exclusively as a Lebanese political, not a military, movement. As Lebanese, we cannot allow this oddity to remain, and cannot afford another war.

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Chibli Mallat is a professor of law at Saint-Joseph University in Beirut and a candidate for president of Lebanon.

Douglas Coupland: Time Capsules - Why Write Modern Fiction?

2006-08-15T14:08:00.000-04:00

August 14, 2006, 10:30 pm

Why Write Modern Fiction?

Many people think of me as being Mr. High Technology Guy, which I find odd since I’m a fiction writer, possibly one of the lowest-tech jobs going. I’m asked why I don’t get into movies or TV — why should I? I enjoy writing fiction. Without fiction we run the risk of losing forever the possibility of certain kinds of stories being told a certain way. And fiction allows for a time to reflect and savor speech and the gift of language.

And yet there’s something weird with me. My existence annoys the hell out of traditional fiction writers. I get all sorts of corny damnations along the lines of, “All he’s doing is ruthlessly exploiting experimental fiction just to make truckloads of money.” Yes, that’s always been my plan all along. Yessiree, there’s no more surefire way of making a living than by exploiting society’s bottomless craving for experimental fiction. I’m sure if you go to any high school career counseling office, at the absolute bottom of a list of 9,472 possible career options, right below morris dancing and poultry sexing, you’ll find experimental fiction writing. My most recent novel features 24 pages of random numbers. Ka-ching! Ka-ching! I was certainly thinking of the jackpot when I put that in. And yet in it went, and it seems the more experimental my work gets, the more people respond to it.

So the fact is that I do write, and I am a writer, and I can’t be wished out of existence by those aging crustysomethings who’ve been trying to do just this for 15 years. I also note that these folks are usually the same folks who are always passionately arguing for society to offer new platforms for new and different voices to be heard. Rich nutritious irony, if ever there was: as long as those voices end up sounding like their own voices in the end.

I find a stifling homogeneity in most fiction. I walk into a bookstore and look at the shelves filled with thousands of doubtless worthy novels — beautifully crafted, nicely honed and all of that — novels of love, loss and redemption and … in my head I feel as if I’ve walked into a Broyhill furniture showroom. I feel like I’m looking at countless dark-stained colonial-style bedroom suites, and endless arrays of pickled-maple empire dining sets, with no spindle left unturned, every buffed surface dreaming of a shot of Pledge. What I’m seeing is undoubtedly fine furniture. It’s just not …new furniture. And I’m not saying that the bulk of novels out there aren’t art — they are — they’re just not modern art. They don’t point out anything new or the possibility of anything new. I mean, it’s also pretty hard to imagine a beautifully rendered canvas of mallard ducks in the Museum of Modern Art. Or a watercolor portrait of Anne Hathaway.

And the truth is that most people want to live in “old fashioned”-styled houses. It’s the way people are. But to be outraged and upset by the fact that someone might want to live in a modernist house seems medieval. No! My taste is absolute! Install Italianate decorative mantelpieces immediately! My ongoing joke is that most new subdivisions resemble microwave ovens with crown molding. If there’s anything new or modern to be seen, smother it with doohickeys.

I began writing because I fell in love with Pop Art at the age of 10. I’ve always thought that words are sexy. Words are art objects even by themselves, even without being inserted into a narrative. I discovered Jenny Holzer’s text work in art school in the early 1980’s. After that, it now seems, a lifetime spent working with words was unavoidable.

And given everything I’ve just said, yes, I continue to write fiction. I continue to write fiction set in a modern world that has never been weirder or richer or more charged with options, a world inhabited with modern people who hoard Tamiflu, compare the advantage of one credit card over another, and, shamefully or not, wonder which tastes better, Coke or Pepsi. Or Royal Crown.

These modern people have TVs and watch them. They shop on eBay. They question the regime in power. They have repetitive stress disorders. They downloaded porn last weekend. And yet in spite of this — maybe even because of this — they possess the qualities to become myths. That’s where art lies.

Douglas Coupland: Time Capsules - Photoshop = Pop Art

2006-08-15T13:13:00.000-04:00

August 13, 2006, 10:30 pm

Photoshop = Pop Art

American Pop artist James Rosenquist has always been one of my favorite
painters. So when I really got into Photoshop in 1998, I used his
visual techniques as my training guide on how to use this new
software. Using Pop imagery from all over the place I was able to
learn about layering and gradation and cutting and pasting and … in the
end I came to the conclusion that the 1960’s Pop artists were merely
dry runs for year 2000 imaging software. For example, Andy Warhol’s work was about cutting, pasting and cloning, while that of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns was about opacity, layering and filtering.

Included here are some early examples of how I used Pop to learn Photoshop.

Line of Fire - Victory and the ‘Battle of Forms’

2006-08-13T14:22:00.000-04:00

August 12, 2006, 5:11 pm
By Chibli Mallat, Lebanon

In the Hezbollah-Israel war, another pattern resulting from the asymmetric conflict — pitting an armed political party against a state — has been the “battle of the forms.” It is clear that neither party can win the war in the classical Clausewitzian manner: overpower the enemy and take over its territory. To overpower Israel, Hezbollah must occupy it. But it does not even envision advancing into the Galilee. On the other side, Israel rightly hesitates to move too deep into Lebanese territory, not only because of the high number of casualties expected against a universally acknowledged brave and effective resistance. By taking over Lebanese villages, Israel risks turning its anti-Hezbollah war into anti-Lebanon war of conquest — in other words into a classical war with a different enemy.

What does asymmetry mean in terms of victory? A concept used by contract lawyers may be useful on such new terrain of geopolitics: “the battle of the forms.” When offer and acceptance become very close in the formation of a contract, it is the very last formulation that wins the day, hence the advice to business clients to get their version of the last draft to prevail. Between Hezbollah and Israel, success will be defined for each by the last version in the cease-fire contract.

As expected, Israeli won the first victory in the battle of the forms, when U.N Security Council Resolution 1701 was passed on Friday, a month after the conflict began. Hezbollah, through the Lebanese government, did manage to whittle down the request to deploy foreign troops under a U.N. Chapter 7 clause to the deployments of an enhanced UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force) in the south. But the text is resolutely in favor of Israel in practically all the disputed points: acknowledgement that Hezbollah started the war on July 12; prohibition of armed Hezbollah operatives in a large stretch from the Litani River to the border; principle of exclusive power of the Lebanese security forces and army across the country; prohibition of weapons and support from outside forces (read Syria and Iran) to non-state parties in Lebanon (read Palestinian factions and Hezbollah). An additional boon was given Israel when it was asked to operate its withdrawal from Lebanon “at the earliest” rather than “immediately.”

Another Security Council Resolution is in the works. It is expected after the U.N. Secretary General reports back to the Council on the implementation of 1701 in a month’s time, and another battle of the forms has already started over it. How the separation between Hezbollah and Israel works out is crucial. But much will also depend on domestic developments in Lebanon, especially the eagerness of the majority of Lebanese to impose the exclusivity of Lebanese law on the remainder of their territory.

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Chibli Mallat is a professor of law at Saint-Joseph University in Beirut and a candidate for president of Lebanon.

Summer in the City - Hillary: What’s Not to Like?

2006-08-13T01:24:00.000-04:00

August 11, 2006, 10:38 pm

Hillary: What’s Not to Like?

By Patricia Marx

Everyone seems not to like Senator Clinton nowadays. A long time ago, of course, lots of people did not like First Lady Clinton because of her hairdo, but those were innocent days and since then, our country has become much more sophisticated in ways not to like a person. There are, for example, columnists in this paper who do not like her because at first she liked the war and then she didn’t like the war, but even today, she doesn’t not like the war enough. There are Democrats who would like to like her, but do not like her because not enough other people like her and therefore, she could ruin the Democrats’ electoral chances against the Republicans, who the Democrats don’t like more than they don’t like this potential nominee. The Republicans do not like her because even though she has liked some of the things they like, still it appears that she has not found it in her heart to not like most of the things they do not like — for instance, people. Bill, I have heard it said in certain circles, does not like his wife, but who am I to tell you who Bill likes or does not like, although I can tell you that I met Bill once and he did not seem to “like” me, if you know what I mean.

I do not not like Ms. Clinton for any of those reasons. I don’t like Hilary for a reason all my own. Or is it Hillary? See, that’s the problem. Hillary, or Hilary, misspells (or is it mispells?) her name. I used to have no trouble with that name. Then Hillary/Hilary came along, and I thought, O.K., she’s a spelling maverick. Just remember, I told myself, that she is like a hill, which has two L’s, because her career has had its ups and downs and the downs have been like valleys — not valeys. And don’t forget: it takes a village, also with two L’s. But then, I started to think, it is also true that Hilary is not like a hill. Hills are covered with grass and though Bill might have smoked but not inhaled, there is no way that Hilary would ever have touched the stuff.

If only the Hilary/Hillary problem stopped there, I could live with it. But the dilemma (two m’s, easy-peasy) has leaked (notice I did not say “spilled”) into the Alison/Allison area. It is almost as bad as “exaggerate,” a word I will never be able to spell, to my embarrassment, a word I seem to spell correctly about half the time. The only reason these words are spelled correctly here, by the way, is because my computer automatically corrects all misspellings.

Hilary/Hillary, incidentally (that I can spell), could also be the name of a man, but don’t get me started on that one. I have not finished with Hilary/Hillary, the woman, whom I would like very much were she to have another name, but she does not, so I say: the hel with her.

Summer in the City - A Sense of Purpose

2006-08-13T01:23:00.000-04:00

August 10, 2006, 10:30 pm

A Sense of Purpose

By Cathleen Schine

Do you ever wish you were sunk into your chintz cushions in your white wicker chair on the veranda? You know — those chintz pillows covered in the fabric with the big, blowsy roses? And that little breeze that blows through your garden of real blowsy red roses? And you sip your ice tea and watch the world go by and think, yes, such a lovely way to spend a summer day?

Except you don’t have a wicker chair, much less a garden?

Me either.

That, however, is why there is the Museum of the City of New York. It has white wicker chairs in which to loll and blowsy roses at which to gaze. And inside … well, how blowsy can a blowsy rose get? Mighty blowsy if it was designed by Dorothy Draper. In the exhibit about her life and work as an interior designer that’s at the museum now, there’s a wonderful video of her looking a little blowsy herself, explaining how every bit of design must have a “puuurpose.” But the only puuurpose you can find in her designs, really, is delight. Ah, delight, what higher puuurpose is there?

I was relieved to be delighted, too, let me tell you, for on our way to the museum the other day, my girlfriend Janet and I were waiting for the bus and it was 100 degrees and the driver … DID NOT STOP.

Yes, it’s been hot and some people — people who drive New York City bus number 5582, for example — have not behaved with the civility one might have expected from the person who drives, say, bus 5582. Some people, and I’m not mentioning names, although they tend to be the person who drives bus 5582, do not realize that it is not only design that has puuurpose, it is also buses. What is the puuurpose of a bus if not to stop and pick up passengers at the bus stop, and in the case of bus 5582, to pick up Janet and me?

This disturbing trend in what can only be described as bus 5582, on the hottest day of the year, by a certain bus driver who happened to be behind the wheel of a bus which I happened to notice was number 5582, has given me an inspiration regarding New York City public transportation. I am a fan of New York City public transportation, which is why the actions of a bus driver who shall remain nameless only because I do not know his name (although he was seen in the driver’s seat of bus number 5582) were so devastating. Also, because it was 100 degrees and we were late.

But here is my idea: Imagine if the interior of a bus looked like a Dorothy Draper interior. Dorothy Draper designed hotel lobbies and spas and the interiors of airplanes. I would like to see a Dorothy Draper design in a New York City bus. Black, but not puuure black, no, an almost puuurple black, with bright white trim and banquettes with pink velvet seats and green and white striped backs and huge, gilded bell pulls, lacquered white poles and red satin straps, fringed, of course … it would be beautiful. And its puuurpose, its only puuurpose, would be to delight. It would stop at every stop, too. Why? Why, in order to delight those waiting there in the 100-degree heat to go to the East Side to see the Dorothy Draper exhibit and sit in the Museum of the City of New York’s white wicker chairs!

Let’s hire Dorothy Draper! Cruel and inhumane bus drivers, the identifying number of whose bus we need not repeat, for by now we have memorized that it is 5582, would be soothed and mellowed by the weirdly, grandly cozy Draper design. Smiling and rehabilitated, this formerly hardhearted driver, who had once so callously guided the large vehicle numbered 5582 past the wilting, overheated citizens, would now pull gently to a halt …

Wait.

Oh.

Janet just told me the number of the bus was not 5582, at all. It was 5593 …

Well, it probably didn’t quite hit 100 degrees that day, either.

But there was a little breeze when we sat in our white wicker chairs. And there was the scent of roses.

Dorothy Draper is dead, by the way. Did I mention that?

Yet her puuurpose lives on in New York City in August. Fat flowers, rococo sunbursts and public transportation for all!

Summer in the City - Filling In the Past

2006-08-13T01:22:00.000-04:00

August 9, 2006, 10:30 pm

Filling In the Past

By Kevin Baker

They’re filling in the West Side now. Every morning during the week, my wife and I awake to the cries of workmen high above our heads, putting the finishing touches on a glass tower that has already risen some 35 stories into the sky.

It is one of two towers that will face each other across Broadway, a matched pair of condominiums roughly twice the height of any other building for nearly a mile around. The one around the corner from us has already topped off, and when I look up it doesn’t seem quite real to me; more like an “artist’s rendition” of some absurdity from a children’s encyclopedia: How would the pyramids of the pharaohs look by comparison in the Manhattan of today? What would it look like if you plunged a gigantic, glass stiletto into a neighborhood of modest brick and stone apartment buildings?

It’s beyond me why dozens of individuals will pony up millions of dollars to stare out at the more-or-less mirror image of their own dismal glass box across Broadway, but then the real estate boom in this town long ago kicked off the last traces of rationality. Over the last few months, numerous businesses in low buildings along Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues have closed their doors, and the scuttlebutt is that these shops are to be demolished and replaced with more gargantuan high-rises. Three gracious old townhouses were razed just to make garage entrances for one of the new towers.

To help us make sense of the pace at which our neighborhood is being transformed, the local Bloomingdale Branch of the New York Public Library recently assembled an exhibit of maps, books and photographs illustrating other changes of the past 200 years. Bloomingdale (no relation to the store) was what much of the Upper West Side used to be called; a collection of farms and villages that persisted until the construction of the elevated railroad in the late 19th century. The library exhibit included pictures of this earlier seismic shift, including photos from the 1890’s of poor farm shanties and turned earth, residing cheek-by-jowl with five- and six-story apartment buildings. I had seen these photos and many others like them before, but I never cease to be amazed at how close we still are to that other, agricultural Manhattan that existed just over a century ago. (The mostly rusted fire escape on my own building bears a date of 1896, something that I don’t like to think about too much.)

The next photographs in the library exhibit, from the 1930’s, are still more astonishing. They show a landscape even more dense and thoroughly urbanized than it is today. The old farms are now completely buried, replaced by row upon row of tightly packed buildings and the elevated rail; all gray steel and stone. The elevated and all those buildings later vanished, too, as if they’d been made of air. The ground was cleared again to make way for “Manhattantown,” Robert Moses’s notorious 1950’s exercise in urban development on the blocks from Central Park West to Amsterdam, between 97th and 100th Streets. The project — later redubbed “Park West Village” — was widely condemned as a paragon of malfeasance and bad urban planning. Robert Caro, in his biography of Moses, “The Power Broker,” blames it for turning much of the Upper West Side into a slum overnight.

I don’t doubt Caro’s charges. “The Power Broker” is one of the best, most thoroughly researched urban histories ever written. It’s significant that his book’s subtitle is “Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.” Caro clearly believed that Moses’s arrogant, racist, car-crazy mutilation of the city really had killed it, that New York was down and it wasn’t coming back up.

Yet cities are remarkably resilient entities. It’s interesting how benign Park West Village and its surrounding public housing developments seem now — largely crime-free, filled in with trees and playgrounds, and full of families. Their buildings were constructed on a scale vastly more human than that of these glass excrescences that will overshadow us all.

Nor is my patch of the Upper West Side a slum, if it ever really was one. It certainly is different from when I first moved here, more than 25 years ago. Then you could still find Bowery-style bars along Broadway, where the floors were sprinkled with sawdust and serious drunks sat downing glasses of bad whiskey. The local bijou, the elegant Metro Theatre, was a porno house. A few blocks south, prostitutes worked the car trade from Jersey, even along expensive blocks between Broadway and West End Avenue. Later years brought new plagues — of break-ins and the crack epidemic, when we stepped outside every morning to find our stoops littered with tiny glass vials and burned-out match books.

I don’t miss those days, of course, but I will miss us. By that I mean so many of us who have lived and worked here all this time, and have strived to make it a better place. For years, my neighborhood has been preserved in a sort of no man’s land, a dividing line just beyond all sorts of furious gentrification. What developed was a remarkably diverse community — what New York is supposed to be, but so often is not. We are almost a joke about multiculturalism. My apartment building includes tenants whose antecedents are Sikh, Indian, Haitian, Ugandan, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Chinese, Ashkenazi, German, Irish and English. And nearly every possible definition of family is included: traditional, extended; gay parents with child; single mother with child; lovers; roommates; friends; and a single member of the transgendered community.

We may not all be best friends, but we manage to live together with remarkable harmony and good feeling. Many of my neighbors have indeed been here 20 years or more, and I have watched them slowly age as they have watched me, as we greet one another at the elevator or in the laundry room — a little paunchier, a little grayer and balder with every year, but still the same faces. I don’t like to think of us all gone, as surely and as suddenly as those seemingly imperishable buildings from the 1930’s.

Cities are all about loss, too. To remain resilient they must change, but the questions remain: What is any change for? And who will be left once it is done? Or are we to go on forever ploughing under and throwing up worse mistakes?

Maybe the great glass condominiums will outlast the handiwork of Cheops. But I take pleasure in spotting more humble survivors in my neighborhood: The church across the street that has been there for more than 150 years. The three-story, wooden building with a diner on the first floor, once a stagecoach stop on Bloomingdale Road. Surely something of us will live on, too. They can’t fill us all in, can they?

Talking to Evil

2006-08-13T00:34:00.000-04:00

August 13, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

If there’s one thing about North Korea that is widely known, it’s that there’s no point in negotiating with it. After all, President Bill Clinton reached a landmark nuclear deal with North Korea and it then cheated and secretly produced nuclear weapons on the side, rendering that agreement no more than worthless paper.

Alas, that one “fact” is wrong. And since the perception that negotiation failed is so widespread — and shapes our unwillingness to negotiate with Iran and Syria, central players in today’s Middle East crisis — it’s worth setting the record straight.

Vice President Dick Cheney’s approach — often paraphrased as, “we don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it” — has hobbled foreign policy over the last six years. It let North Korea outmaneuver us and made progress in the Middle East impossible.

Last month, President Bush led an international gnashing of teeth about North Korea’s missile test. But at the end of the day, despite a U.N. resolution that was a significant achievement for the administration, North Korea is continuing its missile development and plutonium production.

Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush offer us a nice test case of alternative approaches to dealing with rogue regimes — engagement and deal-making in the case of Mr. Clinton, and confrontation and isolation in the case of Mr. Bush. So let’s look at how well each approach worked.

North Korea began obtaining plutonium under President Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush, and that rogue behavior led at the beginning of Mr. Clinton’s presidency to frenzied negotiations that culminated in the Agreed Framework of 1994.

That was the deal in which North Korea would get oil and nuclear reactors in exchange for freezing and eventually dismantling its nuclear weapons program. Republicans were furious, noting correctly that North Korea was in effect blackmailing us by making us pay to stop its outrageous behavior. Moreover, North Korea soon began to cheat: it secretly tried to develop an alternative route to nuclear weapons using enriched uranium.

Mr. Bush, seeing the Agreed Framework as the mollycoddling of tyrants, backed out of it in 2002.

Alas, this approach worked even worse: North Korea revived its plutonium program and converted old fuel rods into enough plutonium for a half-dozen weapons. And North Korea is now adding enough plutonium for about one weapon a year.

So here’s the score card: Mr. Clinton’s negotiated approach prevented North Korea from making a single ounce of plutonium during his eight years in office (no one seriously asserts the opposite). In contrast, North Korea will have obtained enough plutonium for about 10 weapons on Mr. Bush’s watch.

What about North Korea’s cheating? That didn’t involve plutonium but efforts to purchase equipment to enrich uranium and make weapons by a separate path. And that effort apparently never got off the ground; the intelligence community is pretty sure that North Korea hasn’t made any uranium bombs under either Mr. Clinton or Mr. Bush.

So, zero new nuclear weapons under Mr. Clinton, and enough plutonium for 10 weapons under Mr. Bush: that’s a fair indication of which approach works better.

Instead of negotiating directly with evil regimes, Mr. Bush has used a strategy of persuading proxies to help: China in the case of North Korea, and friendly Arab states in the case of Syria. That has failed because those proxies don’t share our strategies and don’t have much influence.

Relying on the Chinese doesn’t work, for example, because the North Koreans and the Chinese privately can’t stand each other. I’m told that after the missile tests, the Chinese government requested an urgent meeting to transmit a message to Kim Jong Il — then the Chinese seethed because the North Koreans made them wait three days before even listening to the message.

There simply is no substitute for engaging directly, even with brutal regimes, as President Richard Nixon did so successfully with Mao’s China. And Mr. Bush has dealt repeatedly with one odious regime: Sudan’s. Mr. Bush hasn’t been able to stop the genocide in Darfur, but he did end the war between northern and southern Sudan, a conflict that had cost two million lives over 20 years. That was a triumph for Mr. Bush, and it came through relentless negotiations.

So with the Middle East in crisis, let’s hope that Mr. Bush will try direct negotiations with Syria and even Iran. Negotiations may not be pretty, but the evidence shows that they work far better than tooth-gnashing.

Frank Rich is on vacation.

Douglas Coupland: Time Capsules - Three Weeks in Florida

2006-08-12T01:33:00.000-04:00

August 9, 2006, 10:30 pm

Three Weeks in Florida

In 2000, I was writer in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Fla. It was a record-breakingly hot summer, and on the nightly news they had a map that showed exactly how much of the state was in flames. It was gripping.

The visual artist in residence was David Carson, someone whose work I’d admired for years. When we met, it turned out we were both children of air force jet pilots who drove silver Audi TTs, and it was slightly creepy. In any event, Florida, for me, was an exotic locale, whereas David grew up just down the Space Coast … which explains his design work in the best kind of way.

I kept a small notepad diary of my three weeks there – quick jots into a Word file using Helvetica bold – it was too hot to write properly. It was also too hot to eat during the daytime. All I ate for three weeks was Lucky Charms and Vitamin D milk around 10:30 each night. I lost eight pounds while I was there. It turns out that the flight school just down the road was where the Sept. 11 bombers trained. It was a strange little interregnum.

Here is a verbal/visual record of those weeks …

Line of Fire - Yitzhak Rabin, My Son and the War

2006-08-11T13:06:00.000-04:00

August 10, 2006, 9:00 pm
By Gershom Gorenberg, Israel

When my son Yehonatan was six years old, in the summer of 1995, I took him to hear Yitzhak Rabin. The prime minister was speaking to a small, closed audience. I had entry passes for two people, my wife couldn’t come, and I wanted to give my son the experience of having seen one of the great men of the age. When my older sister was a child, my mother had taken her to see John F. Kennedy at a campaign stop, and she has spoken of that glimpse of history ever since. On that evening when I took my son and rode the bus downtown, I couldn’t know that a memory of Rabin would be framed by the same pain as a memory of Kennedy.

Rabin had the pale skin of a man who’d once had red hair. He stepped up to the dais with his shoulders back. At the lectern, he held his head a slight angle, and spoke in the gruff staccato of a company commander laying out the route of a forced march – not charismatic, but certain of himself, confident of his line of attack. Within a few minutes, my son’s head dropped onto my knees and he slept. I rested my hand on his back.

The audience was a group of Orthodox Jewish peace activists. But Rabin, the old general, had not become a late-life Isaiah, prophesying tanks refitted as tractors. As I remember, he spoke dryly of strategic choices. Israel had to make peace with the Syria and the Palestinians because it faced more distant and deadly dangers, especially from Iran. A country should devote its resources to preparing for the greatest threats. To confront the outer ring, we needed peace and even alliances with the closer ring. He was not promising that my son would grow up without the need to wear a uniform or carry a gun.

Outside that welcoming crowd, a wave of political fury was rising against the prime minister who would give up sacred land. Four months later, he was murdered.

History can never be run as a controlled experiment. We can’t know what would have happened had Rabin lived. His heir that grim winter, Shimon Peres, rejected the Beilin-Abu Mazen Document, a framework for Israeli-Palestinian peace crafted with Rabin’s views in mind. But there’s no reason to think that Yasser Arafat would have accepted the accord if Rabin had. As the Oslo process jerked onward, Arafat showed his own uncanny ability to miss opportunities for Palestinian independence.

Peres, a perpetual failure as candidate, lost the 1996 election. Rabin would have faced a tough race, but inspired much more trust. Had he won, there is no assurance he would have reached peace with Syria. He certainly appeared determined to try, and was willing to cede land to do so. We can’t know if Hafez al-Assad, then the ruler in Damascus, was capable of reinventing himself as peace would have required. Israelis sometimes appear divided between those who blame only the Arabs for the failure to achieve peace, and those who blame only the Jews. Each group would write too simple a story about what Rabin would have done in the years that he never had.

This summer, though, I can’t help thinking of his cold far-sightedness in recognizing peace as a strategic asset. We are still fighting in the quagmire of Gaza, a battle nearly forgotten most days because we are now, once again, fighting in Lebanon against Hezbollah, our cities under bombardment by missiles shipped from Iran via Syria.

If we had peace with the Palestinians, both we and they would be building our countries. At the least, our army would not have wasted years on manning roadblocks and reinvading Palestinian cities.

At the most, if we had reached accommodation with Syria as well, Hezbollah would be only a fundamentalist faction in Lebanon, proclaiming the praises of Islamic revolution but not equipped for war on this scale. Militarily and diplomatically we would be much stronger. Iran, on the other side of countries friendly to us, would be a more distant and isolated enemy.

My son is 17 now. The smooth face has sprouted a beard. Already, he has begun the physicals and interviews that lead to his draft date and placement in a military unit. I did not expect nation to have stopped lifting up missiles against nation by now. Perhaps, though, the enemy could have been further from our door.

---------------------

Gershom Gorenberg, an American-born Israeli journalist and historian, is the author of "The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977" and "The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount." He is the Jerusalem bureau chief for the Forward and a senior correspondent for The American Prospect.

The Morning After the Morning After

2006-08-11T00:09:00.000-04:00

[With apologies to Norman's dog]
August 11, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

With every war there are two days to keep in mind when the guns fall silent: the morning after, and the morning after the morning after. America, Israel and all those who want to see Lebanon’s democracy revived need to keep their eyes focused on the morning after the morning after.

Here’s why.

The only way that the fighting in south Lebanon will be brought to a close is if all the parties accept a cease-fire and the imposition of a robust international peacekeeping force, led by France, along the Israel-Lebanon border — supplanting Hezbollah.

The morning after that cease-fire goes into effect, everyone knows what will happen: Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah — no matter how battered his forces and how much damage his reckless war has visited on Lebanon — will crawl out of his bunker and declare a “great victory.” Hezbollah, he will say, fought the Israeli Army to a standstill inside Lebanon and rained rockets on northern Israel. Meanwhile, military analysts everywhere will write that Israel has “lost its deterrence” vis-à-vis Arab forces, and blah, blah, blah.

Sorry, been there, heard that, and I don’t buy it. What matters in war, alas, is the balance of destruction on the ground and the political weight it exerts over time.

On the morning after the morning after, Lebanese war refugees, who had real jobs and homes, will start streaming back by the hundreds of thousands, many of them Shiites. Tragically, they will find their homes or businesses badly damaged or obliterated. Yes, they will curse Israel. But they and other Arabs will also start asking Nasrallah publicly what many are already asking privately:

“What was this war all about? What did we get from this and at what price? Israel has some roofs to repair and some dead to bury. But its economy and state are fully intact, and it will recover quickly. We Lebanese have been set back by a decade. Our economy and our democracy lie in ruins, like our homes. For what? For a one-week boost in ‘Arab honor?’ So that Iran could distract the world’s attention from its nuclear program? You did all this to us for another country?”

As Michael Young, opinion editor of The Beirut Daily Star, put it an article in Slate: “Hezbollah’s ... test will be to rapidly alleviate the suffering in its own community and, therefore, avoid losing its base. The party still has substantial backing among its coreligionists, and it is not about to see this disappear. But soon the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Shiites now living in schools, tent cities, and even public parks will be an overriding concern for Nasrallah. Many have fled areas partly or wholly destroyed, to which they might not return for months or years. ... Hezbollah will have to provide funding for reconstruction and rehabilitation that is likely to run into the billions of dollars. ... The party will have a monumental task to revive not only Shiite morale but confidence that Hezbollah can take care of its own. ... Even the party’s most optimistic interpretation of the current war — that it is a heroic achievement — will not spare it having to tiptoe very carefully through Shiite trauma.”

Moreover, if and when a French-led international force is placed along the Israel-Lebanon border, it will be a big loss for Hezbollah. The Shiite militia will no longer be able to directly touch Israel and start a war for Iran or Syria whenever it chooses. And, if Hezbollah tried to lob missiles over the peacekeeping zone, or penetrate it, it would clash with forces from France, Italy and Turkey, the likely peacekeepers. That means Hezbollah, Iran and Syria would not be able to hurt Israel without also hurting their own relations with the European Union.

Israel needs to keep its eyes on the prize. It’s already inflicted enormous damage on Hezbollah and its community, but Nasrallah will only have to pay the full price for inviting all that destruction once the guns fall silent on the morning after the morning after. So let’s get there as soon as possible. That will deter him. What would deter him even more, though, would be if the U.N. would go ahead and impose sanctions on Iran for its illicit nuclear bomb program. After all, it was Iran, Nasrallah’s master, that ordered up this war to distract the U.N. from doing just that. It would be nice to say to Iran: You ravaged Hezbollah for nothing.

Beyond those two limited objectives, there’s no storybook ending for Israel in Lebanon, and it shouldn’t throw more good lives after some elusive knockout blow. It’s just not that kind of neighborhood. As they say in the movies, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

Summer in the City - Summertime Santas

2006-08-09T13:13:00.000-04:00

August 8, 2006, 10:30 pm

Summertime Santas

By Adam Davies

Last Wednesday I read from my new novel at the Astor Place Barnes & Noble store. I used to live in that neighborhood and, as I was too broke most of the time to afford movies or meals out or nearly any other disportment, I would kill countless hours by mooching their magazines and standing in their aisles, reading and reshelving books I couldn’t afford to buy. So when I took to the lectern this week, angled the business end of the microphone my way, and started speaking, I experienced a frisson of something other than stage fright. It was a kind of stage exhilaration. I felt like a Frank Capra protagonist coming full circle in some important way. In fact, returning to New York City and reading at the very same bookstore from which I had filched so much pleasure seemed like I was being afforded a chance to right wrongs.

But microphones make me giddy and provoke some Tourettic center in my brain that can precipitate outbursts of obscenity or non sequitur. As I started reading from the prologue — one of the sadder parts of the novel — I suffered a stutter that elongated into a pause that became an awkward full stop, and instead of backtracking on the page, I was overwhelmed with the desire to utter something that would be unprintable on this site. And to confess my magazine sponging. And to make a public service message: “If you are going to freeload magazines and squat in the café without buying anything for hours on end, please think of the clerks and put your [expletive deleted] magazines back where you got them. Take it from me” — here insert expression of much discomfort of gnashing of teeth — “from someone who has made those mistakes.”

I also wanted to pump my fist and cry out, “San Dimas High School football rules!” but I managed to hold it back.

After a few moments I broke my caesura and finished the reading without incident. During the Q and A and the signing, when I was relaxed enough to really apprehend the crowd, I noticed how full of personal history it was. There were several of my former students from the University of Georgia, including one who now works in the marketing department at my publisher, one who teaches at a New York City school, one who works in the art industry and one who writes for a major magazine. I was touched that they came, but I was also proud of them and wanted to find an uncorny way of telling them so. I felt a kinship with them that I hadn’t felt in the classroom. Back then, there had been something germinal about them. Now we were part of the same thing — the glory and travail of life in New York City.

There was also a woman with whom I went to prep school.

And friends of friends. An ex-colleague. The son of a favorite professor of mine.

A punk-rock Asian woman I remembered from the reading of my first novel who thrust a copy of that book at me and said candidly, “I want you to sign the first book because I am not so sure that your second one is any good.”

This whole thing produced a powerful wave of nostalgia and made me realize, again, how in New York City history is alive in a way that it isn’t in a lot of places. It also distracted me and made me forget that I had brought treats for everyone. I had gotten word just hours before the reading that the Barnes & Noble had no air conditioning in the reading area. They were moving me to the café, which had some window units working, but it might still be uncomfortable. So I had packed up a cooler full of bottles of water and Popsicles and lugged it up and down the countless stairs of the G and the L train stations, and the downtown 6, all the way to Astor Place, with the intention of handing them out to suffering audience members.

But it never happened. I had been mesmerized by the power of the microphone and then beguiled by the figures from my past swarming around my table like benevolent apparitions out of Dickens, and didn’t remember the cooler until after the crowd had dissipated. But there was a consolation. I and a group of friends — some I had known for years, some I had just met — rolled the cooler out onto Lafayette Street and handed out refreshing chilled water and deliquescing Popsicles like a band of summertime Santas.

It was a New York spectacle — my old friend from Ohio hocking free Popsicles with the theatricality of a Yankee Stadium peanut vendor; a fellow writer assuring a profoundly sweaty homeless guy swathed head-to-toe in flannel that it was O.K. to take as many waters as he wanted. And I think we made the poor Greenpeace shills standing nearby, clipboards in hand, jealous. I hope so. And I hope that Frank Capra, wherever he is, might have seen us, and is pardoning some of the karmic debt I owe that bookstore.

Especially because I know I will do it again.

On the Recentness of What We Know

2006-08-09T13:00:00.000-04:00

August 9, 2006

Talking Points

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

The other night I took the dogs for a walk in the pasture. It was a cloudless evening with low humidity, a rare event in this damp, northeastern summer. I always look up at the stars when I’m outside in the dark, but all too often, even here in the country, they’re obscured by haze. Not that night. They shone with a brightness, a clarity I’d almost forgotten. Cassiopeia, Corona Borealis, Lyra, the red light of Arcturus in the west, the diffuse band of the Milky Way arching overhead—their presence was overwhelming. And yet, somehow, when the stars look close to earth it’s easier to imagine how far away they really are. It was a warm July night, but I could almost feel the chill of space.

I’ve been watching the stars for nearly half a century now. Not much has changed up there. The sky is a memory in itself. I stared at the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter through a small telescope of my own when I was a boy in Iowa. I spent part of a summer watching meteors while I was helping my family build a house in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and part of a winter star-gazing from the top of a mesa on the Hopi Reservation, where somehow the smell of cedar mingled with the light of the moon. The only thing that has changed in all that time—apart from a few new satellites crossing the sky—is the state of my knowledge.

* * *

The same could be said for the whole of humanity. Besides a supernova here and there or a comet fluttering past, the night sky visible to the naked eye has barely changed as long as our species has been looking at it, unlike the stories we use to describe what we see up there. In a metaphorical sense, each human culture, separate in time or place, has lived under a different celestial roof. The metaphors for the heavens have changed over time, but not nearly as much as what we know about the universe itself.

I say “we,” as in what “we” know. I really mean what “they” know—astronomers, mathematicians, astrophysicists, cosmologists. Unlike scientists, most of us tend to live easily, almost unknowingly among our assumptions—another word for our ignorance. But the business of science is to formally test assumptions, better known as hypotheses. You can feel the tension between these two ways of knowing in a few lines from the movie "Men In Black" The scene is the Manhattan waterfront. Will Smith is still in shock after his first encounter with aliens. Tommy Lee Jones says to him, “Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the earth was flat. And fifteen minutes ago you knew that people were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.” Obviously, what everybody knows isn’t a very high standard of proof. And things that can be proven — matters of scientific fact — don’t always surface as common knowledge.

* * *

Every few years I go through a bout of cosmological reading, a reprise of what to me is now mostly a familiar story. In a way, it’s like re-reading Raymond Chandler or great chunks of Dickens. The plot comes back to me as I go, but with a new ending every time. I started in childhood with an oversized, illustrated book about the solar system, a place where everything was just as we would like to believe it might be, a cozy people living in a handmade cosmos. The last time I wandered off into the universe, literarily speaking, I found myself, a little confused, on the far shoals of M-theory and the various anthropic principles. I’m never sure what’s going to set me off. It could be a news item about a flyby of Saturn or a new photograph from the Hubble Space Telescope or even a walk with the dogs at night. But however it begins, it always turns into a desire to frame the small questions of life with the big question of existence itself.

Most books about cosmology for general readers begin by telling the story the way Tommy Lee Jones tells it in "Men in Black"—as the history of what we know. The authors walk you, step by step, through the sequence of astronomers who have taught us about the cosmos—Copernicus, Galileo and so on. What you learn about the nature of the universe in a history like that is less important, at first, than what you learn about the decay of dogma and improvements in scientific methodology and equipment.

There are good reasons for telling the story this way. You get a feel for the passion of discovery, and you confront one of the basic cosmological questions —"How do they know that?" But as the pages turn and the chronicle nears the present, the story changes. Suddenly, it’s no longer a history of the development of science, a book about the human capacity for learning. It turns into a book about the nature of the universe we actually live in. The night sky never looks quite the same again.

* * *

The last time I lost myself in a good book about cosmology, just a few months ago, I counted down, as always, from the past to the present—from Aristarchus to Einstein to Weinberg. Usually, the dates in the history of science seem abstract, almost equidistant in the past: 1543, 1632, 1905 — it’s all ancient history. But this time, for some reason, I found myself weighing the dates of various discoveries—the ones that define our present idea of the age and dimensions of the universe—against the time-scale of my own life and the lives around me. I tried to picture what the universe looked like — or rather what it was thought to look like — around the year my dad was born — 1926 —- or the year I was born — 1952.

It was like going the wrong way in one of those analogies meant to convey the immensity of time. You know the ones. “If the age of the earth is the distance from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Empire State Building , then mankind originated in the Garment District.” The current picture of the universe rests, of course, upon the ancientness of what we know—the long series of carefully tested assumptions that make each new accession of knowledge possible.

But I am overwhelmed by the recentness of what we know.

* * *

Take, for instance, a relatively fundamental set of facts, something "everybody knows." Earth belongs to the solar system, and the solar system, with the Sun at its center, belongs to a galaxy called the Milky Way, which is about 100,000 light years across. The Milky Way is one of perhaps a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe, each one containing perhaps a hundred billion stars. But until 1925, many astronomers believed — on the available evidence — that the Milky Way contained the whole of the observable universe, and that our galaxy was thus the only galaxy. Astronomers had seen and catalogued plenty of galaxies — they were called nebulae in those days — but there was no way to know how far away they really were.

In 1923, working at the Mount Wilson Observatory, near Pasadena, Edwin Hubble discovered a Cepheid variable star in the nebula called Andromeda, the first ever found in a nebula. Thanks to Henrietta Leavitt’s research on these stars — which vary in brightness over a period of time, with a predictable ratio between the two — Hubble was able to calculate the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy, as we call it now. It was vastly more distant than anyone had guessed. By his calculations, Andromeda was 900,000 light years away — well outside the Milky Way. In a sense, Hubble had turned the universe inside out.

Hubble was wrong about one thing. Andromeda is the closest galaxy to us, but it is actually 2.5 million light years away, not 900,000. You can see it with the naked eye if you look just below and to the right of the constellation Cassiopeia on a very dark, clear night. It’s worth knowing, somehow, that in another 3 billion years Andromeda will collide with the Milky Way. Perhaps "violently intersift" is a better way of putting it.

* * *

To a casual naked-eye observer on Earth it makes no practical difference whether the universe is the size of the Milky Way or much, much bigger. In fact, it makes little difference whether we’re looking up at stars scattered across empty space or at an empyrean of concentric crystalline spheres. The night sky overhead would look the same.

Or would it? Actually, I don’t think so.

What we see when we look up into the darkness of a summer night isn’t just a pattern of pinpoint lights. We’re also looking up at the state of our knowledge and the contents of our imagination. Does our own galaxy encompass the whole observable universe? Or is it only one among a huge number of galaxies in a vastly larger universe? The difference is enormous. Both are theories. One was plausible before 1925. The other is now true. The revolution in imagining who we are, or rather where we are, is nearly Copernican.

In the years since, there have been many, many discoveries more astonishing than Hubble’s path-breaking calculation of Andromeda’s distance, including his discovery, several years later, that the universe is expanding. But measuring that Cepheid variable in Andromeda fascinates me. It’s tempting to construe its effect solely in human terms, to say, with a vainglorious sniff, that it diminishes the place of humans in the universe. Ah, well. There is no end to that. One of the central problems of cosmology all along has been getting a true sense of scale. The age of the universe, its size, its origin, whether it’s static or expanding or contracting — these things are all interrelated, and they all depend on being able to measure distance accurately out to the far reaches of the universe. The more we know, the smaller we humans seem to loom against the universal backdrop. Luckily, what matters isn’t how big or important we are. It’s how interesting the universe we live in is.

My maternal grandfather, who was born in the 1880’s, used to marvel at the fact that in his lifetime humans had gone from horse-drawn carriages to the moon. I like to think of it a different way. He was born about the time astronomers finally proved that the ether — the peculiar light-carrying substance through which all celestial bodies were supposed to move — does not exist. He was married around the publication of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. He died a few years after Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson found the lingering echo of the Big Bang with a radio telescope in New Jersey. I cannot imagine that my grandfather was aware of any of these discoveries. And yet within his lifetime, the dimensions of the universe increased by a factor I am not mathematician enough to work out. Call it ten to the plenty.

* * *

In 1931, Edwin Hubble concluded that the universe was 1.8 billion years old, a nonsensical number since geologists had already shown that the rocks on earth are nearly twice as old. (Recent knowledge in itself!) In 1952, the scale of distance was recalculated with greater accuracy, and suddenly the age of the universe doubled to 3.6 billion years, much older but still a problematic figure. In 1955, the universe aged another 1.9 billion years overnight, again thanks to a clearer understanding of the things that shine in the dark. In the past 80 years the universe has expanded faster and aged faster — in the minds of humans — than it is doing in actuality. The current age of the universe, as measured in 2003, is now 13.7 billion years, give or take 200 million. That is another way of saying that the distance to the edge of the observable universe is 13.7 billion light-years.

What astronomers are seeing when they look at a galaxy like Abell 1835 IR1916 — 13.2 billion light years away — is light (or radiation) that was emitted 13.2 billion years ago, light that is about 3 times older than the planet we live on. Imagine a galaxy just a little farther away, at the extreme edge of what astronomers can observe. Suppose that it emits light even as you’re reading this sentence. How far away will the edge of the observable universe be when that light reaches us? The answer is somewhere between 78 and 90 billion light years. In fact, we — that is, "they" — have no idea how much of our universe lies beyond the threshold of observability. There is even sober speculation that our universe is merely one of a possibly infinite series of universes, that we live in a multiverse. Oddly, one of the best arguments for the multiverse is the simple fact that we exist.

* * *

Science is mostly a tale of continuity. Scientists today are working within the same professional framework — the same idea about how they do what they do, what hypotheses are, what evidence is — as scientists a century ago. That is the strength of the endeavor. The change from one picture of the universe to another is incremental, based on work that obeys the self-regulating, international standards of the scientific enterprise. But I find myself marveling at its discontinuity, too. What has changed, of course, is the technologies available to scientists, which have exploded at a revolutionary pace. The result is that you don’t have to go far back in time before the best idea of what the universe looks like is very different from the idea we have now.

In 1920 there was one galaxy and now there are one hundred billion.

In 1955 the universe was 5.5 billion years old. Now it is believed to be two and a half times older — an estimate with a considerably higher degree of precision.

For many years, the Big Bang was a conceptual possibility, the logical implication of an expanding universe. (What happens when you run the film of an expanding universe backwards?) But in 1965, Penzias and Wilsonfound an evenly diffused radiation permeating the sky, with a temperature of 2.7 degrees Kelvin. They had discovered the Cosmic Microwave Background — residual radiation from the Big Bang.

The Cosmic Microwave Background has been measured again and again, most recently in 2003 by a satellite called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP, which occupies a stationary post 1.5 million kilometers from earth. Measurements from WMAP support a theory of inflation first proposed by Alan Guth in 1979 and since refined. It says — and the evidence confirms — that at an unimaginably short time after the Big Bang, the universe experienced an abrupt inflation, doubling in size over and over again until inflation stopped an unimaginably short instant later. The result is the relatively smooth and geometrically flat universe we find ourselves living in.

WMAP also suggests that the universe is made of 4 percent atoms (now called baryonic matter), 22 percent dark matter, and 74 percent dark energy. As an idea, dark matter first popped up in the 1930’s. Dark energy is the thought of the past few years. No one knows what either of them is, except that without them the behavior of the universe makes no sense. It’s worth remembering, too, that the modern idea of the atom — that is, the old-fashioned modern idea, well before quarks — only came together in 1932, when the neutron was discovered.

* * *

Someone, somewhere, is likely to be shouting, "Aha!" about now.

"You’re saying that our so-called scientific knowledge is only a projection of sorts and that there is no scientific truth, only relativistic assumptions — culturally created ideas — about the universe around us. Isn’t that what you’re saying?"

Thanks for asking. The answer is no. Science is a cultural enterprise, of course, like everything else humans do, and it sometimes suffers from characteristically human flaws. But the recentness — or, to put it another way, the evolution — of what we know about the universe around us doesn’t reveal the indeterminacy of science. It reveals the extraordinary intellectual and imaginative yields that a self-critical, self-evaluating, self-testing, experimental search for understanding can generate over time.

We know the universe to be a very different — and in every way more amazing — place than we did even a generation ago. We have no idea how much more surprising it will turn out to be in the years — not to mention the eons — ahead, should we manage to survive as a species that is able to do science. If what you want from life is a constant, fixed, unchanging truth, then the spate of fresh news from science can only seem bewildering. But the unchanging truths that people cling to in this inconstant world tend to rest on unexamined and untestable assumptions. At their best they are permanent ethical truths, which cannot be contradicted by the open-ended possibilities of scientific exploration. At their worst, they are mere dogma and deserve to be contradicted.

To me, the open-endedness of science isn’t its failing. It is its very beauty. Each answer is merely the prelude to the next question, and you never know when you’ll come upon an answer that forces you to rethink almost everything. This is as true in biology — itself overwhelmed by recent knowledge — as it is in cosmology. Yet many people can’t help hoping for a final set of answers. "So how old is it really — and how big is it really?" they ask about the universe, with an emphasis on "really." The fact that the answer depends on when you happen to ask it — 1931, 1955, 2003, today — seems to many people to imply that science has no answers worth giving.

But this is simply the bias inherent in living in the "now." Stated as a sentence, that bias goes like this: "We’re here now, so we expect some answers." Think about those analogies meant to convey the immensity of time. They always end in the present. Mankind emerges in the Garment District or at 11 seconds to midnight, and then what? The clock stops at the current time, as if the game is over. But there is no time limit on the questions science asks, and there is very little likelihood of a final set of answers. Humanity emerges, looks up at the stars, and soon there is a probe in space telling us that most of what exists is stuff we can’t identify. Who would want it any other way?

* * *

Thinking about the recentness of what we know is a way, I suppose, of thinking simultaneously about the strangeness of the past and the strangeness of the present — the reciprocal strangenesses that time brings about. I have a hard time trying to imagine the universe as it might have been in, say, 1920 — the whole of it packed into the Milky Way. But then I have an equally hard time imagining what it would have been like to be a hired hand on my grandfather’s farm in 1920. The changes in the way we live loom far larger in most of our minds than any changes in the theoretical model of a universe that most of us think about — if we think about it at all — only on a dark, clear night. But the changes go together.

I am at best the kind of cosmological reader who has to skip the math. As a result, my grasp on most of what astronomers have learned in my lifetime is largely esthetic. I admire the finished painting, but I have no real conception of what it means to apply the paint. And for me, in fact, the old forms of knowledge are hard enough. Not the ones rooted in dogma, but the ones rooted in a practical application of what astronomers have learned over the years. Understanding the motion of the moon through the sky is more complicated than it sounds, as I have discovered from trying to sort it out.

Knowing how and why the universe is expanding doesn’t change the rules of celestial navigation any more than it changes the stories people tell about the figures in the constellations. The recentness of what we know doesn’t annul the old knowledge; it transfigures it. Suddenly, what we used to know is now part of the story of how we go about knowing things and no longer a description of the universe around us. But go out on a deep summer night and there overhead are all the skies we have ever seen.

Lela Moore provided research for this article.

Buffett and Hezbollah

2006-08-09T01:12:00.000-04:00

August 9, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist