Now that nearly every American has access to VHS and DVD and Netflix and Blockbuster, a certain feature of the cinephilia of times past has disappeared: scarcity.  Almost every film one wants to see, one can see – albeit on television.  This has had a major negative effect on the cultural importance of retrospectives, revival houses, film series, etc.  But there is now a retrospective going on that includes truly rare films that are also, in my opinion, unmissable.  The Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who is having his first major U.S. retrospective right now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, became famous worldwide for a series of meditative, often metafictional films–Through the Olive Trees, The Wind Will Carry Us, Close Up, Taste of Cherry (for which he won the Palme d’Or)–that are indisputably part of the canon of cinema.  But prior to that, Kiarostami made a series of films about children that went unscreened and unavailable in the U.S., until now.

In the seventies, Kiarostami was employed by Iran’s Institute of Cultural Development of Children to make explanatory shorts on subjects like the concept of different colors, why one should choose forgiveness over fighting with classmates, how to repaint household objects, etc.  From the first, these films are leavened with poetic insight into their subject matter, an enthusiasm for finding beauty in simplicity, and a playfulness and joyful energy that seeks to inspire the same in their young audiences.  Many of these short works are being screened by MoMA before the longer, sixty-to-ninety minute narrative films Kiarostami made in the same period, also concerning children.  These works are examples of perfect cinema. 

The enforced viewing of these films in MoMA’s excellent projection is a good thing, because with Kiarostami, as with all film artists, it’s imperative to see the movies at the movies.  He relies on big compositions and often gives the crucial details or resolution of a plot in distant long shots, the most famous example being the last shot of Through the Olive Trees.  These early films show that that capacity was an evident talent from the beginning of Kiarostami’s career.  They often detail the most subtle moments of joy, relief, triumph, and despair through beautiful compositions that leave one to infer the rush of internal emotions.  For instance, the climax of one of these films is simply a boy in long shot, watering plants, but with a relief so palpable that the normality of the action turns into an inner celebration.  (Girls, sadly, play a much smaller role in Kiarostami’s children’s films). 

A boy stands in line to buy tickets at Tehran’s soccer stadium.  Around him are grown men, pushing and jostling him and each other.  Still, he moves faster than most, pressing any opportunity to advance.  He is small and vulnerable against this crowd.  Determined, he finally reaches the counter, where the ticket-seller is counting bills.  “No more tickets.”  The boy droops, but, again showing great resolve, presses on, checking other entrances, braving the menace of the police that everywhere surround the stadium, overhearing scalpers.  Finally, he buys a ticket of a man for too much money.  Later he will have to find a way to get back to his village, an overnight bus ride away, with no money or acquaintances in Tehran.  Excitedly entering the stadium, he finds a place in the upper stands.  Nothing much appears to happening on the field of play; the match won’t begin for three hours.  The boy, who is tired, unpacks a small bundle.  It’s a cloth wrapped around some bread, all the food the boy has seen for twelve hours.  Still, with a simple impulse to manners, he taps the man to his right’s shoulder.  “Mister, please, have some!” 

The scene is from Abbas Kiarostami’s 1974 film The Traveler, one of his first feature-length projects.  It  evokes in an almost unbearably moving way the consciousness and travails of Qassem, an indefatigable schoolboy trying to see his first soccer match.  Skipping school, where he is an indifferent student, he tries various schemes to make the needed money, undeterred by beatings from his school principal, the carping of his mother and the utter disregard of his father.  Yet this is no mildly uplifting story of the triumph of childhood optimism and wonder over cynical and brutal adulthood.  It’s much more honest filmmaking than that – Kiarostami observes the boy’s world in a manner that belongs to the neorealist tradition, with sympathy but without overt judgments.  He has a magical ability to summon the emotional world of children, in both its poignance and its selfishness.  And this honesty, in turn, buys him our true emotional engagement with his stories. 

Describing the occurrences of Kiarostami’s plots does not, somehow, communicate the sense of surprise or freshness that pervades almost every frame of the children’s films.  Always, Kiarostami’s plots seem truly simple in a general sense (two boys want to borrow a wedding suit, a man is stranded, etc.) but turn out to be full of revelations, unexpected moments, reversals, setbacks, unforeseen victories and defeats.  They have the vivacity of life, or perhaps more.  The films are kinetic explorations of forward motion.  Never do the characters stop to consider actions for long – they take them, and then react as swiftly to the results.  Because of this, perhaps, the settings are often roads, lanes, alleys, atria.   These boys live in the interstices of home and work, school (if they can afford to go) and recreation.  Comfortable in none of them, they seek relief, fun–basically an escape from the harsh treatment of their bosses, teachers, parents, and older siblings.  Determination is their signature quality. 

Kiarostami’s interest lies very deliberately with working children, hustling to make their way and maybe getting a bit of schooling, which they typically ignore, on the side.  They scheme because they desire, but the desire to escape often traps them further.  The young bully in The Wedding Suit takes the money his older brother saves to send him to school and uses it on karate classes.  Qassem’s trip to the soccer match will no doubt only increase his immiseration when he gets home.  That determination is so often stymied, so often self-defeating, does not entail a retreat into complacency, though – if anything, the failure of a plan only makes the effort nobler.  No false salves or sentimental compensations are provided – only a picture of life that is stunningly convincing. 

It’s a measure of how pure the cinematic quality of Kiarostami’s work is that prose can’t seem to capture what makes his images and journeys so unboring, so endlessly stimulating.  In a short from 1978, we see a man standing by the side of the road.  The din of passing trucks drowns out any other noise.  The man tries, and fails, to hitch a ride.  Truck after truck doesn’t stop.  Rather than compress this sequence, however, Kiarostami keeps the pace even.  Each new truck, we imagine, must be the one to stop.  This is the one!  But they don’t.  The man has a tire with him, and he sits on it idly.  He is high in the mountains; his breath is visible.  A driver stops at the solitary tire shop we see across the road.  Our hero helps him load his new tire, but the driver is going the wrong direction.  Back to waiting.

The road is momentarily empty.  Birds animate the still mountains.  A moment is reached; the man decides he must go himself.  He begins to run, slapping and nudging the tire with him, which rolls along like a animal companion.  The tire and the man make their way – he has determined to get down himself.  The road turns this way and that, a small tunnel is reached, large switchbacks are traversed.  A car stops comically to wonder at the spectacle of a man and his pet tire.  At times the tire speeds up too much, at times it slows, sometimes it looks as if it will go over the edge.  They are descending.  The man is sweating now, he removes his jacket, recombs his hair.  Again the film’s pace does not speed up, we experience time with him, not knowing what will come.  And then, the tire rolls up to and hits a yellow car, missing a tire, on a jack.  The man stops.  He ran down a mountain with his fixed tire.  At best, a momentary victory.  But he made it.

The short’s name?  “Solution No. 1.”  I can’t recommend these films more highly.  The full schedule is here; The Traveler is playing Sunday, March 11th, at 4pm.  “Solution No. 1” and The Wedding Suit are Monday, March 12th at 6pm.  Here’s A.O. Scott’s take on the major films; here, is a properly Kiarostamian anecdote about introducing Close Up from Jeff Strabone. 

The rest of Dispatches.

A couple of months ago, as my debut on 3 Quarks Daily, I wrote about my frustrating experience of being the intended victim of an apartment rental scam on Craig’s List. You can read that piece, entitled Web of Lies, here. Of course, the crooks haven’t been stopped yet. Last I heard the other Beth Ann Bovino has moved to Arizona and cut the rent price, since the apartment had been sitting “empty on the market’” for some time. That’s not surprising. What is surprising, and amazing, is how the story spread so rapidly across the country, enough to catch the attention of regulators.

The morning after it was posted, the Daily News called and asked to interview me about my problem. I agreed and spoke with a journalist on the phone that day. She even sent a photographer by to take my picture. I happened to be dressed up that day, and got ready for my close-up with a big smile. I was asked to stop, given the seriousness of my situation. OK, I can do that, and I frowned. The next morning my frown appeared on the cover of the Daily News.

I thought I ran through my 15 minutes of fame and then some. But the story reached its boiling point. It cascaded into huge headlines nationwide. National Fox News asked to have me on their 8 AM show that day. Associated Press interviewed me over the phone. Another TV network came in for an interview. After over four interviews that morning, I declined local Fox News. They showed up at my office anyway, interrupted a meeting and pleaded that I comply. They said I have been on the news all day and that they had to have an interview. Choosing between sitting in an interoffice meeting or staring in the news, I did the interview. They sent TV crew to the apartment in question, which was my old home as I recently moved. Some asked that I leave work so that they could get a picture of me in front of my (old) home. My name even made it to the 1010 WINS (radio) news loop, in between traffic updates. I was told that my name and issue was raised during a Press Conference with Craig’s List, which was now under investigation because of the event. Inside Edition both called and wrote asking for an interview to use in their investigation into Craig’s List.

Ms. Jordan Lite, the Daily News reporter who first covered the story, said that it’s “a classic New York story (real estate, aggressive renters) with a modern-day (cyber) twist”, and that she wouldn’t be surprised if it got more attention. It did. It was linked to many other web sites, blogs and received countless local and national TV and radio attention, possibly some international press. People called my office or emailed my office to give advice. Sitting at a restaurant in the Miami airport, someone asked me if I caught the crooks. In upstate New York for the weekend I heard “Oh! You’re the girl that…”

How did it spread so quickly?

The surprising impact of Web of Lies was likely an example of a social epidemic proposed in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. The word “tipping point” comes from the study of epidemiology, and refers to that moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass. It’s the moment where the line on the graph starts to shoot straight upwards.

Web of Lies hit Gladwell’s tipping point and quickly spread. It received over 12,000 hits in the first hour posted, and soon after, received about several hundred hits per MINUTE. It received over 70,000 hits in 3 days. To give some perspective, a recent PEW/Internet report said that about one in five bloggers (22%) have fewer than ten hits a day in blog traffic, and 17% say they have 10 to 99 hits on a typical day. Just 13% have more than 100 hits a day. In contrast, Web of Lies spread so quickly, that within 36 hours it reached national headlines. In other words, the line on the graph shot through the roof, much like a virus turned epidemic.

Gladwell explains that ideas and behavior and messages sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease. He compares it to an epidemic of measles in a kindergarten class, saying how “one child brings in the virus. It spreads to every other child in the class in a matter of days. Within a week or so, it completely dies out and none of the children will ever get measles again.” In this sense, they are seen as social epidemics. The virtue of an epidemic, after all, is that just a little input is enough to get it started, and it can spread very, very quickly.

Even more fascinating was how Gladwell explains the three criteria that diseases must meet in order to become an epidemic. This lends itself, by analogy, to practically every change initiative, such as social ones. The three criteria are:
The Law of the Few: A few people doing something different start and incubate the epidemic. These people, who Gladwell calls “mavens” are the ones who rub two sticks together in such a way that they improbably catch fire. Incubation also requires “connectors”. These are people with contact to a lot of people, enough to get the idea out into other communities and networks. They are the ones who move in different circles, so that the epidemic reaches escape velocity and spreads, much like HIV or SARS.
The Stickiness Factor: This allows the epidemic to endure long enough to “catch”, or to become contagious or “memorable”. Ways to make something sticky include repetition, hooks and triggers and an understanding of the message, some kind of story, and suspense. In other words, ways of “packaging to make it irresistable”.
The Power of Context: This requires that the physical, social and group environment must be right to allow the epidemic to then suffuse through the population. A concentration camp environment, for example, will change human behavior at epidemic speed. In a less austere environment, harsh rules and codes will not be as effective.

The success Web of Lies had in reaching such a large audience was likely because it met these three criteria. To begin with, the story had an inherently sticky message that resonated with many. People who had received numerous emails from scammers with the SUBJECT: URGENT!!! in the header would undoubtedly identify with the story. Moreover, given the popularity of “whodunit” TV show; someone trying to crack his or her own case would certainly be very appealing to many. The audience would essentially be “hooked”. The story caught the eye of a few early enthusiastic readers, likely within the blogospere, who incubated the story. It spread by connectors, such as digg.com and other web sites, which spread the message to other communities. Each new group then adapted the message to the group’s own unique social environment and own social context. Postings from renters searching for a home in Canada, relay operators handling phone calls for the deaf, or those fighting consumer fraud online indicate that the story reached across social circles. Together they may explain why the story spread far enough that I could be recognized in a small town a few hours north of New York City. The original internet real estate scam likely meets the same criteria as well.

What is amazing, and what he makes clear, is how frequently this pattern can be seen. Gladwell notes a number of positive epidemics, such as Sesame Street that started a learning epidemic in preschoolers, turning them onto reading and “infected” them with literacy. To a much smaller degree, the impact from readers of the Web of Lies would be considered a “positive” social epidemic in that readers then pushed for change. Of course, there are also social epidemics that have destroyed, he mentions the spread of teen suicides in Micronesia, for example, or the rash of mass shootings at schools and elsewhere. The wave of internet crimes, costing hundreds of millions of dollars yearly, would lie here. In the end, his book attempts to show people how to start positive epidemics of their own, and, hopefully, help wipe out those that could destroy.

Justin E. H. Smith    

Among Aral-Ultaic linguists, it is widely presumed that no single English word, or any word of any other known language, can adequately translate the Yuktun word nâk.  It may denote, depending on context, reindeer lichen (Cladina rangiferina), an Arctic hare (Lepus arcticus), an adult Yuktun woman, a Russian, something resembling poetic justice, and, of most interest to many, the life force that runs through every tundra-dwelling creature, through the sky, through the great sea to the North, and, during the short Summer, through the top ten centimeters or so of the ground.

In contrast with Chinese, Yuktun is not a tonal language, and so differences of meaning cannot be extracted from differences in the semimusical ways in which the various forms of nâk are pronounced, for it’s always pronounced in exactly the same way.  Nor is Yuktun a highly inflected language like Russian.  There are no noun cases, no genders, not even any endings to distinguish singular from plural, nothing at all that might give one occurrence of nâk away as involving the sort of nâk it does.  Nothing except context.  So, for example, in the sentence

Ba nâk kuntân-te nûq pœrtyttun
With a nâk trade you always both-eyes-open
(When trading with a nâk, always keep both eyes open)

we can be sure that nâk refers to Russians, since no trade is conducted with lichen or with hares or poetic justice or life forces, let alone with women.  On the other hand, in the sentence

Nâkkantaq nar tôgyœn bir nâk grâgttyan
The reindeer in the valley on nâk graze
(The reindeer in the valley graze on nâk)

there can be no doubt but that the nâk in question is lichen, since no other sort of nâk may be grazed upon.

A semi-legendary position has been carved out in Yuktun society for Narda, an elder Yuktun, said by some (evidently conscious of their exaggeration), to have been alive even in mythological time.  She is, to be sure, old, 105 by the best estimates.  But nobody knows how old exactly, for nobody else was alive when she was born.  The Yuktun simply take her word for it when she says that she was seven when the Russian soldiers came through in 1905, en route, so they said, to fight the Japanese.  Must have been lost, she laughed, exposing the blackened stubs she still used as teeth when the BBC came through filming a documentary in the early glasnost years on “Russia’s Wild Frontier.”

The mid-1930s were difficult years, following the 1933 report to the Central Committee of the Communist Party on “Shamanistic Practices and Historical Progress among the Siberian Tribes.”  There, it is reported that “the shaman is usually picked from the most unproductive, most nearly criminal element within Yuktun society, from among those who, in a more advanced stage of history would find themselves members of the Lumpenproletariat.  They are positively hostile to labor, often grand mal epileptics, and prone to the sort of deceitfulness and evasiveness that in a socialist society can only be described as counterrevolutionary.  They practice their art by convincing other tribe members that they are in contact with spirits from the ‘underworld’.  They speak in tongues and beat on drums to invoke these spirits, and their fellow tribesmen watch, spellbound.  It is a magic show and a stunt, all craftily organized by the shaman to gain the maximum respect possible, and, we dare mention, the maximum remuneration in the form of gifts.”   

The report tells of a crafty woman, evidently in her thirties but already hunched over, wrinkled and grey like a tribal elder, who had perfected the black art of shamanistic fraud.  According to the report, she had conned the delegates from Moscow into participating in a ceremony where, by skillful use of smoke, intoxicating herbs, and disorienting glossolalia, she managed, as the report maintained by way of an uncharacteristic colloquialism, to make asses out of all of them. 

Narda had been told that she was to stop her shamanistic performances and to confess, before the delegation of party members, to her own charlatanism.  But she insisted to the members of her tribe that she was no charlatan, but a real shaman, and that she would demonstrate as much to the party delegates.  When they arrived, she invited them all into her yurt.  She began by dancing, beating on a drum and calling to her spirit helpers.  Gradually, she worked herself into a trance.  She called forth a flood, and at once her yurt was filled with water, up to the ankles of all of the spectators.  Next, she called forth a serpent from the underworld, and caught it in her hands, holding it close to the faces of the stunned delegates.  Finally she commanded the men in her yurt to drop their pants and to hold their penises with both hands.  She returned from her trance and commanded them to return as well.  And there they were, standing to their ankles in water, pants down, holding their members like onanistic fools.  They begged her forgiveness, rushed out of the yurt, back to Moscow, and made a concerted effort, in writing up the report, not to look each other in the eyes. 

Narda also appears in Butenko and Vainshtain’s groundbreaking 1938 study, Naknost’ i tavtologiia v predstavlenii prirody u iuktunskogo naroda [Nâk-hood and Tautology in the Conception of Nature among the Yuktun],  There, Narda relates the beginning of the Yuktun creation myth: “In the beginning there was only nâk, but one day the nâk got it into its head to take all the nâk for itself, which naturally made the nâk upset and brought down a harsh nâk to teach the nâk a lesson.”  She broke off, Butenko and Vainshtain report, upon seeing the displeasure the ethnologists exhibited as she told the tale.  The authors report that, when asked to specify which sort of nâk she had in mind in each instance, Narda protested combatively that there is only one sort of nâk .  “Nâk is nâk,” she is reported to have said. “Nâk is always just nâk.”

The authors proceed to observe: “However hard it may be for us to imagine a world-view [mirovozzrenie] in which this could be the case, it may be that in the primitive communism of the Yuktun all the sundry things denoted by the term nâk are seen as bearing certain strong affinities with one another, so strong indeed that, from their point of view, no terminological differentiation between them is needed.  Just as for us noga denotes both the actual foot of an animal, as well as anything that serves an analogous function for an inanimate entity such as a table (though, to be sure, by a much more complicated path of conceptual associations), so too in the case of nâk.” 

The authors conclude that, like the medieval philosophers who appealed to the formal virtues of things, explaining, to use Molière’s famous example, the power of opium to put people to sleep by the fact that it possesses a virtus dormitiva, the appeal to the naknost’ (‘nâk-hood’) of something in nature in the effort to make sense of it is equally vacuous, yet, for the Yuktun, equally satisfying.  In the case of the Yuktun, however, the explanatory power of naknost’, is all the more difficult to comprehend, in view of the fact that it is seen as a virtus of a wide range of entities, characters, and phenomena that would seem to have no obvious connection to one another, unlike the soporific quality that opium clearly shares with anything else said to posses the virtus dormitiva.”

In an unpublished footnote, Butenko and Vainshtain speculate: “It is worth reflecting on our own concept of partiinost’ [‘party-ness,’ i.e., suitability or appropriateness from the point of view of the Communist Party].  Imagine, if you will, a Yuktun struggling to determine what it is that a symphony, the wheat yield at a collective farm, and the knot in a Young Pioneer’s neckerchief have in common.  We tell him that what all these things share is partiinost’, and he looks back at us perplexed.  We are likewise perplexed when confronted with the idea of naknost’.  But we mustn’t assume it does not make sense to him, unless we are equally ready to abandon partiinost’ as meaningless.” 

Sergei Vasil’evich Butenko disappeared in 1938.  The last that was heard of him, he was sent to a camp not far from Noril’sk, in the Taimyr okrug, relatively close, but still a few time zones away from the Yuktun to whom he had devoted his life.  His longtime research partner, Lev’ Abramovich Vainshtain, a physician who practiced ethnology not as a vocation but as an avocation, made it all the way to 1951 before embarking on his first involuntary trip to Siberia. 

On a recent trip to Moscow, I found Vainshtain’s daughter, Tatyana L’vovna, now in her early sixties, a physician herself, a chain-smoker of cigarettes whose packages evoke the American West, and a self-described ‘true communist’, in a dreary grey concrete-block apartment somewhere at the far end of Prospekt Vernadskogo.  She is an avowedly obsessive documenter of her father’s life, and she graciously allowed me to peruse the notebooks pertaining to his work among the Yuktun.  It was there that I found the unpublished draft of the famous article, complete with the speculative footnote about partiinost’ and naknost’. I also found there a curious scrap of paper, on which Dr. Vainshtain had, evidently, sketched out a version of Narda’s abortive creation myth, but in full, and with the appropriate denotandum of nâk substituted in the appropriate place.  If it stands up to expert scrutiny, I believe this scrap may make an invaluable contribution in the field of Aral-Ultaic ethnography, and perhaps even to the study, if I may speak so grandly, of the human mind.  For it shows, as no other study has, that apparently arbitrary ways of carving up the world can, from an internal point of view, make perfect sense. 

Here is what I read on the scrap of paper (translated with the kind assistance of T. L. Vainshtain):

“In the beginning there was only Lichen, soft greyish-green Lichen, extending across the tundra in all directions.  A seven-day journey would not bring you to the end of the Lichen-covered tundra. 

“But the Hare became greedy and got it into his mind that he should steal the Lichen. He placed the Lichen in his ear and darted off.  And he ran for eight days, until he came to the edge of the world, where the land meets the frozen sea in the North.  On the long journey, the Lichen had penetrated into the very depths of his body, and wrapped itself around his leg-bones.  And at the shore of the Northern sea the mother of the Yuktun was born from the Hare’s right shoulder.  She became the Hare’s wife, and from them the generations of Yuktun were born, right down to our own day.      

“One day long ago, in the time before the time we know, a Yuktun Woman came upon a Hare in a trap.  The Hare pleaded with her, saying: ‘Do not kill me, for you are my daughter and my wife.’ But the Woman only laughed and replied: ‘I am the daughter of Nâgvak, and the wife of Sik.  Sik is hunting with the others, and Nâgvak is long dead.’  She slit the Hare’s throat, skinned it, and threw it in the pot.   

“Just then, a Man came along, toward the village.  He was pale as the snow, with a yellow beard as thick and rough as the hair on a Yuktun’s head.  ‘What’s that you’ve got in the pot there?’ the Man called out, but the Woman was afraid, and did not speak.  ‘I said, What’s that you’ve got in the pot there?’  ‘A Hare,’ the Woman muttered.  ‘I say,’ the Man bellowed.  ‘There’s nothing I like better than a stewed Hare.’ 

“‘Where is your husband?’ the Man asked as he devoured his big bowl of stew, but the Woman was afraid, and again did not answer.  ‘I said, Where is your husband?’  ‘My husband is Sik, the Woman replied softly, ‘and he will be back soon with many more hares, and many ermine, from which I will make him a warm and handsome sark.’  But the Man simply laughed, for he had ambushed the husband and his men as they slept by the frozen banks of the Yob, and sliced off their heads, and taken their tools and necklaces of the smoothest antler.  He took her as his own wife, and that is how the time we know began.

“But Justice makes all things right, and neither the Hare, nor the Woman, nor the pale Russian can escape it.   For the generations that issued from this union would suffer mightily, streaming in from the West and the South, weary and beaten down, some the prisoners of others.  They would build up their heavy grey homes on ground that in its depths never thaws, laying tracks from the great City in the West to the great Sea in the East, frozen limbs amputated unceremoniously by their comrades, up high enough to get rid of the dead mass, which can only mean high enough to cut away living flesh as well; half-starved boys lying down in the snow for a little rest and never rising again, broken men without number, fighting, always fighting against one another and against the permafrost, itself so great, so massive and indifferent, that it never even noticed it had an opponent. 

“But still there is the the Life Force, which sees to it that Justice does not go on unchecked, and for a few months every year softens up the very top level of the ground.  And at least a few varieties of flowers bloom, and it is always day, for these few months, and the tundra is covered, at least in patches, with soft, grey-green Lichen.” 

*

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com

Edward B. Rackley

A gripping and maddening slow-motion spectacle, last week’s Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing on the Situation in Afghanistan (available on C-Span), drifted predictably to Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan as senators and experts grappled over why Afghans, like Iraqis, could not ‘get it together after all we’ve done for them’. Another exasperated senator demanded, uncomprehending of why the hunt for Osama Bin Laden was still inconclusive: ‘Why not raise the price on Osama’s head by a million USD a week?’ It is currently valued at $25 million. Surely more millions would do the trick.

Among an endless sampling of senatorial hubris and stunning provincialism, the most memorable moment was the testimony of Afghanistan specialist Barnett Rubin from the Center on International Cooperation at NYU. Asked by Senators why the Afghan state and people could not capitalize on what the US had ‘given them’ in the way of democratic elections and the ‘freedom’ in the wake of Taliban rule, Rubin patiently explained that ‘in some parts of the world, freedom and democracy are not perceived as essential’ to a country’s recovery, stability or even prosperity. ‘Security and order’ are the desired ingredients, which neither the US nor the ISAF forces are providing.

‘And whose policies are to blame for the current state of affairs, then?’ demanded another Senator. ‘The United States, sir,’ came the cautious reply. Water wears out a stone, I thought, when the Committee closed the Hearing by noting the excellence of Rubin’s testimony.

Alongside democratic processes, ‘good governance’ (i.e., anti-corruption measures, accountability, transparency, etc.) and the ever nebulous ‘freedom’, justice is another superpower ideal frequently exported to troubled countries hoping that foreign intervention and aid programs will remedy their ills. As with freedom and democracy, local perceptions of the value and utility of justice are not what its defenders in the West would wish or suspect.

The biggest experiment in the pursuit of justice in countries where probable war crimes abound is currently led by the International Criminal Court, in operation since 2002. Its ratification followed four years of heated diplomacy among the 148 states involved, and intense lobbying by humanitarian agencies and human rights activists. The founding treaty affirms that ‘the most serious crimes of concern to the international community must not go unpunished’ and promises ‘an end to impunity for the perpetrators of those crimes’.

Unsurprisingly, the ICC is being tested in central African countries with the least economic and political significance to the major powers. Nor are any ICC suspects combatants in wars supported by the world’s major powers: otherwise their indictment would surely be blocked. The Hague-based body has undertaken investigations in Uganda, the DR Congo, the Central African Republic and, most recently, the Sudan. But as the ICC lacks its own police force, its investigation can only proceed as far as the state concerned allows. Despite its potential as a global legal instrument, its local actions and impact are complex, evolving and far from conclusive. Its four initial investigations have thrown up a slew of surprises; some welcome, others not.

Its primary challenge is the pursuit of justice in war zones defined by their absence of political order. Enforcement of legal limits and rights in an ungoverned—or government-sponsored—context of ethnic cleansing, such as Darfur or the Ituri district of Eastern Congo, is one difficulty. The subordination of justice—the arrest and trial of known perpetrators—to the more immediate need for political settlement is another.

Where protection from prosecution is used as a carrot to pacify warlords and thus restore order—as occurred in UN-brokered negotiations in Eastern Congo where the ICC was investigating suspected war crimes—aid workers call the trade-off ‘peace on the cheap’. Arrest warrants have been issued in DR Congo, and one former warlord is now awaiting trial in the Hague (Thomas Lubanga) But the Court’s work is undone when lesser warlords, also war crimes suspects, are offered high positions in the national military in exchange for a ceasefire and troop surrender.

Such is the slow and uncertain course of the ‘giant without arms or legs’. Since 2002, two of the four ICC investigations (Northern Uganda and Darfur, Sudan) have triggered a powerful popular backlash of opposition. Three unintended consequences of its investigations can explain this popular resistance. In the case of Uganda’s ongoing conflict with the Lord’s Resistance Army, fear of ICC indictments has led war crimes perpetrators to abandon political negotiations with government forces in favor of their original position: a ‘no exit’ war of attrition.

Second, in Congo, the prospect of ICC indictments had the opposite effect: it stimulated sagging political negotiations when a ‘golden parachute’ of high administrative office coupled with amnesty was offered to certain intransigent rebel leaders. Yet the prospect of justice is undermined by ‘peace on the cheap’, when the cessation of conflict is bought with amnesty: protection from ICC prosecution. At what point is amnesty indistinguishable from impunity?

Third, in Sudan, where ICC jurisdiction is categorically refuted by Khartoum officials, many Sudanese associate the ICC with a supposed ‘colonization effort’ by the UN and its western backers. Concerns that ICC warrants recently issued for two Sudanese officials will result in increased attacks on aid workers and the objects of their efforts, Darfuri citizens, are well-grounded. Should justice be pursued if it entails the withdrawal of the aid agencies’ vital life-support system where more than 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced?

No one at the ICC could have foreseen the causal chain of perceptions and reactions born from a fear of indictment among those leading civilian massacres in each of these four countries. The learning curve is steep, and the ICC remains unwelcome in two of Africa’s most gruesome conflicts.

But from my experience in all four of these wars, I believe that subtracting the ICC from the equation of variables at play in each context would not diminish the cruelty or shorten its duration. Symbolic though it may now be, the fact that warlords and implicated government officials are investigated and held accountable by outside observers is a moral and legal dimension of the geopolitical kaleidoscope that did not exist four years ago. Reparations for victims may not be immediately forthcoming, but that suspected perpetrators in these otherwise forgotten crises understand that their deeds are documented and monitored is an essential first step in limiting the seemingly boundless human cruelty of such places.

I was sitting for maybe half an hour in the main room of the plantation house watching an old green and white painted door swing lazy in the gusts of ocean breeze. The door was too heavy to slam. It was creeping open slowly of its own weight and then another gust of wind would blow it back. I knew the gust was coming because I could see it in the trees through the crack in the door. I was watching those trees and I could see the branches shake and the bits of green would start dancing around. And then, I knew that the door would begin to swing closed again. Every time, for half and hour, I braced myself for the inevitable slamming of the heavy painted door. But it never slammed. The door was too heavy, the rusted hinges offered too much resistance. The gust would catch the door in a moment of promise and then give up, indifferent to the door, indifferent to the stubbornness of the door, indifferent to the wobbly frame of the old plantation house and the scraggly grounds with intermittent explosions of bougainvillea and the softer pink of the orchids; orchid, I’m reminded by my wife, meaning testicle in Greek, no doubt referring to the root of the orchid, which dangles off the stem and terminates in a couple of wrinkly little sacs that are normally hidden under the earth, the secret source and sustenance for the vulvic spread of the furry flower above.

***

At around 10:00 AM every morning a small bird that we have named Shelly flies down to the veranda. He is a hopper. He also likes to perch on things, the rim of a cup of coffee, the edge of a book, the screen of a computer. He has a friend we call Fatty but Fatty keeps his distance. Shelly is the guy who engages the world. On the second day, we discovered that Shelly is particularly fond of small containers of jam and if you open one and leave it on the table he’ll eventually make his way over, stick his sharp little beak into the container, and dart his tongue out ten or fifteen times in rapid succession.

Heidegger once said that animals are poor in world. It is a step up, I suppose, from the viewpoint of someone like Descartes, for whom animals were at an infinite remove from human beings, the latter having souls. Still, Heidegger’s comment is more about finding the distinction between animals and men then seeing the lines of continuity. I say this only because I’ve gotten to know Shelly. It is not difficult to say that he has a personality and it differs from that of his dour pal, Fatty. Fatty, I have come to realize, fears rejection and it has made him bitter. Shelly is open to the world, intoxicated by experience, you can see it in the way he pokes his head into the coffee cup and cranes his bird neck back up to look at you and then takes off in the other direction to inspect new developments around the base of the aloe plant.

I suspect that, like many things, it all has its roots in Christianity and the problem of theodicy. We needed to explain how there could be evil in the world since God is good. We hit on the solution of man’s free will. To be good, man needed also to have the capacity to do evil. But this solution left the animal world in an odd and uncomfortable position. Not capable of free will, they none-the-less were fated to suffer in man’s world. They were condemned with no possibility of redemption. That strange problem has been carried over into contemporary discussions about consciousness and philosophy of mind. More often than not, the basic premise is that the problem of consciousness is a human one, and that there is an infinite gap between the way we experience the world and the way that other creatures do. We’re uncomfortable about the way that our own modes of experience overlap with those of creatures like Shelly, who is currently trying to figure out a way to force his entire body into a green bottle sitting along one of the garden walls.

***

May I reveal to you that there is a secret city hidden inside the city of Willemstad, Curaçao? There is only one picture of Willemstad, reproduced thousands and thousands of times. It is taken from Otrobanda looking across the inlet toward Punda. A row of Dutch colonial buildings make Willemstad look like it is just emerging from the seventeenth century. Otrobanda and Punda are at the Southernmost section of a road that is known simply as The Ring. But what does The Ring, ring? That is the secret of Willemstad. I will tell you that this inner city burns and belches. At night it throws strange flames into the air that can be seen for miles. Its color is the dull grey of tankers and silos. Its infrastructure is pipes, little pipes, massive pipes, intertwined pipes, networks of pipes, whole families of pipes, generations of pipes, a universe of pipes onto itself in which one could find, no doubt, pipes whose sole function is to pipe things from one kind of pipe to another kind of pipe. These pipes have forgotten of the world of man and nature and live in an ontology of pipeness where the only kind of being is to-be-an-enclosure and to-be-flowed-through day and night. Inside this planet of pipes and metal husks? Oil. The secret Willemstad is a city of oil. It is my favorite city.

***

The Dutch Caribbean would not be the Dutch Caribbean without the specific combinations of sounds that make it so. There is color, of course, a certain look, and there is feel, primarily the heaviness in the air of heat and the sea but always also there is sound. Typically it comes in the rushes of the wind that sweep across the islands of their own volition paying little heed to the insignificant patches of raised land that make up the landscape of the Dutch Caribbean. And then there is the twittering of the birds who jump around in the swaying branches of the trees and bushes that catch the wind and make of it a rich and fulsome rushing sound, almost like water and the pounding of the tide such that, at the sea, one constantly hears the rushing of the ebbing and flowing of the tide and further inland, one constantly hears the rushing and flowing of the wind. The point is, there is always some kind of rushing. Then there is the sound of one solitary car. You start to hear it from far away and then the sound grows, passes you and slowly fades away. There will always be that one car and no part of any of the islands is really far enough away from any road not to hear it. The car will come and the car will fade. And then the birds will twitter. Birds twitter everywhere, but in the Dutch Caribbean they twitter in mysterious syncopation with the rushing noises of the sea and the breeze that is itself constantly punctuated by the sound of the one car, approaching and passing. These three sounds weave together into one interrelated thing; the lengthy crescendo of the one passing car layered over by, the shorter burst of rushing sound from sea and breeze layered over by, the staccato punctuation of the twittering of the birds. You could graph it something like this:

Gggrgrgrgrgrggrggrgrrrrgrgggggrgrgrgrgrgrggrggrgrgrgrrgrgrggrgrgrggrgrgrg
Sssshhhhhh ssssshhhhhhh ssssshhhhhhhh ssssshhhh
Pip pip pipipip pip pip pip pipip pip

***

A thesis: The Caribbean is terrible and sad. That’s why it is so beautiful. If the people were happy here it would be unbearable. These happy islands would mock the nations of the earth. Nothing would make sense anymore; our daily toils and strife would be stripped of whatever faint meaning we are foolishly able to attach to them. We would all give up, find a lonely niche somewhere to go die in. Luckily, the people of the Caribbean are not happy. They are a wreck. There is something brutal here that will not go away. Plunder, murder, slavery, the basest things, the slow progress of evil that worked its way across every island. There is nothing abstract about this. To cast your eyes around the Caribbean is to see plunder still in progress, the legacy of slavery right there in the racial divides along axes of wealth and power. Let us be honest friends, the Caribbean is a nightmare and because of that we can enjoy it. Merely a thesis.

***

I haven’t told you of the secret within the secret, the ring inside the ring. In the fifteenth century the Catholic Church in Spain decided that it was a good time to get more serious about Christianity. The Jews, sensing that this new direction boded rather ill for them, cast their eyes about the globe once more, looking for safe haven. The Dutch were a good prospect. A basic premise of toleration seemed to govern their internal affairs. And as time went on the Dutch began to establish their colonies, the Dutch Caribbean being one example, Curaçao in particular. And so they came. The Jews sailed the high seas to Curaçao. They lived and died in Willemstad and in the smaller towns, on the beaches and in the craggy coves. They ended up with names like Chaim Aron Henriquez. Linguists say that the language of the Dutch Caribbean, Papamiento, has its roots in the Ladino of the Sephardim and thereby can be traced directly back to the Jews who fled the Inquisition. As they lived and died they built a cemetery. They put it in a place outside the city of Willemstad. And then the city grew. And it continued to grow until, in 1919, Shell came to town. There was oil beneath the waters of Curaçao, and a deep water port in the center of Willemstad where it could be processed. There was also a Jewish cemetery dating back to the seventeenth century.

Today, you can take a turn onto a little used road off the northern section of The Ring. A drive of a couple hundred yards brings you into the heart of the city of pipes. The smell of oil and burning gases is overwhelming. There is a sound that can only be described as a deep mechanical belching. Giant chimneys and exhaust pipes stretch high into the sky letting out a thick white smoke. Here is the final resting place of the Jews of Curacao. Thousands of wind swept graves on which the names and stories of the deceased can barely be discerned. They are being wiped away here a second time, in what seems almost like the concerted effort of man and nature to obliterate this place of memory.

As a postscript, the early modern philosopher Spinoza lived in Amsterdam and was from a family of Marrano Jews who fled Spain. He could easily have ended up in Curaçao. Indeed, his half sister did, and she is buried in the cemetery at the center of The Ring. We know almost nothing of Spinoza the man, and it seems that he wanted it that way. We have only his writings, some of the most powerful and lucid thoughts of their time, any time. In his Ethics, Spinoza wrote, “a free man thinks of nothing less than death.”