Edward B. Rackley

Pencils ready? Here’s today’s five-second brain teaser: What incentives succeed in getting autocrats to relinquish power peacefully? The use of sticks and carrots to bring about reform is fertile fodder for political theory, yet in practice the tools of the trade are limited and primitive. Privation of goods or commerce is common in today’s climate; chest-thumping and bellicose posturing, another favorite, is practiced by the entire animal kingdom. Carrots, as opposed to sticks, work wonders with children but see little success between nations. Why is that?

In the case of Burma under General Than Shwe and his military junta, no carrots have been tried, to my knowledge. Sticks in many shapes and sizes have been brandished and swung, to little effect. Economic sanctions, asset freezes, arms embargos and travel bans are currently in effect by the US and EU. I posed the question to a Burmese dissident last week. He reflected a moment, then smiled and said, ‘A missile launch pad in Thailand, that’s all we need’. No sticks, no carrots, just elimination: everyman’s fantasy. Were regime change so easy!

Western policies designed to weaken the junta have been contradictory, perhaps even self-sabotaging. The State Department claims its trade sanctions have encouraged ASEAN countries to adopt a more critical stance on Burma; this is correlation, not causation. ASEAN countries continue their waffling course of ‘constructive engagement’, meaning: do business and look the other way. The US was alone in pursuing sanctions for over a decade until the ill-fated ‘Saffron Revolution’ last September, at which point the EU implemented similar measures.

Critics of these sanctions, embargoes and other disincentives highlight their feel-good, symbolic character—much like Bush’s declaration of genocide in Darfur being followed by cooperation with Khartoum on terrorist intelligence matters. As with Sudan, sanctions against Burma arguably strengthen the hand of ruling authorities by creating a scapegoat for their own internal policy failures and narrowing the opportunity for Burmese to expand their economic, social, and cultural contacts with reform-minded nations. The conservative CATO institute, for instance, makes a case for re-opening commercial relations with Burma, arguing that investment and trade brings technology, better working conditions, and increased exposure to democratic ideas.

Burmese pressure groups and international human rights agencies have lobbied the UN for Security Council action to target Burma’s gas and oil industries, the junta’s primary source of revenue. Such a vote was never tabled, as China and Russia would surely veto on the grounds of the principle of non-interference, their almighty sacred cow and miracle panacea for any vexing political crisis.

But for those nations who huff and puff and try to blow the junta house down–to what effect? Sanctions that fail to cut off all revenue streams to an offending party are ultimately a non sequitur. And wherever there is oil, there is always political wiggle-room. Extraction rights to Burma’s vast offshore oilfields were accorded to China in 2007, along with contracts to build an overland pipeline leading—where else?—to China.

The junta’s economic ties to China, Thailand and India have grown in recent years, meaning a certain Chinese veto of any Security Council Resolution to pressure or punish Burmese leadership. Because Burma is a strategic nexus—it flanks both China and India and provides access to major waterways—China has focused much of its recent regional diplomatic drive on Burma. The result has been growing economic and diplomatic ties between the two countries.

As in other closed countries whose citizens suffer armed conflict (Northern Sudan), political persecution (Zimbabwe), extreme resource scarcity (Zimbabwe, North Korea), populist rhetoric and disastrous governance (Cuba, Venezuela), survival of the ruling regime means trading with countries for which morality, politics and commerce are distinct affairs. Resource-rich Sudan has little business with Western countries now; Khartoum looks like a mini-Beijing with all the cranes and Chinese construction companies everywhere. Even beleaguered old Mugabe asked China to bail him out several months ago.

Me and my money

And so Burma’s military rulers remain solvent despite an array of sanctions and international opprobrium, selling oil and gas to India, Thailand and China, another state willing to kill large numbers of its own people to stay in power. ‘Burma’s generals act as if they are immune from worldwide condemnation because they’re still getting cash from foreign-financed oil and gas projects. It’s time to cut them off’, Human Rights Watch argued in a 2007 report.

Burma’s vast majority lives under great hardship and does not see any tangible benefit from outside investment in the oil and gas industry. Most Burmese homes lack electricity altogether, and urban residents face frequent power outages, even as Burma’s natural gas is used to power Thailand’s cities. ‘Burma’s generals have used the promise of oil and gas supplies to buy the silence of energy-hungry countries, including China and India’ (HRW).

Burma is following the path tread by many African countries run by semi-autocracies or sham democracies. Human rights, democratic reform, and good governance are the sticks that accompany western development aid to developing countries. Tired of being subjected to conditions on foreign aid by moralizing and duplicitous Western countries, many African nations are turning to China, Malaysia, India and Thailand to conduct business. Because if trade and aid are available from partners who claim no moral high ground or pretense of superiority, the door to cooperation and exchange of ideas is wide open.

Severe shortage of carrots

One recent instance of Western contradiction: as the Saffron Revolution unfolded in late September, Gordon Brown effused that ‘The age of impunity is over for anyone who commits crimes against the people of Burma.’ After Cyclone Nargis hit in early May, senior UN relief official John Holmes visited the country’s worst-hit areas. As Kouchner and company weighed in on a possible ‘humanitarian invasion’–airdrops and cross-border smuggling of relief supplies and staff–Holmes defended the UN precedent of working with Burma’s military regime. So on the one hand we hear blustery declarations that ‘the age of impunity is over’, while the usual round of UN Special Envoys continue their humble entreaties at the threshold of the junta’s door. In short: multiple diplomatic strategies, all involving sticks, all perfectly contradictory.

Contradictions that were readily manipulated by the regime. After promises to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to allow more aid workers in, the junta then extended Aung San Suu Kyi’s period of detention. ASEAN country officials offered insight into Burmese perceptions of missteps in the Western diplomatic dance. ‘They are suspicious of humanitarian aid serving as a camouflage for regime change,’ the Singapore Ambassador to the UN explained, ‘a perception that is not entirely unreasonable when some [western] countries have talked about invoking responsibility to protect and mounting relief operations without host government permission’.

One wonders ultimately if sanctions represent the end of influence: so many sticks that a carrot becomes inconceivable. Here in Washington I hear political talk in some circles of ‘going through China or India’ to reach Burma’s junta. Intermediaries become necessary when one’s own efforts fail, do they not, so is it not therefore best to fix what’s broken? Alas, I forget the first rule in politics: save thy face.

Many Burmese dissidents, and its government in exile, are looking to the Olympics as a way to pressure China, as has happened with Darfur. There is the coincidence that the Games start on August 8, 2008, the anniversary of the 1988 uprisings in which at least 3000 demonstrators were killed.

Is Burma on track for a possible implosion? Economic decay is severe following twenty years of gross mismanagement, and oil revenue is not enough to right the junta’s sinking ship. But how long must the Burmese wait and pray? The internal collapse or combustion of autocratic states does occur, as happened in the Soviet Union and its client states, particularly in Africa. Predicting when and how this happens escapes even the best analysts.

Justin E. H. Smith

There is a scene from Jean Renoir’s magnificient 1939 film, La regle du jeu, in which the members of a decadent French nobility, looking for ways to pass the time at a country estate, decide to put on a little play.  There is a man in a bear costume played by Jean Renoir himself, the son of the great painter Auguste, and the self-declared enemy of all reigning values and of the class that enforces them. Renoir fils seems like such a good sport: the French communist intellectual, the genius artist, up there on stage, dressed up like a bear. The whimsical scene in which he plays is followed by a skeleton dance, to the tune of Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre. As the music plays Renoir’s character, Octave, rushes through the mansion looking for someone to help him remove his costume. Qui va tirer cette peau d’ours?! he moans. And the English subtitles would have him saying: For Christ’s sake, who’ll help me out of this skin?!

There is a scene from the life of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, in which he is encouraged by Princess Sophie Charlotte, of the still-thriving royal house of Prussia, to dress up like a bear for a play she is putting on with her friends in the palace at Charlottenburg. It is the turn of the 18th century, and Leibniz is Sophie Charlotte’s tutor. Their correspondence clearly reveals that she is in love with him, though the court philosopher himself seems not to have noticed. Leibniz’s love life seems to have consisted in two chapters: first, a letter he wrote, at the age of 50, to a man of good standing, inquiring as to whether he might take the man’s daughter’s hand in marriage; second, a note written at the age of 70, the year of his death, in which he recalls the incident, along with the fact that the man never wrote back. Leibniz died a lonely man, with a shrunken reputation. Ossa Leibnitii, his gravestone read matter-of-factly: “Leibniz’s Bones.” In any case, Leibniz refuses to dress up like a bear, and Sophie Charlotte has to ask the Duke of Wittgenstein (not that Wittgenstein), who gamely accepts. Leibniz sits in the audience, and will later claim to have had a great time in that passive role. I’ve long wondered: was he not secretly envious of the duke?  Did he not wish to be more free-spirited, less constrained by his own seriousness? Did he not wish to nail the princess, perhaps even in ursine disguise?

There is a note that Leibniz made to himself in 1675, to which he gave the title, Une drôle de pensée: “a funny thought.”  He had just been to a spectacle in Paris in which an automaton in the form of a man was made to run across the surface of the Seine. The experience filled him with excitement, and with ideas of his own. He rushed home and jotted them down. He imagined “une nouvelle sorte de représentations,” which would involve “Magic Lanterns, kites, artificial meteors, all manner of optical marvels; a representation of the sky and the stars.” There would be “fireworks, jets of water, vessels of strange forms; Mandragores and other rare plants, … [r]are and extraordinary animals,” as well as a “Royal Machine for races with artificial horses,” not to mention “speaking trumpets.” He imagines that “the representation could be combined with some sort of story or comedy,” and that this story might include “extraordinary tightrope dancers. Perilous jumps.” The public could see “a child who raises a great weight with a thread,” and there would be an “anatomical theatre,” as well as a “garden of simple [elements].” There would be “little number machines and other [things]… Instruments that play themselves.” Leibniz imagines that “all honest men would want to have seen these curiosities, so that they would be able to speak about them.” “Even women of quality,” he adds, would wish to be taken there. At this wonderland of “new representations,” “one would always be encouraged to push things further,” though it would also be necessary that in this charmed place “no one ever swears, nor blasphemes God.”

What was Leibniz thinking? Down to the ban on profane language, the institution he envisions would seem to have more in common with Disneyland than with an Academy of Sciences. Both, I want to say, are more or less direct products of the European Enlightenment. But anyway I bring up this drôle de pensée only to give a picture of the mode of Leibniz’s operation. He seems to have written out everything that ever crossed his mind, including the funniest of funny thoughts. The volumes of his writing, the editing of which was begun by the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1923 and is now only about 30% completed, amount literally to the reconstruction of a man’s inner life.

I have set myself up in the world as a “Leibniz scholar,” which means that my salary, my 401k, my health and dental, all get paid in exchange for my willingness to regularly hold forth on the life and work of this man who died 294 years ago. Leibniz wrote about theology, jurisprudence, mathematics, physics, physiology, chemistry, medicine, hospital administration, mineralogy, paleontology, etymology and entomology; I write about Leibniz. Plane tickets are bought, hotel rooms reserved, crates of bottled water lugged about by hotel staff in places like the Lake Superior Conference Room of the Minneapolis Sheraton, all so that Leibniz scholarship can happen. My carbon footprint is Leibniz’s posthumous carbon footprint. Everywhere I go, I go thanks to Leibniz: he has taken me to Norway, Argentina, Israel, the Canary Islands, Australia. (I note in passing that comparable employee benefits have been extracted from the bones of Emily Dickinson, Sergei Eisenstein, Andy Warhol, and even an illiterate 16th-century miller from Friuli.)

Thanks to Leibniz, I have had more surreal conversations with passport control agents around the world than I could possibly recall. Israeli security agents are of course required to engage all who travel into and out of Israel in long, surreal conversations, prying for details about their personal and professional lives in order, I presume, to make sure they really are who they say they are. Twice, on leaving Israel, I’ve found myself delivering from memory the papers I’d just presented at academic conferences in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv the days before. I would stop every five minutes or so –after sentences like, “and so we see that in fact Leibniz continues to propose new models of the structure of the organic bodies of corporeal substances right through the 1704 publication of the Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain“– to ask: shall I continue? They nodded their heads yes, and so I did… for 40 more minutes. They were doing their job, and I was doing mine.

The second time I was in Israel, in 2005, I had presented a paper on, among other things, Leibniz’s theory of the origins of Chinese, his argument that it was not, as many had thought, a deformation of Hebrew, and his general denial that there ever was such a thing as an “Adamic” language, that is, a prelapsarian way of speaking in which words zapped directly into the essences of things, giving the first man and woman perfect, God-like knowledge of the objects of reference in the world. I spoke for 45 minutes, and one of the agents, a girl, 19 or so, with a blonde ponytail, sat taking notes. What, or who, were these notes for, I wondered. Her rabbi? The file Mossad was keeping on me? Her own interest in the nature of language? 

I recently found myself passing through JFK (the airport, that is). For me, coming home to the US is like entering the Green Zone: a highly protected, highly charged spot where every sign of normalcy seems only to point towards the chaos radiating out of it. What disturbs me most are those damned blue latex gloves that ever more Americans seem to be wearing: toll-booth workers, Rite-Aid employees, DHS agents. The gloves are supposed to signal: This is a sterile operation here, everything’s above-board and impervious to corruption, but they remind me of nothing so much as Abu Ghraib. I want to say: they are what made Abu Ghraib possible. The hygienic separation provided by the gloves in turn enables a sort of moral separation from one’s own shit-dirty deeds. Get a few of the other guy’s germs on you, and you might be reminded he’s your brother.

The agent to whose window I was sent wore the blue latex gloves and a name-tag that identified him as “Ferency.” On the form that asked me which countries I’d visited since last in the United States, I’d listed over a dozen (including Hungary), which was all the allotted space would permit. “What line of work takes you to so many interesting places?” Ferency asked in a sort of bored and laconic mumble.

“I’m a professor of philosophy,” I told him.
“Cool,” he said. “
“Who’s your main guy?”
“Leibniz.”
“Is it true he stole the calculus from Isaac Newton?”
“No, that’s a scurrilous slander,” I replied to the Department of Homeland Security agent.
“OK, just asking,” Ferency said, clearly interested. “But seriously, I don’t think I could spend my life studying Leibniz. He’s too logical. There’s more to life than just logic: premise-conclusion, premise-conclusion. Too dry. I mean, what about, like, poetry?” Without even having opened it to confirm my identity, he handed my passport back with his blue-gloved hand.
“Leibniz wrote poetry, too.” I told him.
“He did?””
“Yes. He once wrote a very whimsical ode to a princess’s parrot.”
“Well, maybe I underestimated the guy,” Ferency said as he waved me along.

There is a scene from the life of Leibniz, in which we find him in Bohemian Karlsbad, taking a hot-spring bath with Peter the Great, the Tsar of Russia. It is late in his life, 1714 or so. He is suffering from severe gout, and has taken to trying any and every possible remedy. By now he has constructed a homemade wooden clamp, meant to reduce the circulation of blood to his affected foot, a measure which certainly did not help at all. Leibniz’s first letter on the self-treatment of gout, so far as I’ve been able to find, was written in 1676, decades before he himself would die of over-treatment. Diogenes Laertius, who had believed that a philosopher’s death must reflect the work of his life, would have been impressed by Leibniz.

One source of difficulty I’ve often encountered in trying to imagine my way into the world as lived by 17th-century European men of letters is presented by those goddamned wigs they wore. What could they have been thinking? And why do publishers today insist on reproducing images of their wigged heads every time a new book comes out? (I continue the practice here just to drive home my point.) What do these horrid perruques have to do with the theory of monads or the discovery of gravity? Whenever I see that famous portrait of Louis XIV (reproduced here in a slightly blurred form, so as not to blind the reader with his radiance), with his waist-length curls, his furs, his tights decorated with fleurs de lys, I think to myself: that was a world that had to collapse. Hair-wise, there’s no denying that Leibniz’s wig places him much closer to le roi soleil than to, say, Kant, whose dignified ponytail positions him, a century later, in the respectable company of Thomas Jefferson and other good men.

Leibniz and Peter were in Karlsbad to discuss the establishment of an Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, after the model of the one Leibniz had already helped to found in Berlin. There is no record of their meeting, but I have often attempted to reconstruct how it might have unrolled. The bare physical details take precedence in exercises of the imagination such as this. Did they get fully naked before entering the baths? Did they have towels? What did Leibniz look like, stripped down, without his wig? A colleague insists that without his wig Leibniz looks like no one so much as Ben Kingsley, and that this wide-ranging actor, who has already played Gandhi, should also play the philosopher in any future movie about his life. But there will never be a movie about the life of Leibniz, and if there is it will be a disappointing wigs-and-tights period piece with an invented and implausible romantic twist.

Ferency may very well have been itching to tear that damned glove off, like Octave with his peau d’ours. The Israeli girl no doubt wanted to strip off that uniform, which she would do soon enough, once her obligatory period of service had ended, to go off and dance on a beach somewhere to Goa trance, or Balearic house, or God knows what. Often I would like to tear off the skin under cover of which I move across frontiers, to be waved through by the border guards not in view of what I have to say about Leibniz, but in virtue of everything I have ever thought or felt, my own infinite repository of drôles de pensées. But a job’s a job, and it pays to be a good sport.

By the time he hot-tubbed with Leibniz, Peter the Great had much experience tearing beards right off the faces of men in the streets of St. Petersburg; it was to be a Western city, with an Academy of Sciences and all, and the Tsar could not stand to have his subjects looking like backward Orthodox monks. In France, when the Revolution that relegated the wigs and tights of absolute monarchy to the realm of nostalgia finally came, its heroes were not content to yank off the coiffures of the ancien régime and start fresh from there, but instead removed entire heads. Leibniz for his part believed that when a worm is cut in half, a previously subordinate soul in the weaker half rises up and becomes the dominating soul in the newly independent body. He thought human souls have an even brighter destiny, no matter what their gravestones might read, but I hope to be reborn a few more times before it comes to that.

21 June, 2008

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

For the original French text of the “Drôle de pensée,” go here. .

Perhaps you’re aware that the Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, better known by the name of the London suburb in which it’s played–Wimbledon–begins today.  In case you’d like to catch up, here’s a discussion of the major storylines with my friend and fellow tennis fan, Sydneysider Lucy Perkins.

Asad Raza: Hi there Luce, thanks for taking the time to do this!  So I suppose we’d better tackle the question everyone asks first, first: What the heck is going on with Roger Federer?  He’s won only two tournaments this year, both minor tuneups, and suffered perhaps his worst Grand Slam loss ever at the hands of smiling assassin Rafael Nadal in the final of Roland Garros.  Is Federer, as your Sydney papers have it, ready to be put “out to pasture,” or have reports of his demise as the world’s dominant player been premature?

Lucy Perkins: Hi Asad! No problem: I feel more famous for talking to you. Re: Roger, I wish I knew. I think OUT TO PASTURE is, to put it mildly, a little harsh. There is no need to reel off his list of accomplishments, and anyway we don’t have time, but he’s been winning Wimbledon every year since Mark Philippoussis was a credible opponent. (Fans of the reality TV series The Age of Love will recognise the import of this statement.) He also has an unbroken grass streak of fifty-nine matches – and counting! – and he won Halle just last week without dropping serve. Fed has a knack of picking himself up after the ritual devastation of the French Open final and refusing to look back.

On the other hand, Federer’s performance in the Roland Garros final really was dismal, and his attitude surprisingly blase. And Rafa just keeps getting better; he seemed to reach his first Wimbledon final through sheer enthusiasm, but beating Djokovic and Roddick to win Queens looks awfully like accomplishment. As a Federer fan, my concern isn’t so much over Federer’s form as Rafa’s. He’s getting closer all the time to beating Roger on grass, as anyone who saw last year’s epic Wimbledon final could attest. Could this be the year?

Asad Raza: I think it could–not only did Nadal devastate Federer in Paris, but he handled Andy Roddick and Novak Djokovic with such intimidating form at Queen’s, the most competitive Wimbledon tuneup tournament.  I think Rafa’s grass-court credentials are very real–after all, he made the last two Wimbledon finals–and I think there is no player who does not fear him right now.

If Nadal does win Wimbledon, it will be tough for anyone to dislodge him as the best player this year.  So for Federer, his two stated priorities, the Wimby crown and his number one ranking, are at stake.  Is he fully recovered from mono?  I think he is, since his clay court season was exactly as accomplished as his usually are–i.e. making the big finals and losing to Nadal.  Nothing new there.  On the other hand, he hasn’t looked as imperious as usual, but I thought that last year, too.  In the words of the pirate Mallorcan, we gonna see.

Who else do you think has a chance?

Lucy Perkins: Well, naturally, Novak Djokovic has to be part of this conversation. After winning his first Grand Slam in Australia this year, Djokovic has gone from up-and-comer to serious contender. He’s intensely talented and hypercompetitive, and he seems to manage the surface transition with ease. He’s also oddly brittle for such a brash young thing. I sincerely hope Djokovic doesn’t intend to repeat last year’s performance, in which he fought his way to a semi against Rafa only to retire. (Admittedly, the fortnight had been tough on Djokovic, with long rain delays interspersed with manic stretches of playing. But still.)

As far as form goes, Djokovic appears to have stepped down a notch since the Australian Open, and his loss to Nadal at Queens seemed to confirm his spot just below Nadal in the pecking order. But the greats always peak at the big tournaments, and they come no bigger than Wimbledon, so this could serve as an intriguing test of Djoko’s mettle. Especially since he is in Federer’s half of the draw. Apart from those three, the list of contenders is surprisingly short. Most years, I would also include Andy Roddick as a contender. But watching Roddick nowadays, it’s sometimes difficult to recall that only a few years ago he came within spitting distance of beating King Federer himself at Wimbledon. Last year, against the talented, flaky Richard Gasquet, Roddick was up two sets and a break before losing it, quite inexplicably. It was a measure of how far he’d fallen, and it was sad to behold. Can you be twenty-five years old and belong to a bygone era? It seems you can, in tennis at least.

Meanwhile, my favourite hobby horse, David Nalbandian, appears to have reverted to form after a phenomenal end to 2007. Nalbandian is no stranger to grass, having made the Wimbledon final in 2002, but he has a habit of turning in a string of desultory performances just as you’re starting to warm to him. He’s hardly a form player, having taken precisely one game off Novak Djokovic in the Queens semi. But I feel the need to mention him anyway.

Asad Raza: All true, although I rate Andy Roddick’s chances a little higher than you–my patriotic bias.  I note neither of us mentioned the Great Scottish Hope, Andy Murray, who is really talented but who I think we probably agree seems way too mercurial to win seven straight five-set matches.  Djokovic has chances, but he’s on Federer’s side of the draw and he might be too high-strung to beat both the top guys for the title.

Some other men I think bear watching: Robin Soderling (who may meet Fed in round two) and the always lovably irritating Radek Stepanek.  Then there’s the boy wonder, Ernests Gulbis (round two with Rafa, if he gets past Isner), the only Latvian player ever to be a factor on tour.  Gulbis is charming, confident, and the ball comes off his racquet like a cannon fired it.  And, my major upset guy this time out is Gael Monfils, the French player who came out of a long slump to reach the French semis, where he pushed Federer pretty hard.  He has incredible power and incredible movement, but likes to play a passive style and then counterpunch after baiting his opponent into leaving a side of the court open.  That might be impossible to pull off on grass, because the ball skips through the court faster, but Monfils is always exciting to watch.  Might pull off some huge wins, but also might flame out in the first round.

Okay, in general the men’s tour is pretty much sewn up by the top three. The women’s, meanwhile, is wide open–no one seems to be able to establish lasting supremacy these days, leading many to claim disinterest in it.  But have you noticed that when the women’s tour was dominated by Steffi Graf and Monica Seles, people would complain that the women’s field had no depth?  Now that it has depth, apparently the players are insufficiently dominant.  Any thoughts on this strange double standard?  Are there real problems with the women’s tour right now?

For this decade, it’s really been an inconsistent struggle between Serena Williams and the just-retired Justine Henin, with lesser challenges from Maria Sharapova and others.  Now a new number one, Ana Ivanovic, has emerged with a title at the French and an intensity that others on the women’s tour don’t seem to match these days.  For that reason, I have Ivanovic as my favorite to win the title–I just don’t see the other top seeds as serious enough about it.  Sharapova was in L.A. while the Wimbledon tuneups were being played, and the Williams sisters almost never play them anyway.  That said, Venus is the defending champion and it’s hard to bet against her if she gets through the first week.

Lucy Perkins: I’m glad you brought up the double standard before I did. Nobody is ever happy when it comes to the state of the women’s game: if someone’s dominant, there’s no depth. If nobody’s dominant, it’s boring. And even during the Hingis/Williams/Davenport era, when the women’s game was both genuinely competitive and about a billion times as interesting as the men’s, there were all these gendered stories about how the competition just doesn’t seem as fair or as clean as the men’s.

But at the moment, I tend to agree with you about the state of the game, and I will even point to one problem with the women’s game that does seem systematic: it loses its champions at an alarming rate. I wasn’t particularly surprised when Kim Clijsters retired so that she could wash her husband’s dishes – she was nobody’s feminist poster child. But Justine Henin always struck me as the consummate career girl. I mean, when it was literally tennis or her marriage, tennis won. And now she ups and quits, aged 25? Something really must be amiss.

Anyway, back to Wimbledon. This is, as you point out, clearly a golden opportunity for Ivanovic, and I bet more than one WTA exec is hoping she takes it. Before this year, I wasn’t convinced that Ivanovic had it. Her fitness was always suspect, and off-court she seems bubbly and laid-back. But the steel she showed at Roland Garros was a real surprise.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t dismiss Sharapova’s ability to get serious when the moment requires it. And the Williamses are anyone’s guess. They seem to be able to decide to win and then do it, with minimal preparation. It’s infuriating, but captivating at the same time, as if the rest of the tour is just at the mercy of Williams-family whims. I don’t know about this year, though. Another out-of-nowhere title for Venus just seems a bridge too far, even for her.

I’ll also use this opportunity to plug my sentimental favourite for the women’s title, Elena Dementieva, who is lovely, talented, charming, thoughtful, and a choker extraordinaire. She will probably lose, and it will probably be a heartbreaker, and she will probably be charmingly sincere in her press-conference. But I wish it weren’t so.

Asad Raza: Excellent points all–I’m with you in admiring Dementieva, in my case also because she is the fiancée of one of my beloved Buffalo Sabres, Maxim Afinogenov.  I’m looking forward to running into the two of them eating chicken wings at the Anchor Bar someday.

So that seems to be about the size of it.  Shall we go out on limbs, and offer our predictions for the semifinals onwards?

Read more »

by Jim Culleny

in a blink

the sun comes up
over mountains sublime
and the sea laps its brim like a pup

regal elms come and go
splayed trunks broken by blight
limbs corrupt

future and past collide
winds whistle side by side
bodies touch and often burn up

wars rage
scriptures are taught
good and bad divide
killers are caught
doors open doors shut

in a blink they say
never the twain shall meet
but twains meet
beast and beauty wed,
but news of a split soon spreads:
Truth Divorced From Politician Such & Such
the tabloids eat it up

notions of right and wrong are cinched
in tiny minds that grasp and clinch
and root and rut

love is made
bodies entwine
hate’s kicked on its ass so hard
it can’t get up

mountains move
the earth erupts
promises are kept
and given up
and odes and fugues
make offers
we shouldn’t refuse,
they demand
we not interrupt

in a blink
all of us know
but no one agrees
if mountains are mountains
and trees are trees
if sky is sky
if mud is mud
if wine’s just wine
if blood’s just blood

either way
in a blink

in a blink

we drink
it up