In the NYT:

South African poet and former political prisoner Dennis Brutus, who fought apartheid in words and deeds and remained an activist well after the fall of his country's racist system, has died. He was 85.

Brutus' publisher, Chicago-based Haymarket Books, said the writer died in his sleep at his home in Cape Town on Saturday. He had been battling prostate cancer, according to Patrick Bond, who directs the Center for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, where Brutus was an honorary professor.

Brutus was an anti-apartheid activist jailed at Robben Island with Nelson Mandela in the mid-1960s. He helped persuade Olympic officials to ban South Africa from competition from 1964 until apartheid ended nearly 30 years later.

Born in 1924 in what was then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, Brutus was the son of South African teachers who moved back to their native country when he was still a boy. He majored in English at Fort Hare University, which he attended on full scholarship, and taught at several South African high schools.

By his early 20s, he was politically involved and helped create the South African Sports Association, formed in protest against the official white sports association. Arrested in 1963, Brutus fled the country when released on bail, but was captured and nearly killed when shot as he attempted to escape police custody in Johannesburg and forced to wait for an ambulance that would accept blacks. Brutus was sentenced to 18 months at Robben Island.

Is Iran moving towards dual sovereignty, to borrow a phrase from Trotsky? (“Dual sovereignty” exists at the moment when there are two legitimate but incompatible sources of legitimate power.) Via Andrew Sullivan:

The Daily Nite Owl, Josh Shahryar, has also been live blogging events on this Ashura.

Also see this report from the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran:

An eyewitness told the Campaign that Basij forces attacked protestors near Daneshjoo Park, beating them with batons, wood sticks and metal pipes. He reported that after a protestor’s dead body was moved through the crowd, protestors started to beat back Basijis and brought down several from their motorcycles, setting the vehicles on fire.

“The Basij and special forces were extremely violent. They beat protestors directly on the head. There were many people with bloodied heads and faces. A young protestor was tied to the back of a van and dragged on the asphalt. Protestors attacked the van, took the passengers out and set the van on fire. There were thousands of special forces and Basij members confronting the protestors,” he said.

An eyewitness told the Campaign live shots were fired in Enqelab Street and other eyewitnesses also said live ammunition was used against the protestors at Pol-e College where three people have been reported killed. According to several eyewitnesses, by late afternoon, government forces were busy cleaning and washing blood-covered streets to destroy any signs of the violent confrontations. More protests are expected during the night in Tehran.

From Dawn:

The following pictures are from a procession taken out in remembrance of the Karbala tragedy on the eve of Ashura in Karachi on Wednesday. Dawn.com takes a look at the various symbols prevalent in Muharram processions in Pakistan. Feature by Salman Siddiqui. Photos by WhiteStar/Fahim Siddiqi.

When Ashura comes, the main streets of Pakistani cities are filled with thousands of mourners. Streetlights turn into posts for black-colored flags as the towering Alams (flags) lead the Muharram procession that include a variety of Taazias and Zuljinah (Imam Hussain's legendary horse) to remember the battle of Karbala that took place 1,300 years ago.

More here. And my own photos of an Ashura procession in NYC from 2007 are here.

“The outsider is the safest and handiest repository for the hate one feels
toward God when one’s life go south.”
–A.R. Spokewell, Hard Times in Paradise: the Immigrant Ruse

Nazis

Thank God they’re all gone
except for one or two in Clinton Maine
who come home from work
at Scott Paper or Diamond Match
to make a few crank calls
to the only Jew in New England
they can find

These make-shift students of history
whose catalogue of facts include
every Jew who gave a dollar
to elect the current governor
every Jew who’d sell this country out
to the insatiable Israeli state

I know exactly how they feel
when they say they want to smash my face

Someone cheated them
they want to know who it is
they want to know who makes them beg

It’s true Let’s Be Fair
it’s tough for almost everyone
to exaggerate the facts
to make a point

Just when I thought I could walk to the market
just when Jean the check-out girl
asks me how many cords of wood I chopped
and wishes me happy Easter
as if I’ve lived here all my life

Just when I can walk into the bank
and nod to the tellers who know my name
where I work who lived in my house in 1832
who know to a penny the amount
of my tiny Jewish bank account

Just when I’m sure we can all live together
and I can dine in their saltbox dining rooms
with the melancholy picture of Christ
on the wall their only consolation
just when I can borrow my neighbor’s ladder
to repair one of the holes in my roof

I pick up the phone
and listen to my instructions

I see the town now from the right perspective
the gunner in the glass bubble
of his fighter plane shadowing the tiny man
with the shopping bag and pointy nose
his overcoat two sizes too large for him
skulking from one doorway to the next
trying to make his own way home

I can see he’s not one of us

by Ira Sadoff

from New American Poets of the ‘90s;
David Godine publisher, Boston, 1991

From PBS:

December 18 marked the beginning of the month of Moharram. Shiites, and in particular Iranians, have been mourning the killing of their third Imam, Hossein, the quintessential martyr, since his death in the battle of Karbala on October 10, 680, which falls on Ashura, the 10th day of Moharram. Ashura has been commemorated for at least a thousand years, beginning probably in Baghdad, Iraq, in the 4th Islamic century. Tradition holds that Imam Hossein and 72 of his followers were slain on that day after fighting bravely with the much larger army of the Umayyad Caliph, Yazid ibn Moaaviyeh, which some historians have said was 100,000 men strong.

The death of Imam Hossein, his friends, followers and members of his family by a Sunni Caliph is perhaps the main reason that Shiism is considered a rebellious sect in Islam. Because the Shiites have been a minority throughout the history of Islam, they have transformed the historical battle of Karbala to symbolize ideological confrontation with the ruling elite, and have used a powerful combination of actual events and legend to stir up great emotion; it has been an occasion to complain bitterly about their marginalization in much of the Islamic world and to demand their rights. They invoke Imam Hossein's famous quote that, “Every day is Ashura, and every land is Karbala.”

More here.

From The Washington Post:

This very attractive book, with a cover that subtly recalls a Miles Davis LP from over half a century ago, is a study of how the notion of “cool,” with all its elegance and purity, was co-opted by wretched American corporate types who, in true fairy-tale fashion, killed the cool golden goose that they thought was going to lay them golden eggs. To put it more plainly, the author sets up his work with three short biographies of early jazz icons — Bix Beiderbecke, Lester Young and Miles Davis — and lays out what he thinks they stood for, both in their music and in the outer world.

Then, in just a few following chapters, he takes some dizzying leaps to places where readers may have trouble following him. Gioia's contention is that the mantle of cool passed all too soon from these aloof, original, extremely gifted musicians to another set of equally iconic but very public figures, such as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. Jordan and Woods were hired to endorse Nike and General Motors, who traded on their images to sell running shoes and cars. In an evolution of events that no one expected, “square” personalities like Rush Limbaugh began to intone from the radio, Bob Dole endorsed Viagra, and comparatively unprepossessing contestants like Susan Boyle appeared on “Britain's Got Talent.” That, according to the author, signified the end, the death, of the whole idea of “cool.” (The term “square” is mine here. Gioia never uses it.)

More here.

Six months after the fraudulent elections, the despicable regime is still unable to quell the Irani people's demand for freedom. I am convinced that the days of this brutal government are numbered. This is from CNN:

Fresh clashes broke out between demonstrators and security forces in Tehran on Sunday as large crowds gathered for the climax of the holy period of Ashura.

Since the disputed presidential elections in June, protesters have turned public gatherings into rallies against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was declared the overwhelming winner of the race.

Police, wary of the potential that Ashura gatherings could present, were out in full force Sunday to quell disruptions while demonstrators planned widespread protests.

Near Imam Hussein Square in central Tehran, security forces used tear gas to disperse demonstrators and blocked roads to prevent more from arriving, a witness said.

Protesters seized a motorcycle belonging to a security force member and set it on fire.

The unrest follows day-long clashes between the two sides in the streets of Tehran on Saturday.

On Saturday evening, a pro-government mob barged into a mosque where former president and reformist leader Mohammad Khatami was speaking.

The dozens-strong group forced Khatami to end his remarks abruptly when it interrupted the gathering at Jamaran mosque.

Earlier Saturday, scores of security forces on motorcycles charged protesters on sidewalks whenever they started chanting anti-government slogans, witnesses said.

Baton-wielding security forces bashed and bloodied at least three protesters, arrested at least two people, and smashed the window of at least one car, eyewitnesses said.

More here.

Abraham Verghese in The Atlantic:

So its done. The health care legislation has passed and that makes this a special Xmas. Despite its flaws, it is a milestone for a nation that could be so generous with its aid abroad, yet stymied in caring for its own. I clearly could not have been a politician–I would not have the patience of the president to tirelessly campaign for this and to see it through; nor would I have the tenacity of the opponents to the legislation who opposed it to the end.

This morning I will drive in for my rounds at the hospital (my team is on call, bless their hearts,and will stay all day and night, while I get to come home well before nightfall) and I am already trying to digest what this Xmas present means for my patients and for my house staff. In the last few days we pulled out all stops to get patients home. The ones who can't go home are too ill, and going home may not be an option; instead it might be a specialized nursing facility or rehabilitation place. One or two of these patients have been very much on my mind, long after I leave the hospital, their suffering both palpable and difficult to forget, and making me conscious of the blessings of just walking outside, stepping into a car and going somewhere.

More here.

Is there a more mythic band than Led Zeppelin? At the pinnacle of their success, with Robert Plant’s hair lighted by stadium lights, they looked like they’d just come down off Mt. Olympus. “Plant,” writes Mick Wall in his new book “When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin,” “was tall, blond and looked good enough to eat, a veritable golden god shaking what he’d got — the perfect visual foil to [Jimmy] Page’s darker, more slender, slightly effeminate persona.” “When Giants Walked the Earth” devotes a lot of time to this mythic image of the band, telling us about Page’s studies of magic and how this shaped their music — maybe even contributed to the band’s decline. It’s a hoary cliche, but one has to ask, did Led Zeppelin sell its soul for rock ‘n’ roll?

more from Nick Owchar at the LAT here.

No other writer of the 20th century had Arthur Koestler’s knack for doing odd things, crossing paths with important people and being present when disaster struck. As a 27-year-old Communist he spent the famine winter of 1932-33 in Khar­kov, amid millions of starving Ukrainians. Rushing southward through France ahead of the invading Nazi armies in 1940, he ran into the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who shared with him half the morphine tablets Benjamin would use, weeks later, to commit suicide. The Harvard drug guru Timothy Leary gave Koestler psilocybin in the mid-1960s, and Margaret Thatcher solicited his advice in her 1979 election campaign. Simone de Beauvoir slept with him but came to hate him, and in a fictional portrait described a blazing intelligence and a personality capable of sweeping people off their feet. Yet, although he wrote more than 30 books, Koestler is today known primarily, perhaps exclusively, as the author of “Darkness at Noon,” his gripping short novel of Stalinist coercion. The biographer Michael Scammell wants to put Koestler’s multifaceted intelligence back on display and to show that something more than frivolity or opportunism lay behind his ever-shifting preoccupations and allegiances.

more from Christopher Caldwell at the NYT here.

From The Newest Deal:

Ever since Grand Ayatollah Ali Montazeri’s sudden death last Sunday, events in Iran have been unfolding at a dramatic pace, and with Ashura now only a day away, the regime’s fate has never been more uncertain. In fact, Montazeri’s death may end up being the seminal event that takes the Green Path of Hope from being a social movement into becoming a full-fledged and national uprising.

The regime’s handling of the late dissident cleric’s death has had two discernable effects. First, it has only expanded public sympathy for the Green cause, and particularly to a more pious demographic. The shocking disrespect Khamenei showed in his message of “condolence” by saying he would ask God to forgive Montazeri for failing his “momentous test” — a reference to the falling out the Montazeri had with Khomeini and his eventual renouncement of the Islamic Republic — has enraged many Iranians. Khamenei, it should be noted, was not even an Ayatollah when he was anointed Supreme Leader after Khomeini’s death. Montazeri, on the other hand, stood alone with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani as the most senior religious authority in the Shia faith. Khamenei's recent delusions of self-grandeur have only made many religious Iranians become cognizant of a truth that Montazeri stated long ago: the Islamic Republic acts anything but Islamic.

The Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) has reportedly recognized just how ill-advised the regime’s blundering actions in the aftermath of Montazeri’s death were. In a letter to the Interior Minister, the council blasts the attack on Ayatollah Taheri’s mourning ceremony in Isfahan, citing the enormous outrage it created after word leaked out and first reached Qom and then to the rest of the country. For a supposed theocracy to be targetting the clerical class is indeed telling of just how desperate (and paranoid) the regime has become.

More here. [Thanks to Zara Houshmand.]

Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation:

A new round of political upheaval has been triggered in Pakistan, with the Supreme Court’s decision to void the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) that provided a get-out-of-jail-free card to key civilian leaders of Pakistan. Included among those leaders are its utterly corrupt president, Asif Ali Zardari, and several top officials, including the minister of defense and the minister of interior. Those ministers, and others, have been told by the authorities not to leave town, i.e., they are forbidden to travel abroad, and pressure is on Zardari to resign.

If Pakistan has any hope of breaking the military’s stranglehold on power, that hope rests in the civilian parties, including Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party — the party of the late President Bhutto and his daughter, Benazir, Zardari’s late wife, who was assassinated on her return from exile — and the more religious-centered Pakistan Muslim League (N) of the Sharif brothers, including Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister. Neither the PPP and the Muslim League, however, are true mass-based political parties. Instead, they have become vehicles for the personal and political ambitions of the corrupt families who control them. By default, the leadership of the democratic, civilian movement in Pakistan has fallen instead to the lawyers’ movement and to the courts, but it’s hard to see how those forces could emerge as a credible political movement that could lead the country. In Pakistan, nominally a democracy, actual democrats are few and far between, and it will take a long time for any of Pakistan’s political parties and movements to put down roots and grow into true democratic parties. Meanwhile, it isn’t clear that the army will allow that to happen.

More here.  [Thanks to Maniza Naqvi.]

From The New York Times:

Great men in the winter of their lives often treat the writing of their memoirs as a kind of victory lap, but whatever J. M. Coetzee is after in this third volume of his genre-bending auto­biography, it is not self-­congratulation. The first two volumes, unadornedly titled “Boyhood” and “Youth” (and, in contrast to this one, labeled nonfiction), were marked by Coetzee’s decision to write about himself in the third person. In “Summertime” he takes this schism one bracing step farther, by imagining himself already dead. The book is nominally a kind of rough-draft effort by Coetzee’s own biographer, an Englishman named Vincent, to build the case — through transcribed interviews with lovers and colleagues and other figures mentioned by Coetzee in his “posthumously” opened notebooks — for the years 1971-77 as an especially formative period in the late author’s life, “a period,” as Vincent would have it, “when he was still finding his feet as a writer.”

More here.

Looking Around, Believing

How strange that we can begin at any time.

With two feet we get down the street.

With a hand we undo the rose.

With an eye we lift up the peach tree

And hold it up to the wind — white blossoms

At our feet. Like today. I started

In the yard with my daughter,

With my wife poking at a potted geranium,

And now I am walking down the street,

Amazed that the sun is only so high,

Just over the roof, and a child

Is singing through a rolled newspaper

And a terrier is leaping like a flea

And at the bakery I pass, a palm,

Like a suctioning starfish, is pressed

To the window. We're keeping busy —

This way, that way, we're making shadows

Where sunlight was, making words

Where there was only noise in the trees.

by Gary Soto

from New and Selected Poems;
Chronicle Books, 1995.

Gretchen Reynolds in the New York Times Magazine:

Sit on the floor with your legs stretched straight out in front of you, toes pointing up. Reach forward from the hips. Are you flexible enough to touch your toes? If so, then your cardiac arteries probably are also flexible.

In the study’s experiment, scientists from the University of North Texas and several Japanese universities recruited 526 healthy adults between the ages of 20 and 83 and had them perform the basic sit-and-reach test described above, although their extensions were measured precisely with digital devices. Taking into account age and gender, researchers then sorted the subjects into either the high-flexibility group or the poor-flexibility group.

Next, using blood-pressure cuffs at each person’s ankles and arms, researchers estimated how flexible their arteries were. Cardiac artery flexibility is one of the less familiar elements of heart health. Supple arterial walls allow the blood to move freely through the body. Stiff arteries require the heart to work much harder to force blood through the unyielding vessels and over time could, according to Kenta Yamamoto, a researcher at North Texas and lead author of the study, contribute to a greater risk for heart attack and stroke.

What the researchers found was a clear correlation between inflexible bodies and inflexible arteries in subjects older than 40.

More here.

From RichardDawkins.net:

“But now, Jeeves, mark the sequel. A fellow at the Drones Christmas party was bending my ear last night over the snort that refreshes. Seems there’s a cove called Darwin who says Genesis is all a lot of rot. God’s been oversold on the campus. He didn’t make everything after all. There’s something called evaluation…”

“Evolution sir. The theory advanced by Charles Darwin in his great book of 1859,

“That’s the baby, Jeeves. Evolution. Would you credit it, this Darwin bozo wants me to believe my great great grandfather was some kind of hirsute banana-stuffer, scratching himself with his toes and swinging through the treetops. Now, Jeeves, answer me this. If we’re descended from chimpanzees, why are there chimpanzees still among those present and correct? I saw one only last month at the zoo. Why haven’t they all turned into members of the Drones Club (or the Athenaeum according to taste)? Try that on your pianola, Jeeves.”

More here.

Also on this Christmas, Ziba Mir-Hosseini in MERIP Online:

Iranians of today, from both genders, all classes and all parts of the country, have rejected or at least questioned many of the gender codes and sexual taboos firmly enforced by the Islamic Republic over the past 30 years. So, at least, the current government appears to believe; hence the countrywide Social Morality Plan (tarh-e amniyat ejtema’i) instated by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2006 in an attempt to reimpose the rigid codes of dress and comportment that prevailed in the earliest days of the revolution. Further evidence is provided by several novel elements in the 2009 election campaign and its aftermath.

The first element was the nature of women’s political participation. For a long time, a division, if not an antipathy, between “secular” and “religious” women has marked the politics of gender. The distinction refers to political attitudes, and not personal piety. “Religious” women, in the main, believed that the country’s laws and social norms should be based upon Islam, while “secular” women might be anti-clerical or supportive of complete separation of mosque and state. Many women of all persuasions backed the reformist President Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), because he promised concrete improvements in women’s lives, but the divide lingered nonetheless. On the eve of the 2005 presidential election, at the end of Khatami’s second term, when secular women’s groups organized a rally in front of Tehran University to ask for equality, framing their demands in constitutional terms, women from the official reformist parties did not join them. They did not want to break all ties with the establishment and to be seen as siding with the newly emerging secular feminists, who for their part were keen to keep their distance from religious reformists.

But in April 2009, 42 women’s groups and 700 individuals, including both secular feminists and religious women from the reformist parties, came together to form a coalition called the Women’s Convergence. Without supporting any individual candidate, the coalition posed pointed questions to the field. They raised two specific demands: first, the ratification of the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women and second, the revision of Articles 19, 20, 21 and 115 of the Iranian constitution that enshrine gender discrimination. Using the press and new media, they put the candidates on the spot to respond. Women’s demand for legal equality became a central issue in the campaign season. Distinguished filmmaker Rakhshan Bani-Etemad made a documentary, available on the Internet, which registers the voices and demands of these women and the replies of the candidates. Ahmadinejad was, of course, the only candidate not to appear.

The second novelty was the appearance of Zahra Rahnavard at the side of — and even holding hands with — her husband, the candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. Though many women politicians have served in the Islamic Republic’s legislature, they had been absent from high-level politics, and the 2009 campaign was the first time that a woman appeared as an equal partner and intellectual match for her man.

Justin Smith over at his website:

Among the many signs that the Romanian revolutionaries of 1989 were not thinking of the future was their choice of Christmas day, December 25, for the mediatized execution of the deposed president Nicolae Ceauşescu, along with his wife and controller Elena. One consequence is that now, every year, Romanians get to re-watch, on their ubiquitous televisions, alongside the traditional carols and the kitsch revue shows with teenaged girls in sequined leotards and Santa hats, the wrenching military trial and the bloody execution that quickly followed it. This year, the 20th anniversary of the execution, the Romanian television producers are particularly concerned to show the more gruesome parts. The version I saw 'live', as an adolescent, on NBC nightly news, from within the gates of a Palm Springs country club, was highly censored to suit American sensibilities. The reality is that the Romanian revolution of 1989 did not at all ride that wave of 'velvet' transitions of power, of which the Czechoslovak version, with the media-friendly Vaclav Havel at its helm, will always serve as paradigm.

To Lenin we owe the idea, of which Žižek, Badiou, and others have recently made much, that in the course of human affairs there occasionally comes what may be called a true 'revolutionary moment', a moment that changes everything, when, due to circumstances entirely beyond the will of any individual, the perception of the place of authority shifts, and the legitimacy of the old power structure simply evaporates. There is a new tendency to treat these moments as though their happening were a sort of law of nature, and so today many people are wondering why one failed to happen in Iran recently, why, in spite of the anger of the youth and the total delegitimization of the mullahs in the eyes of the rest of the world, the mullahs themselves went right on as smugly convinced of their own legitimacy as ever.