What Can I Do? —Gündüz Vassaf’s Call to Action in a Time of Rampant Pessimism, Part 2

by Humera Afridi

CrP_YsPVMAAo42rGündüz Vassaf's latest book, What Can I Do, arrived like manna this past summer, a panacea for our times, urging action as an antidote to pessimism. The book's publication in Turkey coincided with the heightened and volatile political climate in the country in the immediate aftermath of the failed coup attempt. Its message couldn't be more pertinent. Certainly, post-election America, traumatized and rattled by aftershocks, could do with just such a guide. The need for an English translation of What Can I Do? feels ever more critical.

On November 4, 2016, days before the US elections, writing from Ortigia, Sicily, Vassaf dispatched a prescient letter to editors of several international newspapers, stating with clarity what's exactly at stake in the US elections: “It's not just who the candidates are. America is too important for the world. And the world is too important to be left to America.” Here we find ourselves now, inhabiting an altered reality post-election, and Vassaf's disavowal of pessimism in favor of action resonates powerfully, offering a means of harnessing our ability to create the change we want to see.

The idea of freedom is a leitmotif in Gündüz Vassaf's work. Freedom is something he is conscious of in all aspects of life, both visible and unseen. It's a subject he delves into in an earlier book, Prisoners of Ourselves. Freedom is, too, a practice he embodies daily, certainly through his creativity, upholding the ideal of a life liberated from artificial and internalized constraints. The day we met, I noticed with surprised delight that he prefers to walk barefoot around the island where he resides in the summer, utterly at ease traversing the stony ground without shoes. Moments after introductions were exchanged, Vassaf suggested a swim, and a small group of us waded into the blue-green Sea of Marmara, as if we'd been friends forever. I marveled at my own readiness to discard formality in Vassaf's company, noting his talent for opening the way to an honest, satisfying experience of reality, stripped of convention and inhibition.

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Darkness at Dawn: Thoughts at the Beginning of a New Day in America

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by Ali Minai

It is the worst of times. Period! The presidential election of 2016 possibly represents a hinge-point in American like no other since the beginning of the Cold War, though perhaps an argument can be made for 9-11. Indeed, September 11, 2001 and November 8, 2016 may be seen as two ends of the same massive hinge that has turned that entire course of American — and, therefore, world — history in a different direction.

Within the domestic context of the United States, it is hard to see the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency as anything other than the ignition of a new civil conflict along ideological lines. It is not a “civil war”, but the weapons involved will be no less destructive to the fabric of society.

The arrival of this conflict is not a surprise since there have been hints of it for years, but its current modality is a huge shock. Tensions have been building up in the United States for decades as it turns inexorably towards becoming a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious society. Power has been siphoning away from the mainly white elite defined by tradition and becoming distributed over a more diverse elite defined by education and technical competence. The largest group “left behind” in this process is the non-elite largely white population that, long conditioned to accept the supremacy of the traditional elite, suddenly finds itself facing competition from unskilled Latin American labor and the ascendancy of a new diverse and global elite. Saying “I want my country back” is a natural response in this situation. It is impossible for this sentiment not to have an ethnic subtext — though it is an oversimplification to see the conflict as primarily racial, ethnic or religious. These factors are important signifiers, but the core issue is a fundamental difference in worldviews.

Add in the devastation of rural America by poverty and drugs, the stoking of religious tensions by 9-11, endless wars fought by soldiers from the lower economic strata, the disdainful attitude of the new liberal elites, and one has a toxic brew of resentment bubbling in the white working class (WWC) throughout the country. The only question was whether this boiling hot mess would subside as the cold water of demographic reality drizzled on it, or if it would come to a boil. Obama’s election in 2008 and 2012 seemed to suggest that it might be cooling down. Unfortunately, not so!

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Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend

Shehryar Fazli in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

AlcaponeIn a classic scene in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), Robert De Niro’s Al Capone weeps to an aria from Pagliacci, and is interrupted by his main henchman, Frank Nitti, to inform him that an antagonist in the police has been executed. His face relaxes momentarily as he digests the news, then swells again toward euphoria. This counterpoint of refinement and violence seems essential to depicting Capone, in a way that it isn’t for other gangsters like, say, Bugsy Siegel or Dutch Schultz. In an earlier scene, after charming a roundtable of dinner guests with sharp one-liners and wisdom about teamwork, a tuxedoed Capone bashes one of the diners’ heads with a baseball bat until the man’s brains and blood spread over the rich white tablecloth. As his latest biographer, Deidre Bair, says, “He was so wildly charming, so blatantly outsized in everything he did, and so fully in the public eye that it was hard to believe such a good fellow and one so highly entertaining, he of the pithy quotation and catchy phrase, could be all that bad.”

And as bad as he demonstrably was, Capone tilted the axis of Prohibition-era high society as much as he did that of organized crime. No other gangster’s name — Siegel, Schultz, Luciano, Lanksy — summons as much cultural heft as Capone’s, his only possible rival being the fictional Corleone.

More here.

Oppenheimer’s folly: On black holes, fundamental laws and pure and applied science

Ashutosh Jogalekar in The Curious Wavefunction:

ScreenHunter_2382 Nov. 21 10.34On September 1, 1939, the same day that Germany attacked Poland and started World War 2, a remarkable paper appeared in the pages of the journal Physical Review. In it J. Robert Oppenheimer and his student Hartland Snyder laid out the essential characteristics of what we today call the black hole. Building on work done by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Fritz Zwicky and Lev Landau, Oppenheimer and Snyder described how an infalling observer on the surface of an object whose mass exceeded a critical mass would appear to be in a state of perpetual free fall to an outsider. The paper was the culmination of two years of work and followed two other articles in the same journal.

Then Oppenheimer forgot all about it and never said anything about black holes for the rest of his life.

He had not worked on black holes before 1938, and he would not do so ever again. Ironically, it is this brief contribution to physics that is now widely considered to be Oppenheimer’s greatest, enough to have possibly warranted him a Nobel Prize had he lived long enough to see experimental evidence for black holes show up with the advent of radio astronomy.

What happened?

More here.

Trumpism could be a solution to the crisis of neoliberalism

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Robert Skidelsky in The Guardian:

The sense then of a “crumbling” world was captured by WB Yeats’s 1919 poem The Second Coming: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” With the traditional institutions of rule thoroughly discredited by the war, the vacuum of legitimacy would be filled by powerful demagogues and populist dictatorships: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/are full of passionate intensity.” Oswald Spengler had the same idea in his Decline of the West, published in 1918.

Yeats’s political prognosis was shaped by his religious eschatology. He believed the world had to wade through “nightmare” for “Bethlehem to be born”. In his day, he was right. The nightmare he discerned continued through the Great Depression of 1929-1932, and culminated in the second world war. These were preludes to the “second coming”, not of Christ, but of a liberalism built on firmer social foundations.

But were the nightmares of depression and war necessary preludes? Is horror the price we must pay for progress? Evil has indeed often been the agent of good (without Hitler, no United Nations, no Pax Americana, no European Union, no taboo on racism, no decolonisation, no Keynesian economics, and much else). But it does not follow that evil is necessary for good, much less that we should wish it as a means to an end.

We cannot embrace the politics of upheaval, because we cannot be sure that it will produce a Roosevelt rather than a Hitler. Any decent, rational person hopes for a milder method to achieve progress.

But must the milder method – call it parliamentary or constitutional democracy – break down periodically in disastrous fashion? The usual explanation is that a system fails because the elites lose touch with the masses. But while one would expect this disconnect to happen in dictatorships, why does disenchantment with democracy take root in democracies themselves?

One explanation, which goes back to Aristotle, is the perversion of democracy by plutocracy. The more unequal a society, the more the lifestyles and values of the wealthy diverge from those of “ordinary” people.

More here.

Trump’s election has undermined ‘political correctness.’ That might actually be a problem.

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Henry Farrell in Monkey Cage:

Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard who caused controversy with his comments on women, announced in The Post that he was never going to use the term “political correctness” again. The real threat, in Summers’ view, stems from the “terrifying events” that Donald Trump’s election has set off, leading to an upsurge in hateful incidents and speech.

Timur Kuran’s academic book, “Private Truths, Public Lies,” helps explain why Trump’s election victory has been associated with an upsurge in hate crimes.

Kuran may seem an improbable person to explain why public expressions of racism are increasing: He doesn’t believe that U.S. racism is as bad as many think, opposes “political correctness” and “affirmative action” and argues that the U.S. has metamorphosed “from a country that oppresses blacks into one that gives many blacks special privileges.”

Even so, his intellectual arguments can be separated from his political beliefs. His notion of “preference falsification” provides a plausible explanation for why many racists, anti-Semites and the like were reluctant to reveal their true beliefs until recently. It also explains why they are more willing to do so now that Trump has been elected.

Preference falsification means that people often don’t say what they really think

Kuran’s key idea is that ‘preference falsification’ explains many aspects of human society and politics. Preference falsification is “the act of misrepresenting one’s genuine wants under perceived social pressure.” Trivial examples of this are commonplace. When we go to our boss’s house for dinner, we don’t necessarily express our true opinion of his or her hideous taste in furniture, and may indeed praise it. At Thanksgiving dinner, we may want to bite our tongues when relatives express loud and confident political opinions that we completely disagree with.

More here.

After Trump

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The Boston Review has a forum on Trump's victory, with responses by Joshua Cohen, Janice Fine, Judith Levine and Robin Kelley. Janice Fine:

Unions, more than any other institution of American life, have been the vehicles through which working-class people, often across boundaries of gender, race, and ethnicity, have organized to have their say, assert their power, and ensure their share of the economic pie. For these reasons, aside from the New Deal interregnum, they have come under unceasing attack.

With the decline of manufacturing, workers no longer inherited union membership when they arrived at the shop. Instead unions had to undertake massive new organizing in other sectors of the economy. But employers resisted them at every turn and repeated attempts at labor law reform fell short. Attempting to organize a union often got workers harassed, threatened, fired, or deported. Even when they won elections, many employers just refused to come to the bargaining table until the clock ran out. Going on strike got workers locked out and permanently replaced. Between 1978 and 2000, the unionization rate among workers with high school degrees fell from 37.9 percent to 20.4 percent.

The Democratic Party, hugely reliant on union money and volunteers, fell increasingly in thrall to the corporate elite and the free trade consensus. It seldom made defending the right to organize a priority in recent years. Today unions represent just 6.7 percent of private-sector workers, and the forces of the right are tireless in their effort to consign public-sector unions to the same fate.

In 2009 the number of union members in the public sector outnumbered those in the private sector for the first time in American history. Public-sector workers have a union membership rate (about 35 percent) which is more than five times higher than private-sector workers. They were a main reason organized labor continued to fight above its weight class in politics. Thus, attacking collective bargaining rights and ending labor’s ability to have union dues deducted from members’ paychecks rose to the top of the right’s political agenda.

Grover Norquist, one of the top strategists of the conservative movement since the Reagan era, wrote after the election of George W. Bush that in order to maintain Republican control, the Bush administration needed to gut unions. To do so, Norquist urged Bush to focus on ending labor’s ability to have dues deducted from member paychecks. “Every worker who doesn’t join the union is another worker who doesn’t pay $500 a year to organized labor’s political machine,” he argued.

More here.

Mesmerising: How hypnosis works is a partnership

Erik Vance in Aeon:

Inline-Charcot-152232752Some trace the first hypnotists back more than 4,000 years to the sleep temple of the Egyptian priest Imhotep; others to ancient Greece. The original source of the induction techniques familiar today is probably the Roma, or Gypsies, who would have brought hypnosis from India to Europe 1,000 years ago. The modern incarnation of hypnosis can be traced to the 18th-century German priest and exorcist Johann Joseph Gassner, who believed he had the power to channel God’s word through his own voice. By speaking in a calm and commanding tone to his patients, he could reportedly rid them of all sorts of demons that today we might call epilepsy or muscle spasm. In one case, he is said to have commanded a patient to slow down his pulse in one arm while speeding it up in the other. Gassner’s work was spotted by Franz Mesmer, a German gentleman scientist who theorised that magnetism controlled the tides (it doesn’t), planetary movement (it doesn’t) and even health (it really doesn’t). He wore a striking silk coat with a silk liner to keep his magnetic power in, and would often carry an iron rod to wave over people, or treat them using small magnets.

…Mesmer’s most famous client was Marie Antoinette. Her husband Louis XVI at first welcomed Mesmer to Paris but soon became suspicious and formed a panel of eminent scientists – including Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry, and Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States – to evaluate Mesmer’s techniques. The result was a wonderfully entertaining scientific treatise that discredited Mesmer’s magnets and foretold the era of placebo-controlled trials. But the team also sent a secret memo to the king, pointing out that a person under the power of hypnosis would be easy to sexually assault.

More here.

Sunday Poem

Refugee Blues
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Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.

The consul banged the table and said,
“If you've got no passport you're officially dead”:
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;
“If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread”:
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying, “They must die”:
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews.

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.
.

by W.H. Auden
from Selected Poems
Vintage Books, 1974
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Theda Skocpol Responds to John Judis

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Theda Skocpol in Talking Points Memo:

We on the center left seem to treat these presidential machines as organization, and they are, but they are not as effective as longstanding natural organized networks. To get some of those working for him, Trump made deals to get the NRA , Christian right and GOP federated operations on his side. They have real, extensive reach into nonmetro areas. But off the coasts, Democrats no longer have such reach beyond what a presidential campaign does on its own. Public sector and private sector unions have been decimated. And most of the rest of the Democratic-aligned infrastructure is metro based and focused. That infrastructure is also fragmented into hundreds of little issue and identity organizations run by professionals.

HRC’s narrow loss was grounded in this absent non-metro infrastructure – and Dem Party losses in elections overall even more so. Obama overcame that deficit. But he is a once in half century figure. How can anyone blame the HRC campaign for failing to equal Obama’s margins among minorities? No Democrat would have done so. For sure, Bernie would not have done so.

Why do these different analytical approaches (aggregate attitudinal vs. organizational) matter? Because they lead to very different prescriptions for what should be done next. Mine says Democrats have to create sustained organizational reach, not just at election time, stretching beyond metropolitan communities and states. Yours, however, is the conventional wisdom: This type of argument is used to argue that Democrats must “message” better and move left on policy issues to attract an imaginary factory-based white working class. How would that have worked in an election where the media never conveyed any policy substance at all?

More here.

How the lawyerly discourse of drone warfare misses the point

Cover00Chase Madar at Bookforum:

How quickly talk of war turns into talk of law! When a hospital is bombed in a military action, whether by the United States in Afghanistan, Russia in Syria, or Israel in Gaza, what typically draws outrage is the “war crime”—the violation of the laws of armed conflict—while the choice to wage war itself evades condemnation or analysis. Opposition to the Iraq War was commonly voiced as a matter of respect for international law. And now that Washington is helping a Saudi-led coalition bomb Yemen, one common apologia is that American targeting assistance saves lives by bringing air strikes into compliance with “international humanitarian law,” the euphemistic term for the laws of war.

Such opposition as exists to US drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Somalia is also frequently expressed as concern about inadequate legal procedure. But as Jameel Jaffer points out in the introduction to his new anthology, The Drone Memos, the problems with these strikes are hardly limited to questions of legality. Dennis Blair, a former director of National Intelligence under Obama, has worried that drone strikes might be harming the “national interest”—presumably, the security of the domestic United States—in the long run. Even perfectly executed tactics can undermine larger strategy: Not mentioned in Jaffer's introductory essay is this past May's drone assassination of Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, the leader of the Afghan Taliban. Instead of causing the Taliban to disintegrate or surrender, it merely brought forward new leaders, who have turned out to be even more hostile to negotiations for peace and power-sharing deals with the Kabul government and its American patrons. At this point, reaching such a deal is Washington's aim in the Afghan war, but because of the successful drone assassination of a high-value target, this goal has been set back at least a year.

more here.

The man who brought ‘Civilisation’ to a mass market

Article-2611748-0001349600000258-119_634x512Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

In 1969 the BBC aired a 13-part documentary entitled “Civilisation: A Personal View.” Hosted by an upper-class Englishman with crooked teeth and a penchant for tweed, it traced the history of European art, music and literature from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, ending on a note of slightly qualified despair. The humanist values celebrated in the series were being lost or forgotten. More and more, we worshiped the machine and the computer, and instead of living with joy, confidence and energy, we dwelt gloomily in the valley of the shadow of global destruction. Still, there had been Dark Ages in the past, and humankind just might squeak through, by — as the very first episode declared — “the skin of our teeth.”

Not surprisingly, no American TV network wanted to pick up an artsy-fartsy program highlighting a talking head who might be discoursing in front of Chartres Cathedral one week and discussing the sculptures of Bernini the next. Oh, ye of little faith! When Washington’s National Gallery of Art arranged a special screening of “Civilisation” in the fall of 1969, the queue to see the first episode stretched down the Mall and numbered in the thousands. The gallery quickly took to running each weekly installment multiple times. Finally picked up by PBS, “Civilisation” was a television blockbuster in 1970, its companion booksold a million and a half copies in its first decade and Sir Kenneth Clark — the subject of the superb biography “Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and ‘Civilisation’  ” by James Stourton — emerged as high culture’s classiest superstar.

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Günter Grass’ last book

Günter_Grass_(1982)Günter Grass at The Guardian:

At long last, having discussed our joint project many times, testing and rejecting various ideas at the kitchen table, we had reached a decision; the master carpenter Ernst Adomait sat across from us. The conversation began over tea and cakes, hesitantly at first, but soon underway.

Adomait has worked for us for years. He’s built standing desks and bookcases, and various smaller items for my wife. We told him what we wanted, never defining it as our last will and testament. After looking through the French window into the summery, windless garden, he agreed to take the job and make the boxes. He suggested they be measured separately for length and width, and we agreed. He had no objection to our request for two different woods: pine for my wife, birch for me. The boxes would be of equal depth, but hers would be two metres 10 long and mine two metres. My box would be five centimetres wider, to match my shoulders.

When I said “not tapered toward the foot,” which was once standard and may still be customary, he nodded in agreement.

I mentioned Wild West films in the course of which this sort of plain carpentry grew in demand. My sketch on a paper napkin proved unnecessary; the idea was clear enough. The boxes would be finished by autumn. We assured him we were in no hurry, but laced the conversation with hints about our combined age.

more here.

‘None of the old rules apply’: Dave Eggers travels through post-election America

Dave Eggers in The Guardian:

UntitledBack in April, I had been in the Gaza Strip and had met a married couple, Mahmoud and Miriam, journalists and activists who badly wanted to leave Gaza. I had e-introduced them to an asylum lawyer in San Francisco, but from 7,000 miles away, she couldn’t do much to help. The impossible thing was that they actually had a visa. A real visa issued by the American state department. All they had to do was get out of Gaza. But permissions were needed from the Israelis or Egyptians, and they were having no luck with either. Finally, one day in October, an email arrived. Mahmoud and Miriam were in Brooklyn. They’d bribed an Egyptian guard at the Rafah gate and had made their way on a 14‑hour journey through Sinai.

…“I’m so sorry,” I said. I was apologising for what we’d done the day before. Electing the man who wanted to ban all Muslims from entering the country. The man who might bring Giuliani into a seat of unspeakable power. This could mean terrible things for Palestinians. There was already talk of the end of the two-state solution. Netanyahu, it was assumed, had danced all night. “It’s OK,” they said.

…The Gazan asylum seekers were telling me not to worry. But I was worried. Worried enough to change their names in this piece. They aren’t Mahmoud and Miriam. We are entering an era where uniquely vindictive men will have uniquely awesome power. Dark forces have already been unleashed and terrible plans are being made. On 3 December, the Ku Klux Klan are holding their largest public rally in years, to celebrate Trump’s victory, which they claim as their own. I also changed Steven McManus’s name. I worried for him, as well. You should be worried, too. George W Bush, a man of comparative calm and measured intellect, started two foreign wars and cratered the world economy. Trump is far more reckless.

We are speeding toward a dark corridor, my friends. Keep your eyes open, your hearts stout and be ready for the fight.

More here.

Saturday Poem

Map to the Stars

A Schwinn-ride away: Eagledale Plaza. Shopping strip of busted
walkways, crooked parking spaces nicked like the lines
on the sides of somebody’s mom-barbered head. Anchored
by the Piccadilly disco, where a shootout was guaranteed every
weekend, those gun claps: coughing stars shot from sideways
guns shiny enough to light the way for anyone willing to keep
a head up long enough to see. Not me. I bought the Star Map
Shirt for 15¢ at the Value Village next to the Piccadilly during
the daytime. The shirt was polyester with flyaway collars,
outlined in the forgotten astronomies of disco. The shirt’s
washed-out points of light: arranged in horse & hero shapes
& I rocked it in places neither horse nor hero hung out.
Polyester is made from polyethylene & catches fire easily
like wings near a thrift store sun. Polyethylene, used in shampoo
bottles, gun cases, & those grocery sacks skidding like upended
stars across the parking lot. There are more kinds of stars
in this universe than salt granules on drive-thru fries. Too many
stars, lessening & swelling with each pedal pump away from
the Value Village as the electric billboard above flashes first
one dui attorney, then another who speaks Spanish so the sky
above is constantly chattering, like the biggest disco ball ever.

by Adrian Matejka
from Poetry, Vol. 200, No. 4,
July/August, 2012