Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 924

December 13, 2015

They’re just trying to scare you: The GOP’s long history of bizarre, make-believe enemies

In the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks, the entire GOP is following the fear-based pathway Donald Trump first blazed against undocumented immigrants from Mexico, in which all manner of different fears get jumbled together as if they were all just parts of one grand conspiracy against “real Americans.”  The idea that Syrian refugees pose a mortal danger that Obama is nefariously ignoring (or possibly even aiding) is symptomatic of a more general tendency to arbitrarily weave together the most unlikely combination of real and imaginary threats into a pseudo-coherent whole whose logic bears no resemblance at all to anything in the real world, while preserving one constant — the central focus on the self-identified victims and their struggle to maintain holy virtue. 

But there's nothing new in this. In fact, it taps into a deep foundational aspect of our national psyche, forged in colonial times in Puritan New England, given form specifically by Cotton Mather, building on the early popular narrative form of captivity narratives, as described by historian Richard Slotkin in his 1973 book "Regeneration Through Violence." Captivity narratives were America's first popular literary genre, based on the capture of colonists by warring Native tribes, which claimed more than 1,000 victims in 17th and 18th century Puritan New England. Mather — based on his encounter with Mercy Short, a 17-year-old captivity survivor — took the captivity framework, and used it directly to explain witchcraft-induced demonic possession (“captivity by specters”), as well as a host of other threats facing Puritan New England at the time.

To understand what Mather did, we need to begin with the captivity narratives he generalized from. Mary Rowlandson's "The Soveraignty & Goodness of God...a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration" (1682) was the first and by far the most widely distributed book devoted to a single captivity,” Slotkin notes, but its cultural potency inevitably led to its narrative appropriation over time. “By the late 1740s the captivities had become so much a part of the New England way of thinking that they provided a symbolic vocabulary to which preachers would refer almost automatically in any attempt at stirring a revival of religious sentiments. Even Jonathan Edward's 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,' [text here] the most perfect of the revival sermons, employs images from the captivities.”

The cultural resonance of the narratives has a straightforward explanation: On the one hand, the fear of capture was objectively quite realistic, on the other hand, the interpretive framework deployed throughout profoundly reflected both the broad assumptions of Puritan theology and the specific inflections of spiritual anxieties that developed in the New England Puritan community at the time. These resulted from their experience after having gained a foothold in the New World, establishing a degree of comfort and complacency that leaders like Mather, particularly, found deeply troubling.

“Mrs. Rowlandson's captivity begins typically, with the heroine-victim in a state of relatively complacent ease,” Slotkin wrote. “She is only vaguely troubled by her easy situation, vaguely wondering why God does not 'try' her in some way. Others of her acquaintance have been so tried, and some had fallen, the Bible promises that all will be tried and should be prepared."  She knows this in her head, as it were, but not in her heart, she “has forgotten the true meaning of these warnings and portents.” Falling into captivity, she then experiences trials she once vaguely wished for, only to be dramatically traumatized, tested and transformed by them, ending up in a place she was always meant to be, in one sense, yet, at the same time subtly alienated from the bosom of her community, purportedly based on that very worldview she now most fully realizes.

The threat of captivity was more vivid and varied than merely the threat of death:

Indian captivity was almost certain to result in spiritual and physical catastrophe. The captives either vanished forever into the woods, or returned half-Indianized or Romanized, or converted to Catholicism and stayed in Canada, or married some “Canadian half-breed” or “Indian slut,” or went totally savage. In any of these cases, the captive was a soul utterly lost to the tents of the English Israel.

The ease Rowlandson experienced before her captivity represented a falling away from the “very reason that the Puritan emigrants had come to America, seeking a hard way to do the Lord's work,” a falling away that greatly troubled their leaders, more than anyone else.  Hence, the captivity narrative was, in its own culturally specific way, a restoration narrative: it articulated a restoration of the state of self-evident risk and peril — entrusting their fate to God's hand — which the Puritans embraced in departing the Old World for New England in the first place. As Slotkin writes, “the captivity experience, with its pains and trials, brings a forced end to comforts and pleasures. The cross is thrust upon the Christian—to love it, accept it, and be saved; or to rail against it and perish.”

The combination of being grounded in a real world threat on the one hand, and in their own shared theology and group psychology on the other, made for the incredibly potency and coherent internal logic of the captivity narrative form. It both made sense of the the real world threat they faced, and demonstrated the proof of their theological outlook at the same time—a self-reinforcing double confirmation. Because of this, it was only logical that the narrative “about” the outside world could then be turned inward as well to make sense of the witchcraft experience, as a form of “captivity by specters,” particularly in the case of Mercy Short, who had already been through the actual captivity experience, two years earlier, at the age of 15. Her parents and siblings were killed in the process, a harrowing experience which could easily give rise to prolonged traumatic episodes afterward, two of which she indeed experienced, and Mather interpreted, after his fashion:

Mather clearly regarded Mercy Short's case as an archetype of New England's condition, and he presented it as such in "A Brand Pluck'd Out of the Burning" [text here]—a narrative of his dealings with the girl that was widely circulated in manuscript. The structural pattern invoked in this account is clearly that of the captivity narrative; but here it is transformed into a ritual exorcism of an Indian-like demon from the body of the white, female “Saint.”

But Mather went even further than this in his systematic integration, which he had been groping toward for some time:

Mather had long been preparing for just such a confrontation with the devil. He was then at work on the gathering and systematizing of historical and theological materials that was to culminate in his masterwork, the Magnalia Chrisi Americana. That massive work was to be the history of New England “under the aspect of Eternity”; it would explicate the New England experience in terms of a total world view in which Puritans and Indians would find their true valuation and be placed in the context of the divine drama of history, as it unfolds from Eden to Calvary to Boston to Apocalypse.

Puritans like Mather were not just confronted by Native Americans, however. They were hemmed in by a whole panoply of enemy others:

His confrontation with Mercy Short's devils clarified issues for him and enabled him to draw connections between the several “assaults” on pious New England that he and his father had resisted for years: the assaults of the Indians and of frontier paganism, the assaults of ministerial frauds and heretics, the assaults of the Quakers, the assaults of the royal governor on colonial prerogatives, and the final assault of the witches and the Invisible Kingdom in 1692. Mercy Short helped Mather discover that the common pattern in each of these assaults was precisely that of the captivity narrative: a devilish visitation, an enforced sojourn in evil climes under the rule of man-devils, and an ultimate redemption of body and soul through the interposition of divine grace and the perseverance of the victim in orthodox belief.

Of course, the Quakers, in particular, really didn't come anywhere close to fitting into this narrative framework in any realistic sense.  But given the intensity of captivity experience, the fears it generated, and the relatively straightforward logic of transposing it onto “specters,” who was really going to be in a position to question the logic or point out its flaws when applied more generally, or to Quakers in particular? After all, if you did raise questions, you were probably a hidden Quaker yourself! And so, as Slotkin goes on to say:

In the years following his treatment of Mercy Short, Mather's several books on the witchcraft trials, his study of the Indian wars (Decennium Luctuosum, 1699), and his Magnalia translated the myth-structure inherent in the captivity narrative into a coherent vision of his culture's history.

Although it's objectively true that Quakers didn't really fit his template, that doesn't mean he couldn't craft a compelling and coherent narrative implicating them in a larger web of villainy:

He makes it clear that, for him, the Indian wars are one phase of the continuing war between Satan and Christ. In the strategy of that war Indian attacks, the “visitation” of specters, devils, and witches in 1692, and the growth of “heretical” sects on the frontier are related phenomena, are pieces in Satan's grand design of conquest. Thus he concludes his study of the Indian attacks with a diatribe against the Quakers. He equates them with the Indians, partly because of their opposition to English usurpation of Indian lands, but primarily because of their doctrine of human freedom and the inner light—their tenet that Christ is contained within each man [not to mention woman!] and that pure introspection, without inhibition by books and creeds, can yield personal revelation. This tenet Mather equates with the beliefs of the Mohamedan sect of Assassins, or “Betenists,” “who were the Enthusiasts that followed the Light within, like our Quakers; and on this principle... did such Numberless Villainies.” 

Radical Islamic terrorists! As I live and breathe! I told you that there was nothing new in the GOP's current tendency to arbitrarily weave together the most unlikely combination of real and imaginary threats into a pseudo-coherent whole. 

In fact, Quakers in that time were actually somewhat analogous to today's secular humanists, at least in regard to matters of religious tolerance—which was part of the reason they had much better relations with Native American tribes than the Puritans had. (They also didn't steal land.) To associate them with Islamic terrorists was thus eerily similar to today's conservatives' efforts to portray American secular liberals as allies of the terrorists who attack us, supporters of secret Sharia law, etc., particularly given that there was zero Muslim presence in New England at the time.  But religious intolerance was key to their faith, so open-mindedness was as threatening to it as any other contrary faith, perhaps even moreso.

I've only just touched on certain highlights of Slotkin's account; there's a great deal more from that time of early American terror that seems eerily relevant today. I'd like to mention just four more, to help expand the sense of how much we have in common with them, how little we've changed at some deep level, and how much there is to question in what we've come to take for granted.

First, there are two points made by Susan Faludi in her 2007 book, "The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America." First, Faludi homes in on the blame-shifting dynamic, something particularly apt to keep in mind, given who was in charge on 9/11, and who launched the endless “war on terror” in response:

Associating colonial defeats in the Indian wars with witchcraft served many purposes, notably among them the elision of another, more worldly explanation. The colonial leaders, including a number of judges on the Court of Oyer and Terminer who prosecuted the witches, were themselves complicit in the Second Indian War's disastrous outcome — through unpreparedness, avarice, mistaken strategy of sheer ineptitude.  And eager to deflect attention from their own failures and locate the cause of vulnerability elsewhere.

Second, Faludi points out that the blame-shifting is deeply gendered — “the leadership ducking its culpability was entirely male, its newly identified antagonists overwhelmingly female”—and that threats to male supremacy and reactions to them permeate the entire subject of New England witchcraft. First, she notes:

Before the recent onset of feminist scholarship the various speculations [on causes of the witch trials] made little of the overwhelming presence of women among the defendants: 11 of the 18 people accused, 52 of the 59 tried, 26 of the 31 convicted and 14 of the 19 hung were female....

She then goes on to note “there was a definite character to the women singled out for witchcraft accusations in New England,” contrasting the European tendency to target “poor villagers, easy to scapegoat because they were without resources” with the relatively high status of the New England accused, as first documented by Carol Karlsen in "The Devil in the Shape of a Woman." Moreover, “they were beyond the dictates of patriarchal family and society and, especially damning, were inclined to defend their unfettered state. A substantial majority of the accused were older women who had no brothers, sons, or children; of the executed female witches, 89 percent were women from families with no male heirs. That is to say, they stood to inherit and so disrupted male control of the purse strings.”

Faludi has a good deal more to say on the gender dynamics surrounding the warfare/witchcraft connection. The fact that male protection so often failed and female initiative proved vital, even heroic was profoundly unsettling, but hardly surprising given the realities of frontier life. Traditional female role models require a far more secure social setting in order to be even superficially plausible. No matter what century, frontier women have to be brave, resourceful, at times even heroic. It comes with the territory, whether men like it or not.

Third, there's something else Slotkin doesn't mention, but that should be obvious: that the Puritan's captivity fears were in some sense a matter of “envious reversal,” as I've written about recently, a switching of roles of victim and aggressor. It was, after all, the Puritans who were capturing the Native Americans' whole world, the entire continent on which they lived. This is far more obvious to us today, of course. But they were in the early stages of an ongoing genocide of unprecedented proportions, a genocide that America continues to habitually ignore, and so it seems a bit rich, to say the least, that the Puritans built up an entire worldview based on themselves as victims in this situation. 

Which isn't to deny the obvious: Puritans often were victims of specific horrific acts. Mercy Short, in particular: “She had been captured by the Indians at her home in Salmon Falls when she was fifteen. Her father and mother and three of their children were murdered before her eyes, and she herself was carried to Canada.”  Yet, the Quakers managed to avoid the whole war experience almost entirely, primarily by not waging war themselves.

What's more, this also isn't to say that Native Americans didn't already take one another captive, which brings us to our fourth and final point: They had a profoundly different way of dealing with captivity trauma, which in turn sheds light on the Puritan approach as a form of eliminationist psychoanalytical technique, in turn reflecting seeds of genocidal ideation. Contrasting the two psychological approaches more broadly, Slotkin writes:

Mather entered the wilderness of the human mind bent on extirpating its “Indians,” exorcising its demons. These Indian-demons were the impulses of the unconscious—the sexual impulses, the obscure longings and hatreds that mark parent-child relationships, the proddings of a deep-rooted sense of guilt. The goal of his therapy was to eliminate these impulses, to cleanse the mind of them utterly, to purge it and leave it pure. In much the same way he wished to purge the real wilderness of Indians, to raze it to ashes and build an utterly new world, uncorrupted by a primitive past, on the blank of the old.

The Indian attitude toward the mind likewise resembled their attitude toward the wilderness. Just as they worshiped every aspect of creation and creaturliness, whether it represented what they called good or what they called evil, so they accepted every revelation of the dreaming mind as a message from a god within, a world spirit manifested in the individual. They responded to the dreams of the individuals as a community, seeking to assimilate the dream-message into their own lives and to help the dreamer accept the message of the dream for itself.

Their way of dealing with captivity nightmares was thus a form of psychodrama, an acting out of the traumatic experience, in the safe shared space of consciously engaged-in ritual. Rather than being primitives, they were far more sophisticated in their self-understanding than the Puritans like Mather were. In fact, it's we, today, still trapped in similar patterns of imagining vast conspiracies against us, who are the real primitives, utterly lacking the sophisticated self-understanding we so desperately need.

In colonial times, the tide of historical forces was at the Puritans' backs, although they could not fully know it at the time, or else, perhaps, they might not have been quite so profoundly driven by their fears. As a result, they could afford to believe all manner of foolish things, and yet they would still survive, and even prosper. But now, this time, that may no longer be the case. We may actually need to understand the world, beyond our own inner world of recycled fears, in order to survive, and perhaps even prosper in it.  We need to finally confront those demons as our own, not aspects of a shadowy other whom we can utterly annihilate. They are, rather, aspects of ourselves we need to have the courage to face up to. There is no vast conspiracy of diverse deadly enemies out there—only the endless outward reflection of our own unfaced inner fears.

Continue Reading...










 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on December 13, 2015 09:00

Publicity hound, coward, liar: Whistleblowers are inevitably demonized by their enemies — Edward Snowden is no exception

The most powerful gun in the damage-control arsenal isn’t truth. It is demonization—a vicious assault on the character of the whistleblower in order to destroy credibility and distract from the message. The damage controller’s bag of tricks is as old as Machiavelli. Find anything that borders on illegal behavior in the whistleblower’s past, such as court convictions, messy divorces, arrest reports, domestic violence complaints, a history of alcohol, child support issues, or drug abuse. Attack the whistleblower’s motive by alleging that he or she was driven by malice, revenge, deceit, greed, or hunger for publicity. Dig up colleagues, neighbors, and fellow workers who are willing to say, true or untrue, that the whistleblower is vindictive, sneaky, dishonest, prone to exaggerate, not a team player, disruptive in the workplace. Allege that the whistleblower is incompetent at his or her job, cannot be trusted with responsibility, or lacks leadership skills. Accuse the whistleblower of being a thief who stole proprietary documents, illegally revealed company secrets, broke a confidentiality agreement. Label the whistleblower mentally unstable. Edward Snowden—“the world’s most wanted man by the world’s most powerful government”—wasn’t surprised that his enemies tried to assassinate his character. He expected as much. As he told Greenwald and the Guardian, “I know the government will demonize me. They’ll say I violated the Espionage Act. That I committed grave crimes. That I aided America’s enemies. That I endangered national security. I’m sure they’ll grab every incident they can find from my past and probably will exaggerate or even fabricate some to demonize me as much as possible. . . . What keeps a person passive and compliant is fear of repercussions. . . . I decided a while ago that I can live with whatever they do to me. The only thing I can’t live with is knowing that I did nothing.” On the one hand, Snowden didn’t make it easy for demonizers. His personal life was squeaky clean. No arrest record. No string of parking tickets or DUIs. No fellow workers willing to denigrate his character, and no unsatisfactory work evaluations. No reports of drunken behavior or girlfriend abuse. No drug paraphernalia sitting around his apartment. On the other hand, Snowden’s actions and statements presented his enemies with a lineup of emotionally charged targets carefully chosen to rouse the patriotic instincts of Americans. Edward Snowden is an egocentric publicity hound, a coward, and a liar. He is a spy, a traitor, and a criminal who betrayed his country. Edward Snowden is an egocentric publicity hound. The damage controllers are quick to point out that all you have to do is turn on the television or browse YouTube, read the Guardian, or scan social media blogs, and you’ll find Edward Snowden waiting for you. Snowden’s hunger for attention is so great, they claim, that you see him grinning on television shows beamed from Hong Kong, Berlin, Moscow, and London. And don’t forget Laura Poitras’s Academy Award-winning documentary, Citizenfour, featuring Snowden’s smirking face. And what about his string of hero awards like Germany’s Whistleblower Prize? And the dozens of invitations to deliver telecast speeches like the British annual Alternative Christmas Message. And how about Snowden making the short list for the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize? And don’t forget the upcoming Oliver Stone movie Snowden. Has Edward Snowden ever turned down an interview request? Do Snowden’s critics make a valid point? In accusing him of being a publicity hound, they are attacking the motive-behind-the-motive and challenging his integrity. Did he lie when he said that his objective was to expose massive and potentially criminal or unconstitutional spying and stimulate open debate? Wasn’t his true motive—conscious or subconscious—more personal? Wasn’t it to bask in the warmth of the spotlight as a self-proclaimed martyr? To earn a place in history? Snowden denies the characterization. “I don’t want public attention because I don’t want the story to be about me,” he told Glenn Greenwald. “I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate—which I hope this [document release] will trigger around the globe—about what kind of world we want to live in. . . . My sole motive is to inform the public to that which is done in their name, and that which is done against them.” Snowden makes an important distinction. There are three types of media stories swirling around him—those that deal with his personal life, those that cover his career, and those that focus on his message. He welcomes all the message attention he can get, while claiming he doesn’t want the personal attention and merely tolerates the spotlight on his professional career. “Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seem far more interested in what I said when I was seventeen,” he complained in a live chat with Guardian readers. “Or what my girlfriend looks like, rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.” But Snowden can’t have it both ways. The minute he faced Poitras’s video camera in his hotel room in Hong Kong and revealed himself as the source of the NSA stories published in the Guardian and the Washington Post, he opened the door to his personal and professional life. In effect, by identifying himself as the leaker, Snowden made half of his story about me. The canon of media questions is deceptively simple. Before it asks what, when, where, why, and how, it asks who. In Snowden’s case, the answer to who does more than just satisfy curiosity or pander to prurient interests. It lays a foundation for motive, which, next to truth, is the most critical element in evaluating the whistleblower. Who explores the whistleblower’s professional credentials, and these are important to establishing credibility. Snowden supporters point out that his eagerness to explain to the media what his documents reveal and why he decided to leak them should come as no surprise. They say he has been consistent in stating his basic motive—to tell the world what the U.S. government is doing so that the people can exercise their right to decide whether they want the government to spy on them. One can hardly “tell the world” without using the media to the fullest extent. Snowden’s enemies and critics are eager to point out that he fled the United States to avoid arrest and punishment and that he is hiding in foreign countries instead of manning up to the charges against him. They say that makes him a coward. Such an allegation strikes a deep chord in the soul of Americans who consider themselves patriotic and want to believe that turning himself in would be the honorable thing to do. From his hotel room in Hong Kong, Snowden argued his defense: “I am not planning to hide who and what I am so I have no reason to go into hiding and feed conspiracy theories or demonizing comparisons. . . . I am not here to hide from justice. I’m here to reveal criminality.” A coward is a person who lacks the courage to do, or endure, dangerous or unpleasant things. Does Snowden lack the courage to return to the United States to face the three criminal counts against him—theft of classified documents, possession of classified documents, and giving those classified documents to unauthorized people. If he returns and is convicted, he could get life in prison. Edward Snowden is a coward. Snowden has repeatedly said that he is willing to return to the United States to face a judge and jury, and that if he does, there would be “a huge chance” that he would go to prison. He’s willing to take that risk, he says, as long as he is guaranteed his constitutional right to a fair trial. He argues that the government is not offering him a fair trial for several reasons. The government has publicly declared him guilty rather than innocent until proven guilty. And it has defined “the disclosure of secret, criminal—and even unconstitutional acts—as an unforgiveable crime.” But whether or not the disclosure is an unforgiveable crime is for a jury to decide, not the government. To prevent classified information from being revealed in a public trial and to deny Snowden a propaganda platform, the Justice Department planned to try Snowden in a closed court under the provisions of the Classified Information Procedures Act. Passed by Congress in 1980, the act’s primary function is to prevent criminal defendants from blackmailing the government—or “graymailing,” as it is frequently called. The defendant presents the Justice Department with an either-or proposition—dismiss the charges or I will disclose classified information in my defense. Snowden argues that a closed court trial is a denial of his constitutional rights. Finally, the Justice Department demands that Snowden plead guilty before it will negotiate terms for his return to the U.S. Snowden refuses to do so. He is willing to admit that he violated the provisions of the Espionage Act of 1917, but he is unwilling to concede that he committed a crime in doing so. In demanding and defining the terms of a fair trial, Snowden is again being consistent. Wearing a muzzle is not an option. He has said over and over that he wants to tell Americans how the government is spying on them so that they can decide for themselves if they want to pay that price for protection in the era of the war on terror. Snowden’s supporters point out that he declined to blow the whistle anonymously because he didn’t want innocent people to be hounded by government agents. Unlike most of the character assassins, who choose to work in the shadows and accuse him anonymously, Snowden faced Laura Poitras’s unforgiving camera. “I believe I have an obligation to explain why I’m doing this and what I hope to achieve,” he said. “I’m not afraid of what will happen to me. . . . I know it’s the right thing to do.” In the opening credits of Poitras’s film, Citizenfour, the screen freezes on the words “NSA Whistleblower.” Then Snowden appears and says calmly, but with an anxiety that the viewer can feel rather than see: “My name is Ed Snowden. I’m twenty-nine years old. I worked for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii.” Is that cowardice? Snowden supporters ask his anonymous character assassins. Edward Snowden is a liar. Snowden said that he reported his concerns about the legality of NSA’s spy programs to his superiors. His detractors say that is a lie. Furthermore, they note that while he rails against America as an Orwellian state, he chose to hide in Russia, an Orwellian state. That, they say, makes him a hypocrite. In sworn testimony before the European parliament, Snowden said that he had voiced his concerns about what he considered to be illegal NSA spy programs to at least ten NSA officials. He was more specific in interviews with NBC Nightly News and the Washington Post. “The NSA has records,” he told NBC. “They have copies of e-mails right now to their Office of General Counsel, to their oversight and compliance folks—from me—raising concerns about the NSA’s interpretation of its legal authorities.” In an exclusive interview with Post reporters, Snowden said that he had raised his concerns about NSA spy programs to two superiors in NSA’s Technology Directorate and to two in the Agency’s Threat Operations Center in Hawaii. Consistent with his concern about shielding the identities of intelligence personnel, Snowden declined to reveal the names of the officials to whom he complained or to make public his e-mails to them. In response to Snowden’s claims, NSA officials who spoke on condition of anonymity told the Washington Post that “after extensive investigation, including interviews with his former supervisors and coworkers, we have not found any evidence to support Mr. Snowden’s contention that he brought these matters to anyone’s attention.” NSA deputy director Rick Ledgett, who spoke on the record, dodged the issue with a lawyerly sidestep. He said that Snowden made no formal complaints. Then he conveniently neglected to define the word “formal.” Except for its deceptive premise, Ledgett’s straw man logic was airtight: For a complaint to be recognized as a complaint, it must be formal. Snowden did not issue a formal complaint. Therefore, Snowden did not issue a complaint. Ledgett went on to say that if Snowden complained personally or informally, no one has come forward to acknowledge it. In response to Ledgett and the anonymous NSA officials, Snowden threw down the gauntlet. “I directly challenge the NSA to deny that I contacted NSA oversight and compliance bodies directly via e-mail,” he said, “and that I specifically expressed concerns about their suspect interpretation of the law. And I welcome members of Congress to request a written answer to this question.” The issue is basically a high-stakes, he said-they said spat. Who is telling the truth? Who is bending the truth? Who is lying? Snowden supporters argue that the NSA and the intelligence community are the liars, not Edward Snowden. The existence of NSA programs like PRISM and BOUNDLESS INFORMANT prove, they point out, that NSA officials have been lying to Congress for years about the scope and breadth of the agency’s bulk spying on Americans. Defenders of Snowden also point out that both NSA director General Keith B. Alexander and National Intelligence director James Clapper lied to Congress about NSA programs. (Lying to Congress is a felony.) Citizenfour contains bone-chilling clips of their false sworn testimony. In one clip, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, asks Clapper: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions of Americans?” “No, sir,” Clapper testifies without blinking an eye.
“It does not?” Wyden asks.
“Not wittingly,” Clapper replies.
 In light of NSA’s long history of deceit, and in response to accusations that Edward Snowden lied, his supporters ask: Why should the public believe anything the NSA says unless it presents compelling evidence that leaves no doubt? Or to put their concern another way—one should assume that the NSA is lying until it proves it is telling the truth. Only time will tell who is lying—Edward Snowden or the National Security Agency. If anyone cares by then. Excerpted from "The Whistleblower's Dilemma: Snowden, Silkwood and Their Quest for the Truth" by Richard Rashke. Copyright © 2015 by Richard Rashke. Reprinted by permission of Delphinium Books.The most powerful gun in the damage-control arsenal isn’t truth. It is demonization—a vicious assault on the character of the whistleblower in order to destroy credibility and distract from the message. The damage controller’s bag of tricks is as old as Machiavelli. Find anything that borders on illegal behavior in the whistleblower’s past, such as court convictions, messy divorces, arrest reports, domestic violence complaints, a history of alcohol, child support issues, or drug abuse. Attack the whistleblower’s motive by alleging that he or she was driven by malice, revenge, deceit, greed, or hunger for publicity. Dig up colleagues, neighbors, and fellow workers who are willing to say, true or untrue, that the whistleblower is vindictive, sneaky, dishonest, prone to exaggerate, not a team player, disruptive in the workplace. Allege that the whistleblower is incompetent at his or her job, cannot be trusted with responsibility, or lacks leadership skills. Accuse the whistleblower of being a thief who stole proprietary documents, illegally revealed company secrets, broke a confidentiality agreement. Label the whistleblower mentally unstable. Edward Snowden—“the world’s most wanted man by the world’s most powerful government”—wasn’t surprised that his enemies tried to assassinate his character. He expected as much. As he told Greenwald and the Guardian, “I know the government will demonize me. They’ll say I violated the Espionage Act. That I committed grave crimes. That I aided America’s enemies. That I endangered national security. I’m sure they’ll grab every incident they can find from my past and probably will exaggerate or even fabricate some to demonize me as much as possible. . . . What keeps a person passive and compliant is fear of repercussions. . . . I decided a while ago that I can live with whatever they do to me. The only thing I can’t live with is knowing that I did nothing.” On the one hand, Snowden didn’t make it easy for demonizers. His personal life was squeaky clean. No arrest record. No string of parking tickets or DUIs. No fellow workers willing to denigrate his character, and no unsatisfactory work evaluations. No reports of drunken behavior or girlfriend abuse. No drug paraphernalia sitting around his apartment. On the other hand, Snowden’s actions and statements presented his enemies with a lineup of emotionally charged targets carefully chosen to rouse the patriotic instincts of Americans. Edward Snowden is an egocentric publicity hound, a coward, and a liar. He is a spy, a traitor, and a criminal who betrayed his country. Edward Snowden is an egocentric publicity hound. The damage controllers are quick to point out that all you have to do is turn on the television or browse YouTube, read the Guardian, or scan social media blogs, and you’ll find Edward Snowden waiting for you. Snowden’s hunger for attention is so great, they claim, that you see him grinning on television shows beamed from Hong Kong, Berlin, Moscow, and London. And don’t forget Laura Poitras’s Academy Award-winning documentary, Citizenfour, featuring Snowden’s smirking face. And what about his string of hero awards like Germany’s Whistleblower Prize? And the dozens of invitations to deliver telecast speeches like the British annual Alternative Christmas Message. And how about Snowden making the short list for the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize? And don’t forget the upcoming Oliver Stone movie Snowden. Has Edward Snowden ever turned down an interview request? Do Snowden’s critics make a valid point? In accusing him of being a publicity hound, they are attacking the motive-behind-the-motive and challenging his integrity. Did he lie when he said that his objective was to expose massive and potentially criminal or unconstitutional spying and stimulate open debate? Wasn’t his true motive—conscious or subconscious—more personal? Wasn’t it to bask in the warmth of the spotlight as a self-proclaimed martyr? To earn a place in history? Snowden denies the characterization. “I don’t want public attention because I don’t want the story to be about me,” he told Glenn Greenwald. “I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate—which I hope this [document release] will trigger around the globe—about what kind of world we want to live in. . . . My sole motive is to inform the public to that which is done in their name, and that which is done against them.” Snowden makes an important distinction. There are three types of media stories swirling around him—those that deal with his personal life, those that cover his career, and those that focus on his message. He welcomes all the message attention he can get, while claiming he doesn’t want the personal attention and merely tolerates the spotlight on his professional career. “Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seem far more interested in what I said when I was seventeen,” he complained in a live chat with Guardian readers. “Or what my girlfriend looks like, rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.” But Snowden can’t have it both ways. The minute he faced Poitras’s video camera in his hotel room in Hong Kong and revealed himself as the source of the NSA stories published in the Guardian and the Washington Post, he opened the door to his personal and professional life. In effect, by identifying himself as the leaker, Snowden made half of his story about me. The canon of media questions is deceptively simple. Before it asks what, when, where, why, and how, it asks who. In Snowden’s case, the answer to who does more than just satisfy curiosity or pander to prurient interests. It lays a foundation for motive, which, next to truth, is the most critical element in evaluating the whistleblower. Who explores the whistleblower’s professional credentials, and these are important to establishing credibility. Snowden supporters point out that his eagerness to explain to the media what his documents reveal and why he decided to leak them should come as no surprise. They say he has been consistent in stating his basic motive—to tell the world what the U.S. government is doing so that the people can exercise their right to decide whether they want the government to spy on them. One can hardly “tell the world” without using the media to the fullest extent. Snowden’s enemies and critics are eager to point out that he fled the United States to avoid arrest and punishment and that he is hiding in foreign countries instead of manning up to the charges against him. They say that makes him a coward. Such an allegation strikes a deep chord in the soul of Americans who consider themselves patriotic and want to believe that turning himself in would be the honorable thing to do. From his hotel room in Hong Kong, Snowden argued his defense: “I am not planning to hide who and what I am so I have no reason to go into hiding and feed conspiracy theories or demonizing comparisons. . . . I am not here to hide from justice. I’m here to reveal criminality.” A coward is a person who lacks the courage to do, or endure, dangerous or unpleasant things. Does Snowden lack the courage to return to the United States to face the three criminal counts against him—theft of classified documents, possession of classified documents, and giving those classified documents to unauthorized people. If he returns and is convicted, he could get life in prison. Edward Snowden is a coward. Snowden has repeatedly said that he is willing to return to the United States to face a judge and jury, and that if he does, there would be “a huge chance” that he would go to prison. He’s willing to take that risk, he says, as long as he is guaranteed his constitutional right to a fair trial. He argues that the government is not offering him a fair trial for several reasons. The government has publicly declared him guilty rather than innocent until proven guilty. And it has defined “the disclosure of secret, criminal—and even unconstitutional acts—as an unforgiveable crime.” But whether or not the disclosure is an unforgiveable crime is for a jury to decide, not the government. To prevent classified information from being revealed in a public trial and to deny Snowden a propaganda platform, the Justice Department planned to try Snowden in a closed court under the provisions of the Classified Information Procedures Act. Passed by Congress in 1980, the act’s primary function is to prevent criminal defendants from blackmailing the government—or “graymailing,” as it is frequently called. The defendant presents the Justice Department with an either-or proposition—dismiss the charges or I will disclose classified information in my defense. Snowden argues that a closed court trial is a denial of his constitutional rights. Finally, the Justice Department demands that Snowden plead guilty before it will negotiate terms for his return to the U.S. Snowden refuses to do so. He is willing to admit that he violated the provisions of the Espionage Act of 1917, but he is unwilling to concede that he committed a crime in doing so. In demanding and defining the terms of a fair trial, Snowden is again being consistent. Wearing a muzzle is not an option. He has said over and over that he wants to tell Americans how the government is spying on them so that they can decide for themselves if they want to pay that price for protection in the era of the war on terror. Snowden’s supporters point out that he declined to blow the whistle anonymously because he didn’t want innocent people to be hounded by government agents. Unlike most of the character assassins, who choose to work in the shadows and accuse him anonymously, Snowden faced Laura Poitras’s unforgiving camera. “I believe I have an obligation to explain why I’m doing this and what I hope to achieve,” he said. “I’m not afraid of what will happen to me. . . . I know it’s the right thing to do.” In the opening credits of Poitras’s film, Citizenfour, the screen freezes on the words “NSA Whistleblower.” Then Snowden appears and says calmly, but with an anxiety that the viewer can feel rather than see: “My name is Ed Snowden. I’m twenty-nine years old. I worked for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii.” Is that cowardice? Snowden supporters ask his anonymous character assassins. Edward Snowden is a liar. Snowden said that he reported his concerns about the legality of NSA’s spy programs to his superiors. His detractors say that is a lie. Furthermore, they note that while he rails against America as an Orwellian state, he chose to hide in Russia, an Orwellian state. That, they say, makes him a hypocrite. In sworn testimony before the European parliament, Snowden said that he had voiced his concerns about what he considered to be illegal NSA spy programs to at least ten NSA officials. He was more specific in interviews with NBC Nightly News and the Washington Post. “The NSA has records,” he told NBC. “They have copies of e-mails right now to their Office of General Counsel, to their oversight and compliance folks—from me—raising concerns about the NSA’s interpretation of its legal authorities.” In an exclusive interview with Post reporters, Snowden said that he had raised his concerns about NSA spy programs to two superiors in NSA’s Technology Directorate and to two in the Agency’s Threat Operations Center in Hawaii. Consistent with his concern about shielding the identities of intelligence personnel, Snowden declined to reveal the names of the officials to whom he complained or to make public his e-mails to them. In response to Snowden’s claims, NSA officials who spoke on condition of anonymity told the Washington Post that “after extensive investigation, including interviews with his former supervisors and coworkers, we have not found any evidence to support Mr. Snowden’s contention that he brought these matters to anyone’s attention.” NSA deputy director Rick Ledgett, who spoke on the record, dodged the issue with a lawyerly sidestep. He said that Snowden made no formal complaints. Then he conveniently neglected to define the word “formal.” Except for its deceptive premise, Ledgett’s straw man logic was airtight: For a complaint to be recognized as a complaint, it must be formal. Snowden did not issue a formal complaint. Therefore, Snowden did not issue a complaint. Ledgett went on to say that if Snowden complained personally or informally, no one has come forward to acknowledge it. In response to Ledgett and the anonymous NSA officials, Snowden threw down the gauntlet. “I directly challenge the NSA to deny that I contacted NSA oversight and compliance bodies directly via e-mail,” he said, “and that I specifically expressed concerns about their suspect interpretation of the law. And I welcome members of Congress to request a written answer to this question.” The issue is basically a high-stakes, he said-they said spat. Who is telling the truth? Who is bending the truth? Who is lying? Snowden supporters argue that the NSA and the intelligence community are the liars, not Edward Snowden. The existence of NSA programs like PRISM and BOUNDLESS INFORMANT prove, they point out, that NSA officials have been lying to Congress for years about the scope and breadth of the agency’s bulk spying on Americans. Defenders of Snowden also point out that both NSA director General Keith B. Alexander and National Intelligence director James Clapper lied to Congress about NSA programs. (Lying to Congress is a felony.) Citizenfour contains bone-chilling clips of their false sworn testimony. In one clip, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, asks Clapper: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions of Americans?” “No, sir,” Clapper testifies without blinking an eye.
“It does not?” Wyden asks.
“Not wittingly,” Clapper replies.
 In light of NSA’s long history of deceit, and in response to accusations that Edward Snowden lied, his supporters ask: Why should the public believe anything the NSA says unless it presents compelling evidence that leaves no doubt? Or to put their concern another way—one should assume that the NSA is lying until it proves it is telling the truth. Only time will tell who is lying—Edward Snowden or the National Security Agency. If anyone cares by then. Excerpted from "The Whistleblower's Dilemma: Snowden, Silkwood and Their Quest for the Truth" by Richard Rashke. Copyright © 2015 by Richard Rashke. Reprinted by permission of Delphinium Books.

Continue Reading...










 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on December 13, 2015 08:59

Religious kids are no angels: Science suggests they’re more selfish — and sadistic

Religion Dispatches Are kids from more religious families more or less altruistic than their peers from less-religious families? That’s what a high-profile new study from University of Chicago neuroscientist Jean Decety and a global crew of collaborators sought to determine. In the course of the study, published in the journal of Current Biology, the researchers use something called the “children’s dictator game,” a.k.a. stickerpalooza. Here’s how it worked: Step one. Go to an elementary school. Find a child. Place a set of 30 stickers in front of the child. Tell the child to pick her favorite ten. Step two. Introduce a plot twist. Tell the kid that not everyone in school could participate in the sticker bonanza. Fortunately, there is a chance to share: the kid can pick between zero and 10 of her favorite, cream-of-the-crop stickers, and set them aside in an envelope. That envelope will go to another person in the school. Afterward, the kid will walk out with whatever stickers she chose to keep. In order to keep things nice and relaxed, this sharing stage is anonymous. Nobody watches the kid set her stickers aside. She doesn’t know which classmate receives them, and the classmate doesn’t find out who donated them. But, later, the researcher can count the shared stickers, and have some approximation of the child’s moral fiber. In their study, Decety and his colleagues gave the sticker test to 1,170 kids at schools in six cities—Amman, Cape Town, Chicago, Guangzhou, Istanbul, and Toronto. “Altruism was calculated as the number of stickers shared out of 10,” they write. The researchers also gave the kids another test, in which they watched videos of people hurting other people, and then judged (a) how mean the bullies were, and (b) how much punishment the bullies deserved. Then Decety and his collaborators went to the kids’ parents and asked them questions about the religious identity and practices of the family, and about how moral they thought their kids were. Here’s the zinger: according to Decety and his colleagues, kids from more religious households are less altruistic, and more apt to deal out punishment, than kids from non-religious households. Corollary zinger: on the punishment front, Muslim kids are even more vindictive than Christians. “Nonreligious children are more generous,” explained a headline at Science magazine. “It’s not like you have to be highly religious to be a good person,” Decety told Forbes. “Secularity—like having your own laws and rules based on rational thinking, reason rather than holy books—is better for everybody.” Forbes headlined the article “Religion Makes Children More Selfish, Say Scientists.” (Decety tweeted a link to the piece). In the Forbes interview, Decety cautioned that there would be naysayers, at least among the anti-science crowd. “My guess is they’re just going to deny what I did—they don’t want science, they don’t believe in evolution, they don’t want Darwin to be taught in schools.” The Cubit is all for science—and Darwin! In fact, that’s why we feel obligated to point out that Decety’s paper is deaf to interdisciplinary critiques, premised on an obsolete and misleading view of the world, fundamentally unable to acknowledge its own hubristic assumptions, and, consequently, unlikely to produce meaningful insights into reality and the human condition. Making generalizations Sometimes, late at night, drinking in pseudo-seedy college-town hipster dive bars, I’ll start complaining about bad social science, and midway through the rant, friends will adopt kindly, exasperated who-gives-a-shit? expressions. It’s a fair response. But this stuff matters. Western societies have developed specific tools with which to make generalizations about human beings. Some of the more traditional tools here include stereotyping and prejudice. Often, these get ideologized into more potent generalization-generators: racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, sexism, and so on. In many cases, social science—and especially experimental social science—tries to produce generalizations about human beings, too. Sometimes, it seeks to do so about a specific subset of the population (say, Christians or Muslims). I want to be 150% clear here: when researchers seek to find general principles or patterns in human society, that does not make them racist, or anti-Semitic, or Islamophobic, or sexist. It is very possible to seek rules for social interaction without falling into ideological or political traps. At the same time, social scientists run a special kind of risk, because their work does seem, superficially, to share certain goals with the ideological generalizers. Researchers have to be extra-careful to ensure that the biases and preconceptions of the political space don’t bleed into their work. And they have to be sober and realistic about the conclusions they draw from their research. Additionally, it might not hurt to make sure that your methods are something other than totally shitty. For a case study of how this little balancing act might break down, let’s check out the Decety et al.paper. The study is trying to understand certain rules that might govern the relationship between religiosity and prosocial behavior, which is a technical term for stuff you do that benefits other people in your community. Prosocial behaviors range widely, from the dramatic (sacrificing your life for a team) to the mundane (sharing stickers). I’d like to peel apart the methodological issues here with a cool and well-informed eye, except that the methods section of the paper is unusually vague, and Jean Decety isn’t responding to my polite emails. Nor my polite calls. Nor the polite request that I lodged with him through his lab manager, who confirmed that Decety knows that I’m trying to reach him. Frustrated, I asked the editor of Current Biology if he could help me puzzle through some of the gaps in the methods section. He told me to email Decety. Soldiering on through the silence, we can see a few key problem areas with “The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World.” Basically, these problems have to do with the definition of religiousness, the metric for altruism, and the concept ofworld. Let’s take them one by one. Problem 1: “The Negative Association between Religiousness….”  Scholars of religion are fond of explaining all the reasons that religion is really, really difficult to define. The more cynical among us might point out that, in a crowded job market, academics distinguish themselves by explaining why everyone else’s categories are wrong, meaning that religion scholars have a strong incentive to expound, at length, about all the reasons that religion is really, really difficult to define. But, look: they have a point. In most of the world, for most of history, cultures had very little notion of a discrete thing called “religion,” as something that you could then choose, reject, or petition forfreedom of. The choice to constellate certain kinds of rituals, stories, propositions and epistemological modes into a single package called “religion” is a fairly recent, European, and Protestant phenomenon. Similarly, the idea that religiousness is separable from the rest of culture, in such a way that you can see it quantifiably motivating certain behaviors, would seem alien and weird to a lot of people, for whom Faith is not so easily distinguished from other strands of culture. In the case of a cross-cultural religiosity study, such as Decety’s paper, this definitional challenge makes the work pretty tough from the start. Religiosity is entangled with all sorts of other cultural markers and experiences. The researchers control for one confounding variable here: socioeconomic status. Number of siblings? The researchers didn’t address that, even though religious engagement can be correlated with family size (thanks to a Reddit commenter for pointing this out). Amount of exposure to other kids outside of school? Ditto. Parents’ education levels? Missing. Heterogeneity of the surrounding community? Also left out. And so on. More slippery, though, is that this kind of works requires some way of measuring religiousness, such that you can get a scale that works the same in mostly-Muslim Amman as it does in mostly-Christian Chicago, and also in Guangzhou, where concepts of ritual and religiousness are wildly different than those held in the Western world. In other words, you have to take this fragile Western construct (religion), put a numerical scale on it, and then apply that scale around the world, as if religion were a solid, universally measurable thing, like the force of gravity or the density of water. Judging by the paper, Decety and his colleagues haven’t even recognized this problem, let alone addressed it. Instead, they just grabbed a handy global-religion-quantifier and went to work. The metric they chose, the Duke University Religiosity Index, or DUREL, is designed for epidemiological studies that take place within a single religious tradition, and for use with Abrahamic religions. In other words, it’s not at all adapted for cross-cultural research that includes East Asia. Problem 2: “…and children’s altruism…”  It’s unclear how well something like the sticker test measures the delicate, context-dependent applications of altruism within an individual child’s life. “One potential critique [of the study] is the artificiality of the situation” said Luke Galen, a professor of psychology at Grand Valley State University who reviewed a draft of the paper. But, he added, “that’s true of 90% of the studies in the literature.” In other words, things like the sticker test are comparable to other discipline-approved tools that we have to plumb the dynamics of human kindness. In all fairness, social science is hard. Developing a metric for altruism is tricky work, and you have to start somewhere. In this sense, the sticker test probably isn’t a bad tool. The question is how far you’re willing to generalize about the qualities of billions of people based on its results. Judging by Decety’s comments about the nature of secularity and morality, the answer for some researchers isvery far indeed. As Galen points out, the fact that the researchers did any kind of rigorous altruism test, instead of just asking kids and parents to self-report about their moral feelings and behaviors, sets the Decety study apart from many others in the field. Wisely, Galen adds that the study should be read in the context of a larger set of recent studies finding that religion might not be the magic prosociality-booster-pill that some other generalizers have claimed it to be. These are important caveats to my snark. Problem 3: “…across the World.” There are a few reasons, though, to wonder whether these results can be generalized very far. Does a population of kids from a handful of major urban centers really tell us much about the world as a whole? Additionally, the researchers don’t explain how they recruited the kids. Omitting recruitment data doesn’t invalidate the findings, but it makes it hard to gauge the generalizability of the results, Galen said. Were the kids selected randomly? Did families have to volunteer? It’s not clear. One other, even bigger problem: most of the non-religious kids probably come from China. Not that you would know that from reading the paper. In a strange omission, Decety and his colleagues do not provide any kind of country-by-country breakdown of where the Muslim, Christian, and non-religious kids come from. As a result, when you see a graph like this, which is the linchpin of the paper— Decety.graph —you can almost imagine that it refers to a robust global sample of non-religious kids, stacked up against their faithier peers, and not a bunch of kids from Guangzhou, getting compared to children from five other cities, all of which lie West of Mecca. How do I know all of this? Educated guesswork. I could be wrong. But here’s how the numbers break down: globally, 323 families in the study identified as non-religious. And 219 kids in the study came from China. It is extremely unlikely that more than a handful of the Chinese families identified themselves as Christian or Muslim, and we know for sure that they mostly avoided identifying as Buddhist, because just 18 families in the whole 1,170 kid dataset did so. Nobody identified as Confucian. Just six families, worldwide, said they were “other.” By elimination, that leaves around 200 Chinese kids for the non-religious side of the ledger, or around 60% of the total non-religious pool. So, how do we know that this study is picking up on something unique to religiosity, instead of the difference between Chinese kids and non-Chinese kids, or Western kids and non-Western kids, or Guangzhou kids and everybody else? Well, you can analyze the stats enough to pick out religiousness as one factor, distinct from country-of-origin, that seems to be driving some of the result. That’s important. But it’s not clear from the numbers provided in the study that non-religious kids, globally, share fewer stickers in a way that’s separable from other ethnic markers. A divergence In the past few decades, there has been a sharp divergence between those who study religion from within sociology and the humanities, and those who approach it from the side of social and evolutionary psychology. The humanists and sociologists have moved toward more and more granular snapshots of religious life, leaving behind the old, sweeping Religion is x, y, and zformulations that defined the good old days, when a dude in an office at Oxford could comfortably sketch out a theory of ritual based on secondhand ethnographies from remote tropical islands. Meanwhile, the social and evolutionary psychologists seem to be flying full-tilt in the direction of more and more grand theories of The Role of Religion in All Humanity. From my semi-neutral post as a journalist who covers both fields, I’d like to suggest that the social and evolutionary psychologists are more full-of-shit than the humanists. The fact that someone like Decety feels comfortable taking his sticker games and making public comments about the fundamental nature of morality and secularity feels slightly surreal. (It’s not just in Forbesinterviews. Here’s the final line of the paper: “More generally, [our findings] call into question whether religion is vital for moral development, supporting the idea that the secularization of moral discourse will not reduce human kindness—in fact, it will do just the opposite.”) The problem is not that Decety and his colleagues’ results aren’t interesting, or even that they’re wrong—for all I know, all the world over, kids who engage more with certain ritual experiences are less kind to their peers. The problem is that, absent robust evidence for his generalizations about the Nature of all Christians and Muslims, it is difficult to tell where Decety’s grand claims emerge from actual evidence, and where they may owe a debt to politicized beliefs about how religion in general, or specific religious traditions (i.e. Islam), motivate people to do bad things. Religion Dispatches Are kids from more religious families more or less altruistic than their peers from less-religious families? That’s what a high-profile new study from University of Chicago neuroscientist Jean Decety and a global crew of collaborators sought to determine. In the course of the study, published in the journal of Current Biology, the researchers use something called the “children’s dictator game,” a.k.a. stickerpalooza. Here’s how it worked: Step one. Go to an elementary school. Find a child. Place a set of 30 stickers in front of the child. Tell the child to pick her favorite ten. Step two. Introduce a plot twist. Tell the kid that not everyone in school could participate in the sticker bonanza. Fortunately, there is a chance to share: the kid can pick between zero and 10 of her favorite, cream-of-the-crop stickers, and set them aside in an envelope. That envelope will go to another person in the school. Afterward, the kid will walk out with whatever stickers she chose to keep. In order to keep things nice and relaxed, this sharing stage is anonymous. Nobody watches the kid set her stickers aside. She doesn’t know which classmate receives them, and the classmate doesn’t find out who donated them. But, later, the researcher can count the shared stickers, and have some approximation of the child’s moral fiber. In their study, Decety and his colleagues gave the sticker test to 1,170 kids at schools in six cities—Amman, Cape Town, Chicago, Guangzhou, Istanbul, and Toronto. “Altruism was calculated as the number of stickers shared out of 10,” they write. The researchers also gave the kids another test, in which they watched videos of people hurting other people, and then judged (a) how mean the bullies were, and (b) how much punishment the bullies deserved. Then Decety and his collaborators went to the kids’ parents and asked them questions about the religious identity and practices of the family, and about how moral they thought their kids were. Here’s the zinger: according to Decety and his colleagues, kids from more religious households are less altruistic, and more apt to deal out punishment, than kids from non-religious households. Corollary zinger: on the punishment front, Muslim kids are even more vindictive than Christians. “Nonreligious children are more generous,” explained a headline at Science magazine. “It’s not like you have to be highly religious to be a good person,” Decety told Forbes. “Secularity—like having your own laws and rules based on rational thinking, reason rather than holy books—is better for everybody.” Forbes headlined the article “Religion Makes Children More Selfish, Say Scientists.” (Decety tweeted a link to the piece). In the Forbes interview, Decety cautioned that there would be naysayers, at least among the anti-science crowd. “My guess is they’re just going to deny what I did—they don’t want science, they don’t believe in evolution, they don’t want Darwin to be taught in schools.” The Cubit is all for science—and Darwin! In fact, that’s why we feel obligated to point out that Decety’s paper is deaf to interdisciplinary critiques, premised on an obsolete and misleading view of the world, fundamentally unable to acknowledge its own hubristic assumptions, and, consequently, unlikely to produce meaningful insights into reality and the human condition. Making generalizations Sometimes, late at night, drinking in pseudo-seedy college-town hipster dive bars, I’ll start complaining about bad social science, and midway through the rant, friends will adopt kindly, exasperated who-gives-a-shit? expressions. It’s a fair response. But this stuff matters. Western societies have developed specific tools with which to make generalizations about human beings. Some of the more traditional tools here include stereotyping and prejudice. Often, these get ideologized into more potent generalization-generators: racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, sexism, and so on. In many cases, social science—and especially experimental social science—tries to produce generalizations about human beings, too. Sometimes, it seeks to do so about a specific subset of the population (say, Christians or Muslims). I want to be 150% clear here: when researchers seek to find general principles or patterns in human society, that does not make them racist, or anti-Semitic, or Islamophobic, or sexist. It is very possible to seek rules for social interaction without falling into ideological or political traps. At the same time, social scientists run a special kind of risk, because their work does seem, superficially, to share certain goals with the ideological generalizers. Researchers have to be extra-careful to ensure that the biases and preconceptions of the political space don’t bleed into their work. And they have to be sober and realistic about the conclusions they draw from their research. Additionally, it might not hurt to make sure that your methods are something other than totally shitty. For a case study of how this little balancing act might break down, let’s check out the Decety et al.paper. The study is trying to understand certain rules that might govern the relationship between religiosity and prosocial behavior, which is a technical term for stuff you do that benefits other people in your community. Prosocial behaviors range widely, from the dramatic (sacrificing your life for a team) to the mundane (sharing stickers). I’d like to peel apart the methodological issues here with a cool and well-informed eye, except that the methods section of the paper is unusually vague, and Jean Decety isn’t responding to my polite emails. Nor my polite calls. Nor the polite request that I lodged with him through his lab manager, who confirmed that Decety knows that I’m trying to reach him. Frustrated, I asked the editor of Current Biology if he could help me puzzle through some of the gaps in the methods section. He told me to email Decety. Soldiering on through the silence, we can see a few key problem areas with “The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World.” Basically, these problems have to do with the definition of religiousness, the metric for altruism, and the concept ofworld. Let’s take them one by one. Problem 1: “The Negative Association between Religiousness….”  Scholars of religion are fond of explaining all the reasons that religion is really, really difficult to define. The more cynical among us might point out that, in a crowded job market, academics distinguish themselves by explaining why everyone else’s categories are wrong, meaning that religion scholars have a strong incentive to expound, at length, about all the reasons that religion is really, really difficult to define. But, look: they have a point. In most of the world, for most of history, cultures had very little notion of a discrete thing called “religion,” as something that you could then choose, reject, or petition forfreedom of. The choice to constellate certain kinds of rituals, stories, propositions and epistemological modes into a single package called “religion” is a fairly recent, European, and Protestant phenomenon. Similarly, the idea that religiousness is separable from the rest of culture, in such a way that you can see it quantifiably motivating certain behaviors, would seem alien and weird to a lot of people, for whom Faith is not so easily distinguished from other strands of culture. In the case of a cross-cultural religiosity study, such as Decety’s paper, this definitional challenge makes the work pretty tough from the start. Religiosity is entangled with all sorts of other cultural markers and experiences. The researchers control for one confounding variable here: socioeconomic status. Number of siblings? The researchers didn’t address that, even though religious engagement can be correlated with family size (thanks to a Reddit commenter for pointing this out). Amount of exposure to other kids outside of school? Ditto. Parents’ education levels? Missing. Heterogeneity of the surrounding community? Also left out. And so on. More slippery, though, is that this kind of works requires some way of measuring religiousness, such that you can get a scale that works the same in mostly-Muslim Amman as it does in mostly-Christian Chicago, and also in Guangzhou, where concepts of ritual and religiousness are wildly different than those held in the Western world. In other words, you have to take this fragile Western construct (religion), put a numerical scale on it, and then apply that scale around the world, as if religion were a solid, universally measurable thing, like the force of gravity or the density of water. Judging by the paper, Decety and his colleagues haven’t even recognized this problem, let alone addressed it. Instead, they just grabbed a handy global-religion-quantifier and went to work. The metric they chose, the Duke University Religiosity Index, or DUREL, is designed for epidemiological studies that take place within a single religious tradition, and for use with Abrahamic religions. In other words, it’s not at all adapted for cross-cultural research that includes East Asia. Problem 2: “…and children’s altruism…”  It’s unclear how well something like the sticker test measures the delicate, context-dependent applications of altruism within an individual child’s life. “One potential critique [of the study] is the artificiality of the situation” said Luke Galen, a professor of psychology at Grand Valley State University who reviewed a draft of the paper. But, he added, “that’s true of 90% of the studies in the literature.” In other words, things like the sticker test are comparable to other discipline-approved tools that we have to plumb the dynamics of human kindness. In all fairness, social science is hard. Developing a metric for altruism is tricky work, and you have to start somewhere. In this sense, the sticker test probably isn’t a bad tool. The question is how far you’re willing to generalize about the qualities of billions of people based on its results. Judging by Decety’s comments about the nature of secularity and morality, the answer for some researchers isvery far indeed. As Galen points out, the fact that the researchers did any kind of rigorous altruism test, instead of just asking kids and parents to self-report about their moral feelings and behaviors, sets the Decety study apart from many others in the field. Wisely, Galen adds that the study should be read in the context of a larger set of recent studies finding that religion might not be the magic prosociality-booster-pill that some other generalizers have claimed it to be. These are important caveats to my snark. Problem 3: “…across the World.” There are a few reasons, though, to wonder whether these results can be generalized very far. Does a population of kids from a handful of major urban centers really tell us much about the world as a whole? Additionally, the researchers don’t explain how they recruited the kids. Omitting recruitment data doesn’t invalidate the findings, but it makes it hard to gauge the generalizability of the results, Galen said. Were the kids selected randomly? Did families have to volunteer? It’s not clear. One other, even bigger problem: most of the non-religious kids probably come from China. Not that you would know that from reading the paper. In a strange omission, Decety and his colleagues do not provide any kind of country-by-country breakdown of where the Muslim, Christian, and non-religious kids come from. As a result, when you see a graph like this, which is the linchpin of the paper— Decety.graph —you can almost imagine that it refers to a robust global sample of non-religious kids, stacked up against their faithier peers, and not a bunch of kids from Guangzhou, getting compared to children from five other cities, all of which lie West of Mecca. How do I know all of this? Educated guesswork. I could be wrong. But here’s how the numbers break down: globally, 323 families in the study identified as non-religious. And 219 kids in the study came from China. It is extremely unlikely that more than a handful of the Chinese families identified themselves as Christian or Muslim, and we know for sure that they mostly avoided identifying as Buddhist, because just 18 families in the whole 1,170 kid dataset did so. Nobody identified as Confucian. Just six families, worldwide, said they were “other.” By elimination, that leaves around 200 Chinese kids for the non-religious side of the ledger, or around 60% of the total non-religious pool. So, how do we know that this study is picking up on something unique to religiosity, instead of the difference between Chinese kids and non-Chinese kids, or Western kids and non-Western kids, or Guangzhou kids and everybody else? Well, you can analyze the stats enough to pick out religiousness as one factor, distinct from country-of-origin, that seems to be driving some of the result. That’s important. But it’s not clear from the numbers provided in the study that non-religious kids, globally, share fewer stickers in a way that’s separable from other ethnic markers. A divergence In the past few decades, there has been a sharp divergence between those who study religion from within sociology and the humanities, and those who approach it from the side of social and evolutionary psychology. The humanists and sociologists have moved toward more and more granular snapshots of religious life, leaving behind the old, sweeping Religion is x, y, and zformulations that defined the good old days, when a dude in an office at Oxford could comfortably sketch out a theory of ritual based on secondhand ethnographies from remote tropical islands. Meanwhile, the social and evolutionary psychologists seem to be flying full-tilt in the direction of more and more grand theories of The Role of Religion in All Humanity. From my semi-neutral post as a journalist who covers both fields, I’d like to suggest that the social and evolutionary psychologists are more full-of-shit than the humanists. The fact that someone like Decety feels comfortable taking his sticker games and making public comments about the fundamental nature of morality and secularity feels slightly surreal. (It’s not just in Forbesinterviews. Here’s the final line of the paper: “More generally, [our findings] call into question whether religion is vital for moral development, supporting the idea that the secularization of moral discourse will not reduce human kindness—in fact, it will do just the opposite.”) The problem is not that Decety and his colleagues’ results aren’t interesting, or even that they’re wrong—for all I know, all the world over, kids who engage more with certain ritual experiences are less kind to their peers. The problem is that, absent robust evidence for his generalizations about the Nature of all Christians and Muslims, it is difficult to tell where Decety’s grand claims emerge from actual evidence, and where they may owe a debt to politicized beliefs about how religion in general, or specific religious traditions (i.e. Islam), motivate people to do bad things.

Continue Reading...










 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on December 13, 2015 08:00

Donald Trump’s war on political correctness is just an excuse to spew his nonstop hate speech

Donald Trump, who has spent much of his week defending his proposed ban of all Muslims immigrants to the U.S., has crossed the line from political punch line to frightening reminder of history. The four weeks since the terrorist attacks in Paris, and increasingly since the massacre last week in San Bernardino, have seen Trump and other GOP candidates toy with a dangerous brand of xenophobia normally practiced by the villains in children's history books. Trump himself has suggested such action was justified by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Trump and his supporters gladly back such rhetoric as “telling it like it is,” a useless term of art generally deployed by people being outright offensive. His campaign has been a war on perceived censorship by nancy liberals of the real “truths” — that Muslims and Mexicans are dangerous and the nation needs a big, strong man to defend itself. But the war over political correctness was never an attempt to stifle debate —only a fence to keep out the kinds of discriminatory animism that has hoisted Trump to the front of our political atmosphere. Trump has morphed such fear of a brown planet into a national movement separate from the Republican Party — a USA Today poll recently found 68 percent of Trump supporters would follow him to a third-party ticket. But its roots lie in the reinvigorated wars over political correctness led by conservatives. Before attacks in Paris and San Bernardino shifted our national focus to security and terrorism, protests from the University of Missouri and Yale against racist speech and symbols of racism had garnered a newfound wave of outrage from conservative critics. For much of its history as a term, warnings of “political correctness” have come from conservative commentators warning of a supposed suppression of new ideas by liberal academics, best epitomized by Allan Bloom’s seminal 1987 book  "The Closing of the American Mind" (recently echoed by the Atlantic as “The Coddling of the American Mind”). George H.W. Bush declared in 1991 that although p.c. culture came from “the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred,” it also sought to declare “certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits." Political correctness has never been a goal of the left as much as decrying it has become a tool of the right, as if avoiding offensive speech just so happened to align with oppression of Republican ideals. Donald Trump has firsthand experience with this phenomenon. The list of people Trump has offended since he began his campaign is obscenely long — women, Mexicans, POWs, Muslims, Jews. Any protestation against his speech Trump and his supporters have gladly written off as the whining of easily offended liberals. To much applause during the first GOP debate, Trump wrote off a laundry list of offensive comments he had made to and about women by saying, “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct.” After NBC, NASCAR and other corporations ended business arrangements with Trump after he called Mexicans rapists and murderers, Trump decried those companies for taking the ”very sad position of being politically correct even though they are wrong in terms of what is good for our country.” In recent weeks, the GOP front-runner has used the phrase as a preamble to nearly every statement he has made about Muslims and Syrian refugees, and even went so far as to blame last week’s terrorist attack on political correctness. Defending his right to be offensive, even dangerously so, is not a side effect of Trump’s campaign but the entire reason for its success. A Reuters poll found 77 percent of Trump supporters most loved him for his disregard for political correctness. Given the frequency and news coverage of Trump’s derogatory comments, one can safely assume this is not a group of people somewhat troubled by Trump’s xenophobia but, rather, believe it is the failure of the media and politicians to be so brazen as to practice racist nationalism. Calling for sensitivity in political speech is not about protecting the fragile nature of those afraid of being offended, as Trump and his supporters would have you believe. It comes from the fear that such talk validates the very real and present threat of racist and ethnocentric ideologies shifting from the edges of political life and into the forefront. While the Republican Party has been criticized for employing “dog whistle” politics since the days of Lee Atwater, Trump has thrown out the whistle and begun waving red meat to the dangerously ethnocentric hordes that lurk in the Republican base. Trump may think he’s ginning up his poll numbers by appealing to the most savage parts of American political life, but his speech is proving the inherent value of p.c. culture in preventing exactly the kinds of racism Donald Trump is living on. Even if we disregard his anti-Muslim policies, Trump’s speech alone has spurned a new wave of Islamophobia that is presenting itself in the most vile ways. A Philadelphia mosque had a severed pig’s head thrown at its door. A Muslim architect’s plan for a new mosque in Fredericksburg, Virginia, was met with anger by locals who screamed at the engineer, “Every Muslim is a terrorist” and “Nobody wants your evil cult in this town.” Such hatred is not specific to Trump, but he has forced such obscure and hateful ideology into the political mainstream and given new validity to the most fringe elements of our national discourse. Trump’s policies on both immigration and terrorism have received numerous endorsements from white nationalists--former KKK leader and former Louisiana gubernatorial candidate David Duke even rose from the political dead to hail Trump for defending “American values” and “the heritage of this country.” Trump has proven speech can be dangerous, especially when it appeals to the kinds of historical forces that have too often led to real acts of oppression and violence. Alongside that, however, he has proven the necessity for societal borders between our national political discourse and bigoted ideologies. A failure to do so breeds not just people like Trump, but the massive crowds that have been waiting for someone like him to say what no one else would.Donald Trump, who has spent much of his week defending his proposed ban of all Muslims immigrants to the U.S., has crossed the line from political punch line to frightening reminder of history. The four weeks since the terrorist attacks in Paris, and increasingly since the massacre last week in San Bernardino, have seen Trump and other GOP candidates toy with a dangerous brand of xenophobia normally practiced by the villains in children's history books. Trump himself has suggested such action was justified by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Trump and his supporters gladly back such rhetoric as “telling it like it is,” a useless term of art generally deployed by people being outright offensive. His campaign has been a war on perceived censorship by nancy liberals of the real “truths” — that Muslims and Mexicans are dangerous and the nation needs a big, strong man to defend itself. But the war over political correctness was never an attempt to stifle debate —only a fence to keep out the kinds of discriminatory animism that has hoisted Trump to the front of our political atmosphere. Trump has morphed such fear of a brown planet into a national movement separate from the Republican Party — a USA Today poll recently found 68 percent of Trump supporters would follow him to a third-party ticket. But its roots lie in the reinvigorated wars over political correctness led by conservatives. Before attacks in Paris and San Bernardino shifted our national focus to security and terrorism, protests from the University of Missouri and Yale against racist speech and symbols of racism had garnered a newfound wave of outrage from conservative critics. For much of its history as a term, warnings of “political correctness” have come from conservative commentators warning of a supposed suppression of new ideas by liberal academics, best epitomized by Allan Bloom’s seminal 1987 book  "The Closing of the American Mind" (recently echoed by the Atlantic as “The Coddling of the American Mind”). George H.W. Bush declared in 1991 that although p.c. culture came from “the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred,” it also sought to declare “certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits." Political correctness has never been a goal of the left as much as decrying it has become a tool of the right, as if avoiding offensive speech just so happened to align with oppression of Republican ideals. Donald Trump has firsthand experience with this phenomenon. The list of people Trump has offended since he began his campaign is obscenely long — women, Mexicans, POWs, Muslims, Jews. Any protestation against his speech Trump and his supporters have gladly written off as the whining of easily offended liberals. To much applause during the first GOP debate, Trump wrote off a laundry list of offensive comments he had made to and about women by saying, “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct.” After NBC, NASCAR and other corporations ended business arrangements with Trump after he called Mexicans rapists and murderers, Trump decried those companies for taking the ”very sad position of being politically correct even though they are wrong in terms of what is good for our country.” In recent weeks, the GOP front-runner has used the phrase as a preamble to nearly every statement he has made about Muslims and Syrian refugees, and even went so far as to blame last week’s terrorist attack on political correctness. Defending his right to be offensive, even dangerously so, is not a side effect of Trump’s campaign but the entire reason for its success. A Reuters poll found 77 percent of Trump supporters most loved him for his disregard for political correctness. Given the frequency and news coverage of Trump’s derogatory comments, one can safely assume this is not a group of people somewhat troubled by Trump’s xenophobia but, rather, believe it is the failure of the media and politicians to be so brazen as to practice racist nationalism. Calling for sensitivity in political speech is not about protecting the fragile nature of those afraid of being offended, as Trump and his supporters would have you believe. It comes from the fear that such talk validates the very real and present threat of racist and ethnocentric ideologies shifting from the edges of political life and into the forefront. While the Republican Party has been criticized for employing “dog whistle” politics since the days of Lee Atwater, Trump has thrown out the whistle and begun waving red meat to the dangerously ethnocentric hordes that lurk in the Republican base. Trump may think he’s ginning up his poll numbers by appealing to the most savage parts of American political life, but his speech is proving the inherent value of p.c. culture in preventing exactly the kinds of racism Donald Trump is living on. Even if we disregard his anti-Muslim policies, Trump’s speech alone has spurned a new wave of Islamophobia that is presenting itself in the most vile ways. A Philadelphia mosque had a severed pig’s head thrown at its door. A Muslim architect’s plan for a new mosque in Fredericksburg, Virginia, was met with anger by locals who screamed at the engineer, “Every Muslim is a terrorist” and “Nobody wants your evil cult in this town.” Such hatred is not specific to Trump, but he has forced such obscure and hateful ideology into the political mainstream and given new validity to the most fringe elements of our national discourse. Trump’s policies on both immigration and terrorism have received numerous endorsements from white nationalists--former KKK leader and former Louisiana gubernatorial candidate David Duke even rose from the political dead to hail Trump for defending “American values” and “the heritage of this country.” Trump has proven speech can be dangerous, especially when it appeals to the kinds of historical forces that have too often led to real acts of oppression and violence. Alongside that, however, he has proven the necessity for societal borders between our national political discourse and bigoted ideologies. A failure to do so breeds not just people like Trump, but the massive crowds that have been waiting for someone like him to say what no one else would.

Continue Reading...










 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on December 13, 2015 07:30

Provoking discussion, not riots: Sandow Birk’s “American Qur’an” is quietly transgressive, eschewing the satirical depictions of the Prophet Muhammad that grab headlines

Imagine yourself in a bland hotel room anywhere in the United States. You’re sitting on the edge of a bed with tightly tucked white sheets, flipping through TV channels without finding anything you can bear to watch. Out of lonely boredom, you open the top drawer of the nightstand. Instead of the requisite King James Bible, you find an English translation of the Quran inviting you to read its pages: “This is a message to all people, to whomever among you desire to take a straight path” (81:27–8). Americans applauding Trump’s promise to ban all Muslims from U.S. borders might imagine the scenario above as a foreboding future brought on by the “browning of America” and a Muslim fifth column’s “Sharia creep.” Rather than as a sign of the destruction of America, painter Sandow Birk imagined this chance, cross-cultural encounter with the Quran as the conceptual launch of his nine-year journey of reading and reflecting on the Islamic scripture and the War on Terror. The result is his "American Qur’an," an illuminated manuscript published by W.W. Norton as a stunning coffee table art book, ideal as a Christmas or Hanukkah gift, perhaps for a friend or relative on your list persuaded by the fear-mongering of Donald Trump, who claims simply, “We have no choice.” Birk’s "American Qur’an" intends to introduce the text to American audiences but he is neither inviting his readers to convert to Islam nor illustrating the history of Islam’s founding; the Quran struck him as far too poetic and abstract for such a literal approach. Birk eschewed the irony and satire that have become the knee-jerk impulse of so many Western artists who criticize the specter of Islam by representing the Prophet Muhammad as ugly, bloodthirsty, perverse and savage. In fact, Birk is unflinchingly neutral on the question of the reform of Islam. Contemplative and open-ended, Birk’s paintings collectively comprise a complete English transcription of the Quran bordered by narrative scenes of everyday life in the contemporary United States. In “Smoke,” Birk depicts the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 from the terrified pedestrians’ point of view. He critiques al-Qaida’s terrorism but also challenges the notion that contemporary Muslim political behavior was created and petrified in the seventh century text by analyzing contemporary jihadists alongside extreme forms of taken for granted state violence such as torture, capital punishment, warfare. Birk wants to provoke discussions, not riots, and while "American Qur’an" will likely strike many as controversial, his paintings reveal a welcome depth and seriousness lacking in so much of our national discourse about Islam. Birk’s illuminated Quran is the first of its kind, not only because it is in English and its scenes are peopled, but also because Birk is not Muslim. For centuries, Muslim artists have created illuminated manuscripts of their sacred text out of faithful devotion. Birk’s relationship to the Quran is characterized by respect but not necessarily veneration. For example, Muslim artists have generally eschewed the human form in art that is explicitly religious and devotional in order to avoid graven images; Birk does not play by such Muslim rules. (Importantly, his paintings never received any Muslim backlash in the form of threats of violence despite years of media publicity and gallery shows.) Birk makes the Quran itself into a cultural criticism tool, a mirror, by making the exotic familiar and the familiar exotic, scrutinizing the beliefs and behaviors of ordinary Americans in much the same way as they typically scrutinize Muslim societies. Birk takes readers to each of the 50 states but also to places beyond the nation’s borders where the U.S. government exerts its power and force, often brutally: landscapes devastated by war in Japan and Iraq, the Guantánamo Bay prison camp in Cuba, and the militarized U.S.–Mexico border. Politically and artistically, Birk is quietly transgressive, and "American Qur’an" is far more interesting and edgy than the formulaic satirical depictions of the Prophet Muhammad that grab headlines. Birk is driven by a political dilemma that troubles him and could not be more timely: Why can’t Islam be an American religion? Seventy-six percent of Republicans and 43 percent of Democrats polled believe Islam is incompatible with the American way of life. If the Bible, a 2,000-year-old book from the Middle East, is embraced as the very essence of American national culture and identity, why is another 1,400-year-old book from the Middle East deemed incomprehensible, dangerous and irredeemably un-American by so many? Birk’s "American Qur’an" tests both Islam’s claims to universality and the universal citizenship promised by American democracy. Can a white man who is not Muslim accept the Quran’s invitation to read, reflect on and interpret its verses without being accused of cultural trespass? Does the Quran have anything to say to a 21st-century American? Birk’s pairing of an image of a foreclosed house with the chapter titled “The Cheaters” is an emphatic affirmative answer to that question: “Woe to the cheaters, who demand full measure when they take from others, but short them when they measure for them” (83:1–3). As for whether there is room for Muslims in America, Birk suggests that we cannot know who is or is not Muslim just by looking at the people who populate "American Qur’an"; the same holds true for the people who populate America. In the wake of the gut-wrenching San Bernardino, California, shootings, anti-Muslim discrimination and hate crimes have spiked though they were already on the rise. American Muslims are suffering a backlash and I am painfully aware that my non-Arabic name and unconcealed hair make me less vulnerable than friends and family who “look Muslim.” It is exhausting, frightening and alienating living among so many people who are ready to indict not only my faith but to punish me and millions of Muslims like me for the crimes of a few, crimes that I find just as terrifying as they do. Growing up in Detroit, my family’s Quran was a cheap, worn paperback that belonged to my maternal grandmother, brought to the U.S. by my mother 40 years ago. The family lore about my grandmother’s short life was a spare mix of sad and inspiring fragments. As a young woman, she lost two of her daughters and their family farm to the war in India before she made a new life as a refugee in Pakistan. In her 50s, and with a greater semblance of peace, she nurtured a new ambition: to learn to read. There was only one book that she wanted to read, and she wanted to read it in its original language, not her native Punjabi. That book was the Quran. So she learned to read Arabic, a language she did not speak or understand, from a tutor, a young girl who had committed the entire book to memory. One page at a time, she worked her way through the book and it was her proudest and final achievement. As a child, I learned to read Arabic the same way my grandmother did, phonetically, with only a vague sense of what the words meant. While I made my way through children’s primers with large blocky print, my grandmother’s Quran sat on a high shelf, wrapped in a neon pink stretchy material that reminded me of a bathing suit, complete with a single, long spaghetti strap my mother untied when she found a few spare minutes to read to herself. I felt the visceral power of the Quran’s words not in their translated meaning but in their ability to absorb my mother’s attention in a way nothing else could. Sometimes I would call her and she would not hear me, lost in fine black Arabic letters curling across thin, mint green paper. That’s not to say I grew up in a strict, religious family. My mother taught piety by her example, not lectures. My family practiced Islamic rituals loosely and debated theology hotly. Fatwas were treated for what they were, mere religious opinions that one could take or leave, as numerous and varied as the guests at our dinner table arguing over them. Then one day an old turbaned man on television transformed the word "fatwa" into a license to kill. The world turned upside down over a novel that posited that the real author of the Quran was Satan. My teacher told our class the problem was that Muslims did not understand fiction as an art. He did not seem to understand that art could also be a racial insult. I did not say anything in class or to the teenage boys who called my Muslim friend a fundamentalist and threatened her with a knife at the bus stop. I wanted to share the Islam I knew intimately but all that stumbled out of my mouth was an embarrassed confession that my grandfather bore a striking resemblance to the Ayatollah Khomeini.      Now, as an adult and an Ivy League religion professor, I am far more prepared to field questions about Islam and the so-called clash of civilizations from friends and strangers, students and journalists. Many want me to disown the violence of jihadists as impurities polluting Islam’s peaceful essence; I disappoint them when I explain that interpreting the Quran incorrectly is not enough to put someone beyond the pale of the faith. Others want me to confirm that no institution has caused more bloodshed than religion and that a world without religion would be a peaceful one; I remind them that the 20th century may have been the most violent in history, with its world wars, colonial conquests, revolutions and counterrevolutions—much of the blood spilled in the name of nation-states, and not God. Others want to separate the ugliness of religion from a beautiful set of shared values that they call spirituality. They want me to confirm that Muslims believe in peace, compassion, forgiveness, generosity, and that once we boil religions down to their spiritual “essence,” we are all the same. They are surprised when I challenge the invisible line they have drawn between this thing they call spirituality and this thing they call religion. What if the rules and the martyrdom and the glorified suffering and the desire for power and the regimes of self-discipline blur right into the love and the light? Aren’t we surrounded by secular forms of all of the things we love and hate about religion? Birk’s transcribed pages force us to confront our fears about how different and similar we might be. Some are frightened by Islam because even “moderate Muslims” believe the Quran is “the literal word of God.” When many Americans hear the expression “the literal word of God,” they misunderstand it to mean that Muslims only read the Quran literally or are only allowed to do so. In fact, a literal reading of the seventh verse of chapter 3 reveals that the Quran contains verses that are self-evident in meaning, as well as allegorical passages and mysteries beyond the comprehension of the human intellect. “[God] has sent down the Book for you. Some of its signs are decisive—they are the basis of the Book—and others allegorical” (3:7). Since the Quran never specifies which verses to take literally or allegorically, Muslims must rely on their communities of interpretation, often led by religious scholars such as jurists and theologians. Muslims have always argued over the Quran’s meanings. After the Prophet Muhammad’s death, an early community of Muslims challenged what they saw as the excessive interpretive liberties of the Caliph Ali, the Prophet's cousin. They accused the caliph, in his capacity as ruler, of trespassing over the bounds of human interpretation and encroaching on the dominion of God’s law. In response, Caliph Ali brought a Quran to a large crowd. Touching the book, he instructed it to speak and to explain God’s law. Alarmed and surprised, the onlookers protested, “The Quran cannot speak, for it is not human!" This, the caliph explained, was precisely his point. As mere ink and paper, the Quran does not speak for itself. It is human beings who give the book its consequence by reading, reflecting, drawing out meanings and lessons, constructing arguments, all contingent on their recognition of the inevitable limits of human understanding and the limitlessness of the book’s divine truth. Birk remains unconvinced of any claims of divinity; however, he is seeking answers to big questions. Why are we here? What happens after we die? Why do bad things happen to good people? By virtue of its format, with text boxes partially obscuring scenes, Birk forces us to confront our own biases. In forcing us to try (metaphorically) to peer around the Quran’s words to see what is happening in his scenes, Birk highlights our always partial (in both senses of the word) understanding. His "American Qur’an" teaches us to look with humility, to remember that none of us has a God’s-eye view of our world. Imagine that the English translation of the Quran you discovered in the top drawer of that hotel nightstand or under your Christmas tree was Sandow Birk’s "American Qur’an."Imagine yourself in a bland hotel room anywhere in the United States. You’re sitting on the edge of a bed with tightly tucked white sheets, flipping through TV channels without finding anything you can bear to watch. Out of lonely boredom, you open the top drawer of the nightstand. Instead of the requisite King James Bible, you find an English translation of the Quran inviting you to read its pages: “This is a message to all people, to whomever among you desire to take a straight path” (81:27–8). Americans applauding Trump’s promise to ban all Muslims from U.S. borders might imagine the scenario above as a foreboding future brought on by the “browning of America” and a Muslim fifth column’s “Sharia creep.” Rather than as a sign of the destruction of America, painter Sandow Birk imagined this chance, cross-cultural encounter with the Quran as the conceptual launch of his nine-year journey of reading and reflecting on the Islamic scripture and the War on Terror. The result is his "American Qur’an," an illuminated manuscript published by W.W. Norton as a stunning coffee table art book, ideal as a Christmas or Hanukkah gift, perhaps for a friend or relative on your list persuaded by the fear-mongering of Donald Trump, who claims simply, “We have no choice.” Birk’s "American Qur’an" intends to introduce the text to American audiences but he is neither inviting his readers to convert to Islam nor illustrating the history of Islam’s founding; the Quran struck him as far too poetic and abstract for such a literal approach. Birk eschewed the irony and satire that have become the knee-jerk impulse of so many Western artists who criticize the specter of Islam by representing the Prophet Muhammad as ugly, bloodthirsty, perverse and savage. In fact, Birk is unflinchingly neutral on the question of the reform of Islam. Contemplative and open-ended, Birk’s paintings collectively comprise a complete English transcription of the Quran bordered by narrative scenes of everyday life in the contemporary United States. In “Smoke,” Birk depicts the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 from the terrified pedestrians’ point of view. He critiques al-Qaida’s terrorism but also challenges the notion that contemporary Muslim political behavior was created and petrified in the seventh century text by analyzing contemporary jihadists alongside extreme forms of taken for granted state violence such as torture, capital punishment, warfare. Birk wants to provoke discussions, not riots, and while "American Qur’an" will likely strike many as controversial, his paintings reveal a welcome depth and seriousness lacking in so much of our national discourse about Islam. Birk’s illuminated Quran is the first of its kind, not only because it is in English and its scenes are peopled, but also because Birk is not Muslim. For centuries, Muslim artists have created illuminated manuscripts of their sacred text out of faithful devotion. Birk’s relationship to the Quran is characterized by respect but not necessarily veneration. For example, Muslim artists have generally eschewed the human form in art that is explicitly religious and devotional in order to avoid graven images; Birk does not play by such Muslim rules. (Importantly, his paintings never received any Muslim backlash in the form of threats of violence despite years of media publicity and gallery shows.) Birk makes the Quran itself into a cultural criticism tool, a mirror, by making the exotic familiar and the familiar exotic, scrutinizing the beliefs and behaviors of ordinary Americans in much the same way as they typically scrutinize Muslim societies. Birk takes readers to each of the 50 states but also to places beyond the nation’s borders where the U.S. government exerts its power and force, often brutally: landscapes devastated by war in Japan and Iraq, the Guantánamo Bay prison camp in Cuba, and the militarized U.S.–Mexico border. Politically and artistically, Birk is quietly transgressive, and "American Qur’an" is far more interesting and edgy than the formulaic satirical depictions of the Prophet Muhammad that grab headlines. Birk is driven by a political dilemma that troubles him and could not be more timely: Why can’t Islam be an American religion? Seventy-six percent of Republicans and 43 percent of Democrats polled believe Islam is incompatible with the American way of life. If the Bible, a 2,000-year-old book from the Middle East, is embraced as the very essence of American national culture and identity, why is another 1,400-year-old book from the Middle East deemed incomprehensible, dangerous and irredeemably un-American by so many? Birk’s "American Qur’an" tests both Islam’s claims to universality and the universal citizenship promised by American democracy. Can a white man who is not Muslim accept the Quran’s invitation to read, reflect on and interpret its verses without being accused of cultural trespass? Does the Quran have anything to say to a 21st-century American? Birk’s pairing of an image of a foreclosed house with the chapter titled “The Cheaters” is an emphatic affirmative answer to that question: “Woe to the cheaters, who demand full measure when they take from others, but short them when they measure for them” (83:1–3). As for whether there is room for Muslims in America, Birk suggests that we cannot know who is or is not Muslim just by looking at the people who populate "American Qur’an"; the same holds true for the people who populate America. In the wake of the gut-wrenching San Bernardino, California, shootings, anti-Muslim discrimination and hate crimes have spiked though they were already on the rise. American Muslims are suffering a backlash and I am painfully aware that my non-Arabic name and unconcealed hair make me less vulnerable than friends and family who “look Muslim.” It is exhausting, frightening and alienating living among so many people who are ready to indict not only my faith but to punish me and millions of Muslims like me for the crimes of a few, crimes that I find just as terrifying as they do. Growing up in Detroit, my family’s Quran was a cheap, worn paperback that belonged to my maternal grandmother, brought to the U.S. by my mother 40 years ago. The family lore about my grandmother’s short life was a spare mix of sad and inspiring fragments. As a young woman, she lost two of her daughters and their family farm to the war in India before she made a new life as a refugee in Pakistan. In her 50s, and with a greater semblance of peace, she nurtured a new ambition: to learn to read. There was only one book that she wanted to read, and she wanted to read it in its original language, not her native Punjabi. That book was the Quran. So she learned to read Arabic, a language she did not speak or understand, from a tutor, a young girl who had committed the entire book to memory. One page at a time, she worked her way through the book and it was her proudest and final achievement. As a child, I learned to read Arabic the same way my grandmother did, phonetically, with only a vague sense of what the words meant. While I made my way through children’s primers with large blocky print, my grandmother’s Quran sat on a high shelf, wrapped in a neon pink stretchy material that reminded me of a bathing suit, complete with a single, long spaghetti strap my mother untied when she found a few spare minutes to read to herself. I felt the visceral power of the Quran’s words not in their translated meaning but in their ability to absorb my mother’s attention in a way nothing else could. Sometimes I would call her and she would not hear me, lost in fine black Arabic letters curling across thin, mint green paper. That’s not to say I grew up in a strict, religious family. My mother taught piety by her example, not lectures. My family practiced Islamic rituals loosely and debated theology hotly. Fatwas were treated for what they were, mere religious opinions that one could take or leave, as numerous and varied as the guests at our dinner table arguing over them. Then one day an old turbaned man on television transformed the word "fatwa" into a license to kill. The world turned upside down over a novel that posited that the real author of the Quran was Satan. My teacher told our class the problem was that Muslims did not understand fiction as an art. He did not seem to understand that art could also be a racial insult. I did not say anything in class or to the teenage boys who called my Muslim friend a fundamentalist and threatened her with a knife at the bus stop. I wanted to share the Islam I knew intimately but all that stumbled out of my mouth was an embarrassed confession that my grandfather bore a striking resemblance to the Ayatollah Khomeini.      Now, as an adult and an Ivy League religion professor, I am far more prepared to field questions about Islam and the so-called clash of civilizations from friends and strangers, students and journalists. Many want me to disown the violence of jihadists as impurities polluting Islam’s peaceful essence; I disappoint them when I explain that interpreting the Quran incorrectly is not enough to put someone beyond the pale of the faith. Others want me to confirm that no institution has caused more bloodshed than religion and that a world without religion would be a peaceful one; I remind them that the 20th century may have been the most violent in history, with its world wars, colonial conquests, revolutions and counterrevolutions—much of the blood spilled in the name of nation-states, and not God. Others want to separate the ugliness of religion from a beautiful set of shared values that they call spirituality. They want me to confirm that Muslims believe in peace, compassion, forgiveness, generosity, and that once we boil religions down to their spiritual “essence,” we are all the same. They are surprised when I challenge the invisible line they have drawn between this thing they call spirituality and this thing they call religion. What if the rules and the martyrdom and the glorified suffering and the desire for power and the regimes of self-discipline blur right into the love and the light? Aren’t we surrounded by secular forms of all of the things we love and hate about religion? Birk’s transcribed pages force us to confront our fears about how different and similar we might be. Some are frightened by Islam because even “moderate Muslims” believe the Quran is “the literal word of God.” When many Americans hear the expression “the literal word of God,” they misunderstand it to mean that Muslims only read the Quran literally or are only allowed to do so. In fact, a literal reading of the seventh verse of chapter 3 reveals that the Quran contains verses that are self-evident in meaning, as well as allegorical passages and mysteries beyond the comprehension of the human intellect. “[God] has sent down the Book for you. Some of its signs are decisive—they are the basis of the Book—and others allegorical” (3:7). Since the Quran never specifies which verses to take literally or allegorically, Muslims must rely on their communities of interpretation, often led by religious scholars such as jurists and theologians. Muslims have always argued over the Quran’s meanings. After the Prophet Muhammad’s death, an early community of Muslims challenged what they saw as the excessive interpretive liberties of the Caliph Ali, the Prophet's cousin. They accused the caliph, in his capacity as ruler, of trespassing over the bounds of human interpretation and encroaching on the dominion of God’s law. In response, Caliph Ali brought a Quran to a large crowd. Touching the book, he instructed it to speak and to explain God’s law. Alarmed and surprised, the onlookers protested, “The Quran cannot speak, for it is not human!" This, the caliph explained, was precisely his point. As mere ink and paper, the Quran does not speak for itself. It is human beings who give the book its consequence by reading, reflecting, drawing out meanings and lessons, constructing arguments, all contingent on their recognition of the inevitable limits of human understanding and the limitlessness of the book’s divine truth. Birk remains unconvinced of any claims of divinity; however, he is seeking answers to big questions. Why are we here? What happens after we die? Why do bad things happen to good people? By virtue of its format, with text boxes partially obscuring scenes, Birk forces us to confront our own biases. In forcing us to try (metaphorically) to peer around the Quran’s words to see what is happening in his scenes, Birk highlights our always partial (in both senses of the word) understanding. His "American Qur’an" teaches us to look with humility, to remember that none of us has a God’s-eye view of our world. Imagine that the English translation of the Quran you discovered in the top drawer of that hotel nightstand or under your Christmas tree was Sandow Birk’s "American Qur’an."

Continue Reading...










 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on December 13, 2015 07:00

December 12, 2015

Muslims are combating radicals too: I’m an American Muslim who served as a Marine in Iraq — and now it’s overwhelmingly Muslims who are battling ISIS

In the aftermath of the attacks in Paris, Beirut and San Bernardino, California, inspired or conducted by a self-labeled Islamic extremist group, a heated debate on Islam has ensued. Common questions touch on the role of Islam and the Muslim identity of the perpetrators, while the religious identity of the vast majority of ISIS’s victims and of those who combat ISIS is absent from media talking points. The simple answer is yes; ISIS fighters are Muslim, and the fact that they follow a radical and twisted interpretation of Islam does not strip them of their Muslim identity. But individuals like Adel Termos, the Lebanese police officer who sacrificed his life tackling a suicide bomber in the Beirut attack, are also Muslim. To highlight the supposed piety of Islamic radicals while simultaneously omitting Islam from the biographies of the heroes who die combating groups like ISIS only contributes to the false argument that Islam and terrorism are synonymous, while undermining the positive role the majority of Muslims play in the struggle against radicalism. The fact is that Muslims are combating radicals—we just never discuss it. I first become aware of the positive role Muslims play in countering radicalism while serving as a U.S. Marine in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006. Stationed in what was then the self-declared capital of al-Qaida in Iraq, which later became ISIS, I, an American Muslim, was embedded as a translator in a makeshift police station composed of former insurgents who had decided to side with coalition forces against al-Qaida. One day, a fellow Marine with minimal Arabic language skills jokingly pointed on a map and asked a young Iraqi police officer, “Ali, where are the mujahedin?” Confused, Ali turned to me and asked, “Why do they call al-Qaida "mujahedin"?  We are the real mujahedin here. We are fighting to save Muslims.” In Arabic “mujahedin” translates to holy warriors, or those engaged in “jihad” or a holy war. Yet in the West, the term has come to be widely used as synonymous with “terrorist.” Two weeks later, Ali was killed while removing an IED from an al-Qaida safe house. A devout Muslim, Ali sacrificed his life in the war against al-Qaida. What Ali revealed then remains true today: The sweeping discourse of terrorism in the West fails to recognize not only the nuances within Islam, but the Muslim identity of those who combat extremism on a daily basis. All too often, we excise heroes like Termos in Beirut, and Ali in Ramadi, from the narrative of Muslim piety, ignoring those who combat extremism in the name of Islam while overemphasizing the faith of those who kill according to their own interpretations of the religion. Today, presidential candidates and political pundits alike are quick to point to the religious affiliation of ISIS members, even when they purchase “Islam for Dummies” prior to traveling to Syria, but omit the Muslim identity of the coalition forces countering ISIS.  Jordanian pilot Moath al-Kasasbeh, who was brutally burned alive in a cage by ISIS, was repeatedly identified by his nationality, but not his Muslim faith. In truth, Moath was a devout Muslim who had memorized the entire Quran. Most likely, had he chosen to join ISIS and not the Jordanian Air Force, the same media personalities who chose to omit Moath’s piety would have eagerly highlighted it. Ali, Adel Termos and Moath al-Kasasbeh are not anomalies—they are the norm. Just as Muslims have made up the vast majority of casualties at the hands of extremist groups since 9/11, Muslims also constitute the bulk of the coalition forces leading the battle on the ground. Kurdish militias; the Free Syrian Army; Iraq Sunni militias; the Iraqi army as well as the large number of military forces from Arab States—all Muslims who continue to play a significant role in the battle against ISIS and their extremist interpretation of Islam. These underreported Muslim forces go beyond the battlefield. On Sept. 24, 2014, more than 120 Muslim scholars from around the world published an open letter to ISIS, denouncing it as un-Islamic by picking apart its ideology using Islamic texts. These Muslim scholars are the very people who have the subject-matter expertise and legitimacy to counter ISIS’s assertions by contextualizing a rebuttal based on Islamic law and customs. Media pundits, like Bill Maher, would do well to invite such scholars onto their programs rather than the cacophony of guests who share in his abhorrence of Islam. As the world recovers from the devastating attacks in Lebanon, Paris and San Bernardino many Muslims find themselves stuck in the middle, battling both the extremists who wish to kill them and the pundits who accuse them of complicity. In a war of ideas and identity, it is essential that mainstream Muslims are allowed to counter extremist narratives and define their own religion. Continuing to battle extremists in the war zones of the Middle East, the streets of Paris or on college campuses is fruitless if we overlook the Muslim identity of those fighting extremism.In the aftermath of the attacks in Paris, Beirut and San Bernardino, California, inspired or conducted by a self-labeled Islamic extremist group, a heated debate on Islam has ensued. Common questions touch on the role of Islam and the Muslim identity of the perpetrators, while the religious identity of the vast majority of ISIS’s victims and of those who combat ISIS is absent from media talking points. The simple answer is yes; ISIS fighters are Muslim, and the fact that they follow a radical and twisted interpretation of Islam does not strip them of their Muslim identity. But individuals like Adel Termos, the Lebanese police officer who sacrificed his life tackling a suicide bomber in the Beirut attack, are also Muslim. To highlight the supposed piety of Islamic radicals while simultaneously omitting Islam from the biographies of the heroes who die combating groups like ISIS only contributes to the false argument that Islam and terrorism are synonymous, while undermining the positive role the majority of Muslims play in the struggle against radicalism. The fact is that Muslims are combating radicals—we just never discuss it. I first become aware of the positive role Muslims play in countering radicalism while serving as a U.S. Marine in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006. Stationed in what was then the self-declared capital of al-Qaida in Iraq, which later became ISIS, I, an American Muslim, was embedded as a translator in a makeshift police station composed of former insurgents who had decided to side with coalition forces against al-Qaida. One day, a fellow Marine with minimal Arabic language skills jokingly pointed on a map and asked a young Iraqi police officer, “Ali, where are the mujahedin?” Confused, Ali turned to me and asked, “Why do they call al-Qaida "mujahedin"?  We are the real mujahedin here. We are fighting to save Muslims.” In Arabic “mujahedin” translates to holy warriors, or those engaged in “jihad” or a holy war. Yet in the West, the term has come to be widely used as synonymous with “terrorist.” Two weeks later, Ali was killed while removing an IED from an al-Qaida safe house. A devout Muslim, Ali sacrificed his life in the war against al-Qaida. What Ali revealed then remains true today: The sweeping discourse of terrorism in the West fails to recognize not only the nuances within Islam, but the Muslim identity of those who combat extremism on a daily basis. All too often, we excise heroes like Termos in Beirut, and Ali in Ramadi, from the narrative of Muslim piety, ignoring those who combat extremism in the name of Islam while overemphasizing the faith of those who kill according to their own interpretations of the religion. Today, presidential candidates and political pundits alike are quick to point to the religious affiliation of ISIS members, even when they purchase “Islam for Dummies” prior to traveling to Syria, but omit the Muslim identity of the coalition forces countering ISIS.  Jordanian pilot Moath al-Kasasbeh, who was brutally burned alive in a cage by ISIS, was repeatedly identified by his nationality, but not his Muslim faith. In truth, Moath was a devout Muslim who had memorized the entire Quran. Most likely, had he chosen to join ISIS and not the Jordanian Air Force, the same media personalities who chose to omit Moath’s piety would have eagerly highlighted it. Ali, Adel Termos and Moath al-Kasasbeh are not anomalies—they are the norm. Just as Muslims have made up the vast majority of casualties at the hands of extremist groups since 9/11, Muslims also constitute the bulk of the coalition forces leading the battle on the ground. Kurdish militias; the Free Syrian Army; Iraq Sunni militias; the Iraqi army as well as the large number of military forces from Arab States—all Muslims who continue to play a significant role in the battle against ISIS and their extremist interpretation of Islam. These underreported Muslim forces go beyond the battlefield. On Sept. 24, 2014, more than 120 Muslim scholars from around the world published an open letter to ISIS, denouncing it as un-Islamic by picking apart its ideology using Islamic texts. These Muslim scholars are the very people who have the subject-matter expertise and legitimacy to counter ISIS’s assertions by contextualizing a rebuttal based on Islamic law and customs. Media pundits, like Bill Maher, would do well to invite such scholars onto their programs rather than the cacophony of guests who share in his abhorrence of Islam. As the world recovers from the devastating attacks in Lebanon, Paris and San Bernardino many Muslims find themselves stuck in the middle, battling both the extremists who wish to kill them and the pundits who accuse them of complicity. In a war of ideas and identity, it is essential that mainstream Muslims are allowed to counter extremist narratives and define their own religion. Continuing to battle extremists in the war zones of the Middle East, the streets of Paris or on college campuses is fruitless if we overlook the Muslim identity of those fighting extremism.

Continue Reading...










 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on December 12, 2015 15:00

Geek food for the geek soul: “As society gets increasingly secular, we need to fill the social void”

It’s one of those ideas that seems inevitable when you hear it: cookbooks based on classic works of science fiction and fantasy. Okay, maybe not quite inevitable, but recipes like Spice-Stuffed Sandworm Bread – inspired by the Dune universe – or Superman sandwich bread will make sense to many of the geeks in your life. These and other creations are the masterwork of freelance writer Chris-Rachael Oseland, who runs the Kitchen Overlord blog, “Your home for geeky recipes, edible art, and nerdy kitchen gadget reviews.” Her cookbooks include “Dining with the Doctor” (recipes inspired by Dr. Who), “An Unexpected Cookbook: The Unofficial Book of Hobbit Cookery,” and “Wood for Sheep” (based on the cult board game Settlers of Catan.) Oseland will bring out a second edition of her Dr. Who book next year, as well as “Geek Breads,” which includes the "Dune" recipe. If you've seen the image of a "Dune" sandworm made of bread that went viral last week, that's her work. We spoke to Oseland from her home in Austin. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. So, where did you get the idea for these recipes? Do you remember the first fantasy- or science-fiction-inspired thing you ever made? The first book I published, which kind of got me started on this, was “SteamDrunks: 101 Streampunk Cocktails and Mixed Drinks"… It was basically to shut up a lot of my steampunk friends, who’d bring a bottle of absinthe to a party and be like, “This is just like what they were drinking in the 1890s!” I have a masters in history: “No, it’s not. Even Byron didn’t drink that stuff straight!” So it started off as a research thing — to see what they were really drinking. As a historian I wanted to go down that rabbit hole. So it came out of your interest in history, more than fiction or something? Yes – and I think that’s reflected in most of my cookbooks. “An Unexpected Cookbook,” my hobbit one, is a straight-up history cookbook: It’s all recipes from Tolkien’s childhood in the 1890s. I’m doing the same thing with my Dr. Who cookbook – anytime where they go back in history, it’s an excuse for me to tuck in a few historical facts… I feel this obligation to make sure I’m historically accurate with these things. Do you remember the first thing you cooked or baked based on fantasy or science fiction? I’m a second-generation geek: My mom started taking me to conventions when I was knee high. So I’ve grown up immersed in all of this. For me there’s always been nerdy food around. If you go to a science-fiction convention, people are gonna bring something iconic just for fun. These are the people I grew up around. Besides your mother’s connection, tell us a little about your interest in fantasy and science fiction. How early did it start, and what books and writers did you get into? I literally can’t remember a time when there wasn’t something fantasy or science-fiction going on around my house. We didn’t have cable, so there was a whole lot of “Star Trek” on PBS… We went to the library a lot. When you’re young and poor and you’re not buying a lot of things, being able to get something new all the time is really great. Taking away my library card is one of the worst punishments anybody could have offered me. “Dune” obviously is one of the ones that hit me early. I remember reading it in fourth grade. Which of your recipes have become the most popular? Are you able to guess which ones will break out, or does it sometimes surprise you? This one shocked me – flat-out shocked me. The [Sandworm bread recipe] is two years old. But I posted a new photo of it because it’s a great recipe! It impresses when you bring it to a party – among nerds. Because it had been there for two years, I had zero thought that it would create the majority of traffic to my site. And because it’s a giant cinnamon role with some almonds shoved in the front… I’ve got some fairly technically difficult things that I think are awesome that people are just like, yeah, that’s cute. The things I know will be popular are tied into a currently popular kind of fandom and are kind of iconic. Like the second edition of my Dr. Who cookbook has a couple that will become insanely popular… I’ve got for example a Pop TARDIS recipe. They’re basically Pop Tarts that look like a TARDIS [the time machine from “Dr. Who”]… If that doesn’t become ridiculously popular next summer, I will be shocked. The Dune sandworm… I have no idea why it became so popular – that one shocked me. A lot of what you do seems to be reducing complicated ideas to something simple that amateur cooks can execute… So how does your thought process work for something like the Superman bread? These days I am – no joke – if I am watching something popular, I’m looking for the geometry of it. Honestly, when I am at the grocery store I am the queen of practical geometry. So if you really boil down Superman’s crest, what have you got? You’ve got three horizontal red lines, two horizontal yellow lines, and a blue box. How do you make that? Sandworms – that’s a tube with teeth on one end. Can I throw one last thing in? I feel like part of the reason this has become so popular is that as society gets increasingly secular, we need to fill the social void that’s been vacated by religion. Not the spirituality part. Just the getting together with other human beings part. So people who haven’t set foot in a church in years are going to get together every week to watch “Game of Thrones.” And when they do, they’ll go through the exact same rituals you’d be going through in a religious service 5,000 years ago. You show up, you bring an offering of some sort… You have some kind of food, or snacks… You enjoy the sermon, or the episode, you have a discussion about it. And then you do it again next week. This is no different, on a sociological level, from a religious service. And there’s nothing wrong with it filling that social void. People are herd animals. “You’re our tribe? Gotcha.”It’s one of those ideas that seems inevitable when you hear it: cookbooks based on classic works of science fiction and fantasy. Okay, maybe not quite inevitable, but recipes like Spice-Stuffed Sandworm Bread – inspired by the Dune universe – or Superman sandwich bread will make sense to many of the geeks in your life. These and other creations are the masterwork of freelance writer Chris-Rachael Oseland, who runs the Kitchen Overlord blog, “Your home for geeky recipes, edible art, and nerdy kitchen gadget reviews.” Her cookbooks include “Dining with the Doctor” (recipes inspired by Dr. Who), “An Unexpected Cookbook: The Unofficial Book of Hobbit Cookery,” and “Wood for Sheep” (based on the cult board game Settlers of Catan.) Oseland will bring out a second edition of her Dr. Who book next year, as well as “Geek Breads,” which includes the "Dune" recipe. If you've seen the image of a "Dune" sandworm made of bread that went viral last week, that's her work. We spoke to Oseland from her home in Austin. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. So, where did you get the idea for these recipes? Do you remember the first fantasy- or science-fiction-inspired thing you ever made? The first book I published, which kind of got me started on this, was “SteamDrunks: 101 Streampunk Cocktails and Mixed Drinks"… It was basically to shut up a lot of my steampunk friends, who’d bring a bottle of absinthe to a party and be like, “This is just like what they were drinking in the 1890s!” I have a masters in history: “No, it’s not. Even Byron didn’t drink that stuff straight!” So it started off as a research thing — to see what they were really drinking. As a historian I wanted to go down that rabbit hole. So it came out of your interest in history, more than fiction or something? Yes – and I think that’s reflected in most of my cookbooks. “An Unexpected Cookbook,” my hobbit one, is a straight-up history cookbook: It’s all recipes from Tolkien’s childhood in the 1890s. I’m doing the same thing with my Dr. Who cookbook – anytime where they go back in history, it’s an excuse for me to tuck in a few historical facts… I feel this obligation to make sure I’m historically accurate with these things. Do you remember the first thing you cooked or baked based on fantasy or science fiction? I’m a second-generation geek: My mom started taking me to conventions when I was knee high. So I’ve grown up immersed in all of this. For me there’s always been nerdy food around. If you go to a science-fiction convention, people are gonna bring something iconic just for fun. These are the people I grew up around. Besides your mother’s connection, tell us a little about your interest in fantasy and science fiction. How early did it start, and what books and writers did you get into? I literally can’t remember a time when there wasn’t something fantasy or science-fiction going on around my house. We didn’t have cable, so there was a whole lot of “Star Trek” on PBS… We went to the library a lot. When you’re young and poor and you’re not buying a lot of things, being able to get something new all the time is really great. Taking away my library card is one of the worst punishments anybody could have offered me. “Dune” obviously is one of the ones that hit me early. I remember reading it in fourth grade. Which of your recipes have become the most popular? Are you able to guess which ones will break out, or does it sometimes surprise you? This one shocked me – flat-out shocked me. The [Sandworm bread recipe] is two years old. But I posted a new photo of it because it’s a great recipe! It impresses when you bring it to a party – among nerds. Because it had been there for two years, I had zero thought that it would create the majority of traffic to my site. And because it’s a giant cinnamon role with some almonds shoved in the front… I’ve got some fairly technically difficult things that I think are awesome that people are just like, yeah, that’s cute. The things I know will be popular are tied into a currently popular kind of fandom and are kind of iconic. Like the second edition of my Dr. Who cookbook has a couple that will become insanely popular… I’ve got for example a Pop TARDIS recipe. They’re basically Pop Tarts that look like a TARDIS [the time machine from “Dr. Who”]… If that doesn’t become ridiculously popular next summer, I will be shocked. The Dune sandworm… I have no idea why it became so popular – that one shocked me. A lot of what you do seems to be reducing complicated ideas to something simple that amateur cooks can execute… So how does your thought process work for something like the Superman bread? These days I am – no joke – if I am watching something popular, I’m looking for the geometry of it. Honestly, when I am at the grocery store I am the queen of practical geometry. So if you really boil down Superman’s crest, what have you got? You’ve got three horizontal red lines, two horizontal yellow lines, and a blue box. How do you make that? Sandworms – that’s a tube with teeth on one end. Can I throw one last thing in? I feel like part of the reason this has become so popular is that as society gets increasingly secular, we need to fill the social void that’s been vacated by religion. Not the spirituality part. Just the getting together with other human beings part. So people who haven’t set foot in a church in years are going to get together every week to watch “Game of Thrones.” And when they do, they’ll go through the exact same rituals you’d be going through in a religious service 5,000 years ago. You show up, you bring an offering of some sort… You have some kind of food, or snacks… You enjoy the sermon, or the episode, you have a discussion about it. And then you do it again next week. This is no different, on a sociological level, from a religious service. And there’s nothing wrong with it filling that social void. People are herd animals. “You’re our tribe? Gotcha.”It’s one of those ideas that seems inevitable when you hear it: cookbooks based on classic works of science fiction and fantasy. Okay, maybe not quite inevitable, but recipes like Spice-Stuffed Sandworm Bread – inspired by the Dune universe – or Superman sandwich bread will make sense to many of the geeks in your life. These and other creations are the masterwork of freelance writer Chris-Rachael Oseland, who runs the Kitchen Overlord blog, “Your home for geeky recipes, edible art, and nerdy kitchen gadget reviews.” Her cookbooks include “Dining with the Doctor” (recipes inspired by Dr. Who), “An Unexpected Cookbook: The Unofficial Book of Hobbit Cookery,” and “Wood for Sheep” (based on the cult board game Settlers of Catan.) Oseland will bring out a second edition of her Dr. Who book next year, as well as “Geek Breads,” which includes the "Dune" recipe. If you've seen the image of a "Dune" sandworm made of bread that went viral last week, that's her work. We spoke to Oseland from her home in Austin. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. So, where did you get the idea for these recipes? Do you remember the first fantasy- or science-fiction-inspired thing you ever made? The first book I published, which kind of got me started on this, was “SteamDrunks: 101 Streampunk Cocktails and Mixed Drinks"… It was basically to shut up a lot of my steampunk friends, who’d bring a bottle of absinthe to a party and be like, “This is just like what they were drinking in the 1890s!” I have a masters in history: “No, it’s not. Even Byron didn’t drink that stuff straight!” So it started off as a research thing — to see what they were really drinking. As a historian I wanted to go down that rabbit hole. So it came out of your interest in history, more than fiction or something? Yes – and I think that’s reflected in most of my cookbooks. “An Unexpected Cookbook,” my hobbit one, is a straight-up history cookbook: It’s all recipes from Tolkien’s childhood in the 1890s. I’m doing the same thing with my Dr. Who cookbook – anytime where they go back in history, it’s an excuse for me to tuck in a few historical facts… I feel this obligation to make sure I’m historically accurate with these things. Do you remember the first thing you cooked or baked based on fantasy or science fiction? I’m a second-generation geek: My mom started taking me to conventions when I was knee high. So I’ve grown up immersed in all of this. For me there’s always been nerdy food around. If you go to a science-fiction convention, people are gonna bring something iconic just for fun. These are the people I grew up around. Besides your mother’s connection, tell us a little about your interest in fantasy and science fiction. How early did it start, and what books and writers did you get into? I literally can’t remember a time when there wasn’t something fantasy or science-fiction going on around my house. We didn’t have cable, so there was a whole lot of “Star Trek” on PBS… We went to the library a lot. When you’re young and poor and you’re not buying a lot of things, being able to get something new all the time is really great. Taking away my library card is one of the worst punishments anybody could have offered me. “Dune” obviously is one of the ones that hit me early. I remember reading it in fourth grade. Which of your recipes have become the most popular? Are you able to guess which ones will break out, or does it sometimes surprise you? This one shocked me – flat-out shocked me. The [Sandworm bread recipe] is two years old. But I posted a new photo of it because it’s a great recipe! It impresses when you bring it to a party – among nerds. Because it had been there for two years, I had zero thought that it would create the majority of traffic to my site. And because it’s a giant cinnamon role with some almonds shoved in the front… I’ve got some fairly technically difficult things that I think are awesome that people are just like, yeah, that’s cute. The things I know will be popular are tied into a currently popular kind of fandom and are kind of iconic. Like the second edition of my Dr. Who cookbook has a couple that will become insanely popular… I’ve got for example a Pop TARDIS recipe. They’re basically Pop Tarts that look like a TARDIS [the time machine from “Dr. Who”]… If that doesn’t become ridiculously popular next summer, I will be shocked. The Dune sandworm… I have no idea why it became so popular – that one shocked me. A lot of what you do seems to be reducing complicated ideas to something simple that amateur cooks can execute… So how does your thought process work for something like the Superman bread? These days I am – no joke – if I am watching something popular, I’m looking for the geometry of it. Honestly, when I am at the grocery store I am the queen of practical geometry. So if you really boil down Superman’s crest, what have you got? You’ve got three horizontal red lines, two horizontal yellow lines, and a blue box. How do you make that? Sandworms – that’s a tube with teeth on one end. Can I throw one last thing in? I feel like part of the reason this has become so popular is that as society gets increasingly secular, we need to fill the social void that’s been vacated by religion. Not the spirituality part. Just the getting together with other human beings part. So people who haven’t set foot in a church in years are going to get together every week to watch “Game of Thrones.” And when they do, they’ll go through the exact same rituals you’d be going through in a religious service 5,000 years ago. You show up, you bring an offering of some sort… You have some kind of food, or snacks… You enjoy the sermon, or the episode, you have a discussion about it. And then you do it again next week. This is no different, on a sociological level, from a religious service. And there’s nothing wrong with it filling that social void. People are herd animals. “You’re our tribe? Gotcha.”

Continue Reading...










 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on December 12, 2015 14:30

We need Asian indie films, too: While Hollywood struggles to catch up, let’s praise these stand-out Asian-American movies

We’re coming up on Oscar season, which I usually sit out because I’m the kind of jerk who likes to mouth off about how meaningless and arbitrary and unimportant awards are--generally because when I do find out about the awards I almost always become irrationally angry at how wrong the judgment of the Academy is. I’m always frustrated by the relative anonymity of “the Academy” and in general of juries who give out awards, wanting to yell at the TV “Who the hell are you to judge?” The rejoinder that whoever they are, they’re all industry professionals with impressive professional accomplishments in the world of film, never really takes the sting out of watching "Crash" beat "Brokeback Mountain" or "Dances with Wolves" beat anything. Which is why, back in August, I found myself in the uncomfortable position of being upgraded from random Internet gadfly grumbling how juries are uniformly staffed by out-of-touch douchebags to myself becoming, as David Foster Wallace, echoing George W. Bush, put it, a “Decider.” In this case I was asked by the San Diego Asian Film Festival to be one of four Deciders in the jury that determined which films would officially be judged as “best” within their various categories and which other films would, therefore, officially be “not the best.” A lifetime of being unduly snarky about movies made by people much more talented and successful than I am didn’t really prepare me for the sense of responsibility this entailed, especially since my three fellow jurors were the global executive director of Kollaboration, a communications professor who literally co-wrote the book on Asian Americans and the media, and an Academy-Award-nominated documentary filmmaker. I, by contrast, am “the 'Jeopardy!' guy,” which gets me recognized on the street sometimes but is a very weak response to that pesky “Who are you to judge?” question, as I’ve experienced several times in the past year. The whole question of determining the “best” films was especially fraught, for me, knowing that SDAFF is a comparatively small festival because the world of Asian-American filmmakers is still a comparatively small pond. It brought me back to my days as a struggling actor in L.A. attending screenings hosted by CAPE and telling everyone I knew they had to go see "Dim Sum Funeral" (even though I knew, with a sinking feeling when I saw it, that it wasn’t that good), just because it meant Asian actors were getting jobs that weren’t kung fu villains or exotic sexpots. I still encounter fierce arguments among my Asian friends whenever we talk about representation. Are we letting down the cause by not showing public support for TV shows like "Fresh Off the Boat" or "Dr. Ken" even if we just personally don’t like them? Should we make allowance for the fact that historically it’s been like pulling teeth to scrape together personnel and funds for an Asian-helmed, Asian-focused production in America when judging the final product? My own hope has always been for the ratio of Asian-Americans to increase enough for this question to be moot. It’s a struggle, especially with the occasional reminders from people like Aaron Sorkin that mainstream Hollywood is convinced “There are no Asian movie stars” is just a cultural fact, even today. But we are getting there. There will be six major TV shows by the end of November with an Asian lead ("Into the Badlands," "Fresh Off the Boat," "The Mindy Project," "Dr. Ken," "Master of None" and "Quantico"). There’s a Broadway show with an all-Asian cast, one that squarely confronts one of our country’s great historical injustices against an Asian-American population, the Japanese internment. And I’ve been spending the past year watching films by Asian-American directors and starring Asian-American leads, and being inspired by what I find. 2015 was a great year for the San Diego Asian Film Festival. If you, like Stephen Colbert, could somehow indeed render yourself “color-blind” and judge the films without any knowledge or understanding of race, you’d still find a lot to like about the gonzo horror-comedy "Crush the Skull," the lush documentary "Changing Season" and quirky, heart-wrenching little experimental gems like R. J. Lozada’s "Distance Between." But obviously this festival exists because we do see race, and because race matters. It does matter that "Crush the Skull" features an Asian man and a white woman as romantic leads, something that I still find surprising whenever I see it onscreen even though I’m married to a white woman. It matters that "Changing Season," a documentary about the Masumoto family farm, describes in detail the farm’s origin in the wake of World War II and Executive Order 9066, a great national shame in America that we still try to paper over. It matters that "Distance Between’s" personal meditation on the meaning of fatherhood and family is deeply intertwined with Lozada’s own story as a child of Filipino immigrants. It matters because as a lifelong obnoxious artsy hipster who’s been obsessed with all things “indie”--indie film, indie games, indie music--I’m very conscious of how “indie film” or “art film” has, for a very long time, been coded as something white kids are into. I’ve seen movies like these lots of times, but the quirky self-aware genre pastiche usually stars a posse of wisecracking white dudes, the introspective documentary short is usually narrated by a white film student from NYU, the documentary feature about the history of a family farm is usually about an all-American white family from the Midwest. The thing that’s long defined my own history as a fan and a critic of media is what W. E. B. DuBois called “double consciousness,” the fact that as a minority in this culture I’ve learned to talk about myself using someone else’s language. Richard Linklater’s "Before Sunset" trilogy and "Boyhood" showed us how richly film can reveal the development of a romance or the development of a life--but it shows us this through the eyes of a middle-aged white guy from Texas by telling us to identify with people who look like Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Our spectrum of art from the sublimely sentimental to the harshly cerebral to the defiantly grotesque--from Spielberg to Kubrick to Lynch--is still a spectrum of white guys plucked from a relatively narrow field of American historical experience. I’m glad to see Asian-Americans succeeding in speaking that language. In this year’s SDAFF "It’s Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong" plays the same game as "Before Sunrise," substituting Jamie Chung and Bryan Greenberg for Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke and the titular city for "Sunrise’s" Vienna, and does a good job of it. The short film "Tadaima" feels like the highlights reel of a Spielberg feature (and I mean that in the most positive possible way). But my bias--as with most insufferable hipsters--is toward things that are different and unfamiliar. In the context of a festival celebrating Asian-American filmmakers, especially, what I was searching for in every film was the sense of someone who was speaking a different language as a filmmaker, a language that to an Asian-American viewer might feel less like something borrowed from majority culture, something authentically us. Which is why I fell in love with Alvin Tsang’s "Reunification" this year. It’s a film I fought for hard, and one which, when it didn’t win Best of the Festival or Best Documentary Feature, we agreed should get a Special Jury Award. Alvin Tsang’s autobiographical documentary resonates with me in a few specific ways but not in others. Like Tsang’s parents, my parents are divorced. Like Tsang, I grew up as a child of Chinese ethnicity in the United States and suffered the attendant feelings of being isolated and out of place. Unlike Tsang, I didn’t grow up in poverty or have to work after-school jobs to support my family. Unlike Tsang, I was born in the U.S. and never had the experience of being an immigrant myself. Unlike Tsang, I didn’t have the formative childhood experience of being trapped in a tiny Hong Kong apartment for hours at a time waiting for my father to come home. The brutal sincerity of Tsang’s work makes the similarities of his story to mine shine brightly and the differences seem to dim. It’s a documentary unlike any I’ve seen--a film very clearly put together to say things through the language of film that the filmmaker is uncomfortable saying any other way. You can almost follow Tsang’s decisions in post-production one by one, watching him assemble a version of his life’s story that makes sense to him out of decades of archival footage of home movies and abortive attempts at interviews, watching the video quality improve as he gets closer to the present day. "Reunification" is much less polished, much more awkward and clumsy in some ways, much more “amateurish” than the other documentaries in the festival. That’s what I love about it. "Reunification," unlike other films in the festival, had its world premiere at SDAFF and, were it not for the existence of Asian-American “niche” film festivals, would be unlikely to be getting any screenings. That, too, is what I love about it. Of all the films I watched this year, "Reunification" is the one that affected me emotionally the most--often bringing me to tears simply because, unlike other films (including other documentary films), the conversations Tsang has with his family members about his childhood felt so real, so immediate they were almost in the room with me. It was as though I were voicing my own long-held grievances about my childhood to my parents and receiving their stinging rebuke “Who are you to judge?” all over again. For me, the point of “indie” film is to show what film can do when it’s not shackled to the need to provide entertaining spectacle to make a profit for investors--what the medium can do when freed up to tell stories that the filmmaker truly, deeply desires to tell and has no other way to get out. It’s the kind of thing I get to see very rarely and that’s even more rarely celebrated and rewarded--and when it is, the accolades are usually going to a wealthy white kid with connections. To me, the fact that a film like "Reunification" got completed represents a minor miracle--even in this age of Hollywood “embracing diversity”--and I’m happy to play whatever limited role I can as Decider in helping it get recognition and more screenings. To me, Asian-American success in cinema--or any minority success in any field--is, yes, partially measured by penetration of the mainstream, by being able to see Asian-American action heroes and Asian-American sexy romantic leads and Asian-American lovable sitcom dads. But I think the most important work that comes out of minority communities is the deeply idiosyncratic, deeply weird work that tries hard to eschew the majority language we’ve been taught and speak our own language. "Reunification" is the film that’s come closest to feeling like a truly distinct Asian-American language to me in a long time, and it’s without any reservations that I tell you--you might not end up liking it, but I still want you to go see it.We’re coming up on Oscar season, which I usually sit out because I’m the kind of jerk who likes to mouth off about how meaningless and arbitrary and unimportant awards are--generally because when I do find out about the awards I almost always become irrationally angry at how wrong the judgment of the Academy is. I’m always frustrated by the relative anonymity of “the Academy” and in general of juries who give out awards, wanting to yell at the TV “Who the hell are you to judge?” The rejoinder that whoever they are, they’re all industry professionals with impressive professional accomplishments in the world of film, never really takes the sting out of watching "Crash" beat "Brokeback Mountain" or "Dances with Wolves" beat anything. Which is why, back in August, I found myself in the uncomfortable position of being upgraded from random Internet gadfly grumbling how juries are uniformly staffed by out-of-touch douchebags to myself becoming, as David Foster Wallace, echoing George W. Bush, put it, a “Decider.” In this case I was asked by the San Diego Asian Film Festival to be one of four Deciders in the jury that determined which films would officially be judged as “best” within their various categories and which other films would, therefore, officially be “not the best.” A lifetime of being unduly snarky about movies made by people much more talented and successful than I am didn’t really prepare me for the sense of responsibility this entailed, especially since my three fellow jurors were the global executive director of Kollaboration, a communications professor who literally co-wrote the book on Asian Americans and the media, and an Academy-Award-nominated documentary filmmaker. I, by contrast, am “the 'Jeopardy!' guy,” which gets me recognized on the street sometimes but is a very weak response to that pesky “Who are you to judge?” question, as I’ve experienced several times in the past year. The whole question of determining the “best” films was especially fraught, for me, knowing that SDAFF is a comparatively small festival because the world of Asian-American filmmakers is still a comparatively small pond. It brought me back to my days as a struggling actor in L.A. attending screenings hosted by CAPE and telling everyone I knew they had to go see "Dim Sum Funeral" (even though I knew, with a sinking feeling when I saw it, that it wasn’t that good), just because it meant Asian actors were getting jobs that weren’t kung fu villains or exotic sexpots. I still encounter fierce arguments among my Asian friends whenever we talk about representation. Are we letting down the cause by not showing public support for TV shows like "Fresh Off the Boat" or "Dr. Ken" even if we just personally don’t like them? Should we make allowance for the fact that historically it’s been like pulling teeth to scrape together personnel and funds for an Asian-helmed, Asian-focused production in America when judging the final product? My own hope has always been for the ratio of Asian-Americans to increase enough for this question to be moot. It’s a struggle, especially with the occasional reminders from people like Aaron Sorkin that mainstream Hollywood is convinced “There are no Asian movie stars” is just a cultural fact, even today. But we are getting there. There will be six major TV shows by the end of November with an Asian lead ("Into the Badlands," "Fresh Off the Boat," "The Mindy Project," "Dr. Ken," "Master of None" and "Quantico"). There’s a Broadway show with an all-Asian cast, one that squarely confronts one of our country’s great historical injustices against an Asian-American population, the Japanese internment. And I’ve been spending the past year watching films by Asian-American directors and starring Asian-American leads, and being inspired by what I find. 2015 was a great year for the San Diego Asian Film Festival. If you, like Stephen Colbert, could somehow indeed render yourself “color-blind” and judge the films without any knowledge or understanding of race, you’d still find a lot to like about the gonzo horror-comedy "Crush the Skull," the lush documentary "Changing Season" and quirky, heart-wrenching little experimental gems like R. J. Lozada’s "Distance Between." But obviously this festival exists because we do see race, and because race matters. It does matter that "Crush the Skull" features an Asian man and a white woman as romantic leads, something that I still find surprising whenever I see it onscreen even though I’m married to a white woman. It matters that "Changing Season," a documentary about the Masumoto family farm, describes in detail the farm’s origin in the wake of World War II and Executive Order 9066, a great national shame in America that we still try to paper over. It matters that "Distance Between’s" personal meditation on the meaning of fatherhood and family is deeply intertwined with Lozada’s own story as a child of Filipino immigrants. It matters because as a lifelong obnoxious artsy hipster who’s been obsessed with all things “indie”--indie film, indie games, indie music--I’m very conscious of how “indie film” or “art film” has, for a very long time, been coded as something white kids are into. I’ve seen movies like these lots of times, but the quirky self-aware genre pastiche usually stars a posse of wisecracking white dudes, the introspective documentary short is usually narrated by a white film student from NYU, the documentary feature about the history of a family farm is usually about an all-American white family from the Midwest. The thing that’s long defined my own history as a fan and a critic of media is what W. E. B. DuBois called “double consciousness,” the fact that as a minority in this culture I’ve learned to talk about myself using someone else’s language. Richard Linklater’s "Before Sunset" trilogy and "Boyhood" showed us how richly film can reveal the development of a romance or the development of a life--but it shows us this through the eyes of a middle-aged white guy from Texas by telling us to identify with people who look like Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Our spectrum of art from the sublimely sentimental to the harshly cerebral to the defiantly grotesque--from Spielberg to Kubrick to Lynch--is still a spectrum of white guys plucked from a relatively narrow field of American historical experience. I’m glad to see Asian-Americans succeeding in speaking that language. In this year’s SDAFF "It’s Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong" plays the same game as "Before Sunrise," substituting Jamie Chung and Bryan Greenberg for Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke and the titular city for "Sunrise’s" Vienna, and does a good job of it. The short film "Tadaima" feels like the highlights reel of a Spielberg feature (and I mean that in the most positive possible way). But my bias--as with most insufferable hipsters--is toward things that are different and unfamiliar. In the context of a festival celebrating Asian-American filmmakers, especially, what I was searching for in every film was the sense of someone who was speaking a different language as a filmmaker, a language that to an Asian-American viewer might feel less like something borrowed from majority culture, something authentically us. Which is why I fell in love with Alvin Tsang’s "Reunification" this year. It’s a film I fought for hard, and one which, when it didn’t win Best of the Festival or Best Documentary Feature, we agreed should get a Special Jury Award. Alvin Tsang’s autobiographical documentary resonates with me in a few specific ways but not in others. Like Tsang’s parents, my parents are divorced. Like Tsang, I grew up as a child of Chinese ethnicity in the United States and suffered the attendant feelings of being isolated and out of place. Unlike Tsang, I didn’t grow up in poverty or have to work after-school jobs to support my family. Unlike Tsang, I was born in the U.S. and never had the experience of being an immigrant myself. Unlike Tsang, I didn’t have the formative childhood experience of being trapped in a tiny Hong Kong apartment for hours at a time waiting for my father to come home. The brutal sincerity of Tsang’s work makes the similarities of his story to mine shine brightly and the differences seem to dim. It’s a documentary unlike any I’ve seen--a film very clearly put together to say things through the language of film that the filmmaker is uncomfortable saying any other way. You can almost follow Tsang’s decisions in post-production one by one, watching him assemble a version of his life’s story that makes sense to him out of decades of archival footage of home movies and abortive attempts at interviews, watching the video quality improve as he gets closer to the present day. "Reunification" is much less polished, much more awkward and clumsy in some ways, much more “amateurish” than the other documentaries in the festival. That’s what I love about it. "Reunification," unlike other films in the festival, had its world premiere at SDAFF and, were it not for the existence of Asian-American “niche” film festivals, would be unlikely to be getting any screenings. That, too, is what I love about it. Of all the films I watched this year, "Reunification" is the one that affected me emotionally the most--often bringing me to tears simply because, unlike other films (including other documentary films), the conversations Tsang has with his family members about his childhood felt so real, so immediate they were almost in the room with me. It was as though I were voicing my own long-held grievances about my childhood to my parents and receiving their stinging rebuke “Who are you to judge?” all over again. For me, the point of “indie” film is to show what film can do when it’s not shackled to the need to provide entertaining spectacle to make a profit for investors--what the medium can do when freed up to tell stories that the filmmaker truly, deeply desires to tell and has no other way to get out. It’s the kind of thing I get to see very rarely and that’s even more rarely celebrated and rewarded--and when it is, the accolades are usually going to a wealthy white kid with connections. To me, the fact that a film like "Reunification" got completed represents a minor miracle--even in this age of Hollywood “embracing diversity”--and I’m happy to play whatever limited role I can as Decider in helping it get recognition and more screenings. To me, Asian-American success in cinema--or any minority success in any field--is, yes, partially measured by penetration of the mainstream, by being able to see Asian-American action heroes and Asian-American sexy romantic leads and Asian-American lovable sitcom dads. But I think the most important work that comes out of minority communities is the deeply idiosyncratic, deeply weird work that tries hard to eschew the majority language we’ve been taught and speak our own language. "Reunification" is the film that’s come closest to feeling like a truly distinct Asian-American language to me in a long time, and it’s without any reservations that I tell you--you might not end up liking it, but I still want you to go see it.

Continue Reading...










 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on December 12, 2015 12:30

“Please pass whatever they’re smoking”: Astronomers skeptical over “Planet X” claims

Scientific American For decades astronomers have searched for a possible “Planet X” in the far outer reaches of our solar system, speculating that something big and dark may be lurking out there, its gravitational influence occasionally stirring up trouble in the orbits of the objects that we do see. There are major incentives to look: When astronomers sought a Planet X beyond Uranus in 1846, they discovered Neptune; when they looked for one beyond Neptune in 1930, they found Pluto. Since then, the search for a Planet X beyond Pluto has almost been too successful—astronomers have found so many new and Plutolike “trans-Neptunian objects” (TNOs) that it became more sensible to demote Pluto from planethood rather than swell the solar system’s planetary population into the hundreds. After all, even the largest of the newfound TNOs were just about Pluto’s size—astronomers knew of nothing out there worthy of the “Planet X” name. That is, perhaps, until now. On December 8 researchers from Sweden and Mexico quietly submitted two papers to the prestigious journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, announcing their discovery of not one but two possible Planet X candidates. The quiet did not last for long. Even though neither paper has yet been accepted for peer-review and publication, the researchers uploaded both to the arXiv, a public online repository for preprint papers, where they appeared last night. Today, as claims of newfound planets in our solar system reverberate around the world in news stories and blog posts, other astronomers are reviewing the papers and reacting mostly with skepticism. The ensuing discussions between experts in public forums like Twitter and Facebook offer a rare, real-time glimpse of the sometimes messy scientific process as it unfolds. “Normally I prefer to only upload accepted papers,” says Wouter Vlemmings, an astronomer at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and co-author on both studies. “This time, however, we had exhausted our ideas. … With the arXiv upload we specifically wanted to reach the community that could tell us if we overlooked something, in which case we fully intend to withdraw the papers…. What I personally did not count on was the impact it has had outside the astronomy community.” One of the candidates, nicknamed “Gna” (after a fast-moving “Nordic messenger goddess,” Vlemmings says) showed up in the sky next to the star W Aquilae whereas the other, as-yet-unnamed, appeared adjacent to our nearest neighboring star system Alpha Centauri. Astronomers detected both objects using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a massive group of radio dishes perched in the high desert of the Chilean Andes, and thought at first that the bodies were faint glows from far-distant background galaxies. But in separate pairs of snapshots taken over a period of months, both objects seemed to move swiftly against the “fixed” background stars, suggesting a relatively close cosmic proximity to our solar system. Considerable uncertainty exists about the properties of both objects because each was observed only twice, and bodies with a wide range of sizes, compositions and distances from us could explain the measured brightness. Gna, the researchers say, is quite likely to be something like a 200-kilometer-wide asteroid floating between Saturn and Uranus, but it could also be a free-floating Neptune-size planet drifting a hundred times farther out or a failed star—a Jupiter-size brown dwarf—passing by in nearby interstellar space. Similarly, the object seen in the direction of Alpha Centauri could conceivably be a nearby brown dwarf, a super-Earth midway in size between our planet and Neptune some six times farther out than Pluto or an impressively-sized hunk of ice much, much closer in. Alternatively, both objects could be illusory, random blips of noise echoing through the world’s most complex and ambitious array of radio telescopes. According to Scott Sheppard, a planetary scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science involved with surveys of the outer solar system, the fact that only two observations apiece underpin both discovery claims makes them hard to swallow. “Anything could create two random detections, and you can always fit a straight line through any two points,” Sheppard says. Demonstrating that either object was real, he says, would likely require a third detection, one that shows the object’s clear, linear movement at a consistent speed. What these objects are, and whether they exist at all, are open questions.  What is certain, however, is that earlier searches have placed limits on the possibilities for any Planet X. An all-sky search by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer space telescope previously found no signs of any additional planets in our solar system, ruling out anything Jupiter-size within about three trillion kilometers of the sun, and anything Saturn-size within half that distance. Something smaller and dimmer like a super-Earth could still lurk out there, unseen, but to find it with such easy serendipity in routine ALMA measurements seems statistically unlikely, astronomers say. Mike Brown, a prominent California Institute of Technology astronomer and self-described “Pluto killer” who discovered several large TNOs that dethroned the former planet, unleashed another statistical argument against the claimed new planets on Twitter. “If it is true that ALMA accidentally discovered a massive outer solar system object in its tiny, tiny, tiny, field of view,” Brown tweeted, “that would suggest that there are something like 200,000 Earth-sized planets in the outer solar system. Which, um, no.” “Even better,” he added later, “I just realized that this many Earth-sized planets existing would destabilize the entire solar system and we would all die.” That said, Brown notes, “the idea that there might be large planets lurking in the outer solar system is perfectly plausible.” Many of the most cutting reactions came from astronomers discussing the results on a public Facebook group devoted to imaging exoplanets—that is, planets around other stars. (Update: the group has since been made private.) After tweeting that the two papers “will launch 1,000 undoubtedly wrong blogs and news releases,” University of Rochester astronomer Eric Mamajek detailed what he believes to be serious inconsistencies in the measurements of motion and brightness for both objects. “‘Gna’ presumably stands for ‘Goofy Non-Asteroid,’” Mamajek quipped, before suggesting that the objects could perhaps be activity in faraway galaxies, simply misconstrued as being much closer to Earth. “Please pass whatever they are smoking in Onsala,” he added. In the same group, astronomer Bruce Macintosh at Stanford University noted the “astonishing coincidence” that the first two trans-Neptunian objects discovered by ALMA would be found right next to bright stars. More likely, Macintosh guessed, is that the putative objects are actually “some residual artifact”—mirages produced in the data by quirks in ALMA’s complex calibration methods. Vlemmings insists that he and his colleagues have already carefully checked these and several other scenarios, but to no avail. Whatever they are, the objects simply seemed to be too bright and pointlike to be explained away as far-off galaxies, and their proximity to bright stars, he says, actually helped the data calibration and reduced the likelihood of observational errors. “Still, we are certainly open to such options and have several times sent out queries to ALMA colleagues [asking] if they could conceive of how such point sources could be artificially created,” Vlemmings says. “None have yet said they think it could be done.” The trial of these claims in the court of public opinion has not come without its perks, Vlemmings adds. Although the sudden publicity was unwanted, “the most helpful feedback so far has been numerous offers to observe with other instruments.” With a little help from the rest of the astronomy community, evidence for—or against—the next Planet X may not be so far-off after all.

Continue Reading...










 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on December 12, 2015 12:00