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We Wish to Inform You
I'm about half-way through Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. I ordered it after Gourevitch's work on Rwanda was mentioned in an article by Samantha Power -- an article I dug up because Barack Obamas recently hired on Power as a foreign policy adviser. Power writes that in the President Clinton reportedly scrawled "is what he's saying true?" and "how did this happen?" in the margins of a Gourevitch article on Rwanda.
What I really like about the book so far is the style of it. Gourevitch doesn't just report the story of what happened in Rwanda in 1994. He engages in it. He pokes and prods at it. When an interviewee says something that Gourevitch can't understand, he goes on for a bit about why he can't understand it. He talks back to the damn story. It's a literary approach to non-fiction and it works well for something like Rwanda, a story that's pretty much incomprehensible when told in the form of "this happened and then this happened and then this happened."
Wakeup Call for DC
Finally, for once, Hotline says something truly useful:
Anyone else get the feeling that we here in official Washington haven't quite grasped the seriousness of what's happening in LA and MS?
-- This is not a criticism of any one person or one agency. It's meant as a wakeup call to all of us. This could very well be the biggest natural disaster in this country's history; an entire city in ruins.
-- If this happened in Washington, you wouldn't be reading this. There would be no electricity; there would be no light; there would be no phones (even cell service would be nearly non-existent); your Blackberries would get no email; there'd be no subway; there'd be no newspaper delivered or available; you couldn't reach your friends; your office wouldn't exist or you couldn't get to it; your home would be gone; there'd be no schools to send your kids to; the graves of your family would be washed away; electrocuted family pets; snakes and other scary creatures everywere; and you'd have to move somewhere for at least 3 months.
-- And this is what life is like for those with means in New Orleans. MS is the 3rd poorest state in the union, according to a Census report released yesterday.
Entourage Backstory
I need something to give my mind a break from thinking about Katrina. And I choose HBO's Entourage. Point no. 4 in this Slate article reminded me that I do think that the back story of Vince, Eric, Turtle, and Drama is quite muddled. For one thing, where is it in Queens that full-on-Irish Eric would have worked as 'pizza tosser,' as he has said to have done in several episodes? That we lack clarity on that sort of thing leaves us without a strong sense of where they came, which is strange, considering that four-friends-frome-New-York-making-it-in-LA is sort of one of the show's major themes.
Wow
Editor & Publisher:
On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Abe Lincoln's Depression
One thing that this Joshua Wolf Shenk article on Lincoln's many depressions in October's (!) Atlantic Monthly makes clear is that the 'Great Emancipator' would be ravaged, just ravaged, if he tried to run for office today.
Times-Picayune Neighborhood Forums
In a nifty use of tech, the Times-Picayune, the newspaper of New Orleans, is hosting online neighborhood forums that residents are using to contact each other to check on the state of their houses and how friends and family have made out. (No direct link, just go to the home page and scroll down to "WHAT'S HAPPENED TO MY NEIGHBORHOOD?")
New Orleans
My mom's family is from Louisiana -- Avoyelles Parish, actually, smack in the middle of the state -- and this Katrina is getting me down. New Orleans has of course long known that it's built to low (see this Chris Mooney article for more) but its strange architecture is part of the reason that the city is so ridiculously fabulous. For example, because of the high water table under the city, they 'bury' bodies there above ground in crypts. (They tried burying them below ground for a while but then a big rainstorm would come and the coffins would pop right up out of the ground.) The result is 'cities of the dead' scattered around the city. The last time that I was down there, I wandered through St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 and got lost in the twists and turns of the cemetery. I'd find myself in some dead end, alone with a crypt tagged with voodoo markings and offerings like chicken bones scattered on the ground. That's part of what makes New Orleans so unique -- what feels to me about as far as you can get from Washington DC and still be in a major American city. It breaks my heart to think that we likely will have lost some of that.
Update: It looks like things are actually far, far worse down there than we I first wrote this. The point stands, though, that -- in addtion to the lost lives, the huge cost of rebuilding, and the suffering that those down there are going to be going through for a long time to come -- if we lose the unique blend of history, culture, architecture, and people that made NO such a spectacularly original city, that will be a damn damn shame.
Update: Oh, jeez. I don't say this lightly, but it seems as if some of the above ground crypts may have opened.
Television Question
My generation: Beverly Hills 90210, Party of Five
Generation after mine: Felicity, Dawson's Creek
Generation after that: The OC?
Anthropology of Marriage
I'm hopping around the old Internets and what do I come across but a recent National Review column by Peter Wood, my old grad school professor. In it, he takes issue with the AAA (the American Anthropological Association, not the auto-club people) for its declaration last year that:
The results of more than a century of anthropological research...provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution.
Wrong, he says, you "reflexive affirm[er] of leftist pieties." In fact:
[S]ome 150 years of systematic inquiry by anthropologists leaves little doubt that heterosexual marriage is found in nearly every human society and almost always as a pivotal institution. Homosexual marriage outside contemporary Western societies is exceedingly rare and never the basis of "viable social order." (emphasis added both times)
What Wood really must know is that no one is actually proposing that we throw out heterosexual marriage all together and build a new society based entirely on male-male/female-female unions. The idea is, of course, to augment the existing base of marriages with a wee sprinkling of same-sex ones. So I think the more interesting question is whether 150 years of anthropological research supports that that the idea of marriage now bandied about -- 'one man and one woman for all time' -- is always the foundation on which society is exclusively built. And I seem to recall from my studies that the ethnographic record includes a whole range of different ways that marriage is done. Off of the top of my head and to the best of my memory, it includes places where young people join together in 'practice marriages' that are dissolved after they reach maturity, where men inherit their brother's widows or marry their widow's sister, even where women marry their own body parts so that they might claim the social standing that comes with marriage. And, as far parenting goes, it includes societies where the maternal uncle takes the dominant role in raising his sister's kids. All I'm saying, the ethnographic record isn't crystal clear on just what marriage and family always means.
I would have hope that by now anthropologists would have in fact taken a comprehensive look at the different styles of marriage found out there in the world. One reason I think that hasn't happened might be because anthropologists traditionally make their bones working in one specific location -- many, in fact, base their entire career on a year or two fieldwork in one tiny village. I think that cross-cultural survey work is looked down upon. That's a shame, if true.
It also raises another question I've often wondered about. Where are all the public anthropologists? You hardly ever see any as talking heads on TV or writing op-eds. (Unless they're physical or forensic anthros and that's a whole different thing.) Anthropology is a unique field -- the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences, as the saying goes. We're vexed by problems that the big public disciplines like economics and political science aren't really helping to explain that well -- like religious fundamentalism, terrorism, even abortion and euthanasia. Why isn't the public getting the anthropologists' take on them? Part of it might be that anthropologists are, by nature or nurture, put off by the idea of self-promotion. I think that's a shame too.
Change is Good
I've done a wee bit of a redesign, mostly of the top banner. If you're interested, the image is a slice of a map of West Africa, turned backwards. If you're not interested, it still is. No deeper meaning intended, just liked how it looked.
Tipping Point
I mentioned here that I was anecdotally tracking the use of the phrase "tipping point" in the media. Here's one more: Oceans Nearing a 'Tipping Point.' (All this talk of headlines reminds of something I that cracked me up recently. It was about a comedy writer who sold his first headline to the Onion when he was just 17. The headline? "Hotcake Sales Brisk.")
Conversation on a Greyhound Bus
The bus from New York City to DC yesterday was incredibly noisy. First off, the bus driver started playing the Frankie Muniz-vehicle "Racing Stripes" at what must have been full volume. But he started the movie at about two-thirds of the way in only because, as best as I can figure, he had started watching it on his first trip of the day and wanted to see how it ended. And then, several rows behind me, several people were conversing in Spanish at loud volumes, with a lot of back and forth and laughter. I turned up my iPod really loud. When I got tired of listening to music I put on the audiobook of Sandra Day O'Connor's "The Majesty of the Law." As I listened to her talk about how our system of government depends on people being willing to engage in public debate and forcefully advance their own opinions, this happened:
First Woman: "Would you people please shut up? You've been talking non-stop the entire bus ride!"
[Spanish talking stops]
Second Woman (soft-spoken): "They don't know. It's part of their culture. They're just loud people."
Man (Southern accent): "They don't even understand what you said. They don't speak English. What you're doing is not right."
First Woman: "They're so loud. I've a four-year old, and even she isn't that loud."
Man: "That's just not right. You're yelling -- you're just as bad as they are."
Third Woman: "No, she's not. She just said one thing. And they've been talking for hours. It's not the same."
Second Woman continues with "don't know any better ... just their culture ... loud people." This goes on for a bit.
First Woman: "Just their culture? Well, you know what? We learned. We all learned. They can learn."
[Murmurs of accession]
First Woman: "And today is lesson number one!"
Second Woman: "Yeah. You're right."
Man: "Uh huh. Yeah."
(above is paraphrased)
I love this country.
We the People
Matt Yglesias reminded me this morning of something that I had forgotten that I was ticked off about. The DNC website relaunched in June has a tab called "People" right in its top tool bar. When you mouseover the tab, the people options you are given are "African American, Asian Amer./Pacific Islanders, Disability Community" and so on. I questioned the wisdom of this approach to an acquaintance at the DNC right after the relaunch and got no response. Now David Ignatius has it in his column. As I said at the time, my first thought when I visited the new site was about my brother -- a New York City financial-type, white, straight, and non-disabled. And perhaps a more rabid Democrat than I am. But while I fit in at least two people categories, he fits in nowhere. Given that some people see the Democratic Party as less a coherent party and more a collection of special interests, it seems less than ideal to pick an organizational scheme that says, "yup, you're pretty much right about that."
Dolly Does Dylan
I saw Dolly Parton's Vintage Tour at Radio City Music Hall last night. And my, was she fabulous. She played an interesting set list -- there were her old favorites (I Will Always Love You, Why'd You Come in Here Lookin' Like That, Jolene, Coat of Many Colors, but no Joshua) but most of the rest were covers of 60s and 70s songs that she has recorded for a CD due out in October (Blowing in the Wind, Me & Bobby McGee, and Turn, Turn, Turn). It seems as if Dolly is feeling perhaps a little bit political. She referenced the 60s over and over, saying things like hippies had some right ideas, war is a bad bad thing, that sort of thing. She made a few too many practiced boobie jokes for my taste, but they were more than made up for by a cover of "Imagine" that was downright beautiful. It gave me the chills. I'm not kidding.
A note on the crowd. My mom and dad were originally planning on going to the show with some family friends. When I expressed interest in it, they bought me and Jane tickets for my birthday coming up in two weeks. I had thought that the crowd would likely be around the age and flavor of my mom and dad. But, well, no. While the the older suburban crowd was well represented, there was perhaps an even larger contingent of New York hipsters, sprinkled liberally with transvestites. Twas a beautiful thing.
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