Has anything in the world changed more in the past quarter century than China? And yet one wonders: has China changed at all? John Feffer’s review of six recent books about China and what it’s up to is better, I suspect, than any of the books themselves.
Bob Herbert’s  column on Tuesday was unusually inspiring. As a rule, I agree with his commentary on the plight of Afro-Americans so completely and with so much sadness that I glance over it quickly, nodding uselessly, but this time my mind quickly filled up with all the important things that, for perfectly good reasons of his own, the columnist was glossing over as not, for the moment, directly relevant.
The older I get, and the longer I look, the more obvious to me it becomes that making America a better place for blacks will make America a better place for everybody else, as well. So I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I write from a position not of high-minded idealism but of enlightened self-interest. No points for me.
Gail Collins is absolutely right.
We aren’t going to solve the problem [of child care] during this presidential contest, but it is absolutely nuts that it isn’t a topic of discussion – or even of election-year pandering.
Do read her column in today’s Times, “None Dare Call It Child Care*.” It got me to thinking. Let’s get out a piece of paper and pencil and try to write down ten reasons why “child care” is such an open sore. Everybody recognizes the cause of the problem (few middle class families can support themselves on one spouse’s income alone), and its side-effects (poorly paid, unlicensed caregivers) are certainly well known. What’s the problem?
(Continue reading at Portico.)
Perhaps because I’m not British, I found it difficult to follow Simon Jenkins’s review of The Cost of Democracy: Party Funding in Modern British Politics, by K D Ewing. But the review wasn’t the important part. (“The Leader’s Cheerleaders,” London Review of Books, 20 September 2007). Mr Jenkins made his own views about party politics very clear, and it didn’t take long for my faint surprise to turn into ringing endorsement.
¶ Simon Jenkins on Party Politics, in the London Review of Books.
A lot happened at the beginning of September. I came to believe that I was to some extent afflicted with Asperger’s Syndrome. Then I fell down and broke my neck, having had a few too many martinis at a bistro lunch. Putting the two together was not fun, but I’m doing well – healing very quickly, and establishing new ways of getting things done that, in truth, I’d been mulling over for months and doubtless would still be dithering over if it hadn’t been for a sudden spot of surgery. I’m doing well enough to think very hard about the irreversible mess that I almost made of my life, not because I’m a bad person but because there was some very important information about my life that I didn’t have, and because the luxury of waiting for that information to sink in and work some changes in my life was denied me.
The linked page isn’t for everybody. If it strikes you as strongly wrong-headed, or driven by some sort of denial, then please, for the love of humanity, stop reading it. It’s provisional and preliminary. I’m not ready to do much with anyone else’s experiences. But the desire to begin some serious work is very strong, and Thursday is my day for taking stock.
Fifteen years ago, the cinquecentennial of a certain “discovery” in 1492 was brushed over by pundits everywhere: Columbus had become an embarrassment to a militantly post imperial age. I couldn’t help thinking that it was just bad timing, and today I am proved right, by a story in the Times by Amy Harmon, “Seeking Columbus’s Origins With a Swab.”
In 2004, a Spanish geneticist, Dr. Jose A. Lorente, extracted genetic material from a cache of Columbus’s bones in Seville to settle a dispute about where he was buried. Ever since, he has been beset by amateur historians, government officials and self-styled Columbus relatives of multiple nationalities clamoring for a genetic retelling of the standard textbook tale.
The Times lists, in graphic form, the five most likely theories of Columbus’s background: the Genoese, the Catalan, the Portuguese, the Majorcan, and the Jewish. At the bottom of this list, there’s a lovely bouquet of other possibilities, one that ends with the Times’s own Manhattan-inflected whimsy:
Columbus may have been the son of Pope Innocent VIII or the King of Poland. He may trace his origin to the Balaeric island of Ibiza, or the Mediterranean island of Corsica [!!!!!]. He could be from Greece or Norway. Or. for that matter, from anywhere that people have DNA.
D’you see what I mean about timing? in 1992, Columbus was the European oppressor of indigenous Americans. But, just as there was hardly any Internet in those long-ago days (1992, not 1492), so the sleuthing possibilities of DNA had hardly begun to register on the popular consciousness. Now, however, having discovered for certain that “Anna Andersen” was not the Archduchess Anastasia of Russia, the world is clamoring to establish the true nature of Columbus’s own indigenuity.
It’s true that I had a wonderful week in Istanbul in 2005. It was a quite unexpected business trip for Kathleen, and I’d never have gone along if it hadn’t been for Remicade, which I hadn’t even been taking for a year at that time. My interest in Turkey, however, pre-dates that junket. Friends remember my muttering ominously that, whatever else happened in the event of a war in Iraq, the Kurdish question would probably prove to be intractable. If Iraq were partitioned, a minority of Kurds would finally have their own Kurdistan, and it would not be long, so one thought, before their Turkish brethren sought to join them, something that would happen, not to speak too frankly, “over Turkey’s dead body.” If nothing else, our geographically illiterate populace overlooks the fact that the headwaters of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers – sources of irrigation for Syria and Iraq, but also of hydroelectric power for Turkey – lie in southeastern Turkey, a/k/a Kurdistan.
The wonderful thing about political predictions – about negative, pessimistic ones, that is – is that the world turns so slowly (still) that dire previsions so often turn out to be wrong. It’s much too early to say that the Turks and the Kurds are going to work things out to mutual satisfaction, but, as Christopher de Bellaigue reports in the current New York Review of Books, there are some surprisingly promising signs on the horizon.
¶ Chrisopher de Bellaigue on Turkey, in The New York Review of Books.
Podcasts:
Christopher de Bellaigue on Turkey (RSS)
Christopher de Bellaigue on Turkey (MP3)
Last May, The New Yorker published an article, “The CSI Effect,” by Jeffrey Toobin, about the really rather shaky foundations on modern forensic science. It turns out that hair, for example, is usually pretty uninformative as evidence. Fibers shed by clothes and upholstery aren’t much better. Aggressive prosecutors (pardon the tautology) are past-masters at finessing the doubts that crime lab technicians might have about their own findings. It turns out that the triumphs of dispositive clues on TV crime shows are about as realistic as your basic Seventies sitcom.
I was heartened, therefore, to read this morning that states are buckling down, not only on crime labs, but on lineup procedures and the use of DNA evidence. According to Solomon Moore’s sotry, “DNA Exoneration Leads to Change in Legal System,”
Nationwide, misidentification by witnesses led to wrongful convictions in 75 percent of the 207 instances in which prisoners have been exonerated over the last decade, according to the Innocence Project, a group in New York that investigates wrongful convictions.
The great thing about all of this is changes are being mandated by state legislatures, not by courts. I’m second to none in believing that judicial activism is our ultimate bulwark against profound social injustice, but in a well-run democracy that fallback is rarely if ever necessary, because legislatures do what they’re supposed to do: pass intelligent laws.
Cheering as this news is, it oughtn’t to deflect our attention from the fact that the far dirtier blot on American justice is the shameless exploitation of unconscionably broad drug laws to incarcerate African Americans.
One of the oldest pages at Portico is this one, about the strange folly of talking about business as though it had something in common with sports. Would that they did! – as I’m sure businessmen would think, if they thought. In fact, the comparison between business and sports, the overlay of sports metaphors on business situations, is specious, a real case of “whited sepulchre.”
What do you think?
The perfect book for August – or so it would seem. In fact, Tom Lutz demonstrates just how much work serious loafing requires.
This jolly book got a so-so review in the Book Review, and I duly took note in these pages. Mr Lutz got hold of me to tell me that, in his opinion, the review was completely wrong. How could I doubt him?
I am not a philosopher. I do not believe in systems, metaphysical or otherwise, that explain how the world works. If I believe anything, it’s that we’re far too unintelligent as of yet to be claiming to know how the world works. We’re still working on building bridges that don’t fall into the Mississippi.
In common parlance, “philosophy” denotes a way of living, an understanding of virtue. My “philosophy” is built on a single concept: decency. I believe, crazy optimist that I am, that everyone who has survived adolescence knows what decency is. I’ve written two pages about it; if you’re interested, you’ll find a link to the older page in the newer.
