No Architects Were Killed or Maimed in the Making of this Masterpiece

I did a long post about the Taj Mahal earlier today but Blogger went down and it got lost. This is the first time that ever happened to me. Anyhow, it's hard to get the energy to type the whole thing again. In a nutshell, I had heard from my kids, who had learned it in their Islamic history classes, that the guy who had the Taj Mahaj built, Shah Jahan, a Moghul emperor, killed the architect after the building was completed so that he could not make anything more beautiful afterwards.

This story always bothered me. It did not seem to match the rest of the story, which is about how much Shah Jahan loved his wife and how he had the Taj Mahal built as her mausoleum because of this love and his abiding grief over her death. I suppose it is possible that a person can be capable of both great love and great cruelty/inhumanity, but it still jarred with me.

After a bit of searching on the internet for information on the building, I found that there are a fair number of legends about the Taj Mahal that seem to be false.

* The Taj Mahal was actually a Hindu temple! (Propagated by some Hindu Indians who are sort of upset about Muslims getting any credit for anything good about India, apparently)
* There was going to be another black building built opposite to the white Taj Mahal! (No, apparently not; there's a preexisting garden in the spot they refer to and there seems to be no evidence that Shah Jahan wanted to do this.)
* An Italian goldsmith actually was the chief architect for the Taj Mahal! (This rumor was started by an Italian priest who apparently went to the trouble of finding a real Italian goldsmith who really did live in India at the time in question - but of course would not have been capable of doing this, since he was not an architect, and since there is absolutely no evidence he was involved at all.)
* Shah Jahan killed/blinded/cut the hands off of the architect(s) who built the Taj Mahal! (All apparently completely false.)

The real story is interesting enough: Shah Jahan did in fact build this mausoleum to house the remains of his late second wife who he had loved very much. His son deposed him shortly after the building was completed. The son had him buried next to his wife, the only detail in the entire shrine that is asymmetrical. The shrine is absolutely gorgeous and there's a fascinating site that allows you to navigate it and see various panoramic views of its interior and grounds (here).

Why did someone invent the story of the punishment of the architect(s)? I wonder who started that legend and how. Unfortunately, it appears to be a complete mystery. (Someone is very welcome, however, to come here and teach me something about it, much like the Air Force in Cyberspace discussion the other day, which was completely fascinating.)

Air Force Mission Statement

One of the first things I did when moving to Portland was to get a PO box (as I moved here without a job and assumed I would be moving around a fair amount for the next couple of years). The box is in a "Post Net" store in a mall. Next to it is the local recruiting office for the military.

As I was walking by the recruiting office I noticed a sign in the window entitled "Air Force Mission Statement" and read it.

It said, "The mission of the United States Air Force is to deliver sovereign options for the defense of the United States of America and its global interests - to fly and fight in Air, Space, and Cyberspace."

This sign struck me as very funny, particularly because of the following:
* It seems to be modeled on corporate mission statements that use "key words" in sentences in which they don't really make sense but just sound good
* Along the same lines, it reminded me of the "Dilbert Mission Statement Generator"
* The idea of flying and fighting in cyberspace in the defense of the USA struck me as very sci-fi - but not in a good way, rather in a completely laughable way

So today I decided to blog a bit about what makes this statement sound so inane. I decided to research the issue first, and found this press release about the mission statement, which is less than a year old, apparently: Air Force releases new mission statement

The article offered "definitions" for the "two new concepts" of:
* sovereign options
* cyberspace

In their discussion of what they mean about cyberspace, they seem to mean that they have some air force members working to make sure their websites cannot be hacked.

So, everyone who works on network security is flying and fighting in cyberspace?

Look. The problem with mission statements like this (or like the ones created at the Dilbert Generator, which are really quite representative of the genre) is that the SENTENCES don't have any meaning. It is not enough to put a few nouns/adjectives with cool associations together using random verbs that also have cool associations.

Making websites hackproof is a laudable thing (although if I were a military leader, I would hesitate to admit that it is of such overwhelming importance to the Air Force that this pretty normal function needs to be mentioned in the mission statement - unless they mention other equally important functions, such as radar communicator, or payroll accountant, as well). But it is not flying, nor is it fighting (except in a really, really metaphorical sense). (I have to admit that the first thing I thought of is a bunch of Air Force people sitting at their computers playing on-line role-playing games.)

However, the press release made me realize that not only was the mission statement silly, but disturbing as well.

The "sovereign options" phrase was not only meaningless in context (delivering? To whom?) but the definition the article gave for it was creepily imperalistic sounding:

"They said having sovereign options is the essence of being a superpower."

OK, this is pretty damned honest - almost refreshingly so. It brings up a few other questions, though. e.g., why, then, call the entire shebang the "Department of Defense"? It seems to me you should be the Air Force within the "Department of Imperial Offense" if this is truly your aim.

The article also said that the "leaders" [of the Air Force] said that America's "adversaries" would use "any method or venue necessary to contest America".

Contest America? As what? A nation? A concept? A city on a hill? What about America is being contested? What is America anyhow? Don't you have to define that, first?

I realize that the various entities in the Armed Forces have differing purposes in that they use specific methods of "defense" (the Air Force using planes, the Army using ground forces, the Navy using the sea, etc. etc.). However, it seems to me that they have a single goal, which is the goal that all their new members take an oath about:

"I, _____, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same."
(source: Oaths of Enlistment)

I took that oath once, upon joining the U.S. Foreign Service.

It strikes me as pretty pithy and does not contain any nonsense about flying in cyberspace, yet somehow it gives enough information to help me remember what my job is supposed to be. As an oathtaker, when in doubt, I am supposed to refer to the Constitution for help. For example, if I were ordered to torture someone, I would probably find that this is directly in opposition to the Constitution's eighth amendment and thus I would have to disobey that order to obey my oath.

It is U.S.-centric to argue that the U.S. constitution is the pinnacle of right or justice. And I am not arguing that.

But the U.S. Constitution, however imperfect, is a heck of a lot closer to truth and justice than a mission statement that defines the US project as the essence of being a superpower ("delivering sovereign options"), and that refers to flying through the Internet ("fly and fight in cyberspace") in all seriousness.

Middle East imperial history

I have moved to the US and have been offline for the past several months. I will try to start blogging again.

I found this map program to be really interesting (and educational).

Shab Khaled does India

A Poem By Yasser

Yesterday was Egyptian Mother's Day. My son, who is in the first year of high school and is 15 years old, wrote me a poem. I asked him if I could post it at the blog and he said this was OK. As you can see, although it may not be Shakespeare, from the rhythm and scanning and all that stuff point of view, it has the advantage of being a pretty honest view of his relationship with me. Although actually, I have never spit in his face. :)

But I don't mind at all, you know?

When you often shout at me,
I don't always laugh with glee.
Sometimes I even be quite sad,
But on the whole you're not bad.

But I don't mind at all, you know?

When you're always on my case,
Bellowing, spitting in my face.
Grounding me for the things I did,
But you don't know half the things I hid.

But I don't mind at all, you know?

All I want you to know is that,
I love you much more than my hat.
When you're cross and we've had a row,
You make me wash, rinse, clean, and sew.

But I don't mind at all, you know?

You try to make me think about good and bad,
Until the point where I just think that you're mad
Sometimes you even drive me to the brink of a scream,
And I think about conspiracies and of your scheme

But I don't mind at all, you know?

In the end, is there love as wild,
as the bonds between mother and child?
Is there anything more worthwhile,
Than to just see your dearest mom smile?

So we do perhaps, sometimes laugh with glee
because in the very end... It's just you and me

A Mea Culpa

Well, I am re-reading some Idries Shah books in order to do a really super good essay on him. It's daunting. I also have a lot of thoughts on the "Danish Cartoon Controversy" that, now that it has quieted down, I wanted to put down in this space and elicit some discussion on. But, I am going crazy at work and home, so all of these promised goodies are currently still figments of my imagination. If anyone who has said kind things about this blog is still listening, you are a trooper! And by now if I were you I would have given up in disgust! However, be a better person than me, and I promise some reward (Heavenly, at this rate).

Chomsky and Mistakes

Mark Alexander asked me in the last post about Chomsky whether he had ever admitted to a mistake, and raised the bar extremely high on what he considered a legitimate example: It had to be when he was grown, it had to be something he had advocated passionately, and a bunch of other qualifiers.

So I decided that given that I don't know Chomsky personally and most of what I have read by him are political books about states, not things about himself, I would have to go looking for something like this.

One of the first interviews I read on the Chomsky official site, which has tons of writings by him, mentioned in passing that Mark's question is, in fact, a common critique of him, which got me to wondering why. I mean, the guy just does not write a lot about himself, and gives extremely self-effacing answers whenever he is asked direct questions about his personal background, so when exactly would he have the platform to raise a mistake he had made and apologize for it? Also, the examples I did find did not meet the level set by Mark, but....

Mark contrasts him with Richard Mitchell. Yes, Richard Mitchell admits he is often wrong. Like in the "I am not OK" quote I gave. However: Did he give a concrete example? Not that I remember.

In fact, I don't see this level of "Oh God, How Wrong I Was!" much, generally, in writers from the pre-blog era. It mostly seems to be a recent phenomenon - bloggers write something too fast without checking up on it, and publish on the Internet and later discover they were factually wrong and have to do a mea culpa.

As for people completely changing their entire life view, Mark mentions Hitchens, who I do not think is a deep thinker and whose later work (post 9/11) seems to me to not be thought provoking at all, and I could also mention people like David Horowitz, who seemed to have discovered that their team was not the winning one and switched to what they thought was the more likely-to-win worldview. These people's writing does not make one feel uncomfortable because it challenges assumptions. On the contrary, the writing seems to me to be extremely shallow and have an undertone of mere meanness - in brief, they seem to be angry and lash out at other people who have deeply held convictions precisely because they have none.

(And, my husband knew Hitchens personally, but that's another long story!)

Anyhow, not that these will satisfy Mark, but I found a few instances of Chomsky remarking that he is fallible (and again they did not meet Mark's very high bar of what he considered acceptable):

Example 1: Not Feminist Enough

Q. A former student of yours was quoted in Mother Jones a couple of years ago as follows: "Chomsky thinks he is a feminist, but at heart he's an old-fashioned patriarch. Of course, he's a very good person. He has just never really understood what the feminist movement is about." What do you make of that? How do you evaluate the feminist critique? Has it affected you or your work personally?

A. Well, I'm in no position to evaluate it. That's for others to do. But yeah, I think the feminist movement is probably the most important development to come out of the Sixties, in terms of its actual impact on values and perceptions. How has it affected me? I don't know. Hard to say. It probably has, but probably not as much as it should have.

Q. Is that a criticism you hear fairly often?

A. Yeah, in fact it's a criticism I've been hearing for years, from friends and others. And I think there's probably some validity to it.

(source: http://adamjones.freeservers.com/chomsky.htm )

Example Two: Sports Fan

And here is one more, discussing something he changed his mind about in high school, which admittedly is not very earthshattering - hopefully we all changed our minds about what we thought that long ago.

CHOMSKY: Oh, I don't think competition is a good thing... Take sports, which doesn't lead to much in the way of hierarchy and domination -- some, but not much. But I think especially professional sports brings out just the worst instincts in people. I mean it brings out gladiatorial instincts. First of all, it enhances blind and foolish loyalty. Why should you be loyal to your home team? What do you know about those guys? Do I ever meet anybody out of the [New England] Patriots? I remember when I was in high school, and I was all excited, passionate, about the high school football team. And I remember asking myself, Why do I care? I couldn't say one word to any of these guys. And I don't want to sit at the same table with them, and they don't want to sit at the same table with me, and they're no different than the guys at the other school, and what do I care whether they win a game or they lose a game? All that this does is enhance blind and foolish loyalties, which is extremely dangerous, because that carries over into chauvinism for the state and others; it's extremely dangerous. And in things like, say, professional football and professional boxing, it's really horrifying. It's like gladiatorial contests. You know, you're watching people kill each other -- and cheering. So that kind of stuff is extrememly dangerous.

(Source : http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/198912--.htm )

Example Three: A Mistake in First Grade Causing Entire Life to be Different

Finally, there's the following paragraph from a short bio introducing an article by him:

Seventy-seven-year-old linguist and political writer Noam Chomsky has been a vocal opponent of injustice since the Vietnam War era, but his opposition to the abuse of power goes back even farther, to a schoolyard encounter in the first grade: Seeing a boy being taunted because of his weight, young Chomsky started to intervene. Then he got scared and ran away. The shame and regret he felt following the incident stayed with him and developed into a lifelong commitment to champion the underdog.

(Source: http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/200504--.pdf )

So Mark, I didn't answer this satisfactorily. But I have a challenge for you! (Post the answer to WitNit!) Find another person who writes as thoughtfully as the people in my series, (no ,Hitchens does not count) and find an example of him/her being devastatingly wrong as per your own criteria (and not just talking about being wrong, but providing an example). And you can start with Richard Mitchell.

Browse more Chomsky info here (including articles by other people both for and against him):

http://www.chomsky.info/

Good Writers 2: Noam Chomsky

Now, Noam is, in a lot of ways, like Richard Mitchell. I think this may be because he is a linguist.

Everyone who knows of Noam Chomsky as a public figure is vaguely aware that he is a linguist. I actually have a linguistics degree – in foreign language literature. Don’t ask me how that can be. Ask the university. I really do have a Bachelor of Science in Language Arts and my major was French and Spanish. However, the “science” part of the very funny and contradictory-sounding degree name came as a result of having to take a certain number of courses in linguistics.

As my knowledge of linguistics never went beyond the superficial, having taken four introductory courses in the subject, I did not really read Noam Chomsky in his specialty domain. I know that he is the author of a theory that language is somehow partly innate as well as being taught, which is called the theory of universal grammar. I know that he wrote the sentence “colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” But that is about the extent of my knowledge of his career as a linguist, sad to say.

However, I do believe that his preoccupation with language has forced him to have a more general preoccupation with truth. Richard Mitchell pointed out, in one of his essays, that the point of writing is Truth, and that good writing is that which shows truth, and that this can only be done through the correct use of language - and everything else is, as he put it, “whoring” or “communicating” (writing instruction manuals, for instance, or self-help books). He also pointed out that seeking for the truth is the opposite of fun; that it is hard and discouraging to keep finding out that you don’t know things you thought you were certain about or that you have been dishonest with yourself or deluded into believing or propagating a falsehood.

Well, that is sort of what ties Noam Chomsky to Richard Mitchell in my mind. He confronts things that are not fun to think about, in the realm of politics. And as he is trying to point them out to people in his own country and from his own background, and he is an upper-middle-class highly educated American, he writes about American doings and how they come up short if you are searching for that Truth with a capital T. For this, he sure gets a lot of grief.

I always wonder at the people who attack Chomsky for his criticism of US policies, or for his discussions of some political topic or other, or for his adherence to principle even when it means that he will take some unpopular stance. For example, he has repeatedly defended the freedom of expression of people who say really horrible and false and nasty things. It is amazing to me the number of people who are able to look at this defense and say he is actually defending the nasty ideas themselves, rather than freedom of expression. After all, if we only like freedom of expression when we agree with the ideas being expressed, it’s not really freedom of expression at all. This is self-evident, yet everyone seems to miss the point.

Chomsky wrote a very powerful essay when he was a quite young professor, during the Vietnam War, in which he argued that people who were educated and who used their minds had a greater responsibility than others to stand up against things that were wrong. The essay was, of course, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” written one year before I was born. I think about it a lot when I see modern political discourse and hear strange defenses coming from what he would have considered intellectuals, newspaper opinion columnists, or political theorists, or whatever, of what would be in any moral system at all, indefensible behavior or decisions. I thought about it again today as I was re-reading one of my favorite Richard Mitchell essays, “Writing Against Your Life,” when he said that “I’m OK, You’re OK” was a lie and said, “I am NOT OK. I have lied, I have misstated, I have …”

Chomsky told a story in an interview that I read, about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He said that when he heard of it, and he was a youth or teenager at the time, he felt that there was not a person on earth that he could talk to about how he was feeling, and went off for a walk because he could not face people.

Chomsky’s confrontation of painful things about our country (I say, as an American, albeit an expat) that so many of us would so much rather not know of, means that he has had to take a lot of abuse over the years. But he has also made a lot of friends of people who have some sort of masochistic need to search for the truth with a capital T the way he does. And now he is not alone, unlike when he was young and isolated; and this is because he confronts the demons through his writing, and others read it.

I think writers who make us uncomfortable are far greater than those who make us feel good – they give us a lot more potential for growth. This is why this series is actually focusing on writers who are not much for happy endings or comfortable morals that we can all nod and agree with. So, Chomsky is in good company.

Good Writers: Richard Mitchell

Shortly after I wrote the “good writing as writing” post, Arthur disappeared from the Internet again. After that, I tried to get up the willpower to write the promised series, and kept coming up short.

Every day I would think about posting and decide against it. I’d read other sites that I love and tell myself that I really don’t have anything important enough to add, and then I got very busy with work, and then I finally contacted the people at Crooks and Liars who had helped me find Arthur’s new site when he had shut down his original “Light of Reason” blog asking them if he were all right.

I came back from the weekend to find no reply, but then when I re-tried Arthur’s new site, “Once Upon a Time,” I found that he had come back. Not only that, but he had posted my favorite group of his posts, the series on the power of denial, called ‘The Roots of Horror,’ on a second website he had just started up.

It seemed a day for posting once again.

So, let’s start this series with a short post on the Underground Grammarian, a crusty college professor whose real name was Richard Mitchell.

Richard Mitchell started a newsletter making fun of the academic bureaucracy in his college in the 1970s, which began by making fun of their language, and as time went on, became more philosophical and much wider-ranging than simply a mocking correction of other people's grammar. This was at the height of a sort of post-60s movement to make teaching sound more scientific by using scientific-sounding terminology. As I went to primary school in the 70s and felt the effects of this to some extent in my own schooling, I found his writing very funny and apt. He had a brilliant way of stripping the verbose silliness of its pretentions and showing it to be, in fact, empty of content. I remember vividly how he mocked hapless Ph.D students – and faculty – in the field of education, for using references to “circles” and “spheres” and talking about nonsensical role plays and other classroom activities designed to basically force kids to accept certain premises rather than making them think (usually using the term “the affective domain” which somehow sounds better than “well-meant brainwashing”). He continually reminded people of some unpleasant truths – first, that learning is not supposed to be either entertaining or prescriptive; second, that schooling as dictated by government standards cound not possibly ever produce truly educated citizenry; and third, that learning takes place in an individual mind, not in “group activities.” These truths should not really be all that unpleasant, but it appears that they are.

What was kind of amusing about him was that he collected a large following of iconoclasts. Some, like George Will (who would do well to go back and re-read the entire Underground Grammarian oeuvre now and get back to good serious writing), were conservative, others were merely grammar purists, others were homeschoolers who agreed with his attacks on government schooling but wished to carry out their own version of it using religious prescriptives rather than social ones (who were often chastised in the pages of the newsletter for their own version of sloppy thinking), still others were people like me, who love reading and love clear writing and love to think of things in new ways and learn new things.

I am not as good a writer as Richard Mitchell was (he passed away in 2002). I often catch myself writing bureaucratese (I work for a USAID-funded project, and it is hard to avoid falling into the trap of jargon and using long words to say nothing and to hedge). But, because of Richard Mitchell, I cannot avoid recognizing my own bad writing when I re-read it, and thanks to him (although actually it is sometimes rather a curse in my line of work), I see it and point it out in other written materials that I am supposed to edit, proofread or “give feedback on”.

Richard Mitchell’s ability to see through empty writing and his very witty takedowns of it made me a much more critical reader. This has helped me to learn more from, and to get more good out of, the things I read.

Mitchell also inspired me to read some classic works I would not have sought out before reading him, such as Boswell’s entire Life of Johnson (which was a much more enjoyable experience than I had imagined).

For all of Mitchell’s Underground Grammarian newsletters as well as longer essays and selections of classic texts that he compiled, go to Mark Alexander’s site where he has collected all of it on line. I don’t agree with Mark Alexander on very many political issues, but he and I sure do agree that Mitchell was an inspiring and amazing writer.

Good writing - as writing

Arthur Silber, who I have mentioned before, has started a new blog, Once Upon a Time. He commented in a recent post on his personal situation,

Moreover, and an aspect of this that deeply disheartens me, there is almost no appreciation for decent writing as writing anywhere among blogs or among blog readers. (I'm obviously referring to blogs that focus on culture and politics. I'm aware there is another subset of blogs, which deals with literature and literary concerns. Unfortunately, that subset does not regularly address the other issues that so interest me.) A few well-known bloggers write exceptionally well, Billmon for example. But many of the most prominent bloggers seem to have given up even the most basic rules of grammar and punctuation, and correct spelling has become a memory.

It is true. A lot of the writing in the blogosphere is similar to the writing in the mass media; glib, careless, and often ungrammatical. In the political sphere this may be particularly true, although I find good writing at several websites that are not purely political but have a political element (e.g., Making Light, or The Corpuscle), that furnish me with incredibly good writing that is a pleasure to read.

I am myself more of a reader than a writer. I appreciate good writing with a lot more ease than I can produce it. So, I propose to devote a small series, dedicated to Arthur Silber and his ongoing efforts to state, in elegant and correct English, exactly what's wrong with our current political messes and what we should do about it, on "Good Nonfiction Writers that Changed My Worldview."

(If I did a similar series on fiction, I doubt it would ever end. Fiction is mostly what I read.)

This series includes the following 4 names:

Arthur Silber, himself (I will do him last)
Noam Chomsky (his political books, not his linguistic ones, which I sadly did not have occasion to delve into yet)
Richard Mitchell, "The Underground Grammarian"
Idries Shah

I hope I can get it together to start the series in the next couple of days. My full time job and family make my blogging very inconsistent, though. This post is mostly to say that I am very glad to be reading Arthur's blog on a regular basis once again. I missed it.

The Homework Issue - In Egypt

What a wonderful morning - checking one of my favorite news blogs, Steve Gilliard's News Blog, and finding this article about homework in the US. The mother is really upset that her 7 year old has an hour of homework a night - and that it is homework in which parents are supposed to "help" (she listed a project in which you could tell the parent was going to do everything).

I laughed at the thought of 1 hour of homework being considered a bad thing for a 7 year old, because in Egypt a kid is VERY lucky at that age if he/she does not have a lot more than that. But I agree that homework should be designed so that the kid can do it with a minimum of parental supervision and difficult projects should probably wait until kids are old enough to handle them without the parents basically doing the work for them.

In Egypt, the system is very heavy on rote learning, so that young kids are routinely given dictation tests (and therefore have to do dictation exercises with their parents every night). The system also teaches math a lot faster than the system I was raised in and gives a lot of homework. Most parents who can afford it (and actually, many parents that really can't) get private tutors to help kids in math and often in Arabic language, English as a second language, and any other subjects kids may have trouble in.

The system is also heavily based on regular testing, meaning that if kids are not doing actual homework (assignments that are written down and handed in) they are studying for a test. My two kids, who are now in the final year of middle school and the first year of secondary school, put away their novels, their computer games, their chess sets, and their sports equipment for the school year, and buckle down to studying until bedtime every night. They have a math tutor and an Arabic tutor (and this is after I spent years fighting this trend - and they are the only kids in the extended family who only have tutors in 2 subjects), who come twice a week each (meaning that there are lessons 4 nights out of 5). Their only studying-free time is their weekly visit to their grandmother's house, to which they do not take any school books. There, they are able to read their novels, watch TV, play soccer in the street, or go to an Internet cafe and play games.

I wish that the structure would allow kids more time to devote to out of school activities. I also wish that there were not so many tests and that there was less pressure on the kids to get high grades and more encouragement for them to learn interesting and useful things even if they weren't in the curriculum. Yet, given that some of their teachers are all too eager to introduce things I don't want them to learn (see my past post on the Arabic teacher's religious enthusiasm), I see that incremental changes in this system would simply not work.

It is sad to see that systems in the US, a country with infinitely more resources than Egypt to devote to education, are not all that much better than what kids face here. I wonder if the next generation will be able to confront the challenges past generations have created for them, given the abysmal, rote-based education foisted upon them.

Yom Kippur/10 Ramadan Commemoration

This year, I notice that the 10th of Ramadan (today) is also Yom Kippur (according to an announcement from Michael Lerner that I received yesterday).

This apparently happens every 32 years or so. The last time it happened was at the very beginning of the 1973 war in the Middle East. The war of 1973 is still known to Israelis as the Yom Kippur war, while to Arabs it is remembered by the date of 10 Ramadan, as well as the date of 6 October. (In Egypt, many places are named after these two dates in commemoration of a war against Israel in which the Arabs fought well and won some battles. I live in one of these places: 6 October City in the Giza desert.)

In spite of the instability, violence, war, occupation, economic problems, and overall pain and suffering that continue to affect the Middle East today, herein lies something to be grateful for: at least this time, the confluence of the 10th of Ramadan and the Yom Kippur is not marked by the opening of a full-scale war between Arabs and Jews.

Happy Yom Kippur and continuing wishes for a happy Ramadan, to all.

The Teacher and his Captive Audience

I am a firm believer in the separation of religion and state and in secular education. However, I live in a country (Egypt) with a national religion (Islam, with Christianity recognized as the religion of some citizens), which does not have such a separation as a core value. Therefore, religion is a subject taught officially in all schools here. Muslim kids are taught Islam and Christian kids are taught Christianity.

My son is in the first year of high school and came home two days ago telling me that the religion books had not been issued (the textbooks are government-written and are very noncontroversial and innocuous - I check them every year and monitor what they teach). The teacher has picked up the slack by preaching very extreme ideas to the kids that are in no way part of the official curriculum:

* A kid with longish curly hair who was wearing athletic wrist bands was told that his "long hair" was "haraam" (forbidden) because it made him look like a girl and the wrist bands were also forbidden because they were like girls' bracelets.
* The 5 girls in the class, 4 of whom do not wear a head scarf (they are 14 year olds) were told that if women don't wear the headscarf throughout the month of Ramadan their prayers will not be accepted even though they put the scarf on to pray.
* A kid who told this teacher that the scarf idea was wrong was told to stand outside the class for the entire period as a punishment for saying the teacher was wrong. When he came in and asked for water and my son asked the teacher if he could give him a drink from his water bottle the teacher said no.
* The teacher did not back any of his weird ideas up with any "Islamic proofs" (verses of the Quran or sayings of the Pprophet Muhammad, upon him be peace) but just stated them as facts.

I called the school the next morning and talked to the principal, telling her what had happened in the classroom and making the following points:
* The religion class should be completely restricted to what is in the government approved curriculum.
* The teacher is an Arabic language teacher and has absolutely no credentials to teach religion other than to cover the material in the book.
* The school's job is not to take over from parents and students on personal issues like dress/hairstyle.

The principal was horrified at what I told her and promised that the issue would be dealt with. Yesterday when my son came home I asked him what had happened in Arabic class. He said the girls in the class had tried to raise the discussion of the scarf issue again and the teacher had refused to discuss it. I hope he was warned sufficiently strongly to mind his own business and keep his extreme and weird attitudes to himself.

Happy Happy Ramadan

It's Ramadan 1426! Blessings and easy fasting to all who observe it. Here in Egypt - as usual - everyone is happy about starting Ramadan observances and many are not only fasting but doing extra prayers and visiting the mosque more often and other "extra" religious observances.

As for me, I'm just trying to maintain the religious observances that are required, and to not be grumpy while going without food or drink - I hope this is OK with the man upstairs.

Hurricane Katrina

I am completely numb about the horror of the hurricane and its aftermath. I am not very good at articulating my feelings when they are very overpowering, so I prefer to read and hear others rather than share my impressions, which are very similar to other people's (anger, horror, tears). Please donate to the Red Cross if you have not already.

I hope that as a result of this, FEMA gets its funding back and gets some new, competent management. That is all I am going to say about that. There is no reason for me to waste time putting into my own words what has been said much better by that poor parish president, Mr. Broussard, who was on the Meet the Press show.

An Article about US Public Diplomacy

Often on lists that I belong to, I comment on articles that were sent to the list. Recently one was sent regarding the new Bush Administration "Public Diplomacy initiatives" supposedly undertaken by their relatively new appointee to the Undersecretary of State Department for Public Diplomacy position, famed campaign person and writer of Bush biographies, Karen Hughes. The article really irritated me, so I have written a dialogue back at it. This puts me right in the same league with crazy people who yell at their TV sets, but that's OK. I never claimed to be normal.

The article is from the New York Times, and was by a reporter named Laurie Goldstein who was at the recent Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) convention.

I care about this issue because actually, during the mid-90s, I used to work in "public diplomacy" for the US government (at the time, I worked for USIA which is now an arm of the State Department).

Rosemont, Ill. -- American Muslims met with Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes on Friday at an Islamic convention here to offer advice and assistance as she began an initiative to improve the flagging image of the United States among Muslims overseas.

Public diplomacy was never intended to "improve flagging image" but was intended to use long-term, proven exchange type mass-oriented programs to build the US's image overseas over decades. This long-term effort began after WWII and ended in the Reagan Administration, when the decision was made to focus on "improving relations" with the elites only and to take away funding for broad-based programs (English language teaching programs and public libraries and film nights and other things that cultural centers do).

Hughes began overseeing "public diplomacy" for the Bush administration last month. She said she and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would hold a public forum and announce a new "public diplomacy" strategy next week. She gave few details but said the initiative would involve exchange programs, debates and interfaith dialogues.

What in the heck is the "initiative" in doing exchange programs and interfaith dialogues? These things have existed before. They were cut to the bone. They are long-term, they don't deliver instant results in terms of changing of attitude. What is their hope in doing these things?

Also: Whose attitudes do they aim to "improve" - society at large or elites? If society at large, the attitudes are based on observation of US policy and improvements in that attitude might happen if US policy actually shifted.

We have a common interest in confronting terror and violence and hate and crime that is committed in the name of any religion, and we want to isolate and marginalize those who would seek to kill innocents," Hughes said at a news conference. "And frankly, who better to do that than many of our American Muslims themselves, who have friends and family and groups in countries across our world?

As usual, they are using this so-called "public diplomacy" initiative as a further bully pulpit to demonize those in the Middle East opposed to US interventionism and imperialism, labeling them all as terrorists, criminals, and haters.

Polls have shown that the image of the United States among Muslims abroad has plummeted since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the start of the Iraq conflict.

Gee, and this must be because there are not enough exchange programs and interfaith dialogues - or government funded boondoggle radio and TV stations blasting US music and fashion advice to the Middle East. There can't possibly be any CAUSAL relationship between the Patriot Act, the invasion of Iraq, the invasion of Afghanistan, the whole Israel-Palestine long-term issue, and the "plummeting" of the US "image."

Hughes met separately with leaders of Muslim organizations, young people and a delegation from England that was among an estimated 40,000 here for the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America. The society is an umbrella group of mosques and Islamic centers in the United States and Canada.

What did she meet with the delegation from England for? And, more importantly: What exactly do these people hope to accomplish by trying to help the US design its PR to fool the people of the Middle East into thinking it is benign, when facts on the ground so clearly state the opposite?

"It's all talk right now and unclear what the concrete steps are," Rubina Khan, treasurer of the Muslim Students Association, said. "But if we can form a relationship with anybody in the administration who has that power, then obviously we should try."

What do you hope to do with this relationship, Ms. Khan? Why are you helping them design advertising to convince Muslims in the Middle East that "we're here to help!"???

Some Muslim leaders who met Hughes said they were gratified to be consulted and impressed with her willingness to listen. A few said she appeared to lack knowledge about the Middle East and seemed unaware of how fearful many American Muslims had become of government surveillance and intrusions on their civil liberties.

But she is not in CHARGE of those issues, so the fact she is a good listener and acts sympathetic is completely IRRELEVANT. Her task is to market the US to Muslims, not to fix the real problems causing the bad attitudes. Why do they think it's great she can listen to them, when her brief has nothing to do with solving their real problems? She is not going to repeal the blasted Patriot Act.

Hughes said at the news conference that when some Muslim students told her that they were afraid to speak on cell phones to family members overseas, "that broke my heart."

Well, at least she is a bit more diplomatic than Barbara Bush was about the NOLA refugees, but I don't see what her sympathy has to offer in terms of concrete solutions. She's a PR flak. That is her job. She is supposed to act sympathetic. Emphasis on the word 'act'.

Several Muslims said Hughes should denounce hate speech against Islam from non-Muslim Americans in the American news media, because those comments are amplified overseas as representative of America. "I think that would probably be the most effective thing she could be doing, is confronting the bias, prejudice and racist views of Islam that are perpetrated in the U.S.," said Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, an organizational consultant from Oakland.

I like how Muslims buy into this 'denounce' thing and figure that if they can get the Bush Administration to denounce things it somehow evens out that we are supposed to denounce every negative thing any co-religionist ever does, like there is shared responsibility for it. The Bush Administration is already too good at mouthing words that are totally at odds with their damned actions, you clueless people. Sure, they will happily make silly statements about how great Islam is and how it is a religion of peace, and then go bomb Fallujah again and cause "collateral damage." What planet are all these people on, where words are so crucial and deeds don't mean a
damned thing?????

American Muslim leaders are also trying to repair the flagging image of Islam. There is a growing sense of urgency among Muslim leaders since the bombings in London in July that they have to do more to counter Muslim extremists who are citing Islam to justify violence and terrorism.

Yeah, that is the main issue here. Don't let anyone forget that it is the Muslims who are the villains here, not the poor Bush Administration.

Plato's Cave

I was cruising around on the Internet today and spent some time looking at science-oriented sites that I enjoy reading. My grasp of science is not high, because I did not take very many science classes in high school and did not *have* to take any hard science courses in college, and therefore chose to take courses that would give me credits in my double major and minor fields (French Language/Lit, Spanish Language/Lit, and American Government). This is something I later regretted, as was my decision at about age 16 to stop at Algebra II and never take higher math.

Because of this lack, I often struggle to understand scientific concepts and I am trying to encourage my kids not to go for what's easy for them (verbal oriented stuff, just like me) and keep on with their interests in science and math.

This is all an explanation of why I enjoy science blogs; I usually learn something new from them, given there is such a wealth of information in that area, a lot of it pretty basic, that I did not learn in school.

However, I did take two years of basic biology and am deeply interested in the U.S. "culture wars" between scientists and Creationists regarding the theory of Evolution. I happen to be a religious believer and practitioner. Yet, to me, the spiritual belief in some sort of organizing principle/force (God) does not contradict the theories that have developed in scientific query through the system of experimentation, analysis of results, and analysis of available evidence. There obviously has been a lot of evolution between the past and the present, and evolution continues today, and the principles developed by evolutionary theorists are used to design new medicines and to understand genetics and to do many other things that contribute to our current civilization. Being against it is unbelievable to me.

By clicking on some links, I found an article by a scientist mocking a guy named Vox, who happens to be anti-evolution as well as apparently believing that U.S. society, economy and culture went South when women started entering the urban workforce in the 1970s. The scientist had a lot of response from this guy Vox's fans who read his website. One in particular started into the evolution argument.

Now at first it seemed this guy was just your regular silly Internet troll. He used bad spelling and grammar and used terminology wrong (calling a regular insult an "ad hominem" for example) and kept the discussion veering off in weird directions. Then he admitted to being 14 years old, and the scientist and his buddies, probably feeling bad for being harsh on him near the top of the thread, began carefully and soberly responding to his arguments against evolution. They were really trying to get him to understand, feeling wrong for merely mocking a young person like this, I imagine (they did not actually say this, though - the tone of their posts just changed).

At the very end of the thread, the kid said he had to go play a baseball game, at which point his younger sister got on and angrily told the people on the website to stop making fun of him because he was a very smart 14 year old and she was 13 and they were home schooled and evolution was evil and they were good Christians.

I felt like crying. Why is it legal for parents to keep their kids this ignorant? Not only the fact the kids don't understand science and what it is, and think that to understand it is bad, but that they can't write, spell, use grammar correctly, or use terminology correctly. What are their parents teaching them? As far as I could tell, very little. It also seemed they had done very little reading and considered the idea of reading articles that they were told about to be beyond the pale. I started that post thinking it was kind of funny, but ended up feeling so sorry for the kids I was close to tears.

Here is the link at Dispatches from the Culture Wars if anyone is interested in the story.

The only thing that is keeping me from total depression is the hope that these people are making up their identity and are not really young, impressionable teens locked in their house by their religious fanatic parents and not allowed to learn basic science (or spelling or anything else).

Update! Yay! Yes, it was just an internet troll who is not really 14 1/2. Thank Goodness. Also, which is not so good, he apparently posts from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The Holy Grail Quiz

Too many serious posts these days so I was very happy to get the idea to take this and jazz up this site a little.

No surprises there. Mark of Witnit was, of course, God. I was, of course, Dennis the Peasant. This was predictable if you are one of the so-small-as-to-be-nonexistant group of readers who reads both of us regularly.

The test was fun, but totally easy to fix if you have seen the movie as many times as I have (I have two teenagers who love to recite the dialogue to it).

Take the quiz: "Which Holy Grail Character Are You?"

Dennis the Peasant
Oh, King, eh, very nice. And how d'you get that, eh? By exploiting the workers! By 'anging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society. If there's ever going to be any progress with the...

Why is Honesty Brutal?

I got a very kind note from Arthur Silber after writing the previous post. In it, he wondered why we see honesty as being "brutal." He mentioned that he, too, uses this phrase, but isn't there something strange about seeing truth as being violent?

I agree with him that it goes back to the Alice Miller theories he discusses (go to his blog to read up on these and come back here when you are done!). In fact, we are socialized from a very young age to carry certain core values and assumptions. I have Western values and assumptions, but unlike most Westerners, I know what these are and am sensitive to differences, having lived in non-Western society for many years and made a daily effort to observe myself as well as others.

Sometimes we find that our core assumptions and values turn out to be either morally wrong, or not factual, or both. When that happens, just stating that they are wrong/not factual seems like an act of violence.

For example, the core assumption that Alice Miller attacks is that parents always do what is best for their children, and if they don't, it does not matter because they 'mean' well. Thus children are made to feel guilty if their parents are cruel to them - and often internalize the cruelty. Arthur has a great article on the strength of this cultural assumption, examining the actor Mel Gibson's relationship to his father. Alice Miller was strongly attacked in her native country of Germany by psychiatrists for bringing up this issue.

I have taught management workshops in which people discuss how to challenge assumptions. It is really difficult to do directly. People have a lot invested in their assumptions - and they have internalized them from a very early age. I think this is why there are often surprisingly hysterical reactions in US and other societies to people who attack those core assumptions.

For example, a feminist writer who points out that some widespread cultural conventions, such as telling upset-looking women you don't know to "smile," is sexist, gets really outraged reactions. People of color and women who write about white or male privilege get this all the time from white/male people whose assumptions are being challenged.

People who challenge homophobia also tend to receive outraged responses that don't seem to have at all comprehended what they actually said. I think the action of "speaking truth to power" often brings out people's defensive reactions. Anything that provokes such strong reactions could thus be categorized as violent.

Those of us who do try to speak the truth in uncomfortable circumstances really feel that we are being brutal at times. Sometimes, I feel when I confront people in the US on their faulty assumptions regarding the Middle East, that I am truly attacking them, though I am trying to approach it rationally. Part of this is because I often provoke an outraged and often completely disconnected angry response. Then I feel as if I really don't know where to start with this person.

Thus, "brutal" honesty.

Arthur Silber, Great Writer on the Internet

I plan to start a regular feature on this blog highlighting other, better, blogs in case there is anyone who, by some weird stroke of luck/lightning, happens by here and has not heard of them.

For the past year or so I have been in the habit of checking The Light of Reason blog religiously every day. Its owner, Arthur Silber, is a tremendously articulate and brutally honest writer. He has written a series that I expect will someday be compiled in college texts on the history of blogging - "The Roots of Horror," about Alice Miller's theories on child-rearing and their relevance to geo-political events. If that's not enough, he is also a classical music buff who writes about opera and orchestral news.

Arthur is ill and jobless, yet continues to write thought-provoking, timely and important articles every day in spite of all of the problems in his personal life. Because of the strain of maintaining his great blog, he needs and deserves financial contributions from readers.

(I think he feels even greater need to post regularly, as his well-written articles are more and more often mentioned by big and popular blogs such as Atrios and Digby, and thus attracting an ever greater readership.)

I highly recommend that you check him out - and that if you find his writing as valuable as I do, you should pay for his inestimable service.