Columns by notable Eurobloggers on politics, culture, and society.
Friday, May 28, 2004
METAPHORS
By Nelson Ascher
Since we are back in the poetry business, it’s time to remember that the main, but in no ways exclusive, raw material with which most poems are built is metaphor. There are obviously good and bad ones. My favorite 20th century writer, the great Argentinian master Jorge Luis Borges, once said that there’s only a handful of excellent metaphors and quite probably all of them were not exactly invented, but rather discovered very early in the history of our species.
I think that the linguist Marc Myake (or Amritas), whose excellent blog is called Amaravati, would disagree with me, but even so I’m fascinated with the research of some of his colleagues according to whom the early humans were few in number and spoke the first language from which all subsequent ones, both living and dead, originate. These linguist have been trying to find traces of the so-called Ur-Spräche in the known languages. Their work involves searching for certain root-words that would, in some form or other, show up in any language or family of languages.
There’s for instance a word the ancient shape of which would be something like “ml(k)”, with different vowels between the consonants. A Californian researcher believes that it’s from this root that words like “mel” (breast) in Hungarian (an Uralic tongue) and “milk” in English, “Milch” in German and “moloko” in Russian (all of them Indo-European languages) come, as well as words related to the verb “to suck” or “to suckle” in Tamil and other Dravidian languages.
But one of the most ancient roots would be something like “d*k” (with the * in the place of some vowel). Well, this root can be found in many different languages, but instead of having a precise, restricted sense, it covers a whole area of related meanings which go from “finger” (“digitus” in Latin), to words meaning “number” or specific numbers line “one”. As far as I know, till they’re about five or six years old, whenever asked about their age children answer showing the equivalent number of fingers. If those theories are right then, from the very beginning, we’ve been thinking metaphorically.
And thus, Borges would be right too. Some of the “Ur”-metaphors he talks about are those that associate old age to autumn, death to the night, stars to the beloved’s eyes. But then, if Borges is right, all poets are more or less condemned to never innovate but just to recycle old similes in new shapes.
All this was a somewhat lengthy introduction to a very brief point I’d like to make.
During my stay in France, after a while I got fed up with the anti-Americanism there.
(I’m kind of inoculated against anti-Americanism because of the simple fact that in my age group, high school and among my friends I was also the very first one to be contaminated by this virus. For years I didn’t wear jeans nor drank Coca Cola and watched only non-American movies. By the time I was outgrowing this teenage sickness, the others were becoming infected by it.)
Well, fed up with cheap Euro anti-Americanism as I was, I couldn’t help reminding those non-simplistic peoples that the US saved their sorry skins at least three times in the last century, and saved the Europeans from other Europeans mainly, because WW1, WW2 and the Cold War were actually one single and huge European civil war.
What do you think they answered me when they were unable to question the facts? Obviously that America did it out of self-interest. Eventually, I found a metaphor to use against them and, up to now, none of them has been able to fight or "deconstruct" it.
What I tell them is the following:
Look, what do you prefer, to be saved by a doctor who does it for money because he too has bills to pay or to be killed by an idealistic murderer for free?
NO COMMENTS (updated with some comments) By Nelson Ascher
The fourth stanza of W.B. Yeats' Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen is not only one of the most impressive pieces of writing I've ever read. The whole poem applies perfectly well to our own times, but due to the recent popularity of a certain mammal, that specific stanza acquired a whole new meaning undreamt of by the poet. Here it is:
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery Can leave the mother, murdered at her door, To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free; The night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, And planned to bring the world under a rule, Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN Robert Frost Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth.
Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same.
And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
CHANGING THE WHEEL Bertolt Brecht I sit by the road side The driver changes the wheel. I do not like the place I have come from. I do not like the place I am going to. Why with impatience do I Watch him changing the wheel?
Whoever thinks that there's no kind of bias or animosity in the French press, should take a look at the cover of Marianne. It is reproduced at Merde in France. Last year, another French magazine, I think it was L'Express, also gave Bush the cover and the text was something like "The Man who Ruined our Year" ("our" meaning French, and that happened a few days before Saddam was captured). One wonders what Bush may have done to ruin such a perfect country's year. Did he bomb Paris? Was he responsible for the summer tragedy when 15.000 Frenchmen perished due to the lack of air-conditioning in their shoe-boxes, sorry, I mean appartments, and also due to the lack of doctors in their perfect socialist hospitals? Was he responsible for France's stagnated economy and unemployment? And now I ask myself, rhetorically of course: will any French magazine have the courage to criticize the invitation, for D-Day's ceremony, of the leader of the former enemies, Gerhard Schroeder? Marianne is protesting as loudly as it can against Bush's presence there. Did the magazine protest when the butchers of Chechnya and Tibet visited the country officialy? Did it protest Robert Mugabe's visit? Would it have the courage, as magazines and newspapers have even in a Third World country like Brazil, to criticize its own government, to give such a cover to Chirac? Would they do it with Kofi Annan? I'm obviously in favour of total freedom of press and, thus, I think that each and every American should see Marianne's cover and should also be informed whether the magazine gets any amount of money from the local government. BTW, I think that it would be quite helpful for Bush if he used that cover in his campaign.
The Abu Ghraib scandal seems to have been the shortest one since the beginning of the WoT. With the previsible exception of the NYT, no mainstream English or American newspaper seems to be giving it its headlines, not even a small corner on its front page. Only such openly partisan publications as The Nation are still trying to keep the story's dying flames alive. That the NYT is doing the same is less a proof that the scandal can still be revived than that the Grey Lady is fast becoming a fringe paper. And, as the WMDs story cost the heads of some top BBC apparatchiks, the only victim so far of the Abu Ghraib scandal has been the Mirror's editor. Well, I have not checked French language papers yet, but, whatever they say, who cares?
The fact that the pictures showing Brtish soldiers torturing an Iraqi prisoner are likely to have been faked went obviously below the press' radar.
But take a look at Le Monde 's graphic comment on the beheading of Nick Berg. It shows Berg as the axe is going down while his head is lying on a video camera. (It can be seen at MERDE IN FRANCE). Does anybody see something terribly wrong in it?
If not, let me just suggest the the trouble is not the obvious lack of an executioner, since only an axe and a hand are seen, but nothing else that could suggest who murdered him.
What's an absolute lie is the following.
In the cartoon Berg is wearing something that looks like a military uniform. It happens, however, that he was a civilian. The "official" picture that made the front pages all over the world shows him wearing a kind of orange prisoner garb. The Le Monde caricature has him wearing boots, but in the above mentioned "official" picture his feet were naked.
I don't need to elaborate further, right? Take your own conclusions.
Stratfor is, in its own way, asking for Rumsfeld to go. Whoever there wrote the article The Edge of the Razor is someone clever enough not to do it openly, but to disguise it as a prediction. His or her analysis is intelligent. Its main points are (1) that, through lack of adequate communication with the American people, the Administration simply cannot show or discuss publicly its strategic successes because the public hasn’t been clearly informed beforehand what the strategic goals were to begin with; and (2) that a strategic victory over Al Qaeda is being compromised by many tactical failures on the ground in Iraq.
The Secretary of Defense would have to go for having allowed that to happen. Sounds reasonable or, at least, it would sound more reasonable to me if I were completely sure that Rumsfeld has complete control over both the White House’s propaganda efforts (or lack thereof) and the occupation.
Neither, however, seems to be the case.
Everything I have been seeing and reading till now confirms for me the thesis according to which the whole Iraqi thing has been “Rumsfeld’s war and Powell’s occupation”. Whatever depended mostly on the military has been and continues to be brilliantly accomplished. I, for one, don’t buy in the “there should have been more troops” story line. I still believe the troops there are more than enough and that more soldiers would mean not more strength, but more liabilities and risk. Rather than the fighting, that is being well done, they would be doing mainly the dying. More troops = more body bags.
But Stratfor has a point about what went wrong with the government’s communication strategy. In terms of marketing, they have failed both to define their target public and even to understand it.
In principle it seems that it would have been impossible anyway for the president to go public and say something along these lines: “Our objective in Iraq is to scare the hell out of the neighboring governments and force them to cut any ties with/and turn against Al Qaeda; it is also to be near enough to threaten Syria and the Saudis and to complete the encirclement of Iran.” Diplomacy, political correctness and quite simply the inability of this Administration to trust the Americans entirely and communicate with them have been Bush’s main fault.
Divisions inside the Administration helped confuse the issue of who its real public was. The truth is: one cannot at the same time please Americans, Europeans, Brits, the Arabs, the UN and the EU. Fortunately, most of these cannot be pleased anyway. The only people with which the Administration should have done its best to communicate candidly and clearly are the American people.
And now we can see how damaging the UN imbroglio has been. Maybe it didn’t delay the invasion and, according to some, it even helped in the meanwhile the invanding army’s build up. But it doubtlessly derailed whatever was left of the government’s communication strategy as it spent months trying to figure out arguments that would be convincing elsewhere. Trying to conquer an inexistent or irrelevant world opinion, Bush put aside the best arguments, those that would have been heard and understood by his countrymen. These were, are and should always be those a president has to convince. If he manages to do it, whatever is thought in European or Arab capitals becomes secondary. If not, he may be backed by the Pope, the Dalai Lama, Kofi Annan, Nelson Mandela, even Jacques Chirac, and he’ll still be losing.
Well, if there was someone who got it right from the beginning and tried to fight against this, telling, as far as he could, the press and the public what the war was about in tough, concrete, politically incorrect ways, was none other than Rumsfeld himself. It is as much due to this as to his victories in the battlefield that most Americans still want him to stay. His openness, when confronting the press corps, was an inspiring example unfortunately not followed by the rest of the Bush Administration.
Most of the problems now in Iraq were probably unavoidable. Its occupation, besides being a necessary tactical step, is also a kind of experiment the goal of which is to determine if the Arab world can be reformed. There’s another objective people have not been talking much about. As the government reached the conclusion that it would be in for a long engagement with the Arab and Muslim world, it has been using this opportunity in Iraq to build up a military and civil elite that, through direct contact with that world, will get to know it from the inside out. A new generation of Arabists, thousands of them and very different from the diplomatic Arabists who have dominated the field, is being born right now and is going through its elementary school in Baghdad and Basra, in Kirkuk and Al Fallujah. Many will learn Arabic, will have Arab girlfriends or wiwes and will eventually get to know the Arabs better than they, the Arabs, know the West or themselves. The most effective terrorists got to know the West by living in Europe and the US for a long time. Well, that’s the American response to this. And, as a group, unlike the diplomatic Arabists, the American and British “Camel Corps”, they won’t go native.
Had the President followed the advice of many generals, of the State Department, of the press and so on, the tactical situation wouldn’t be better. It would most likely be worse. Imagine how many Abu Ghraibs would there be now with twice or three times as many troops in Iraq. Whatever we get to know about those responsible for what was done in that prison, one thing is sure: they had too much time in their hands. Their job should be to fight and it is possible that what happened there was due to a lack of battlefield action. Troops have to be kept busy, otherwise those nasty things are bound to happen again and again. 100.000 extra troops would mean not twice, but maybe ten or twenty times as many soldiers doing nothing and that would be dangerously explosive.
All I have been hearing from those who want Rumsfeld’s head is a long sequence of non sequiturs. He should be sacrificed because he got it right and because he has been accomplishing the Administration’s goals. He should be fired for the mistakes of his rivals and enemies, mistakes which, up to a point, he managed to fight and vanquish. It is never enough repeating that, among the members of the Administration, he is the one who was right there on 9/11. He knows what this war is about and who the enemies are. That makes all the difference.
AFTERTHOUGHT: I’ve seen General Abizaid only once on TV, but he’s communication skills are nothing short of impressive. I cannot understand why he is not going public more often to make the Administration’s case.
I have just created a new blog called NENHURES (nowhere). I will be posting there in Portuguese only and only literary stuff with, maybe, a few exceptions. Whoever reads Portuguese is invited to pay me a visit there.
In the thread below the MUCH ADO post, a countryman of mine wrote criticizing me personally. My answer to him there is the last time I'll ever discuss my humble person in this blog.
I don't trust shrinks who would charge a lot to "analyze" me, so why should I take seriously anyone who's willing to do it for free? What I wrote in the thread was due to the fact that this is the first time a countrymen got here by God knows what accident and wrote here in my tongue the kind of things I don't feel like discussing.
Ad hominens will simply be ignored. Anyone who wants to discuss with me is welcome, but only if he/she is willing to discuss my points, not my person. And I'll discuss only substantive criticisms, not adjective ones. Name calling like "you're a rightist, fascist, Zionist, Nazi etc." won't be addressed. However, I'll gladly discuss, as time allows me, objections like "you're factually wrong in this or that" and "I disagree with you on points 2 and 3 because etc."
I write here not to become a better or different human being or to explore my conscious and unconscious selves, but mainly to formulate and test my ideas about certain specific subjects with people who agree or disagree in an intelligent way with me. I've had great discussions here which have often forced me either to reformulate my take or to change my mind and I'm quite grateful for all those who helped me do it.I also hope this experience has been as rewarding for most of those who came here as it has been for me.
Today's London Times brings a story about a UK waiter who was trained by Al Qaeda to hijack commercial planes and flow them into high buildings. For several reasons, he changed his mind and gave himself up in the US. After being questioned by the FBI, who didn't believe his story, he was sent back to Britain where he was then questioned by Special Branch and then released. British authorities eventually lost track of him.
And all this happened, take note, in the Spring of 2000, that is, more than a year before 911.
If true, this is a big story.
But there are details that just doesn't fit.
First of all, though he is Muslim, he was born in the UK to Pakistani parents. Well, all the known 19 hijackers were Arabs. There must be some reason why, for its most important mission, Al Qaeda has chosen only Arabs. It reminds me that, as far as I know, the inner core of the Mafia used to be composed exclusively of Sicilians. That's because family and clan relations make it so much harder to penetrate. The same probably applies in some measure to Al Qaeda's leadership. Besides, the Arabs have always seen themselves as the natural core of Islam. And communications between the 19 hijackers were surely in Arabic and someone who is not a native speaker of the tongue would have been quite out of place among them.
This British-Pakistani's second thoughts were, according to The Times, due to the fact that he has wife and kids. That's another reason why I think he wouldn't be recruited for that specific suicidal mission, though a British pasport would obviously have been quite useful.
Again, if true that would point to an almost unbelievable measure of incompetence on the part of the FBI and the Special Branch and a corresponding measure of luck on the part of Al Qaeda.
I'm skeptic, however. Let's see how this story develops...
(Let me first thank my friend Roger L. Simon, Instapundit, Amritas and Demer ni Cefran (though this sounds maybe like Gaelic, it is, according to the Verlen, or rather, L'Envers, the French slang that consists in inverting the order of syllables, Merde in France) for their generosity. It's not only the possibility of linking to each other across countries and continents but also this very generosity, breaking ceaselessly the hierarchies so entrenched in the press and elsewhere in the media, that make the blogosphere what it is. This return to an informality that was at the heart of modernity has been lost in our post-modern times which in many ways resemble the Ancien Regime.)
Now, I know that what I'm going to say may sound outrageous. People will even write me telling how outraged they are. And I won't doubt their sincerity.
Fine.
I cannot speak for anyone else, but come on, the whole story about prisoners being abused in Iraq is no big deal, is it? No. Not at all.
Has anybody seen Midnight Express, Papillon or any other prison movie made anywhere in our wide world? What are they all about? They are about how unpleasant it is to be jailed. And that's not only because of the lack of liberty or space. And I'll tell you all a secret: the worst prison movie is still an understatement. It doesn't show even 10% of what we all know goes on inside a jail. And this applies to labor camps, to POW camps and to every place where human beings, mainly male human beings are confined.
It is surely better or, rather, less worse to be jailed in Sweden than in Brazil. But still, the best and most humane prison house in the world is very, very bad indeed.
What applies to regular criminals applies also, more or less, to POWs. In the Soviet Gulag it was much better to be a common criminal than a political prisoner. Throughout most of history, the valueless POWs, that is, those whose country or family couldn't afford to ransom them, were either killed or enslaved. In ancient Mexico wars were waged because the Aztecs needed a continuous flow of prisoners to be sacrificed on the top of their pyramids and then cooked (because the Aztecs were a civilized people) and eaten.
So, what is all the current scandal about?
Don't think I approve of what was done to those Iraqi POWs. I don't. But I'm not amazed or surprised at what happened. And I'm sure neither were they.
While crime and war are not eradicated, prisoners will always be in some measure abused and mistreated. And war and crime will never be eradicated.
The abuse or mistreatment can be kept under control, but it will never be completely abolished. Look at how the Germans dealt with the Russian prisoners and vice-versa. It is true that the Germans were treated infinitely better by the Brits and Americans and they reciprocated in kind. But what happened in Western Europe during WW2 was a different kind of war from the one fought in the Eastern front. The Japanese military, on the other hand, massacred quite a few British and American POWs, while the US sent American civilians of Japanese ancestry to its own camps. I think it is likely that even in the most civilized places some form of abuse took place now and then.
So, please, don't misunderstand me. Those who did what was done must be judged and, if found guilty, punished accordingly. What's pretty hard for me is to match the relative insignificance of something that was bound to happen anyway with the hyperbolic dimensions of the publicity it has been getting. And the worst is that anyone who comments on it has to preface whatever he/she says by stressing how outraged he/she is. This became the politically correct position.
Well, sorry, but I'm not outraged. Outrage presupposes surprise, shock. One can be surprised or shocked only by what's unexpected. What took place wasn't exactly unexpected, was it? It happens everywhere, all the time. And it is, has been and will always be an integral part of warfare.
These are surely strange times, because in normal times Rumsfeld would just tell the press (and the press would get his message): "No, I've not been informed about it, but if some of our men did something against the rules, I'm sure their officers will punish them. Next question, please."
UPDATE: For God's sake. Let's say there are ten or twenty rotten apples among the hundred thousand plus US troops deployed in Iraq. Big deal. There were more even in my kindergarten.
SECOND UPDATE: What's taking place right now is obviously a concocted scandal. It is not easy to have a clear idea of who's behind it, but one thing is beyond doubt: Donald Rumsfeld is the target. I've seen it happening once. It was on a Friday. Early that day rumours began circulating about a dangerous liaison between a certain president and a certain young female intern. By the afternoon, the media talking heads were already swarming like flies around that "i" word (impeachment). And now we are at it again. Rumsfeld is the key person in the WoT and that means that he's behind this administration's main success, namely, its stratgic decisions. He is the one who was right there, in the middle of the storm, on 911. He was present at the birth of a new world. Without him it is not altogether impossible that the attacks would have been dealt with in the usual way, not as a war, but as a law enforcement matter. Make no mistake: he is the one who makes the Bush administration credible. Take him out, and the Bush administration is as good as gone, with chances of an electoral disaster growing. This would surely benefit the democrats, but, because we know who Rumsfeld's enemies are, I bet this scandal is an inside job fabricated by his rivals. Whatever happens in the US is not, since I'm not American, my problem. But the WoT is definitely my problem. We're actually crossing right now the most perilous days the world has witnessed since those immediately after 911. Rumsfeld's fall would mean a victory for the Islamofascists. Not any victory, but a huge one, something much more important than their proven ability to become kingmakers in Europe. If Bush doesn't stand firmly behind Rumsfeld, both are done. And, quite probably, we too with them.
