I bet Rep. McKinney will come out swinging.
The Hebrew Hammer
I haven’t written about the war that broke out between Israel and Lebanon this weekend because I don’t know what to say.
I feel like I did in the months after 9/11: tracking all the wheels-within-wheels, trying to understand who stands the most to gain from which actions, whose decisions may backfire, which groups will break from their traditional responses.
As you can guess, I’m paralyzed. All I can do is hope for the safety of my family and friends (including my buddy Mitch, who’s reporting from Beirut), and for a quick, decisive end to hostilities.
I don’t think that’s going to happen, but the status quo hasn’t been around for years.
With all the heaviness out of the way, I offer you proof that I’m still a retard who goes for cheap laughs.
The Music of the Spheres
Sorry to be out of touch, dear readers. I was busy finishing up the last stages of the Top Companies issue, plus dealing with our annual conference. For some reason, whenever I finish up this issue, I get sorta down. Maybe all that writing and research leaves me drained, but I think it might be that I don’t feel it was good enough, and that triggers a bit of a depression. If I only had more time, resources, expertise, etc., I could make the report that much better.
But it’s off to the printer, and now I have a little while to breathe.
Some of you have e-mailed to ask about the new header-picture for this site. It’s from a postcard I bought in Budapest, at a park devoted to old Soviet-era statues. I posted a bunch about my trip in July 2004 (look it up in the archives), and also put the pictures up on Flickr. That guy’s around 35 feet tall, and mighty imposing, so I laughed when he got recontextualized in that postcard.
And I went to the beach!
To use the local parlance, Amy & I “went down the shore” this weekend, staying at her friend’s place in Lavallette, NJ. It was only a 27-hour getaway (so as to avoid traffic), but refreshing. We lounged on the front porch, lounged out on the beach and read while listening to guys who made Gino the Ginny sound tame, cooked up fajitas, watched Sexy Beast, and meandered down the Seaside Heights boardwalk on a Saturday night.
It’s that last one that I know you want to hear about, and I’m peeved that I forgot to bring my camera with me on that journey, since it was filled with awesome sights.
Starting with the tattoo/piercing shop that had two studios with big windows facing out onto the boardwalk. That’s right; you can stand outside and gawk as knuckleheads get inked with “tribal bands” for tribes they don’t belong to. It’s captivating. When we passed the shop, a woman was getting something tattooed on her ankle while her underaged kids sat in the studio. We started to wonder if the windows were actually two-way mirrors, and they had no idea we were watching.
The people-watching vibe held up; they just weren’t behind glass. The Saturday night attire was fantastic, what with the boardwalk’s cosmopolitan mix of gaudy Italians, gaudy Puerto Ricans and gaudy black people, all dressed to the, um, fours. Maybe to the fives, but definitely not to the nines.
There was the obligatory “Jersey Girl” stamped across the ass of a girl’s sweat-shorts, the combo of “wife-beaters” and Italian horn necklaces, the throwback basketball jerseys (and a Utah Jazz DeShawn Stevenson authentic: what’s up with that?), the generally short (except when way short) skirts, and the families with baby carriages, just taking an evening out on the promenade.
We stopped in front of some T-shirt places, where we considered buying several novelties:
“Two tickets to the gun show” (with arrows pointing at the arms)
“Free hand lotion” (with an arrow pointing straight down)
I (Heart) My Italian Stallion
I (Heart) Black Guys
I (Heart) Puerto Rican Guys
(but no I (Heart) Jewish Guys, sad to say)
Later, we walked by a video arcade where a pair of teens were playing Percussion Master, a drum-based game. You have three different drums to hit, and you have to follow the symbols scrolling down the screen to get the sequence right.
Scott, who loves this sorta stuff (he was playing Guitar Heroes on his PS2 earlier in the afternoon), waited for them to finish and then popped in his coins.
He selected the Easy level, which I cruelly hoped would consist solely of Def Leppard songs, but in fact contained some goofy dance tracks. No Underworld or Chemical Brothers, unfortunately; I guess those come in the later rounds. Scott drummed pretty well, even though his avatar in the game was a Japanese schoolgirl.
But the video arcade actually brings us to the real reason we hit the Boardwalk that night: reconnaissance!
See, my brother and his family are planning to come out to NJ next month, and it’s my mission to find a boardwalk that has our favorite pastime: a functioning Addams Family pinball machine. And Scott knew exactly where we could find one.
Strangely, it seems that I’ve never written about pinball on this blog. I’m amazed by this fact, because it’s actually a subject I can ramble on about at length (and am about to).
To paraphrase A River Runs Through It, “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and pinball.”
My brother and I both love to play pinball–and this particular machine–but we play in very different ways. Like the brothers in Maclean’s sublime story, our methods say something about how we each achieve grace in this world.
Why does the Addams Family machine enthrall us? It’s a combination of the tricky-but-not-tortured layout of the playing-field, the “mission” aspect of the 13 mansion rooms (you want rules?), and all those great Raul Julia and Anjelica Houston soundclips that it plays.
About those clips: I hadn’t played a machine about three or four years, until Saturday night, but it all came back to me as I played my first game:
“Quicksand, fumes, toxic waste . . . It’s all ours!”
“Good show, old man!”
“Raise the dead! Out to the cemetery! Come on, everybody!”
“Dirty pool, old man . . . I like it!”
And, during the apocalyptic buildup to the multiball sequence, “SHOWTIME!”
(What’s great is that my wife was watching me play this, as Scott and I called out these lines in the loud arcade (“The Mamushka!” “It’s Cousin It!”). I say “great” insofar as I mean “pathetic.” I have an impression of what I look like when I’m playing, actually, and it’s not pretty. Because I tend to lean on my palms, middle fingers on the flippers, the rest of my body is sorta slack while the tension runs between my shoulders, as if I’m on braces. It’s like a feedback loop, in which I’ve simply extended the circuit of the machine, and I’m afraid it makes me look like a zombie slave of the machine. Which would be so different than how I usually look.)
To my brother, the game is a matter of precision, of slowing down the field of play and making every shot count. For example, when the ball kicks out of The Swamp, he traps it on the lower right flipper so he can size up his shot toward the Electric Chair, the Bear Kick Ramp, or the Thing Ramp. He’s awfully accurate in that scenario.
Me? Most times, I’m in the “Mark McGwire vs. Randy Johnson” school, where I take the momentum of the kickout and connect it to a well-timed hit from the flipper. It’s done on instinct, and a quick twitch (who just finished re-reading All The King’s Men?) that fires the ball (pretty much) where I want it. And it’s not as embarrassing as missing the shot when you’ve got the ball trapped on your flipper.
These styles carry throughout the game: my brother tries to slow the game down, while I try to speed it up. It’s most obvious during a multiball sequence, when three balls are in play at once. That’s when I give up on any semblance of control, instead chasing all three in their dance, influenced though they are by the fluctuating magnet near the center of play (“The Power”). I jokingly call it “The Music of the Spheres,” but I find a beauty in it, melding physics, chaos (lousy Power), and Hollywood (“Jackpot!”).
It’s interesting to note that, while I’m much more into the speed of the game, I’m much less into putting english on it. I rarely bump the machine, except very subtly. My brother tends to tilt more than I do. If a bad bounce leads to the ball going down an outlane, I tend to punch my palm, and let it go. I also like to leave a free game on the machine: libation to the pinball gods.
None of this is to sneer at my brother’s style of play. It mirrors the way we learned Attic Greek together (because that’s how we spent the summer of 1992). I had a natural facility for it, while Boaz had to bust his butt night in and night out. I never had to, and subsequently never developed a deep understanding of it. He’s now teaching ancient Greek, while I’m the editor of a pharmaceutical trade magazine.
He admits to some awe when I really get my speed-game on, and I admire the patience he has to make it play his game. But neither of us can function well using the other’s style.
It probably also mirrors the way we approach religion. My brother’s an observant Jew, while I favor physics, chaos and Hollywood. Okay, it’s not that simple, but my view of the universe–when I have one–is one of intuition, of constantly shifting patterns and speed. We both have ineffable visions of what This is about, and I’m hoping he uses the Comments section to offer his.
The great thing is that our top scores on the machine are just about equal, and we both enjoy the heck out of playing.
The best news from the weekend is that the pinball machine in Seaside Heights was in pretty good repair (a couple of mansion room lights were out, and the upper right flipper isn’t strong enough to finish the left ramp). I’m hoping we can make a trip down there next month, even if our wives give up on us and take Bo & Jane’s kids out to the beach for a while.
It ain’t Camp Gitchy Gloomy
Official VM buddy Mitch Prothero has an article on the meanest Palestinian camp in Lebanon in this week’s U.S. News and World Report.
In any Palestinian camp or neighborhood, the walls are adorned with posters depicting “martyrs” of the fight against Israel. But in Asbat’s neighborhood, the Iraq battlefield is evident: The main road has been renamed “Martyrs of Fallujah,” and the signs glorify men killed fighting alongside Zarqawi or in suicide attacks against U.S. troops or Iraqi Shiite Muslims.
No word on why Lebanon never tried to assimilate the refugees into its population, of course. Read more.
Gaza into the Abyss
In the Washington Post yesterday, Charles Krauthammer had a column on the poor Palestinian family that got blown up on a beach in Gaza. After explaining that the explosion could not have been due to an Israeli shell fired in response to nearby rocket launches into Israeli neighborhoods, he writes,
Let’s concede for the sake of argument that the question of whether it was an errant Israeli shell remains unresolved. But the obvious question not being asked is this: Who is to blame if Palestinians are setting up rocket launchers to attack Israel — and placing them 400 yards from a beach crowded with Palestinian families on the Muslim Sabbath?
Answer: This is another example of the Palestinians’ classic and cowardly human-shield tactic — attacking innocent Israeli civilians while hiding behind innocent Palestinian civilians. For Palestinian terrorists — and the Palestinian governments (both Fatah and Hamas) that allow them to operate unmolested — it’s a win-win: If their rockets aimed into Israeli towns kill innocent Jews, no one abroad notices and it’s another success in the terrorist war against Israel. And if Israel’s preventive and deterrent attacks on those rocket bases inadvertently kill Palestinian civilians, the iconic “Israeli massacre” picture makes the front page of the New York Times, and the Palestinians win the propaganda war.
Krauthammer then goes on to ask exactly why terrorists in Gaza are bothering to launch rockets into Israel, since, y’know, Israel pulled out of Gaza and withdrew behind pre-1967 borders. He sums it up as the same mindset that I always ascribed to Arafat: it’s a lot easier to be a terrorist/victim than a statesman.
In my opinion, one of the key functions of the Israel’s withdrawal from the territories and construction of a wall — besides keeping Palestinians from homicide-bombing inside Israel’s new borders — is to force the Palestinian people to look at themselves as citizens of their own state. Quite early in the withdrawal, we began hearing stories that Palestinians were not happy that Yasser’s cousins had all the good jobs.
My buddy Mitch Prothero commented in a recent article that the foreign press isn’t interested in covering the civil war going on in Palestinian society. He doesn’t say explicitly that this is because it goes against the accepted narrative of the Palestinians as the oppressed victims of the Zionist conspiracy, but I think that’s a big part of it (another big part is that journalists don’t want to get shot at).
Just as Brendan O’Neill has brought up some very-difficult-to-stomach aspects of the genocides in Rwanda and Sudan in his recent columns, there are parts of every story that we gloss over to keep from facing the messiness of reality, or to keep from sullying the purity of our outrage.
The Mark of Zoroastrians
I really hope this story turns out to be total BS.
No Soccer Moms
Well, I see who wears the pants in this theocratic tyranny:
[Iran’s] President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had ruled in April that he would allow women to go to soccer games and sit in a separate section of the stands. He wanted to “improve soccer-watching manners and promote a healthy atmosphere.”But Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — who under the Islamic Republic’s constitution has the final say — opposed the move.
“The president has decided to revise his decision based on the supreme leader’s opinion,” Iranian government spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham said Monday.
One Shot at History
I find the figure of Lee Harvey Oswald fascinating. The more facts we know, the less of a complete picture we get of the guy. Ron Rosenbaum has a neat essay on the JFK assassination theorists in his big collection, The Secret Parts of Fortune, that (to me) forms a sort of trilogy with essays on Danny Casolaro and Kim Philby.
But this essay by James Piereson in Commentary contends that my Oswald-mosaic concept is bunk, and that LHO was set on killing JFK in response to U.S. attempts to kill Castro. More to the point, Piereson contends that most of the conspiracy-theorizing derives from the fact the LHO was a left-wing assassin:
Hence, when the word spread on November 22 that President Kennedy had been shot, the immediate and understandable reaction was that the assassin must be a right-wing extremist–an anti-Communist, perhaps, or a white supremacist. Such speculation went out immediately over the national airwaves, and it seemed to make perfect sense, echoed by the likes of John Kenneth Galbraith and Chief Justice Earl Warren, who said that Kennedy had been martyred “as a result of the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.â€Â
It therefore came as a shock when the police announced later the same day that a Communist had been arrested for the murder, and when the television networks began to run tapes taken a few months earlier showing the suspected assassin passing out leaflets in New Orleans in support of Fidel Castro. Nor was Lee Harvey Oswald just any leftist, playing games with radical ideas in order to shock friends and relatives. Instead, he was a dyed-in-the-wool Communist who had defected to the Soviet Union and married a Russian woman before returning to the U.S. the previous year. One of the first of an evolving breed, Oswald had lately rejected the Soviet Union in favor of third-world dictators like Mao, Ho, and Castro.
Informed later that evening of Oswald’s arrest, Mrs. Kennedy lamented bitterly that her husband had apparently been shot by this warped and misguided Communist. To have been killed by such a person, she felt, would rob his death of all meaning. Far better, she said, if, like Lincoln, he had been martyred for civil rights and racial justice.
Now that last paragraph is hearsay, as far as I’m concerned, but Piereson uses this idea of Oswald-denial as a springboard for the meltdown of liberalism. I find it pretty fascinating, but you know what I’m like.
Or just write humorless comments about how big corporations are controlling our minds.
It’s good to be the Shah?
Human Events runs a long and implausibly candid interview with Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah of Iran, who seems to be campaigning for U.S. backing for a ‘peaceful’ overthrow of the mullahs. Highlights include:
I’m against developing any weapons of mass destruction. I work to see the world develop a process of disarmament because otherwise it will be madness. If we build it, tomorrow the Turks will build it, then the Saudis want to build it, then the Egyptians want to build it. Believe me, in that part of the world, there’s some track record how stable the world will feel having a whole bunch of nuclear warheads in the hands of all these people. Forget it. I’d be the first one proposing a plan to reverse the cycle of proliferation.
Since when has Israel been a threat to anyone? Israel just wants to be left alone and live in peace side by side with its neighbors. As far as I’m concerned, Israel never had any ambition to territorially go and invade, I don’t know, Spain or Morocco or anywhere else. And let me tell something else about Iran: Unlike the rest of the Islamic or Arab world, the relationship between Persia and the Jews goes back to the days of Cyrus the Great. We take pride as Iranians of having a history where Cyrus was the most quoted figure in the Torah, as a liberator of Jewish slaves, who went to Babylon and gave them true freedom for them to worship and in fact helped them build a temple. We have a biblical relation with Jews, and we have no problem with modern day Israel. As far as regional politics, I believe, I think many Iranians believe so, that as much as Israel has a right to exist, so should the Palestinians. They have to work the problem between each other. And we have no business interfering, and we need to help get as much stability in the region.
The reason the regime was using Khatami as the smiling face talking about a dialogue of civilizations was just to buy time. The same way that in the nuclear race they played the game of buying time by saying we’re going to negotiate with Russians or we’re not going to talk to themâ€â€buying time. Three years of endless negotiations has produced nothing. Why? The regime gained an extra three years. All I’m saying is that now, when you look at the future, we have a delicate time frame within which we can bring about change.
Q: In your Iran, Mahmoud Abdullah, the Afghan who converted to Christianity, would have every right to do that and the state would protect him from retaliation by radical clerics?
A: God, I hope so. I hope so. Because if we are basing our constitution on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that’s one of the most fundamental rights that any human being should have. I’m sick and tired of hypocrisy and all this dubious attitude that is so typical of our region. If you believe in something you say it, you don’t fool around. I mean, that’s where I’m coming from. I haven’t lived 45 years of my life to fool around with these things. If I’m willing to lose my life for it, hell I’m going to fight for these rights, otherwise it’s not worth it. Frankly it’s not worth it! I might as well forget about Iran and become a citizen and live my life in this country. No. I want to have the same rights you have over here over there. That’s what I’m fighting for! Otherwise why bother?
This ties into a link that VM reader Faiz K. sent over this weekend, about a Canada-based Iranian blogger’s experiences visiting Israel for the first time (and blogging about it):
Israel never existed except when Friday prayers would finish their “death to” chants with Israel. Everywhere else, even on maps, Tel Aviv was the capital of the “Zionist Regime” or “Occupied Palestine”.
I believed that Israelis saw no distinction between Mr Ahmadinejad and the former reformist president Mohammad Khatami of Iran, in the same way that Iranians could not differentiate Shimon Peres from Binyamin Netanyahu.
My biggest surprise was when I found myself with two other Iranians, completely randomly, on the same minibus from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. I had no idea that Israel had the world’s largest proportion of Iranians in its population, outside Iran itself.
It was only then I could digest the fact that Israel’s President Moshe Katsav and Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz, despite their hardline stances against the Iranian government, were originally from Iran.
I’m working on a longish post about Dubai, city-states and Jane Jacobs, but I’m not sure how that’ll turn out. I’ll let you know.
You can’t fire me, I quit!
Fawaz Turki explains “How To Lose Your Job at a Saudi Newspaper”
What mattered was that I had committed one of the three cardinal sins an Arab journalist must avoid when working for the Arab press: I criticized the government. The other two? Bringing up Islam as an issue and criticizing, by name, political leaders in the Arab or Islamic world for their brazen excesses, dismal failures and blatant abuses.
[. . .] My first provocation was — horror of horrors — to criticize Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak after he cracked down on human rights activists several years ago. My second occurred soon after the failure of the Camp David accords when I called for the resignation of Yasser Arafat as head of the Palestinian Authority.My last was to write about the atrocities Indonesia had committed during its occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999. For that transgression, my Saudi paper showed no mercy. I was out the door. No questions asked, no explanations given. You don’t write about atrocities committed by an Islamic government — even when they’re already documented in the history books — and hope to get away with it.
In other depressing news from the Islamic world, it appears my buddy the Brooding Persian is pulling the plug on his blog. I hope that’s not the case; while his posts could get insanely overlong, he offered me a vitally important perspective on life, politics and religion in Iran and on earth. And he also reminded me of the importance of The Iliad.