BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

Heads up, Madonna, Ms. Kabbalah-Children'sBook Phony: here are some more children's books, which are "about things". For your records.

These were sent in by Beth, with comments:

-- Any of Eric Carle's books (The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Very Busy Spider, Papa Please Get the Moon For Me)

-- Welcome, Little Baby by Aliki (this was read to Ceileidh and Conor every night when they were little), as well as Yertle the Turtle by Dr. Seuss. Tom and I can still recite most of the both of these.

-- Anything by Shel Silverstein



  contact Sheila Link: 4/25/2003 04:12:00 PM

 
LETTER TO MADONNA

by Andrea Harris. 'Nuff said.

Well, I actually do have a couple things to say: Madonna: YOU'RE FROM DETROIT. Why are you talking with a fake weird British accent? "And the tabloids were making cheeky comments..." "Give us a kiss, love..." Why does this annoy me so much? I suppose it's my kinship to Holden Caulfield, and my scorn for "PHONIES".

And then Madonna blithering in that weird British accent about the Kabbalah, and how she feels that she has "become enlightened", and that it is now her duty to share her enlightenment with others. Oh, please. Keep your enlightenment to yourself. I like it down here in the unenlightened UN-PHONY gutter.

Then the kicker: how children's books these days aren't "about anything" and so she MUST write children's books based on the messages in the Kabbalah. I mean, you could not make this shit up!! Madonna, the last time you published a book, it was a career-debacle from which you have never fully recovered. (Warning: that link leads to pornographic images ... Blame Madonna, not me.)

And speaking of children's books which are not about anything: Gimme a break. Here's some good books to start with: (books which are "about" a lot of things):

One Morning in Maine: - by Robert McCloskey (beautiful book about Sal's first day as a big girl ... losing her first tooth ... fantastic drawings ... and the last page alone is worth the entire book. "CLAM CHOWDER FOR LUNCH!" My family and I still scream that out, to this day. "What should we do when we get home from the beach?" Inevitably, one of us will holler: "CLAM CHOWDER FOR LUNCH!") So, Madonna: maybe your kids would like that book.

Or is it not enlightened enough for you?

The Giving Tree - by Shel Silverstein My father read this book to me and my brother when we were very little. I read it now, and I hear the words in my head as coming from my father's voice. This book is about love. And sorrow. And loss. My mom thought it was too sad for little kids, and maybe she had a point ... but this book was my all-time favorite. It made me question everything. "But why? Why did the little boy do that to the tree? Why?" Important lessons to be learned, as a 5 year old. But besides any "moral of the story": It's just a good tale about an intimate relationship. Wonderful.

Burt Dow, Deep-Waterman - by Robert McCloskey (I guess you can't go wrong with Robert McCloskey). I LOVED this book when I was little. Burt Dow is a "deep water man", with a gull for a companion, and he goes out to sea one day, and has a very interesting encounter with a whale. Very interesting. The pictures are GREAT. I still have this book on my shelf.

Harold and the Purple Crayon - by Crockett Johnson I have such a soft spot in my heart for this book. And now that I have a nephew, I love this book even more. My nephew, as a tiny tot, was a little white-haired beanster, in feetie pajamas. So cute you wanted to weep. He was like Harold. Harold, with his powerful purple crayon, creates his own world, by drawing it. Some of it is benign, happy, and then suddenly, his purple crayon draws a tremendous dragon. Harold is alone, trying to find (draw) his way back to his own bed. Great book.

The Snowy Day - by Ezra Jack Keats The artwork in this book has to be seen to be believed. Amazon describes it as:

"the simple tale of a boy waking up to discover that snow has fallen during the night. Keats's illustrations, using cut-outs, watercolors, and collage, are strikingly beautiful in their understated color and composition. The tranquil story mirrors the calm presence of the paintings, and both exude the silence of a freshly snow-covered landscape. The little boy celebrates the snow-draped city with a day of humble adventures--experimenting with footprints, knocking snow from a tree, creating snow angels, and trying to save a snowball for the next day. Awakening to a winter wonderland is an ageless, ever-magical experience, and one made nearly visceral by Keats's gentle tribute.

The book is notable not only for its lovely artwork and tone, but also for its importance as a trailblazer. According to Horn Book magazine, The Snowy Day was "the very first full-color picture book to feature a small black hero"--yet another reason to add this classic to your shelves. It's as unique and special as a snowflake."

 
REPEAT AFTER ME...

(and also after Steven Den Beste): Turks are not Arabs. Turks are not Arabs. Turks are not Arabs.

And while we're at it, also repeat: Iranians are not Arabs. Iranians are not Arabs. Iranians are not Arabs.

Before you start making blanket historical comments, please try to know your basic facts. It is very obnoxious otherwise. Den Beste's piece on Turkey and the Ottoman Empire (and the Arab revolt against such empire) is worth the read.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/25/2003 02:32:00 PM

DIARY FRIDAY

 
A DUBIOUS HONOR

If you Google "Shiites covered in blood", I am the third link you are led to. Someone just got to my site by running a search on those particular words. I do not know whether to be proud or embarrassed.


  contact Sheila Link: 4/24/2003 02:12:00 PM

 
THE NAZI ANALOGY

I saw Dennis Miller on Bill Maher's show a couple of nights ago. Dennis Miller rocks. He said something about Bloomberg and the smoking laws ... "Bloomberg comes out and makes a statement like: 'We should not over-react to SARS.' And yet we're all supposed to freak out 'cause some guy is smoking a butt in public 4 blocks away." Ha ha. A person in the audience stood up and said, "You used to be more liberal. You're sounding very conservative now. What happened?" Dennis Miller described how a couple of years back (before Sept. 11) all of his friends in New York City were comparing Guiliani to Hitler. "Hitler Hitler Hitler". It sounded so off to him, so extreme. "To me, there was something wrong about that ... always comparing someone whose policies you don't like to Hitler. A genocidal dictator. To me, there is only one Hitler, okay?"

Rachel Lucas writes a ranting letter to Janeane Garofolo, who just came out saying that driving tractors over Dixie Chick CDs is "Nazi stuff". Rachel goes to town. Very good.

More from Rachel: A Free Speech Primer

  contact Sheila Link: 4/24/2003 12:42:00 PM

 
TV TURNOFF WEEK

Oh, by the way, it's "TV Turnoff Week", and I refuse to stop watching television. No. I continue to watch TV. I will not be told what to do. I dislike the moral-tone of the whole "TV Turnoff Week" thing. I still read books. I read like a maniac. I read every day, I write every day, and I also watch TV every day.

I watch Six Feet Under. (The last line of the last episode: "There's one thing I forgot to tell you about Petrarch. He started the Renaissance" was ... so damn good.)
I watch Animal Planet. I love Animal Planet. (Last night, I saw a thing on a tiger family. Gorgeous animals, love them.)
I watch my cousin Mike's show "Yes Dear" on CBS, every Monday night.
I watched "The Bachelor" last night. (That poor girl who didn't get a rose and was weeping to the camera: "I have nothing left. I gave everything I had to this experience and I have nothing left." Woah, girl. Get a grip.)
I watched the HBO documentary on Crank (and had nightmares the following night - woke up with all of my sheets kicked off the bed. I must have been thrashing about like a lunatic).
I watch the news every night, switching back and forth between channels.
Occasionally I check MTV or VH1 to see if there is anything having to do with Eminem being shown.
I watched a little bit of "Affliction" on IFC. Nick Nolte is staggering ... Jesus. But the movie is almost unwatchable, it's so painful.
I will be watching ER tonight.

All is right with the world.

Oh, and here's the TV Turnoff page. It annoys me. Here's a quote from the page: "MTV saw our simple, quarter-minute clip and gave us a flat out "No." How's that for free speech from a station with attitude?"

MTV said No to the ad. That is MTV practicing IT'S first amendment rights. When will these boneheads get that free speech goes both ways?



  contact Sheila Link: 4/24/2003 11:23:00 AM

 
KISS = 74 LASHES

I've been following the story, as best I can, of Iranian actress Gohar Kheirandish (a star in her country). She kissed a male film director, a colleague, at an awards ceremony. (The harlot! The jezebel!) The mullahs had a freak-out, holed up in their dream palaces of unreality, based on the mores of the 7th century, and she has been given a suspended sentence of 74 lashes.

Imagine what would have been done to Adrien Brody and Halle Berry in Iran, for their passionate kiss at the Academy Awards. They would have been killed!! Kheirandish just kissed her colleague on the forehead, for God's sake.

I mean, really: try to imagine it. Adrien Brody passionately kisses Halle Berry when he wins his award. They are not married. They are not even dating! Halle Berry is married to someone else! Yes, there were pictures of it all over the news the next day, but ... it's already been forgotten. Who cares? Adrien Brody couldn't believe he had won, he was thrilled, and also Halle Berry is hot. He took his moment. We ASSUME that this is all right, in general. Or, if people disagree, then they just sit around and mutter in their homes, staring at the television, grumbling about the licentiousness in Hollywood. Whatever. No harm done. In Iran, in many other countries, the two of them would be whipped. Imprisoned. Pilloried. Not just CRITICIZED, but given 74 lashes.

Come on. Picture that.

Every time a story like this comes out, I think of the celebs in Hollywood right now, whining about how persecuted they feel, about how tyrannical the government is, how "dissidence" is punished with "invective". Oh, just SHUT UP. You have no idea how good you have it.

Iranian Girl weighs in. I feel her pain.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/24/2003 11:09:00 AM

 
PRAISING VACLAV HAVEL

Fantastic article by Matt Welch about Vaclav Havel. There's a whole side to Havel's journey which I did not know: the psychedelic punk-rock vibe over-taking Europe in the 1970s, directly following 1968, when Russia crushed the "Prague Spring". Havel, along with the likes of punk rock musicians, refused to play by the rules, refused to keep his mouth shut, refused to listen when people told him to calm down, and accept things, and just conform a little bit. The 1989 revolution in Czechoslovakia was called "the velvet revolution" because the exchange of power occurred without a shot being fired, and with very little looting or rampaging, or parading through the streets with the bloody corpses of their former leaders. It was also because of the impact the Velvet Underground had had, on Czech culture in the 1970s. Fantastic.

The story of Havel writing a letter to Gustav Husak, the dictator of Czechoslovakia, directly following the violent crackdown in 1968 made the hair on my arms rise up. The courage of this one man. Unbelievable:

The new rulers ushered in the "normalization" period, during which tens of thousands emigrated and most "nonconformist" writers (including Havel) were inconvenienced, banned, or sometimes just locked away. In April 1975, facing an utterly demoralized country and an understandable case of writer's block, Havel committed an act of such sheer ballsiness that the shock waves are still being felt in repressive countries 30 years later. He simply sat down and, knowing that he'd likely be imprisoned for his efforts, wrote an open letter to his dictator, Gustav Husak, explaining in painstaking detail just why and how totalitarianism was ruining Czechoslovakia.

"So far," Havel scolded Husak, "you and your government have chosen the easy way out for yourselves, and the most dangerous road for society: the path of inner decay for the sake of outward appearances; of deadening life for the sake of increasing uniformity; of deepening the spiritual and moral crisis of our society, and ceaselessly degrading human dignity, for the puny sake of protecting your own power."

It was the Big Bang that set off the dissident movement in Central Europe. For those lucky enough to read an illegally retyped copy or hear it broadcast over Radio Free Europe, the effect was not unlike what happened to the 5,000 people who bought the Velvet Underground's first record: After the shock and initial pleasure wore off, many said, "Wait a minute, I can do this too!" By standing up to a system that had forced every citizen to make a thousand daily compromises, Havel was suggesting a novel new tactic: Have the self-respect to tell the truth, never mind the consequences, and maybe you'll put the bastards on the defensive.

"I felt the need to stir things up," he told his interviewer Lederer at the time, "to confront others for a change and force them to deal with a situation that I myself had created."

This act of literary punk rock was followed, logically enough, by a defense of rock music that sparked the Charter 77 movement. Or, as Havel told a startled Lou Reed when he met the Velvet Underground's former frontman in 1990, "Did you know that I am president because of you?"

 
THE COLLAPSE OF THE DREAM PALACES

Phenomenal article by David Brooks in the current issue of The Weekly Standard, called "The Collapse of the Dream Palaces". He uses the phrase "dream palaces", echoing the title of Fouad Ajami's wonderful book The Dream Palace of the Arabs. Ajami, a Lebanese journalist, writes about the Arab nationalist movement of the 20th century ... the hopes of the Arab intellectuals and poets, the true thinkers of these societies, fighting for Islam to grow up, to expand, to let in social change. Arab nationalism, of course, was hijacked by Islamism. I found Ajami's book to be very sad. The intellectuals are still out there. They are still trying to initiate change. Most of them are in jail, or persecuted. Or, they write from the safety of Western countries.

The thesis of Brooks' piece in The Weekly Standard is:

Now that the war in Iraq is over, we'll find out how many people around the world are capable of facing unpleasant facts. For the events of recent months confirm that millions of human beings are living in dream palaces, to use Fouad Ajami's phrase. They are living with versions of reality that simply do not comport with the way things are. They circulate and recirculate conspiracy theories, myths, and allegations with little regard for whether or not these fantasies are true. And the events of the past month have exposed them as the falsehoods they are.

In this dream palace, it is always the twelfth century, and every Western incursion into the Middle East is a Crusade. The Americans are always invaders and occupiers. In this dream palace, any Arab who hates America is a defender of Arab honor, so Osama bin Laden becomes an Arab Joe Louis, and Saddam Hussein, who probably killed more Muslims than any other person in the history of the world, becomes the champion of the Muslim cause.

In this dream palace, the problems of the Arab world are never the Arabs' fault. It is always the Jews, the Zionists, the Americans, and the imperialists who are to blame. This palace reeks of conspiracies--of Israelis who blew up the World Trade Center, of Jews who put the blood of Muslim children in their pastries, of Americans who fake images of Iraqis celebrating in Baghdad in order to fool the world. In this palace, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Iraqi information minister, was taken seriously because he told the Arabists what they wanted to hear.

In this palace, old men really do shoot down Apache helicopters with AK-47s. Saddam's torture chambers are invisible, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis he murdered go unmentioned, the fedayeen who shot their own refugees are ignored, but every civilian casualty caused by an American bomb is displayed in all its bloody agony. In this dream palace, rage is always the proper emotion, victimhood the pleasure most indulged. Other people--Iraqis, Palestinians, suicide bombers--are always called upon to fight the infidels to the death so that the satellite TV-watching Arabists, safe in their living rooms, can have something to cheer about.

BUT THERE IS ANOTHER, larger group of people whose worldviews will be permanently altered by the war in Iraq. Members of this group were not firm opponents of the war. Indeed, they were mild supporters, or they were ambivalent. They were members of the vast, nervous American majority that swung behind the president as the fighting commenced.

These people do not have foreign policy categories deeply entrenched in their brains. They don't see themselves as hawks or doves, realists or Wilsonians. They don't see each looming conflict either through the prism of Vietnam, as many peaceniks do, or through the prism of the 1930s and the Cold War, as many conservatives do. They don't attract any press coverage or much attention, because they seldom take a bold stand either way. Their foreign policy instincts are unformed. But they are the quiet people who swing elections.

the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics. They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion.

In other words, there will be no magic "Aha!" moment that brings the dream palaces down. Even if Saddam's remains are found, even if weapons of mass destruction are displayed, even if Iraq starts to move along a winding, muddled path toward normalcy, no day will come when the enemies of this endeavor turn around and say, "We were wrong. Bush was right." They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future. Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The war's opponents will lose self-confidence and vitality. And they will backtrack. They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact, they rejected only months ago.

 
A GROUP EFFORT

Last night, had a reunion get-together with a group of friends. Risa, back in town for Passover, wanted to see everyone in one go. We all met at a great place in Chelsea called "The Trailer Park" bar. The decor fit the name: velvet Elvises, Pabst Blue Ribbon in a can, lava lamps. It was a good evening. Good talk, deep, connected...all of us re-connecting, catching up with one another (surface events: "So what have you been up to?" and then the subcurrents: "And how are you really doing?")

At a later point, Marpa started a game: You pass around a piece of paper. Each person writes one sentence, or one phrase, on it, and as you go along, you fold the paper over, so that the next person only sees the sentence directly before, not the whole thing, and has to add to it, not knowing what the rest of it says. Sort of like how Woody Allen passes out his scripts. He never passes out the whole thing. The actors only know their parts, the scenes they are in. They have no idea how it will fit into the whole.

Once the paper had gone around the table, Marpa took it, and read out what we had written, as a group. Here it is:

Friends gather as if no time has passed ... giving connection to the rise and fall of nations, hoping love and joy can supercede greed in a world so confused and bring forth a new foundation from which greatness, joy, and love will emerge like a breath that fills you all the way down You hear your own voice say, "I love you. Yes. I do."-- Shit! Did I just say that? It is really quiet now. What is love anyway? My mother-in-laaw says that eventually it is the big blue ocean, love saturationn. Tell me, how can it go wrong!? So as you might expect a new institutionn is born for the good of all mankind.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/23/2003 07:43:00 AM

 
JAMES LILEKS

Lileks has a column entitled "A Manic-Depressive Approach to War", which cracks me up. God, I love his way with words.

Here are some gems:

Alive or dead, we've lost the war. It was lost Sunday, when the news suddenly turned dark. Confounding all expectations, the Iraqis were actually shooting back, and many experts muttered that the total defeat of a nation the size of -- well, the size of Iraq -- might take days, not hours. It was entirely possible that "American Idol" would finish faster than the American war. A reporter stood up at a CentCom briefing and spoke the dreaded V-word -- was it possible that once again the glass-jawed, clay-footed giant of the American military had stumbled into another Vietnam?

It brings to mind the Quagmire of Afghanistan, that slough of despond in which our forces were mired for an afternoon or two.

Even Fox News, which has been reporting developments through a trumpet tuned to play only major-keys, seemed swamped with dread. You'd think that Tommy Franks had taken to his bunk in tears. You'd think that all the military planners at CentCom had given up their bootlaces, lest they be tempted to hang themselves in the night. Casualties, POWS, missing planes -- who thought war would be like this?

The insatiable maw of the news cycle demands a tenor, a tempo, a sweet-or-sour flavor that determines the mood of the moment. We have Stunning Successes; then we have Troubling Setbacks.

It's as if the media think war is a single solid thing, a giant red arrow that can be seen from space. Have any military commanders promised a walk in the park? No. Did the president's speeches assure us easy, quick, cheap victory? No.

But this is the face of modern war: Success is measured not in miles, not in territory won, not in forces demolished. Success is measured in the number of newsweekly covers devoted to the conflict. Three consecutive covers is an ideal number. The Quag-nam talk kicks in somewhere behind cover No. 4.

 
FROM "THE RECKONING" BY SANDRA MACKEY

Post World War I Mesopotamia:

British colonial policy demanded retention of the oil-rich Mosul province, which was deemed vital to the economic viability of the rest of the Iraqi mandate. Thus, at Britain's urging, the League of Nations convened the Lausanne Conference, which concluded by invalidating the Treaty of Sevres. The future state of Kurdistan, envisioned and confirmed at the end of World War I, ceased to exist...

With independence taken off the table as an option, the Kurds split between those favoring rule by Turkey and those favoring rule by Britain. Yet in the eyes of London, the Kurds remained essential to the stability of the mandate. it was not simply that the economy required the oil pooled beneath Kurd-populated land. The Sunni Arab minority in whom Britain had entrusted the power needed the Sunni Kurds to help balance the numbers against the Shia majority.
...

When the British arrived in Mesopotamia, the Sunnis, the favored class of the Ottomans, were so burrowed into Iraq's administrative structure that to remove them meant precipitation profound economic, political, and social change. That smelled of instability, the last thing British colonial policy would permit. As a result, the Sunnis were left in place, maintaining political dominance, enjoying most of society's benefits, gaining greater social mobility, and acquiring a vested interest in the new, emerging Iraqi state. Fearing what would happen once the British were gone, Shia leaders from the shrine cities attempted from time to time to counter Sunni dominance by proposing some kind of permanent British presence in Iraq, which they saw as preferable to full Sunni hegemony. At one point, the urban Shia floated the idea of creating an independent Shia state or to create an autonomous Shia territory in southern Iraq administered and protected by Britain. These adherents to Islam's dissenting sect even went so far as to invite British officials to take up residence in the holy cities, the very heart of their communal and religious life. This preference of infidels over orthodox Muslims demonstrated more than anything else just how much apprehension the Shia felt about the Sunnis who held the levers of the state. But the British, secure in the existing power balance, rejected all the entreaties of the Shia in favor of perpetuating their existing relationship with the Sunnis.

As for the tribes, the bulk of the population, the British allowed tribal organizations, mores, and customs to continue among all tribal groups -- Sunni, Shia, and Kurd. Ottoman tribal policy that had so fragmented the great tribal confederations and tamed the once feared paramount sheikhs was reversed. When the British took possession of Iraq, they chose to impose order and improve tax collections by reconstituting the power of tribal leaders through economic fat dispensed by Baghdad and arms supplied by the government. By bestowing upon the tribal population special privileges not enjoyed by those in the cities and by preserving tribal customs and practices that were incompatible with nation building, the British turned back the clock. The net result was that at the very dawn of the Iraqi state, Shia and Kurdish populations became stalled in their intensively tribal societes, tied ever more closely to their sheikhs created by tradition and economics, and resentful of any authority outside the kinship group. Therefore in the countryside, the individual, more than at any time over the last century, constructed his allegiance to his tribe, his village, his sheikh, his religion, his sect...

As a result, fixed, singular communal identities of most Iraqis formed the base of the political system, precluding all serious efforts to meld Sunni and Shia, Christian and Jew, Arab and Kurd, into a viable nation. Thus, the tragedy that Iraq is still living began in the mandate in which British administration centered on one goal: maintaining enough internal control to secure British territorial interests as they related to the issues of India and oil.

Ironically, after securing these vital interests, Britain over the decade of the 1920s great increasingly weary of administrating Iraq. The energy and expense of its self-imposed entanglement in a territory and society that possessed little cohesion seemed to offset the gains encased in the mandate...The British lion was ready to retreat to London if British interests could be protected in what was still scarcely more than a geographic expression.

King Faisal, who had always told the British with complete frankness that he would fight the mandate to the death, sensed Iraq's long-awaited independence...

As the occupying force departed, Baghdad was a far different place than the broken, poverty-ridden city that the Ottomans occupied in 1534. It was also a far different city than the destitute backwater that the British had entered in 1917. here and there irrigation works had been slowly rebuilt for the first time since the Mongol invasion. Administration was better than under the Ottomans. Educations had improved in the urban areas. Revenues from the fledgling oil industry had begun to dull some of the sharp edges of rural poverty. An uneasy peace prevailed between city and countryside, between Arab and Kurd, Shia and Sunni, and Muslim, Christian, and Jew. But all the deep fissures were still there. Aggravating them all was Sunni dominance of the political system. Begun by the Ottomans to undergird their legitimacy and to maintain a bulwark against Shia Iran, this privileged position of one element of Iraqi society was propagated by the British to shore up a monarchy with little authentic legitimacy. The difference between the rule of the Ottomans and the rule of the British was that the Ottomans tied the territory of Mesopotamia to Istanbul through Islam. The British gave Mesopotamia its own nation-state but bound it to a Western country toward which most Iraqs felt no cultural or political affinity. it was the monarchy so carefully constructed by the British that would pay the price. Token independence did nothing to close the chasm of sectarianism, tribalism, conflicting economic interests, and differing definitions of identity that divided the urban Sunnis and the rural Shia. Nor did it even begin to resolve the animosity that existed between Sunni and Shia, who as "peasant and townsmen alike reciprocated the hatred of the 700,000 Kurds, half-Moslem, half-animist, who glowered down on them from the mountain fastness of the northeast." (Howard M. Sachar, The Emergency of the Middle East 1914-24, 1970). After 1932, the central issue of the monarchy would become whether Iraq was part of the mythological Arab nation dominated by Sunni Arabs or a state in which Arab and Kurd, Sunni, Shia, Jew, and Christian could build a common identity within a unique territorial unit.

SHEILA'S NOTE: Obviously, nothing was resolved in 1932. This is what everybody is still talking about now.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/22/2003 04:31:00 PM

 
FROM "THE RECKONING" BY SANDRA MACKEY

And here's an excerpt on where the Sunni vs. Shia thing comes in. I mean, it is a factor in every Islamic society, because they cannot agree to disagree. They have been at an impasse for over a thousand years. Again, beware of "quagmire" warnings, mouthed by Western reporters, or even Middle Eastern reporters. People who have been saying, "You are wrong, and you must die" to one another for 1,500 years are not going to bury the hatchet and get along just because we say they should, and that it is better to be nice to each other and have a dialogue than go around murdering each other.

So, in 1515 and 1516, Mesopotamia was taken into the Ottoman Empire. They were part of the empire for 400 years. The Ottomans, of course, are Sunnis. The sultan of the Ottoman Empire was also a Sunni. But remember: he was not an Arab. He was Turkish. A very complex balancing game had to be achieved, or attempted for. All of this was messed up by the Persian empire, directly to the east of Mesopotamia. The Persians were Shiites, of course, but also Sufis, all of this with an undercurrent of Zoroastrianism. Shiism in Persia has a mystical aspect, completely heretical to this day to Sunnis. Sunnis are LITERAL. LITERAL LITERAL LITERAL. (Yawn.) Anyway, the Safavid dynasty began in 1501, and the Shah immediately began to conquer surrounding territory. One of their goals was to liberate Sunni-controlled cities in Mesopotamia, places where they knew many Shiites resided. Anyway: the antagonism between Sunnis and Shiites goes back that far.

Here's Mackey's writing on the Safavid triumphs in the early 16th century:

Following the magnetic Ismail, the Turkomans and the Sufis, now turned into Shia zealots, plunged south to take parts of Persia. Assuming the title of shah, or king, in 1501, Ismail declared Shiism the official faith of his new Safavid kingdom. From his throne, he sent forth an edict denouncing Islam's first three caliphs with the following instructions: "Men should loosen their tongues in the street and square for the profanation and cursing of Abu Bakr, Omar, and Uthman," and that they should chop off the heads of any that stood in the way of this. Continuing to gobble up territory, Ismail freed the city of Khorasan from Sunni control by personally killing the Uzbek king, the ruler of what is now Uzbekistan. Severing the head from the neck, he ordered the skull set in gold to create a drinking cup, which he sent to the sultan of the Ottoman Empire as a hideous statement of rising Safavid power. When Ismail's army finally completed its sweep of Persia less than a decade later, the Safavids stood within the rough borders of Sassanian Persia won under the banner of Shia Islam.

In Istanbul, the Ottomans shuddered. Here was Shia Islam challenging not only Ottoman control over much of Asia Minor but also the very foundation of their legitimacy -- Sunni Islam. So began a long struggle for power between the Ottomans and Persia, first under the Safavids and then their successors, the Qajars. Wedged between the two was Mesopotamia. For three hundred years, it periodically served as a battlefield of culture and sect -- Turks versus Persians, Sunnis versus Shias.

...

In the 17th century, the more tangible threat to the Ottomans were the Arab tribes. No effective administration had ever been established over the tribal lands in southern Mesopotamia, and the situation only worsened during the increased migrations from the Arabian Peninsula...In the 19th century, a larger wave of tribes came out of Arabia, pushed by the fanatical Wahhabis.

The Wahhabis came out of the religious reform movement of Muhammad ibn Abdul al-Wahhab. In crude sandals and a tattered robe ... al-Wahhab traveled the camps and oases of the central Arabian Peninsula, preaching the need for Muslims to return to the teachings of Muhammad unsullied by elements of mysticism injected by the Sufis and the Shia. Striking his camel whip against any shrine or tomb declared holy by superstition, he railed against those he charge dwith deviating from the path of truth. "Mud cannot save you. Pray to God and God alone." Religion made alliance with politics around 1744 when al-Wahhab joined the court of Muhammad ibn Saud, the ruler of the small market town of Diriyah outside of Riyadh, the present capital of Saudi Arabia. Together they created a rustic state founded upon their pristine interpretation of Islam. Lighting the desert with the flame of jihad, or holy war, Wahhabism's warriors butchered resisting tribes en route to conquest of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. In 1801, the Wahhabis charged into Mesopotamia to sack Karbala and twice lay siege to Najaf. The terrified clerical establishment of the shrine cities sent out emissaries to the Arab tribes who were fleeing the zealous Wahhabis. Converting them to Shiism, the clerics succeeded in defending not only Shiism's holy sites but also the Shia Persian ulama within Arab Sunni Mesopotamia. They also created a source of perpetual resistance to Ottoman rule. Embracing Shia theology in which protest against government injustice forms a central tenet, these Arab Shia tribes rejected Sunni authority. Thus, the fear of Persia on their eastern border and the dread of the Shia tribesmen in their own countryside, led Istanbul to structure its rule in Mesopotamia on the one element in society it trusted -- the Sunnis of the city.

The Sunni Ottomans came to rely on the cities, particularly Baghdad, to hold the desert Arabs in check. These urban populations were largely a mix of Sunni Arabs, Jews, and Christians ... Although Christians and Jews were recognized as distinct millets [small communities, recognized by the Ottomans as such] entitled to their own courts, the Ottomans denied the Shia clerics the right to render judgments under their own schools of Islamic law. Shia laymen were largely excluded from administrative positions, from the military, and even from what little secular education existed. Working their own side of what was a two-way street, the Shia themselves fed this process of exclusion. Since only Sunni judges were appointed in the courts, the Shia declined to take their cases before them. And since none but Sunnis were recognized as teachers in Ottoman schools, the Shia refused to attend. Similarly, they declined to study the Turkish language, thereby closing any chance of entree into the bureaucracy. Living away from urban areas and therefore cut off from the few currents of progress and reform that flowed in Sunni Arab cities, the rural Shia as a whole drifted into ignorance and isolation. This made it easy for the Sunni political elite concerned with protecting their own vested interests to brush the Shia off as unprepared for inclusion in the official life of Ottoman Mesopotamia. Consequently, generation by generation, the cycle was repeated. Excluded from government, the Shia refused to participate, prompting even more alienation, resentment and defiance. Acknowleding the Ottomans' control of the urban areas, the Shia held sway in the rural south.

As the 19th century ticked away, the Ottomans gathered their resources to enforce their will on the Shia of Mesopotamia. They began with the Persians of the shrine cities. Istanbul had grudgingly accorded the Persian community in Mesopotamia privileged status in the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala for one reason -- to avoid renewed conflict with the Qajars who continued to claim the right to protect Persian nationals in iraq. But what had been a gain for Ottoman administration was also a loss. In granting special status with its accompanying economic benefits, the Ottomans had essentially relinquished Istanbul's authority over two of the three cities south of Baghdad. Only Basra was left to unimpeded Ottoman control...Trade with Persia became restricted, barriers at the border of Mesopotamia stopped Shia pilgrims on the way to Karbala, and taxes descended on every salted and dried corpse arriving from beyond the borders of Mesopotamia for burial around the shrine cities. Even with smuggling of everything including bodies, the incomes of Najaf and Karbala sank lower and lower. Finally, the Ottomans succeeded in clamping their hand firmly on the cities of Ali and Hussein.

Next, Istanbul moved on the Shia Arab tribes. The strategy centered on a land policy intended to supplant the traditional practice under which tribes held land in common. The Ottoman Land Law of 1858 bestowed on individual farmers the rights of tenure through a deed ... The theory behind this distribution of land to those who worked it reasoned that a peasant owner would no longer need to look to the surrounding tribes for rights of cultivation and the tribesmen, as individual landowners, would be lured into settling down into the Ottoman order. The grand scheme failed...The tribesmen saw land ownership as nothing but a prelude to taxation. With those in the lower echelons of the social order refusing the offer, urban speculators, many of them Sunnis, bought up the land of the peasants while certain sheikhs registered the lands of their tribes in their own names...

Although land distribution ceased in 1881 due to a lack of effective machinery to enforce the tax laws, the program did succeed in pacifying the countryside by corralling the forces of tribal power that had characterized Mesopotamia for centuries. According to Muhammad Salam Hasan, an Arab scholar, "Nomads who were no longer in a position to rely on camels or plunder for their livelihood -- were still subject to the discipline of tribal organizations regarding the relations between followers and leaders. [They] had no alternative but to follow their sheikhs into settlement on the land." There was a second result, disastrous for Mesopotamia's long-term political interests. As major landowners, a segment of the Shia sheikhs joined the economically powerful Sunni urban elite. Together the urban Sunni landlords and the Arab Shia sheikhs would ensure that the economic and social status quo continued, blocking the evolution of a more inclusive political system even after Ottoman rule over Mesopotamia ended.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/22/2003 03:43:00 PM

 
FROM "THE RECKONING" BY SANDRA MACKEY

Heads up: this can get completely overwhelmingly confusing. Persians, Arabs, Sunnis, Shiites, the tribal Shiites, different from the shrine-city Shiites, tribal law versus sharia law ... Try to wade through it, though. All of the problems being discussed at this very moment in Baghdad have been present in the "land between the two rivers" since the 7th century. Rome was not built in a frigging day. So beware of people crying out "quagmire" after one week. The fissures in Mesopotamian society have been in place for over a thousand years. Having a bunch of meetings, setting up dialogues between Sunnis and Shiites, isn't going to change this. At least not immediately. Especially if the Shiites refuse to even show up at the meeting, if Sunnis are present. These people are stubborn. They hate each other tremendously. They love to hate each other. They live for that hatred.

Oh, one thing: "Hussein" is the Prophet's grandson. Ali is the martyr of Shiism, from the 7th century. Again: if you don't know all of this, you'll have to do your own bit of research to get the story. I've read it so many times that I am sick of it quite frankly. Yeah, yeah, Ali was the 4th caliph ... related to the Prophet ... blah blah ... schism schism ... I just want to be clear that "Hussein" here is not "Saddam Hussein". He is "Hussein", another Shiite martyr. Ali and Hussein are who the Shiites follow. Ali and Hussein are why you see Shiites covered in blood during their parades, cutting their flesh open with knives. (Warning: Do not open that link if you faint at the sight of blood! It's a disgusting photograph.)

On the beginning of Shiism, and Shiites in Mesopotamia

Over several centuries, the historic conditions and geographic locations in which the Shia sect of Islam developed bred a culture distinctly different from that of the Sunnis. Shia Islam, in everything from theology to architecture to authority, is as complex as Sunnism is simple. In Iraq, these differences have mattered and continue to matter to the most fundamental issue facing the country -- who governs Iraq under what kind of government? The answer to that question ultimately rests with numbers translated into political power. Although now outnumbering the Sunnis at least three to one, the Shia have not always been the majority.

During the early centuries following Islam's great schism, the Shia remained what they originally were -- a small, dissenting sect bobbling on the ocean of orthodox Islam. Until Iran adopted Shiism as the state religion in the 16thc entury, most Shia resided in the Arab world, principally grouping in and around the great Shia shrines at Najaf and Karbala in what is now Iraq. Persecuted by the orthodox Sunni leadership of the Islamic Empire, Shia theologians secreted themselves away in these centers of learning to develop their own particular view of Islamic law and to cultivate the sect's own forms of piety. In this unfolding Shia theology, the Sunni doctrine that the community of believers as a whole is charged with upholding the collection of teachings and interpretations that make up Islamic law was not enough. Rather, the faith, as in the time of Muhammad, required the presence of an authoritative figure possessing the wisdom and knowledge to interpret divine will to the faithful.

In Shiism, the whole question of religious leadership has always been significantly more important than it is in Sunnism. The scholar, the master of Islamic law, is charged with interpreting all moral questions -- social, political, and religious -- until the return of the Mahdi, the Shia savior figure ...

These clerics, the moral guides of the Shia, are instantly identifiable by a cloak draped over an ankle-length robe, a turban ...and an unmistakable air of authority. This is the artistocracy of Shiism, the elite to whom commoners pay obedience. Yet this is the great paradox of Shiism. As part of Islam in which the equality of all believers is so firmly rooted, the Shia follow authoritarian lines that divide those who interpret religious law from those who are qualified only to obey the law ...

The early clerics of Shiism, acting as theologians of an ever evolving doctrine rather than functioning as lawyers interpreting a static Sharia, kept the sect's basic tenets fresh for an expanding number of converts. When Shia Islam became the state religion of Iran in the 16th century, the Shia schools in Najaf and Karbala fed highly trained teachers and students into the Persian clerical establishment to the east. In return, Iran provided the holy cities with pilgrims, many of whom stayed on to profit in the lucrative commercial trade that flowed back and forth across the Iranian border. They, along with a large percentage of the clerical establishment, would form the Persian component of Iraq's population. Once significant, this component has now been largely cleansed from the country by successive Sunni governments. But the Persian influence planted through commerce and more so through religion remains ingrained in Iraq.

The shrine cities, now the domain of Arab religious custodians rather than Persian clerics, have never lost their sacred aura. Whatever the fortunes of the institutions of the sect, they remain the sites on which Shiism's most revered figures -- Ali, 4th caliph, and his grandson Hussein -- died. Within the walls of the magnificent shrine in which each is buried, centuries of pilgrims have sought shelter from the heat and cold and rain and wind of the desert...

The Shia never even approached a majority of the population of what is now Iraq before the 19th or perhaps the early 20th century. In the 18th century, Shiism that was concentrated almost exclusively within the Persianized region around the shrine cities of the south received a heavy infusion of Arabism. It was at that point that Shiism in Iraq formed two informal yet distinct branches, one preserving the Persian model and one reflecting the tribalism of the Arabian Peninsula.

Ever since the Islamic invasion of the 7th century, knots of black-veiled Bedouin women urging on heavily laden donkeys had followed their men and livestock across the upper reaches of the Arabian Peninsula toward the fertile lands of the Tigris-Euphrates valley. In the last decades of the 19th century, this trickle of Arabs into Mesopotamia turned into a flood unleashed by religious and political warfare on the deserts of Arabia. Their black, goat-hair tents scattered across the grazing grounds west of the Euphrates and hung along the edges of the marshes of southern Iraq. Like the Bedouin who had arrived with the Islamic invasion, these men and women hardened by the ceaseless tribal wars of the desert gave obedience to nothing but tribal law dispensed from the tents of their own sheikhs. Wielding primitive yet potent military power, the tribes quickly cowed the disorganized Iraqi peasantry already present on the land, who, much as they had in the 7th century, subjugated themselves to whatever tribe dominated the area. At the same time, the Shia of the shrine cities sought to enlist the immigrant tribes to serve their own interests.

Early in this latest phase of Arab immigration and domination, the Shia clerics of the shrine cities recognized in the newly arrived tribes a source of protection against marauders and a font of revenue for the shrines. In hot pursuit of converts, the Persian religious authorities dispatched sayyids, descendants of the Prophet, to the tribal tents and villages of southern Iraq. Dressed in black and wearing small, tightly wound turbans, they delivered the rituals of Shiism to audiences who found in them components of their own culture. Obsessed with lineage, tribal Arabs emotionally bonded with Ali, the blood kin of the Prophet. No less important, the recently arrived tribal Arabs also found psychological and practical benefits in Shiism. The transition from nomadism to settled agriculture cut beneath the tribal order that descended from the sheikh. Organized around the need for defense, the tribes and the sheikhs who led them watched as much of their relevance drained away in surroundings where there no more wells to protect or herds to guard. In what amounted to escalating social chaos, tribesmen and sheikhs searched for any elements in their new environment that promised some kind of stability and order. They found them in the motifs of resistance to oppression and the intolerance of organized government embedded in Shia Islam.


Acting as a faith, a tool of social stability, and a doorway into the economic system entrenched in the shrine cities, Shia Islam pulled the Arab tribesmen of southern Iraq into a new society. Yet while Shiism gave the tribesmen a sense of acceptance and a measure of power, the tribesmen gave Shiism little of themselves. Shia by confession, they remained Bedouin by birth. Refusing to surrender the traditions of the tribe to the dictates of the religion, Arab families and clans continued to resolve their conflicts through blood money, not the courts of Shia judges. And declining to explore the real meaning within the tenets of Shiism, the tribesmen remained little more than the followers of the religious sect dictated by their sheikh. Accepting these realities, Shia missionaries who were more interested in conversions than theological purity adjusted their religious teachings to the Arab value system. Ignoring the theme of suffering by the weak that has such resonance for Persians, the sayyids exalted the ideal of Arab manhood. Thus, Ali in his courage, honesty, and concern for justice, became a heroic example of the Arab tribal values of masculinity -- honor, pride, and chivalry. Similarly Hussein, who to the Persians died a martyr to injustice at Karbala, was transformed into a glorious victor in defense of Muhammad's lineage. Writing in commemoration of his death, poets portrayed the Prophet's grandson as the the avatar of virtue, the sheikh who gives to his followers strength against their enemies, bounty of their crops, and fertility for their women.

...Even the hausa, the most timeless and dramatic of Bedouin rituals, moved into Shiism in Iraq. Still seen on the occasion of weddings, circumcisions, holidays, deaths, and celebrations, the hausa is performed around a pile of wood engulfed in lapping flames. In Sunni tribes, men wearing the simple traditional robe of the desert move in a circle, left to right, stamping out a slow measured rhythm in which they chant the past glories of their kin. Among Shia Arabs, the only difference is that the repetitious sound often comes in praise of Ali. In celebrating Ali with the most Bedouin of rituals, the tribesmen confirm that they are both Arab and Shia.

In spite of all the factors feeding the rapid conversion of Iraq's tribes, Shiism never encompassed the whole. Outside the newly settled tribes of the south, Shiism generally failed to establish itself across the region. As a consequence, the Arab tribes in the deserts north and west of Bagdad remained almost exclusively Sunni. And many of the confederations and tribes that did convert still retained segments that remained orthodox Sunni. Even so, by the early 20th century, Shia Islam, layered on top of a strong Arab tribal system, claimed the majority of the Arab tribal population.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/22/2003 02:44:00 PM

 
LET'S TALK ABOUT SHIITES, BABY

I can't remember where I heard this, but I think it was on Fox News ... I could be wrong, but it's the kind of snarky smart-ass comment they specialize in: "And now, let's watch the Shi'as hit the fan." Oh, lordy. Funny funny.

Time to break out The Reckoning again, for those of you out there baffled by what the hell is going on in southern Iraq right now. It all can be very confusing. However: If you don't know about the split between Shias and Sunnis in the 7th century, then there really is no hope for you, and I can't try to catch you up to speed.

However, the cultural and social fabric of Iraq/Mesopotamia/Babylon is really what we're talking about here, and a lot of it is not being mentioned in the news. The news can only bring you so far. It's not a classroom, it's not "Shiite vs. Sunni 101". You have to fill in the rest of the stuff yourself.

So get ready for some big ol' excerpts. I am gathering them together now. I have found this book enormously helpful over the last year. Enormously. Not comforting, not at all comforting ... but I'm not all that interested in comfort anymore. I just want knowledge. I want to know what is happening. And why. I want the truth. Not the spin.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/22/2003 02:37:00 PM

 
IRAQI SHIITES

Michael Ledeen stresses the urgency of the Shiite situation in Iraq. We can already see it all over the news, at the moment. Friends have written to me, perplexed, saying: "Wait ... what's happening now? What's up with the Shiites?

As I have mentioned in this blog countless times, I read Sandra Mackey's book The Reckoning earlier this year, before the war even began. She describes the population-split in Iraq (Sunnis-Shiites-Kurds, not to mention a ton of other sub-divisions) so well, so clearly, that it gave me pause. "How the hell will these people ever come together? How will the Sunnis ever allow the Shiite majority larger participation?"

To concede, in Islam, is to give up your honor.

Someone's gotta concede here ... But it's not looking good.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/22/2003 02:11:00 PM

 
THE LOOTING

Great piece by the indispensable Daniel Pipes on the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad. Good good good. We've got to talk about this stuff, we have to face reality, otherwise none of any of this (re-building Iraq, creating a workable government) will ever have a shot at survival.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/22/2003 01:45:00 PM

 
THE ECHO CHAMBER

Meryl Yourish eloquently describes her blogging journey, on the two-year anniversary of her beginning.

Sometime in October of 2001, I had a letter published in Salon. Shortly thereafter I received four emails that made me realize I was no longer writing in an echo chamber, and that more than my friends and family members were paying attention.

And thanks for reading. It really is a lot more fun now than it was writing in that echo chamber in the spring and summer of 2001.

One last thing: The how of it for other bloggers. Write. Write well. Write about topics that interest people. That's really all I did.

 
THE CHICK RENAISSANCE

I loved this piece about the strength of the females in the cast of Saturday Night Live, at the present moment. I completely agree. I remember seeing a couple of those girls perform in improv groups, way before they were famous, back when I lived in Chicago. Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Rachel Dratch. It is hard to sufficiently describe what a boys' club the improv-comedy scene can be. The guys will railroad much-more talented girls right off the stage, forcing them to play wives or hookers. Not letting them take the lead, not letting them set the scene ... Improv-comedy groups require teamwork, and I would see boys up onstage not let the girls join the team.

One of the number-one rules of improv-comedy is the "Yes, and--" rule.

Always say Yes on stage. Always say Yes, to whatever one of your teammates has set up, and then, add to it. Say "Yes, and--"

Someone is walking around, pretending to talk on a phone, very upset about an accident their kid has had at school. Let's say that that is how someone has begun the scene. The worst thing you can do as a team member is walk into that scene and say, "Why are you pretending to talk on the phone? Also: you don't even HAVE a kid."

This sounds far-fetched, but I've seen stuff like that happen time and time again. It's a way to embarrass your team members, to take control of the stage...90% of that behavior came from males. And in general, the most talented males were usually the most generous. The ones least likely to cut off their female team-mates in that manner. Talented comedians just care about humor. If it's funny, we love you. If you can't make it funny, then we will race onstage and take over.

The girls now on SNL were stronger than many of the men they played with. They were hilarious, they had huge range, their imaginations were incredible, they could completely transform their appearances, without the use of costumes or wigs or props. Many women in improv groups find themselves taking on the re-active role, because the men can be such bullies on stage. The men set up the scene, the men take over the scene, and the women are forced to try to squeeze themselves in as best they can, playing supporting roles. But these girls refused to take on supporting roles.

It's like 1950s suburbia on the improv stages in Chicago!

Here's a very insightful quote from the piece I linked to:

Just like Gilda Radner’s Lisa Lupner, these actresses aren’t afraid to get ugly for laughs. Rachel Dratch shows up as a nerdy young man named Sheldon, a homely NPR deejay, a senile grandmother, even the drooling, morbidly deformed child of Angelina Jolie and her brother. And Dratch isn’t the only one: all the actors are quite capable of shedding body consciousness. This hasn’t always been the case with SNL: Victoria Jackson seemed perpetually stuck playing the dumb blonde and Janeane Garofalo, who has made a pretty penny capitalizing on body issues in her career, seemed hindered by it when she was on the SNL stage. However, leggy, gazelle-like Maya Rudolph can play a screaming Donatella Versace one minute and an awkward 13-year-old the next. Ana Gasteyer, instead of hiding last season’s pregnancy, utilized her bulging belly in an inspired commercial for a pregnancy test (‘Could I be pregnant? I’m not sure if we’re ready’ she ponders while she looks as if she’s at least 10 months pregnant).

Nothing is less funny than a female performer too self-conscious of her looks: she seems distracted by her body and it distracts the audience as well. Everything is funnier, though, when female comics shed their socially acceptable primness and put humor first. Most of SNL’s notable male comics, whether falling down (Chevy Chase) or baring down (Chris Farley) made us laugh by wholly losing their inhibitions and it’s refreshing that these female actors aren’t afraid to do so either.

 
NINA SIMONE, THANK YOU

A beautiful elegy for jazz great Nina Simone on Patio Pundit.

Here's the NY Times obituary. Very inspiring... tells her life story.

She was born Eunice Waymon on Feb. 21, 1933, in Tryon, N.C., and grew up singing in a church choir and studying piano. She received a scholarship to the Juilliard School of Music in 1950, although she had to work as an accompanist for singers and as a piano teacher to help support herself. She eventually ran out of money, left Juilliard and moved back in with her family, at that time living in Philadelphia.

In 1954 she got a job playing piano at a bar and grill in Atlantic City, where she assumed her stage name — because, she later explained, she did not want her mother to find out what she was doing. After her first night on the job, she was told that she had to sing as well as play, so she began emulating Billie Holiday and other singers she admired. She later said that she kept herself from getting frustrated with the often indifferent crowds by playing the piano in a manner "as close to classical music as possible." This unusual mixture of approaches produced what the music writer Ashley Kahn has called "an impassioned, impromptu approach that became her signature."

 
BRIDESMAID NIGHTMARE

Found this hilarious site via Oxblog: Ugly Dress. It is dedicated to heinous bridesmaid dresses ("archive of the world's ugliest bride's maid dresses), a near-universal topic of disgust and contempt among all of the women I know. I've only been a bridesmaid twice, and both times I lucked out primarily because of :

Low-maintenance chilled-out brides

Let me say it again:

Low-maintenance chilled-out brides

Low-maintenance chilled-out brides want their wedding day to be a fun day for all. They want their bridesmaids to be comfortable. They want to make sure that everyone has a rocking good time. They themselves want to have a rocking good time. They do not want to have a nervous breakdown because the flowers are salmon-pink instead of fuschia. Low-maintenance chilled-out brides will not stuff their 6 bridesmaids into teal-green frilly nightmares, which only look good on Kate-Moss body-types or J. Lo body-types.

The first wedding in which I was a bridesmaid was Meredith and Jacques'. Meredith is one of my best friends from high school. It was a December wedding, there was a snowstorm. Our dresses were made by a local seamstress, they were black velvet on top, with a deep wine-colored satiny skirt. Gorgeous. Comfortable. And CHEAPLY MADE. The dress also looked good on all body-types. They were made to fit each of us. Our shoes were black velvety PayLess shoes. Perfectly functional, looked good, comfortable, cheap. We all had French braids with holly in our hair. We looked terrific. Like a bunch of Lady Macbeths strolling down the aisle. No, just kidding.

The preparations for the wedding were very chilled (at least for us, as bridesmaids).

Thank you, Meredith. Your wedding was gorgeous, we all felt comfortable, and I still have my dress. Lovely.

The second wedding in which I was bridesmaid was the wedding of Jackie and Stuart. Jackie wanted all her bridesmaids in black, but she let us pick out our own dresses. "Just pick out a nice black cocktail dress. Whatever you like best."

Uhm: Jackie is a HERO.

I bought this little sleeveless black slip-type dress, I had on strappy black sandals, I sang in the wedding, I jitterbugged like a maniac, I had a blast.

So these have been my two bridesmaid experiences. Lovely, through and through.

But I have heard stories. Man, have I heard stories. Women I know who were bridesmaids are NO LONGER friends with "the bride" because of what a high-maintenance bitchy nightmare "the bride" was. Forcing bridesmaids to travel far and wide to get to the wedding, broke bridesmaids charging plane tickets, resenting every penny, hating the $600 bright-blue dress they are forced to buy, and the $150 matching bright blue shoes, that no one in their right mind would EVER WEAR AGAIN. And I have been in attendance at those nightmare weddings, where the bride is a shrieking type-A lunatic, and the poor groom is hungover and pussy-whipped already, no way can the dude ever match up to the bride's perfectionist expectations, and all of the bridesmaids (fat, slim, whatever) are wearing saffron-yellow sari-type dresses, or pouffy lavendar lampshades, with sweat stains showing gloriously through, everybody in a fight with each other, the bride universally despised. Miserable pissed-off sweaty bridesmaids.

Jackie was in a wedding-party like this. She was forced to purchase a silk dress which looked like a prom-gown gone wrong. It would fit in quite well on Ugly Dress.com. Jackie hated the dress. She said that the bride said to the resentful bridesmaids: "It'll be perfect to wear again on New Year's Eve or whatever." The typical bride's excuse. As though normal people go to formal BALLS on New Year's Eve. Who does that? If you're going to a party on New Year's Eve, who the hell would wear a blazing blue silk prom gown with matching blazing blue spike heels? What??

Jackie lived in a little cottage in Snug Harbor, a place where we all, in college, would convene. To drink wine, play Trivial Pursuit or $20,000 Pyramid, walk along the docks, and laugh our asses off.

Jackie, one evening, disappeared upstairs for a while. No explanation. The party continued on downstairs. Suddenly we heard, from the 2nd floor, Jackie burst into song.

"Hit the road, Jack
And don't you come back no more no MORE NO MORE NO MORE
Hit the road, Jack
And don't you come back no more...."

She sang in a cheesy Las Vegas Lounge-act voice, and slowly, she appeared .... step-touching her way down the stairs, dressed in her blinding-blue bridesmaid dress and bright-blue spike heels. We, of course, downstairs, all completely dissolved into hysterics, and she continued on with her lounge-act, smoking cigarettes, taking a sip of wine in between numbers, telling inappropriate stories, sashaying around in her BRIDES MAID dress.

If ******, the bride, could have seen Jackie ... she would have been devastated. Can you imagine? Knowing that the dress you chose for your wedding was being used as a SPOOF by one of your bridesmaids?

Another friend of ours was also in this infamous wedding, and had the same dress, so the following Halloween, Jackie and I wore the identical dresses to a party. We went as the Sweeney sisters.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/22/2003 11:16:00 AM

 
WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN THE APPROPRIATE WAY TO "REACT" TO SEPTEMBER 11?

Maybe I am, as Tom Friedman says in his latest column "The Third Bubble", "overreacting to 9/11" (my instinct to that is to growl at him: grrrrrrr) - but I get the sense that the "terrorism bubble" is FAR from burst. I like a lot of what Friedman says, I always like a lot of what Friedman says, but this is not over. This is not a done deal. Everything is still very precarious, very dangerous ... I mean, who am I to talk? I'm just a lowly citizen, and Friedman works for the New York Times ... but I think the USA, as a country, have actually UNDER-reacted to September 11. We have acted with ENORMOUS restraint in the fact of the worst terrorist attack on non-combatants this world has ever seen. Think of what we COULD have done, think of how we COULD have reacted. But we did not. We held ourselves back, we tried to negotiate with allies, we worked with the Northern Alliance ... we could have turned all of Afghanistan into a smoking pile of rubble. We could have reacted out of our rage. We did not. But the threat is still not gone, dead, wiped out off the face of the planet.

Friedman:

We and the Arab-Muslim world must now draw the right conclusions. One hopes Americans will now stop overreacting to 9/11. Al Qaeda is not the Soviet Union. Saddam was not Stalin. And terrorism is not communism. America sliced right through Iraq. It did so because we are a free-market democracy that is capable of amassing huge amounts of technical power. And it did so because our soldiers so cherish what they have that they were ready to fight house to house from Basra to Baghdad. That was the real shock and awe for Iraqis — because the terrorism bubble said Nasdaq-obsessed Americans were so caught up with the frivolity of modern life, they had lost the will to fight. Wrong.

 
GALLOWAY

This is amazing (and yet not all that surprising) news.

George Galloway, the Labour backbencher, received money from Saddam Hussein's regime, taking a slice of oil earnings worth at least £375,000 a year, according to Iraqi intelligence documents found by The Daily Telegraph in Baghdad.

A confidential memorandum sent to Saddam by his spy chief said that Mr Galloway asked an agent of the Mukhabarat secret service for a greater cut of Iraq's exports under the oil for food programme.

He also said that Mr Galloway was profiting from food contracts and sought "exceptional" business deals. Mr Galloway has always denied receiving any financial assistance from Baghdad.

For months, anti-war campaigners have been imputing the basest of motives to their adversaries. The whole campaign, they argued, was really about money and oil.

Yet what if it turns out that they, rather than their opponents, had hidden pecuniary motives? What if it was actually the supporters of the campaign who were acting on behalf of Iraqi civilians, while antiwar activists - or at least their leaders - were acting for profit?

There is a word for taking money from enemy regimes: treason. What makes this allegation especially worrying, however, is that the documents suggest that the money has been coming out of Iraq's oil-for-food programme. In other words, the alleged payments did not come from some personal bank account of Saddam's, but out of the revenue intended to pay for food and medicines for Iraqi civilians: the very people whom Mr Galloway has been so fond of invoking.

 
I am not sure if I am calm enough to discuss this yet. I just tripped over it on A Small Victory.

To boil it down: Immediately, NOW has stated that it opposes a double-murder charge in the case of Laci Peterson and her unborn baby because it will aid the anti-abortion lobby.

These people have no shame. Michele puts the rage into words. I can't right now.

A quote from Michele:

As far as I'm concerned, Mavra Stark and all of her NOW compatriots should learn how to keep their mouths shut once in a while. It was not necessary for them to weigh in on this story at all. Why take someone's tragedy and turn it into a political debate, if not for the publicity?

And that's really all it comes down to. Mavra Stark saw an opening and ran with it. She has taken a terrible murder and made it an abortion issue.

Not everything that happens in this world has a for and against. Not every story can be sorted out and divided up into good and bad, right and wrong, left and right.

Some things are better left unsaid. I think the people who are reacting to this story with a willingness to let Scott Peterson be tried for double homicide are reacting out of anger, sadness and repulsion for the crimes committed, not out of anti-abortion righteousness.

 
In regards to Scott Peterson (who now, apparently, is a blonde):

There is no punishment that would fit his crime.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/21/2003 10:06:00 AM

 
NATIONAL POETRY MONTH

On the recommendation of my father, here are 2 poems by John Montague. My father told me to specifically look up these two, and after reading both, I can completely see why. MAN. Masterful stuff.

All Legendary Obstacles
by John Montague

All legendary obstacles lay between
Us, the long imaginary plain,
The monstrous ruck of mountains
And, swinging across the night,
Flooding the Sacramento, San Joaquin,
The hissing drift of winter rain.
All day I waited, shifting
Nervously from station to bar
As I saw another train sail
By, the San Francisco Chief or
Golden Gate, water dripping
From great flanged wheels.

At midnight you came, pale
Above the negro porter's lamp.
I was too blind with rain
And doubt to speak, but
Reached from the platform
Until our chilled hands met.

You had been travelling for days
With an old lady, who marked
A neat circle on the glass
With her glove, to watch us
Move into the wet darkness
Kissing, still unable to speak.


Like Dolmens Round My Childhood,
The Old People
by John Montague

Like dolmens round my childhood, the old people.

Jamie MacCrystal sang to himself,
A broken song without tune, without words;
He tipped me a penny every pension day,
Fed kindly crusts to winter birds.
When he died his cottage was robbed,
Mattress and money box torn and searched.
Only the corpse they didn't disturb.

Maggie Owens was surrounded by animals,
A mongrel bitch and shivering pups,
Even in her bedroom a she-goat cried.
She was a well of gossip defiled,
Fanged chronicler of a whole countryside:
Reputed a witch, all I could find
Was her lonely need to deride.

The Nialls lived along a mountain lane
Where heather bells bloomed, clumps of foxglove.
All were blind, with Blind Pension and Wireless,
Dead eyes serpent-flicked as one entered
To shelter from a downpour of mountain rain.
Crickets chirped under the rocking hearthstone
Until the muddy sun shone out again.

Mary Moore lived in a crumbling gatehouse,
Famous as Pisa for its leaning gable.
Bag-apron and boots, she tramped the fields
Driving lean cattle from a miry stable.
A by-word for fierceness, she fell asleep
Over love stories, Red Star and Red Circle,
Dreamed of gypsy love rites, by firelight sealed.

Wild Billy Eagleson married a Catholic servant girl
When all his Loyal family passed on:
We danced round him shouting "To Hell with King Billy,"
And dodged from the arc of his flailing blackthorn.
Forsaken by both creeds, he showed little concern
Until the Orange drums banged past in the summer
And bowler and sash aggressively shone.

Curate and doctor trudged to attend them,
Through knee-deep snow, through summer heat,
From main road to lane to broken path,
Gulping the mountain air with painful breath.
Sometimes they were found by neighbours,
Silent keepers of a smokeless hearth,
Suddenly cast in the mould of death.




  contact Sheila Link: 4/21/2003 09:56:00 AM

 
"CHRIST ... ON THE CROSS ... WILL HEAL YOU...."

I went to an incredibly boring Good Friday mass, which intensified my appreciation for Christ the King, the Catholic church I went to growing up, the church my parents still go to. The people at Christ the King really feel like a congregation, a community. I mean, who knows, perhaps Our Lady of Grace in Hoboken feels like a community to some, but quite frankly, it's not a community I want to belong to.

Our Lady of Grace is an absolutely gorgeous church. My aesthetic pleasure when I enter that space is why I chose it for my Good Friday mass. It is a cathedral, with dark shadowy corners, smooth marble statues, vaunting stained glass windows, a tremendously high arched ceiling ... which is painted a midnight blue, with dim gold stars all over it. It is clearly a holy space. I FEEL holy when I walk in there. Or, that's not the right way to put it. It's the kind of church where you walk in, whether a mass is going on or not, and you feel like sitting down in the pews, and praying, or contemplating, or meditating. Everything inside you gets quiet and still when you walk into a church like that. It's my favorite kind of church.

Interestingly enough, Christ the King is not like that at all. It is the church on the university campus in the town where I grew up. It's a relatively new building. Light pours in through the windows, which have modern sort of abstrarct stained glass designs in them ... not overtly religious. Pastel washes of color, blues and light pinks. There isn't a realistic Jesus on the cross behind the altar, like there is in Our Lady of Grace. There's a tall slim cross, and at the very top of it, circling out around the top beam, is a thin golden crown. Which unfortunately looks sort of like a basketball hoop.

There are churches throughout Manhattan where, if I have a free couple of minutes, I like to go in and sit. I like dark churches. With dimly lit Virgin Marys standing in dark alcoves, a bank of flickering candles at her feet. I like churches with cavernous altars, the stained glass and the statues crowding the air above. I like the dark velvet curtains and the dark shiny wood of the confessionals, the space of dark air above the pews.

Christ the King has none of that. However: comparing it to Our Lady of Grace ...Christ the King IS a sacred space. Basketball hoop or no. It doesn't need all the medieval accoutrements to lay stake its claim as a holy place. It just IS one.

Our Lady of Grace had all the props. But it was just dead air in there.

There was no sense that Good Friday was different from any other day. There weren't a hell of a lot of people there. I remember having to stand in the back on Good Friday masses at Christ the King.

And the priest! Man, the guy was just getting a paycheck, in my opinion. He put nothing of HIMSELF into his sermon, the way Father Creedon does so brilliantly back home. Father Creedon speaks to the congregation as a friend, and as a teacher. He tells personal stories, to relate it to the readings, he picks a theme to work on for the day, he references newspaper articles he just read: He is a man of the cloth, but he also lives in the real world. The Our Lady of Grace dude was incomprehensibly boring. Basically, in looking back on it, the priest was just a representative of the Catholic church, a figurehead, a symbol, nothing more.

The whole mass was done in English and in Spanish, which also annoyed me. The Mexican community sat on one side of the church, saying "Thanks be to God" in Spanish, when their reading was complete, the white folks sat on the other side of the church, responding in English. No shared community. Two completely separate groups. Those Spanish people know how to speak English ... come on! At least enough to know when to say "Amen" or "Praise to you, Lord jesus Christ." If I were in Italy, I would know when to respond ... because I'm frigging CATHOLIC, okay? The masses are the same whereever you go.

I kept working with my annoyance, talking myself out of it, reminding myself, like a mantra: "Don't judge, Sheila ... just go with it ... don't judge..."

But the mass did not have a coherence to it. A driving theme. And the dude's sermon!!! Zzzzzzzzz Especially since after each paragraph, he paused ponderously, and then said the whole thing again in Spanish. It was interminable. I sat there, suddenly realizing, for pretty much the first time, how extraordinary Father Creedon really is.

The priest told no personal stories, he didn't use any colloquialisms, he made no reference to Good Friday ... he did not guide us, or teach us. Father Creedon has a way of making you think about these well-known Bible stories in a totally new way. He can make you look at it the way it should be looked at: as something to learn from, as something that is alive, and still has much to teach us.

Well, that approach would have required some actual WORK from the priest at Our Lady of Grace, a modicum of independent thought. Way too much energy.

Here is how his sermon went: He listed out, one by one, the seven deadly sins. And then gave little examples of each one. (But not personal examples ... just a grocery list. A 7 year old could do that.) And then at the end of each deadly sin paragraph, he would pause, and pause, and pause, and then say, with exactly the same intonation and phrasing each time:

"Christ ... on the cross ... will heal you."

So it went something like this: (all said in a droning monotone ... and then repeated, in the same droning monotone, in Spanish)

"Gluttony. Gluttony for material possessions. For wealth. For position. Gluttony for an unjust war." (I considered getting up and walking out at that point. But I sucked it up, and stayed put) "Not sharing what you have with others." pause pause pause pause pause "Christ ... on the cross ... will heal you."

I think he wanted the repetition to reverberate in our souls. The way Martin Luther King's repetition of "I have a dream" escalated, and escalated, until the entire crowd watching, felt that dream come alive in them. A beautiful thing. Repetition can be very effective. But this priest was just a big snooze.

By the 6th deadly sin, I was thinking: "Yeah, yeah, I know, let me guess ... Christ ... on the cross ... will heal me?"

I wanted to raise my hand, and call out: "Right, right, but HOW? HOW will He do that??"

Talk about your deadly sins! This priest was the epitome of slothfulness. Intellectual laziness. Just sitting up there in his robe, glad he has a job, and a place to live. I'm sorry, this is rather harsh, and I only went to this church once, but that was my impression. I'll never go back, I'll tell you that. I still think the church itself is a sacred space, and I will still walk in there, randomly, to sit quietly, and think. But the mass did nothing for me. He doesn't realize how lucky he is, how beautiful that church is, what his role really is.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/21/2003 07:14:00 AM

 
SYRIA AND THE DECLINE OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

The following excerpt is from Desert Queen, by Janet Wallach. It is the biography of Gertrude Bell, the British woman often described as "the female Lawrence of Arabia".

-- The Ottoman Government was suffering a quick decline, succumbing at home to the will of theYoung Turks (the reformist group thata rose agaist it in the name of nationalism), and in Europe to the fervor of independence of the Balkan states. During the costly Balkan ars of 1912, the Sultan lost his hold over Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, and Montenegro. What would happen to the Ottoman interests in Asia? Gertrude worried. Syria, Mesopotamia, Arabia would all be up for grabs. "I should not be surprised if we wewre to see, in the course of the next ten years, the break-up of the empire in Asia lso, the rise first of Arab autonomies," she wrote presciently toward the end of 1912...

  contact Sheila Link: 4/20/2003 10:29:00 AM

 
ALAWITES

Islam, like Christianity, is not an unbroken monolith. Sects have broken off, different perspectives, different versions....The Sunnis, the all-knowing righteous Sunnis, can't stand this, of course. (I'm sick of the Sunnis, quite frankly. They BORE ME. Get a little bit flexible, people, or you will not survive. If you bothered to learn about Darwin, you would understand the threat of extinction. Adapt, or die out.)

Syrians are Alawites.

The Alawites are, according to Kaplan, "a branch of Shi'ism whose members have for decades taken refuge in secular Turkish and Syrian nationalism as a defense against Sunni Moslem fundamentalism. Thus, Turkey's religious Moslems hate Syria for two reasons: because the Syrians are Arabs, "mere dust," as the Turkish saying goes, and because the regime in Damascus is dominated by Moslems who are both heretical and secularized. Such hatred has long been reciprocated by Syrian president Assad."



  contact Sheila Link: 4/20/2003 10:06:00 AM

 
SYRIA

Robert Kaplan's book Eastward to Tartary devotes a couple of chapters to Syria (as well as to Lebanon, pretty much overtaken by Syria at this point). Kaplan travels through the area in 1998. So Hafez al-Assad, long-time suffocating dictator of Syria, is still alive, and still in power. Here are some excerpts on the history of Syria, and the fascinating story of the "Hatay panhandle". In the first one, Robert Kaplan is on a bus to Syria from Turkey, traveling through the disputed Hatay:

-- Syria is a Greek word derived from the Semitic Siryon, which appears in Deuteronomy in reference to Mount Hermon, straddling the borders of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. Throughout the 19th century, until the collapse of the Ottoman empire after World War I, the region that travelers called Syria stretched from the southern slopes of the Taurus Mountains of Turkey in the north to Egypt and the Arabian desert in the south, and from the Mediterranean eastward to Mesopotamia. It encompassed southern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and western Iraq. After World War I, Ataturk annexed a sliver of northern Syria to his new Turkish state. That strip lies east of here in the desert and was never really contested. But as my bus headed southeast of Iskenderun across a dramatic series of mountains (the northern end of Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon Ranges) to a sprawling, fertile panel of cultivataion, we were in the heart of the Hatay: a two-thousand-square-mile panhandle between the Mediterranean and the Syrian border where Arabs and Armenians once outnumbered Turks. In July 1938, the Turkish army moved into this area, and many of the Arabs and Armenians fled. This led to a Turkish annexation that was not protested by France, which then held the mandate for Syria. But to this day, on Syrian government maps, Iskenderun (Alexandretta) and the rest of the Hatay are shown as part of Syria, like the Golan Heights.

At the foot of a mountain I saw a city, and soon the bus entered a dusty and chaotic jumble of streets noisy with cars and old motorbikes. This was Antioch, called Antakya by the Turks, the main city of the Hatay. Antioch was one of the great cities of the ancient world. It was founded in 300 B.C. by one of Alexander's Macedonian generals, Seleucus, and named for his father, Antiochus. In 64 B.C., Pompey annexed Antioch to Rome, and the city, strategically situated on both the main trade route from Anatolia to Arabia and on a branch of the Silk Road to China, became a thriving military and commercial center, with a famed school of Greek philosophy. The emperors Julius Caesar and Diocletian visited Antioch, and Peter and Paul preached there. In Antioch the followers of Jesus were first called Christians. Antioch was one of the Church's three original patriarchates, along with Rome and Alexandria. In the fourth and fifth centuries, under Byzantine rule, Antioch's elite spent their money on mosaics, and the archaeological museum here has one of the world's finest collections. At the height of its glory in the Roman-Byzantine gae, when it had an amphitheater, public baths, aqueducts, and sewage pipes, half a million people lived in Antioch. Today the population is only 125,000. With sour relations between Turkey and Syri, and unstable politics throughout the Middle East, Antioch is now a backwater -- seedy and tumbledown, with relatively few tourists. I found it altogether charming...

"Is the border with Syria open?" I asked people.

"Of course," they said.

Turkey's military exercises were taking place much farther east, in the desert. A shopkeeper who was an Alawite, like Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, told me: "The Syrian people are our brothers. We share the same language and religion. Only one man is a problem in Syria -- Hafez al-Assad. He has made Syria the country of mukhabarat!" (the Arabic word for "intelligence services", which my acquaintance used as shorthand for a police state). Throughout my time in Antioch I heard similar comments. The Arabs of Antioch were not shy about their hatred for the Syrian regime. I had heard it all five years before ... Assad refuses to acknowledge Turkish sovereignty over the Hatay, but the region's Arabs saw a closer relationship with Syria only after the demise of his regime.

For the moment, the past and the future of Antioch seemed to me more promising than its present. Antioch's delicious mix of Turkish and rabic still gives the city a cosmopolitan essence, but this ancient crossroads of the eastern Mediterranean, ruins of which lay beneath the modern concrete, could rise again if political change were to come to Syria.




  contact Sheila Link: 4/20/2003 09:01:00 AM

 
CONTEXT

I have gathered together some good quotes about Syria. They should, if nothing else, provide some necessary context. Without context, nothing can be understood. Or, if it IS understood, then it is only in a superficial way. Syria is a problem, and has been a problem for a long time. It is another stifling dictatorship. The people have no freedom whatsoever. As the situation with Syria heats up, "context" is going to be ever more important.

I have a couple of books on my shelf, which deal with Syria. I'll start posting excerpts from them shortly.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/20/2003 08:48:00 AM