Month: June 2012

Egypt’s new president.

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The Muslim Brotherhood candidate has now been declared the winner of the Egyptian election. Some foolish things are being said, as a consequence.

Morsi’s election is tempered by the army’s recent move to significantly limit the powers of the presidency regarding the national budget, military oversight and declaring war. Following a court ruling this month to dissolve the Islamist-controlled parliament, the military also seized legislative powers and is angling to cement its legal authority over the nation by guiding the drafting of a new constitution.

The military will not be able to control the destiny of the country. The army in Turkey was much stronger with a 60 year history of secularism and a recognized right to displace governments that violated Ataturk’s intent. Since the election of Erdogan, the army has been neutered and half the senior officers are in prison, either with no charges or trumped up charges.

Barry Rubin has a pessimistic view of the future for Egypt.

Let me divide the discussion into two parts: What does this tell about “us” and what does this tell about Egypt and its future?

First, what does it tell about the West? The answer is that there are things that can be learned and understood, leading to some predictive power, but unfortunately the current hegemonic elite and its worldview refuse to learn.

What could be more revealing of that fact than the words off Jacqueline Stevens in the New York Times: “Chimps randomly throwing darts at the possible outcomes would have done almost as well as the experts”? Well, it depends on which experts. Martin Kramer, one of those who was right all along about Egypt, has a choice selection of quotes from a certain kind of Middle East expert who was dead wrong. A near-infinite number of such quotes can be gathered from the pages of America’s most august newspapers.

These people all share the current left-wing ideology; the refusal to understand the menace of revolutionary Islamism; the general belief that President Barack Obama is doing a great job; and the tendency to blame either Israel or America for the region’s problems. So if a big mistake has been made, it is that approach that has proven to be in the chimp category.

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Fair Shakespeare

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Just randomly found this sonnet and it touched my heart. Maybe it might touch yours too.

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery so gazed on now,
Will be a totter’d weed of small worth held:
Then being asked, where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days;
To say, within thine own deep sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserv’d thy beauty’s use,
If thou couldst answer ‘This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,’
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

Flight 93 Memorial

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I recently visited the Flight 93 National Memorial in Pennsylvania. The park is new and well laid-out and highly recommended. There are signs off the highway to direct you to the park and it seemed very well attended when I was there, on a beautiful Friday afternoon.

There are a series of introductory displays as you enter the park. This display shows the crew and passengers on Flight 93. You can see that there weren’t many of them that day.

There were many parents with their children in hand. I could hear them trying to explain what the park was about, and it was difficult. September 11, 2001 was over ten years ago, and I have several nieces born since then, and other relatives too young to remember what 9/11 as it happened.

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The Long Hot Summer of ’60

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The summer of 1860 culminated a decade of increasingly bitter polarization among the citizens of the still-United States over the question of slavery, or as the common polite euphemism had it; “our peculiar institution.” At a period within living memory of older citizens, slavery once appeared as if it were something that would wither away as it became less and less profitable, and more and more disapproved of by practically everyone. But the invention of the cotton gin to process cotton fiber mechanically made large-scale agricultural production profitable, relighting the fire under a moribund industry. The possibility of permitting the institution of chattel slavery in the newly acquired territories in the West during the 1840s turned the heat up to a simmer. It came to a full rolling boil after California was admitted as a free state in 1850 . . . but at a cost of stiffening the Fugitive Slave Laws. And as a prominent senator, Jesse Hart Benton lamented subsequently, the matter of slavery popped up everywhere, as ubiquitous as the biblical plague of frogs. Attitudes hardened on both sides, and within a space of a few years advocates for slavery and abolitionists alike had all the encouragement they needed to readily believe the worst of each other.

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Re: David Foster on Empathy

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Perhaps the greatest pleasure of literature is its access to all those extra minds (and feelings). My freshman teacher asked why I wanted to major in English. Because I like people, I said, then paused. I don’t really like people many are irritating and frankly I can be a bitch. The real reason then and now – was they fascinate.

I loved critic’s insights though not as much as narratives. So, if the following is bitter, remember I’m more jilted lover than fair observer. When I was young, we spoke openly of our passion for our discipline, but now the academy discourages such talk, understandably fearing sentimentality. But is cynicism all that attractive? It is brittle. And thin. For isn’t “strange” as Gopnik privileges it, a superficial criteria? He condemns Gottschall, a literary critic who is breaking new ground in literary theory, as a “popularizer;” Gopnik speaks from his regular gig at The New Yorker as an academic and he’s probably right. More’s the pity.

David Foster comments that empathy includes both our ability to understand others and what we do with that understanding. We recognize that maturity comes from broadening sympathies but we’ve all known con men (and, if unlucky, psychopaths) who read us rather well. But the generative subset of bio-criticism in which Gottschall works include “Theory of Mind” studies, especially Lisa Zunshine’s. It analyzes one literary signal of empathy: our ability to “think” as another. asking what does he think, what does she think he thinks, what does he think she thinks he thinks? But empathy is also part of a fiction writers’ ability. We take it for granted, though a genre with a bad reputation for wooden characters and contrived plots is “the novel of ideas.” Authors don’t make works “live” since characters are means rather than ends. Perhaps that happens when we professionalize our reading as well – the ideas we seek dominate our understanding of character. David posits “The career pressure in academia seem to be toward a very clinical, theoretical, and even cold approach to subjects…indeed, I wonder about the ratio of actual fiction-reading to the reading of other academic papers ABOUT fiction.” Critics shouldn’t “lose themselves in a good story” but keep their antennae up.

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