Brimmings: up from the well

Sequel to Russian Incursion: Ukraine’s Likely Fate

What we’re seeing in Ukraine we’ve seen before; namely, Russia’s incursion into Georgia in 2008 when that government attempted to wrest back its secessionist breakaway territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. We did nothing then. We will do little now, simply because we lack leverage.

The Crimea itself, now fully occupied by Russian troops, poses a strategic necessity for Russia that goes back 240 years. Adjacent to the Black Sea, it provides Russia with warm water naval outreach to the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Russia is unlikely to hand it back to a belligerent regime.

The scenario could get even worse for Ukraine, since Russian incursion may not stop with seizing the Crimea. After all, a large swath of Eastern Ukraine is also Russian speaking. One incident and Putin is likely to seize upon it as pretext for moving troops into this area as well. Just yesterday, there was a bloody exchange between rival factions in the region. In short, the dismemberment of Ukraine may already be underway.

But the situation could prove even more sinister: Russia may decide to depose the Ukraine’s interim government and install a puppet regime loyal to its interests. It tried to do this in Afghanistan in the 1980s, propping up a Marxist government. What this would mean for Ukrainians is painful to contemplate–perhaps civil war between the factions or an incipient resistance movement.

I find it ironic, to say the least, that Russia has waged two conflicts to keep Chechnya within the Mother Land, yet has abetted secession efforts in Georgia and, currently, Ukraine.

In all of this, our hands are sadly tied, exacerbated by our own confusion. The G8 nations of which Russia is a member, could refuse to attend this June’s trade summit scheduled in Sochi. Acting more bravely–don’t hold your breath–it could expel Russia. This would sting.

But doing so could hurt our own interests as well. We need Russian cooperation on Syria and Iran, say critics. I would argue, however, that this is moot discussion, since it assumes Russian cooperation as a verity. The truth is that Russia continues its efforts to support a ruthless Syrian regime and remains a potential menace to our efforts to curtail Iranian access to nuclear weaponry. It’s quite evident that Russia, deeply jealous of the West and, especially the U. S., suffers from an immense insecurity complex reflected in a historic penchant for destabilizing Western aims.

Meanwhile, the UN can muster the Security Council, but to what end, since Russia will employ its veto yet again.

In all of this, Russia ironically doesn’t need to invoke troops, since its ultimate weapon to keep Ukraine in line is natural gas, which it enjoys in abundance. Ukraine needs that gas desperately and presently owes Russian billions in deferred payment. Putin, additionally, was already supplying the country with natural gas at sharply reduced rates.

As for the EU, it’s a given that it knows the potential seismic effects of a reduced gas supply from Russia to power its own economies, several of which are already floundering.

In all of this, I would draw a parallel with what happened in 1956 in Hungry, when the Soviets invaded to overthrow an insurgent rebel government. 2000 Hungarians and 700 Soviet soldiers died; 13,000 Hungarians were imprisoned; hundreds executed; and 200,000 refugees fled to the West. Then, as now, the invaders blamed the revolt on western instigation and facist-nazi reactionaries.

The more the free-world protested, the more things stayed the same. The Russians vetoed the Security Council’s mandate to withdraw and ignored the General Assembly’s majority vote. Then, as now, the Kremlin called the West’s bluffs. A few months later, both East and West were working trade deals.

And this is the way things will end for the brave people of Ukraine, despite Western protests and threatened sanctions. Human rights didn’t keep the world from swarming to Sochi for the Winter Olympics.

The heavy truth is that politics has always operated in a context of power, not morality. Right now, Russia enjoys the upper hand.

–rj

Russia Likely to Intervene in Ukraine

Last week, Ukrainian protestors in Kiev’s Maidan (its central square) were mowed down by security forces of the hated Yanukovych regime. Undeterred, they advanced into the fusillade. What is life without freedom?

I’ve been thinking a lot about Ukraine, no doubt heightened by media coverage of the continuing unrest in that nation of 46 million. But it’s more than the headlines. When I was a young boy growing up in Massachusetts, I played with a friend who had recently arrived in the U.S. from Ukraine with his mother and siblings. Though young, he had seen vestiges of World War II’s carnage. While I can’t recall the details, they left me with an impression of a people that had endured considerable suffering.

In Lexington, Kentucky, there exists a vibrant, growing Ukrainian community. We’ve had a lot of renovation done at our house and one of the primary workers is a Ukrainian affectionately dubbed “Slav” by his fellow workers. We’ve talked about Ukraine on occasion. On one occasion I accepted his invite to a bake sale at his Ukrainian church. The church is doing well and is an anchor in providing a social network for newly arrived Ukrainians, which include many young people. The other day, I was walking back to my car after grocery shopping at Meijer’s, when a car honked. It was Slav. He had just returned from the Ukraine.

Just maybe Lexington’s best roofing enterprise happens to be Ukrainian. My physician is from the Ukraine. How can I not think about them?

It’s estimated that some 7 million Ukrainians perished from famine following Stalin’s collectivization of Ukraine’s peasant owned farmlands in 1932-33. Another 10-million perished in World War II. What most historians miss is that Ukraine bore the biggest brunt of the Nazi invasion, being a total battleground between German and Soviet armies. Only 5% of Russian territory was occupied.

Following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine announced its independence. There was little Russia could do, since the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal was on Ukrainian soil. In 2009, an agreement was worked out between the negotiating parties, which included the United States. One of Ukraine’s demands was a guarantee of its sovereignty. The U. S. granted Ukraine the same assurances guaranteed to non-nuclear signatories of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the signatories of the Final Helsinki Act (1975).

As I write, paramilitary forces in Russian dominated Crimea have seized the local parliament buildings and its airports and Putin has put 150,000 troops on alert. The Crimea had been added to the Russian Empire under Catherine II. In 1954, it was restored to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev, an ethnic Ukrainian.

Despite Secretary of State Kerry’s warning to Russia not to interfere, it’s not going to mean much in a way of any meaningful U.S. response, especially with an indecisive president in office who runs from confrontation; has failed to support moderate rebels in Syria, allowing extremist sectarian factions to enter into the fray; has never really signed on to supporting our troops in Iraq or Afghanistan; and is now bent on unilaterally reducing our army to pre-World War II levels. No one wants war. But it’s doubtful the EU or U.S. will invoke economic or trade measures either.

What seems a given is that Putin isn’t going to allow Ukraine to cozy-up with the West, culminating in joining the EU and becoming a NATO member. Putin dreams of reestablishing a political and trade confederation of the former constituencies of the Soviet Union under the auspices of the Eurasian Customs Union (ECU). Slated to go into full effect in 2015, its prototype presently includes Russia, Belarus, and Kazakstan, with Kyrgyzstan to join soon. This grand scheme ultimately includes Ukraine, which can only be accomplished by Russian economic pressure and/or military intervention. Putin’s scheme is to return Russia to its past preeminence, a world competitor on equal footing with the EU, USA, and China. It’s what Sochi was all about.

Right now, the situation in Ukraine is ominous, given the large Russian majority population in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Historians may remember that Hitler used the pretext of a mistreated German minority to invade Poland.

It will only take a spark for history to repeat itself.

–rj

Trans Pacific Partnership: Corporate Mayhem Alive and Well

Despite President Obama’s spirited pledge to reduce the growing gap between rich and poor, his administration has been covertly involved in negotiating a Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement whose potential fallout would only exacerbate, not lessen, the economic divide, consolidating what is essentially an oligarchy of Wall Street interests.

You may be unfamiliar with the TPP, as it’s not played up in the media, unless you’re a rare aficionado of the marketplace. Briefly, 14 nations bordering the Pacific, controlling 40% of the world’s GDP and 26% of its trade, have been at work for more than a year, hammering out the final details of a complex agreement that would eliminate tariffs on goods and services. Composed of 29 chapters, its scope would include not only the area of finance, or banking, but telecommunications (i.e., the Internet), and even food services. It would have devastating consequences for those of us committed to environmental concerns that include global warming.

Ominously, it includes proposals that would curtail consumer protection across a wide spectrum. According to Republican Reports, leaked TPP negotiation documents reveal the Obama administration’s attempts to stymie other governments from implementing financial regulations, believing they could mitigate another bank collapse.

These leaked documents (see citizen.org) indicate proposals allowing corporations to sue governments under the auspices of “foreign tribunals,” thus circumventing domestic courts and local laws. Corporations could even demand financial compensation for “tobacco, prescription, and environment protections” that undermine their profits.

As Senator Elizabeth Warren–I like her more everyday–warns, such provisions allow “a chance for these banks to get something done quietly out of sight that they could not accomplish in a public place without the cameras rolling and the lights on.”

Alarmingly, even without the TPP, over $3 billion has already been paid out to foreign investors under current U.S. trade and investment agreements, with another $14 billion pending, “primarily targeting environmental, energy, and public health policies” (citizen.org).

Representing the U.S. in the negotiations is Obama appointee Stefan Selig, a former Bank of America investment banker nominated to become Under Secretary for International Trade at the Department of Commerce. Since his nomination, he’s received $9 million in bonuses. (He had received $5.1 million incentive pay the previous year.)

Slated to join him in the negotiations, pending Congress’ approval, is Michael Froman, presently U.S. Trade Representative. He received $4 million from CitiGroup as an exit payment in addition to $2 million in connection with his holdings in several investment funds.

This practice of banks lining the pockets of their former cohorts upon joining government is pervasive in the banking industry, pocket money for establishing influence in contexts affecting public financial policy.

Unfortunately, for all the pretty rhetoric coming out of the White House, the oligarchy of the one percent remains entrenched, and even abetted, while the TPP, added to its already formidable arsenal of financial peddling, poses a potent means to intimidating the common citizenry, here and abroad, opposed to its hegemony of privilege.

It certainly doesn’t contribute to economic parity. According to a study by the Center for Economic Policy and Research, as reported in the Washington Post, the economic gains would largely accrue to the wealthy.

–rj

Virgin Balzac Reader: First Impressions

I’ve been meaning for a long time to read the 19th century French writer Honoré Balzac (1799-1850), just maybe the first really modern writer of novels in his realistic depiction of people, particularly as to what motivates them, with keen observations of places, trends, and social discourse. I’m actually embarrassed to say I haven’t tried him out before, as I earned my bread for some forty years teaching literature at the college level. While it’s true that my specialty was 19th century British literature, I often taught some of the great French masters like Voltaire, Flaubert, Proust, Camus and Gide.

Balzac I somehow missed, maybe because my own profs had themselves passed him by, though considerable talents like Henry James, Flaubert, Zola and Proust modeled much of their work on his methods: long sentences weighted in details; psychological probing focused on characters, both major and minor, fraught with ambiguities amplified by an acutely observant omniscient narrator acquaintance. Hard to believe they could do this, when you ultimately discover he’s widely thought of as one of our preeminent writers of fiction.

I came upon Balzac finally via The New York Review of Books, which recently published a collection of his short stories as part of its Classic Books series. It seemed a good place to start with this prolific writer who penned some 85 novels and novellas under the canopy of The Human Comedy in the short space of 20-years, the first modern writer to make a living by his pen. (Dickens got the message, obviously.) Some say Balzac worked himself to an early death, writing to pay off his many debts.

Every human type is plainly exhibited in The Human Comedy, which in some ways, makes it analogous to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with the frequent use of a frame device in which a narrator employs a particular circumstance–locale/event–as foreground for story telling. Unlike Chaucer, a narrator may himself serve as a frame device, setting up minor and highly divergent sub-narrators spinning their own versions of people and events. What’s more, you don’t have Chaucer’s naive narrator, who often, comically, misses the truth left for readers to discern. Balzac’s narrators are deeply serious about divulging the truth behind the vagaries of human guises.

My first impressions of Balzac have been mixed. He’s certainly your acute observer of every palate of human experience, whether of fashion, politics, religion, historical figures and events, even–and surprisingly, coming so early–repressed libido urges within his characters. There is also a fluidity, or speed, to his sentences, however long they may be, which, unlike James, avoids a tangled syntax. Frequently, however, he digresses, leaving off finishing one story before indulging in another, followed by still others, as if imitating the desultory nature of most of our conversations. In a very real sense, Balzac is all about story telling, or the verbal interplay between people. He could probably have achieved success in drama, and actually did write several plays.

At the moment, I find myself, however, drowning in detail, sprawling sentences sometimes running two pages held together by semicolons and, as I’ve hinted, numerous digressions to the point I lose track of whom and what. If Balzac is about rendering conversation, surely he misses the mark, for none of us dialogs this way, or the way of essay.

But everything in Balzac, by the same token, has a way of taking on a life of its own, places as well as people, particularly Paris. You are there, on a street, in a room, an invisible witness to every nuance of quotidian humanity, encyclopedic, exhaustive in minutiae, often disturbing, but always revelatory.

To get at Balzac better and reach a more informed impression I, of course, need to go on to some of his masterpieces like Eugenie Grandet, Père Goriot, and Lost Illusions. Otherwise, it’s like visiting France and omitting Paris.

–rj

Artemis Cooper’s Fermor Biography: A Great Read

artemiscooper I just finished Artemis Cooper’s splendid biography (Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure).

Fermor, who died in 2011 at age 96, is widely regarded as the foremost travel writer of the last century–ever observant, never boring, blessed with diligent recall, and unexcelled with metaphor. When you read Fermor, you’re getting not only description, but history and art amid the first stirrings of fascism in pre-World War II Europe.

The apex of his writing is, of course, his recounting of his three year walk (1933-35) across Europe, or from Rotterdam to Istanbul in two volumes: A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. Sadly, it’s a Europe that’s largely vanished with its post Great War vestiges of Hapsburg resplendence; of unfettered freedom-loving peasants; of an untamed Danube not yet shackled by dams, bounded by bird-saturated wetlands; of fulsome traditions and extant vernaculars; of a redolent human goodness replete in hospitality transcending class or wealth; of a Europe not yet initiated into the apocalyptic horrors of fascism and the aftermath of Soviet hegemony across Eastern Europe.

Gifted with an ebullient personality along with many a youth’s folly, he made friends easily and treasured these friendships across the years. They included every day people–shopkeepers, peasants, gypsies, monks–along with luminaries like Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connally, Dylan Thomas, and Philip Toynbee. He was especially close to Lawrence Durrell and Ian Fleming.

Here let me confess I prefer biography to autobiography because I think it’s in the former you’re more likely to find honesty than among the raconteurs of the latter, often promoting themselves or embroidering their narrative through boasts or claims difficult to confirm.

Fortunately, we have one surviving Fermor journal that records his journey, assuring us it happened. Even so, any perusal of it tells us what we surmised–that despite his prodigious talents for memory and detail, no 18-year old could possess the salient knowledge Fermor displays forty years later in his layered recall.

In short, Fermor added details across the years, embellishing his journals through vast, omnivorous reading–often in their original languages (he was fluent in six of them)–in a laboring akin to fashioning a mosaic. At times, he confessed to steeping his writing in imaginative touches like riding horseback across the Hungarian steppes. At heart, Fermor was an ardent Romantic who sometimes linked himself with Byron, who like himself had a fondness for Greece and fought for its freedom. I wasn’t surprised then that like his hero, he swam the Hellespont. What shocked me was that he was 69.

Like, Byron, he also had many lady loves, despite his long relationship and later marriage to Joan Raynor, whose mother was heiress to a fortune made in woolens manufacturing. (Be warned that when you learn of Fermor’s women friends you’re probably right to assume they were loves.) What enabled Joan and Paddy’s marriage to survive these amours was their foreswearing of sexual jealousy. In fact, Joan was observed providing Paddy with money on one occasion, should he need a woman in his travels. His early love affair–before Joan– with the Rumanian princess, Balasha Cantacuzine, sixteen years older than himself, is certainly moving in its ultimate tragedy of ensuing separation with the onset of war and later Communism.

I know I risk understatement when I say Fermor had an intensity about him when it came to life. Passionate, he wanted to know the full palette of human experience and verbally paint its textures. A consummate intellectual, he never put on airs with his encyclopedic command of many disciplines, whether music, art, history, literature or languages.

He was also a brave and ingenious man, serving in World War II as a naval officer assigned to the Intelligence Corps and dropped into Crete as a liaison to the Cretan resistance against the occupying Germans. Ultimately, in one of the war’s greatest exploits, he would mastermind the capture of the commanding German general on Crete. Cooper is very thorough in presenting the many facets of this endeavor and the narrow escape of Fermor and his fellow partisans from German reinforcements in search of their general.

Cooper unflinchingly gives us full portraiture of Fermor. Not everyone liked his tendency to dominate a conversation, for example. Politically, he was conservative and despised the Communists who created havoc in civil war Spain, opposed resistance efforts in Crete, and contributed to considerable violence in post-war Greece. He had also killed a fellow member of his Cretan guerrilla unit in an accidental shooting incident he could easily have avoided with more diligence to gun safety. As for his writing, some critics argue his long sentences, weighted with details, may trip up readers and frequent digressions provoke their annoyance. We learn, too, that he smoked as many as seventy cigarettes a day.

Cooper knew Fermor firsthand as the granddaughter of Lady Diana Cooper, who found Fermor captivating and remained a lifelong friend and correspondent:

He could illuminate any subject under the sun, and had a memory that had retained most of the thousands of books he had read over the years. He knew all her favourite passages from Browning, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Meredith and Keats by heart–and much more besides….

As for Paddy, he worshipped Diana, not just for her indestructible beauty, but for the original cast of her mind, the flourish of her phrases, and the blind eye she turned to convention.

The New York Times has recently listed her book as one of the year’s (2013) most notable biographies; likewise the prestigious New York Review of Books, which had already proven its fondness for Fermor by printing several of his works as “Classics.

Having recently read A Time of Gifts, I found the biography an exceptional read in translating an extraordinary life into an effulgence of candor, scholarship and artistry. I can’t think of a better memorial.

–rj

Governor Cuomo: “They have no place in the state of New York.”

As New York governor Andrew Cuomo sees it, pro-life activists, anti-gay activists and Second Amendment supporters aren’t welcome in his state:

Their problem (GOP) is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves. Who are they? Are these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.

Later, in an open letter to the New York Post, he claimed his remarks had been distorted. Here, I’ll take him at his word–that he meant that the New York electorate won’t tolerate such views. Judging by recent elections, he’s right.

Still, the genie is out of the bottle and his phrasing unfortunate, if not symptomatic, of an increasingly trenchant political milieu, though I admit that politics hasn’t ever been a safe place to venture, even at the private level.

I’m further dismayed that much of the current incivility comes from the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party, intolerant of those who disagree with them, subjecting them to highly charged labeling, caricature, and derision.

It didn’t help matters when Mylan Denerstein, counsel to the governor, later published a backtracking piece on the governor’s website, using the phrase, “extremist agenda” for those with such views.

Ironically, with one verbal swoop, the governor sloughs off the sincerity of millions of Roman Catholics and evangelicals who believe abortion to be a termination of a human being or that homosexuality isn’t biologically a genetic component, or gun advocates who believe the Second Amendment supports their viewpoint.

Let me make clear I don’t subscribe to their beliefs, but I do advocate strongly their right to their beliefs in keeping with the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech….”

It’s time for all of us to quit throwing rocks at each other. It solves nothing except to underscore an underlying insecurity about our views, spilling over into angry backlash rather than testing our beliefs in the arena of public debate.

Cuomo assumes this conservative element is both extreme and a minority viewpoint. Does this mean that you judge the worth of an idea or belief by how many hold it, or the weight of public opinion? As that “saint of rationalism, John Stuart Mill, cogently warned us in On Liberty (1859), majorities can ultimately consummate themselves as tyrannies repressing minority opinion even in a democratic context.

Minorities come not just in colors or ethnicities, but in beliefs as well. thus they also fall under the canopy of civil rights and need to be assertively protected. Only one boundary should exist:

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it (Mill).

Unfortunately, we’ve seen our liberty for divergent opinion increasingly eroded, ironically, often lurking within the bastions of academe and not just government or media. Ideas, no matter how repugnant we may view them, deserve their exposure in public debate.

I think Jonathan Rauch, political commentator and Brooking Institute member, summarizes it quite well in his Kind Inquisitor: The New Attack on Free Thought, Expanded Edition (Univ. of Chicago, 2013):

A liberal society stands on the proposition that we should all take seriously the idea that we might be wrong. This means we must place no one, including ourselves, beyond the reach of criticism; it means that we must allow people to err, even where the error offends and upsets, as it often will.

Are you listening, Governor Cuomo?

–rj

The New Martyrdom: Christians in Peril

What do these nations below have in common? Quick answer: they all persecute Christians. What’s more, thirty-seven of them are Muslim nations:

North Korea
Somalia
Syria
Iraq
Afghanistan
Saudi Arabia
Maldives
Pakistan
Iran
Yemen
Sudan
Eritrea
Libya
Nigeria
Uzbekistan
Central African Republic
Ethiopia
Vietnam
Qatar
Turkmenistan
Laos
Egypt
Myanmar
Brunei
Columbia
Jordan
Oman
India
Sri Lanka
Tunisia
Bhutan
Algeria
Mali
Palestine
United Arab Emirates
Mauritania
China
Kuwait
Kazakhstan
Malaysia
Bahrain
Comoros
Kenya
Morocco
Tajikistan
Djibouti
Indonesia
Bangladesh
Tanzania
Niger

This shouldn’t come as any surprise. As the Skeptical Inquirer reports, Islam currently poses the world’s greatest threat to human freedom, or to think for oneself.

You’ll note that this is a gradated list, with the worst offenders coming first, among them North Korea, a non-Muslim Stalinist holdout that persecutes Christians vigorously. Estimates have it that between 50,000 to 70,000 Christians languish in prison camps, with few survivors likely, given the brutal conditions. An unconfirmed report, says that 80 Christians were executed in November, 2013. Change the regime, however, and the persecution will cease, as happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ironically, today’s Russia is the one nation that has vigorously denounced the persecuting of Christians.

Not so for Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan–all former Muslim constituents of the Soviet Union–where persecution of Christians continues.

You’ll see that the list also features some U. S. allies like Saudi Arabia and even Kuwait, a Muslim nation we saved from Saddam’s incursion.

And, of course, we all know about Pakistan with its endless duplicity, a nation outraged by our killing of Osama bin Laden who had taken refuge there and a free haven for the Taliban. Persecuting Christians is almost a sport in Pakistan, with Christians often accused falsely of violating blasphemy laws by those seeking their property.

But Kenya, a nation with a predominantly Christian population, is also on the list. This is because Kenya also has a minority Somalian population. Bombings are frequent as in the recent terrorist insurgency from Somalia itself, resulting in the Nairobi mall massacre in which Christians were deliberately targeted and Muslim hostages let go.

Meanwhile in Egypt, several hundred Coptic churches have been ransacked and many of them burned by deposed President Morsi supporters from the Muslim Brotherhood.

As in Kenya, a nation needn’t have a Muslim majority for Christians to be singled out. Take, for example, the Central African Republic, which has been in the recent headlines. Following a recent seizure of power by a Muslim in a county overwhelmingly Christian, the Muslim minority immediately began to kill Christians. Here, Christians formed their own militias to wade off the attacks, successfully driving the usurpers from power.

Some of the worst scenarios for Christians are playing out in war-ravaged Syria, whose Christian community dates back to the first century and St. Paul, who was converted on his way to Damascus. In 2013, 2,123 Christians died, representing a 100% increase over the previous year. Assad, by the way, didn’t persecute Christians. In some Christian towns, insurgents have given Christians the option of converting or being executed on the spot. Priests have been killed; nuns taken hostage.

It’s conceivable that soon there will be no Christians left in the Middle East. Consider Iraq: Before our incursion in 2003, there were some 2 million Christians in Iraq. Only about half now remain. According to the UN Committee for Refugees, 850,000 Christians have left at last count. There may even be as few as 250,000 remaining.

Before the rise of Islam in the 7th century, the Levant and North Africa were actually largely populated by Christians. St. Augustine, in fact, was a North African bishop. Then came the Arab invasions, spreading “the religion of peace” by the sword. The truth is that Islam hasn’t changed very much across the centuries, in doctrine or behavior. Unlike Christianity, it’s rooted in a fundamentalism that has stubbornly resisted reform. It’s as though time stood still. It’s questionable whether Islam can ever reconcile with the tenets of democracy, for what Islam fears most is divergent opinion.

But I also want to be fair. I studied in France a number of years ago and came into contact with a good many Muslims. My politics, not my religion, was what mattered. In fact, not once did faith enter into our conversations. Additionally, I frankly sympathize with the Palestinians in their quest for nationhood and a return to 1967 borders. I haven’t any quarrel with secular Muslims, whom militants place in the same company as Western “infidels.” I cherish the several friendships I developed that transcended religion and homeland, whether Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, or Iran.

Unfortunately, where persecution of Christianity does exist, it often generates from a perception of the West as anti-Muslim. We give billions to Israel annually, much of it employed to buttress Israel’s military might. Think, for a moment, how you would feel were your people strafed and bombed by Israeli pilots flying American fighter jets, or your lands appropriated by Israeli settlers feverishly supported by many American evangelicals. We don’t have a good footprint when it comes to the Middle East. I would even argue that our disregard for the Islamic culture and faith has made groups like al Quaeda possible, feeding on aeons of resentment. Unfortunately, Christians are caught in the exchange.

Religion, like politics, can prove violent in absolutes giving no ground. I despise the lingering animosities of every political and religious faction. True progressives move past ideology to an embrace of the human family. I also distain religionists who fashion deity into a human assemblage, or composite of ourselves, incumbent with our prejudices and capacity for malevolence.

I likewise dislike the silence of governments with regard to the assault on Christians in their pursuit of the political game of expediency. I find this as unsavory as militant Islam’s historical penchant to impose religious and socio-political hegemony.

I yearn for the day that moderate Muslims disavow the sword; that Israelis cease their apartheid; that the U. S. commits itself to genuine justice for those long denied. I think of Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

But do I wake or sleep?

–rj

Reflections on Boyd’s Any Human Heart: Elegant Solemnity

Have just finished William Boyd’s riveting novel, Any Human Heart, nearly 500 pages long. You may remember it had appeared on PBS as an award-winning three part adaptation. That’s what led me to the novel, the fictional playback of the posthumous journals of Logan Mountstuart, novelist and free lance journalist, whose life of eight and half decades virtually bookends the previous century. Though a fictional work, Boyd ingeniously transmutes it into a rerun of much of that century’s principal happenings, replete with landmark political and cultural figures. We almost believe Mountstuart is real. Boyd even supplies copious endnotes! Obviously, Boyd did his homework.

Most readers embrace this novel warmly, despite its weight of persistent melancholy. Life for Mountstuart adds up to luck and unluck and, subtracting the difference, hoping your assets top your liabilities. For Mountstuart, there’s an awful lot of bad luck, though you could argue much of it’s of his own doing rather than a conspiracy of fate.

There are readers who don’t like him. I see things differently–Mountstuart an anti-hero in the sense we all are, living behind masks, or an assemblage of many selves, creatures often governed by inertia, self-absorption, insecurity, pettiness, obsessive evolutionary drives– and not infrequently, self-pity; in sum, a panoramic narrative of human finiteness foregrounded in the human condition that forestalls its amelioration.

I see a character refreshingly honest about his failings, indeed his saving grace, who by story end, arrives at a greater, more compassionate self, reaching beyond narcicissm to embracing others; distilling what good elements remain through sharpened awareness; at last accepting of mortality’s proximity in keeping with the tenor of his several journals underscoring the ephemerality of experience.

Any Human Heart just happens to be one of the wisest novels I’ve read in a long time with its plethora of acute observations, reminding me of Herzog’s insightful ruminations in Bellow’s eponymous work. Accordingly, I’ve jotted some of them down, hoping you’ll like them as I do and perhaps want to try out this novel for yourself:

On life:

Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary–it is the respective proportions of those two categories that make that life appear interesting or humdrum.

That’s all your life amounts to in the end: the aggregate of all the good luck and the bad luck you experience. Everything is explained by that simple formula.

You can’t make these unilateral pacts with life: you can’t say that’s it, my emotions are securely locked away away, now I’m impregnable, safe from the world’s cruelties and disappointments.

On religion:

It was all a bit obscure to me and now I understand why I don’t give religion much thought. The awful boredom of uncritical faith. All great artists are doubters.

I’ve never understood how a person of real intelligence can believe in a god. Or gods.

Shelley was so right: Atheism is an absolute necessity in this world of ours. If we are to survive as individuals we can rely only on those resources provided by the human spirit–appeals to deity or deities are only a form of pretense. We might as well howl at the moon.

On sexual initiation

I could only marvel at her nudity. It seems to me that first time of mutual nakedness is almost a more lasting memory than the sex act.

On mortality:

We’re not ready for it–for people of our age to die. We think we’re safe for a while, but it’s a dream. No one’s safe.

That moment when you realize quite rationally, quite unemotionally–that the world in the-not-so-distant future will not contain you: that the trees you planted will continue growing but you will not be there to see them.

We all want a sudden death but we know we’re not all going to be provided with one. So our end. So our end will be our ultimate bit of good or bad luck–the final addition to the piles.

On NYC:

I miss New York more than I would have imagined. I miss those perfect spring days. Wraiths of steam rising from the manhole vents backlit by slanting early morning sun. Cross streets thick with cherry trees in bloom. The way time seems to slow to a crawl in diners and coffee shops.

On health:

Those of us who have the luck to enjoy good health forget about this vast parallel universe of the unwell–their daily miseries, their banal ordeals. Only when you cross that frontier into the world of ill-health do you recognize its quiet, massive presence, its brooding permanence.

On pets:

He’s only an old dog, I tell myself, and he lived a full and happy dog’s life. It may sound stupid, but I loved him and I know he loved me. That meant there was an uncomplicated traffic of mutual love in my life and I find it hard to admit it’s over.

On good writing:

The studied opulence, the ornament for the sake of ornament, grows wearing and one longs for a simple, elegant, discursive sentence. This is the key difference: in good prose precision must always triumph over decoration.

–rj

China Destroys Ivory Stocks: Too Little too Late?

I’m pleased again at another good omen for the environment in learning of China’s destruction yesterday of six tons of seized ivory ornaments and tusks. This is exciting, since China has been overwhelmingly the prime market for ivory, where it’s turned into trinkets and statuary, and it’s the first time China has done this. Hopefully, it won’t be the last. This comes on the heels of Tanzania’s recent destruction of four tons of ivory, adding up to about forty slaughtered elephants. In addition to Tanzania, Kenya and Gabon have recently destroyed large caches of ivory.

Still, China has a long ways to go. As reported in the NYT on Monday, The Wildlife Conservation Society says that there may be as much as forty-five tons in the total ivory inventory in China, not including Hong Kong. Let’s face it: ivory can be lucrative, fetching $1000 a pound. In poverty stricken Africa, poachers in the field rarely command such profit, pocketed by sophisticated black market smugglers, but minimally still incentive enough. Elephant poaching is further exacerbated as the continent’s many warring factions use ivory sales to purchase arms.

What shocks me is our own large stash of ivory, with six tons of ivory destroyed last November. I guess I shouldn’t be so naive. We have a large Chinese immigrant community, especially on the West Coast, where demand for ivory, rhino horn, tortoise and shark fin can ratchet up lucrative profits. In fact, we’re downright hypocrites. The good old USA ranks second to China in consumption of illegal animal products, including not only those I just mentioned, but even tiger bone! Nothing is sacred; nothing off limits for crime syndicates operating internationally.

Unabated, the trade will peter out in about ten years. We’ll simply have run out of elephants, rhinoceroses, sharks and tigers.

But just maybe the window’s opened a bit with China’s move, offering a new vista of hope. As China’s legacy of ancient wisdom has it, “The longest journey begins with the first step” (Lao Tzu).

–rj

A Conservation Hero: Greg Carr and Gorongosa National Park

Sometimes I find it terribly painful to hear the news or surf the net for the latest on environment, earth lover that I am. It’s gotten so bad that I even toss a lot of my mail from cherished environmental organizations, unopened, to ward off grief. Still, I can’t live in a bubble. It changes nothing.

Last night, the sobering Guardian report on climate change with its catastrophic scenario of a 7.2 F/4C temperature rise by century end, rendering life in the tropics virtually impossible. Then the just released Intergovernmental Panel Report on Climate Change, indicating human activity as “the likely cause” for global warming, or 95% certain. Hey, is anybody out there listening? Meanwhile, business as usual: Boeing announces its plan to double its new North Charleston, SC, facility, which includes filling in 400 acres of wetlands.

ThIs explains my elation on discovering the story of efforts to restore Mozambique’s once iconic Gorongosa National Park, since such good news is a rarity these days, or akin to say a medical breakthrough in remedying a chronic disease.

Gorongosa Park, founded by the Portuguese in 1960, used to be famous for its teeming wild life that even included nearly 2000 elephants. But then came the long struggle for Mozambique’s independence in which armies sometimes ravaged the Park for food and ivory. Like today’s Mali, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, independence (1975) then gave way to protracted civil war, lasting 17 years. By then, poachers and subsistence farmers had settled in, decimating virtually all wildlife, apart from the Park’s crocodiles. As one example, only 50 buffalos remained of an original herd of 14,000.

The new government (1992), finding itself cash-strapped, was looking for new resources, among them eco-tourism through restoration of Gorongosa National Park, but it lacked investment capital. That’s when American businessman Greg Carr, who had made his fortune offering Internet services, stepped in, setting up a foundation and pledging $40 million over the next 30 years to finance the project.

Thanks to his herculean efforts, the Park has been steadily regaining its pristine splendor with herds of elephants, African buffalo, hippopotamus, warthogs and antelopes now grazing its savannas in growing abundance. Further good news: in 2010, the government enlarged the Park to include Mount Gorongosa, so essential to the year round flow of the Park’s rivers and preservation of its unique megafauna. Were the rain forest gone, there would no longer exist the capacity of the mountain to release monsoon rains gradually and long term, sustaining life in the dry season. As is, subsistence farmers have reduced the rain forest at its summit by a third over the last decade.

Like all such noble schemes to preserve environment, hard choices often pit habitat vs jobs. You can’t simply ask these settlers to leave. Poverty is just so immense, with the per capita annual wage $310, according to World Bank, and a life expectancy of only 40 years. The trick is to create new industries for them.

Again, Carr has proven to be visionary in providing economic incentives, creating rain forest seed nurseries, schools and medical clinics below the rain forest line, hiring guards, and expanding tourist facilities offering comfortable amenities that are increasingly attracting European and North American visitors, initiatives now employing more than a thousand workers.

While things are off to a good start, the Park’s ongoing fate depends on two key factors: a stable democratic government and tourist dollars. With regard to the latter, once again, good news, with visitor tallies rising from an initial 1000 to over a current 10,000. Eco-tourism is obviously essential to making Carr’s bet pay off.

If Carr’s project works in Mozambique, it can work elsewhere in Africa as seems the case in Botswana, providing ecological preservation linked with economic well-being.

This is, indeed, good news!

–rj

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