Nobody
cared for yesterday's commute , eh? Did everyone click "read more?"
You know that's where the treasures are hid. There was some good human interest
stuff in there - polio, WWII, the Holocaust, etc. Imagery too, if I'm not
mistaken. No. Take that back - it's short on imagery. Anyway.
Don't tell me - I know what it is:
Tell us more sea stories, Lex.
Gotcha. Give the audience what they
want. Only, you had a pretty good run of sea stories last week, and there are
only so many in a single lifetime.
So.
Don't
get
greedy.
----------------
Have
been on a tear lately at Blockbusters. Ran through the first three seasons of
"24" over the course of the last month, driving my family nearly to bouts of
hear-pulling exasperation. I get like that, find something I like and overdo.
Plus, there are no commercials. And I don't have TiVo, because I don't watch
much TV.
I have no problem
reconciling those statements. Just so you
know.
I rather like the way 24 is
framed and executed - the idea of the episode unfurling in real time was at
first a novelty, then a distraction, and then - well, nothing at all. It's a
part of the rhythm of the show, you accustom yourself. There are some
disadvantages of course: Seeing it all together takes a little bit of the edge
of the knife when we're told that " someone from division is coming down."
Right, OK, yes - things get exciting, and we add new
actors.
Speaking of acting , I do find it rather surprisingly good -
it's like these folks actually care about their work. I've never been a huge
Kiefer Sutherland fan, ever since "Lost Boys," he's always looked to me like he
needs a shave. You get the sense that you'd be surprised to meet him and find
out that he doesn't smell, just a little, too. But he's doing well here, as Jack
Bauer, in spite of the fact he's in a dynamic role, and lacks a bit of the
requisite physical gravitas. Carlos Bernard as Tony Almeida grows marvelously
over the course of three seasons. And Penny Johnson Jerald as the Senators wife
and eventual first lady in exile, is pitch perfect. You really start to hate
her, which is the point I think.
It'd
be rather cool if there was a place in the federal government where everyone was
hip and edgy, wearing Banana Republic clothes, and working at Mac G4
workstations in front of Apple Cinema displays on open bay desks lit by Ikea
desk lamps. But I've seen the inside, the belly of the beast, and I suppose it
won't be revealing any state secrets to tell you that it's much more like the
service department at your local GM dealership than it is like the set of
CTU Los
Angeles.
You know what else you
notice, when you see three seasons over three weeks? The actors get fat.
Well, not exactly fat, but
comfortably sleek let's say.
I think
that they've probably starved themselves to get the job, at least those without
a pre-existing rep. And once the show survives the first season, grows some
legs, well - they get comfortable. You and I would probably be the
same.
Sure. I'll have another glass
of
wine.
-------------------
This got some mileage 'round the sphere last
week. Apparently a 13-year old Islamic girl in Britain finally won her right
through the courts to wear the full-body jilbab at her mostly Muslim school.
This was a place where a consensus had been reached about school uniforms that
was slightly less severe. The sense of the article's writer is that she was put
up to it by her older
brother:
"...a supporter of
Hizb ut-Tahrir, a Muslim party that seeks to establish a Muslim world state,
that believes democracy is blasphemy, and that denies that the Western
citizenship of Muslims is real or meaningful, or confers any privileges or
imposes any duties."
The writer, the
delightfully yclept Theodore Dalrymple, goes on from the specific to the general
with breathtaking speed, cataloguing the list of culture-clash grievances that
women of apparently Pakistani background are heir to in
Britain:
"...substantial
numbers of young Muslim women are virtually enslaved in Britain; they grow up in
what can only be called a totalitarian environment... They are not allowed out
of the house except under escort, and sometimes not even then; they are allowed
no mail or use of the telephone; they are not allowed to contradict a male
member of the household, and are automatically subject to his wishes; it is
regarded as quite legitimate to beat them if they disobey in the slightest...
They are forced to wear modes of dress that they do not wish to wear. Their
schooling is quite often deliberately interrupted, so that they are not infected
by Western ideas of personal liberty; ambitious for a career, they are kept at
home as prisoners and domestic
slaves."
"They are taken by
their parents, often at a young age, “back” to Pakistan, where they
are told that they are getting married, often to a first cousin. Their fathers
regard their British passports with all the respect Hitler accorded to treaties.
"
"a young man of Pakistani
origin who was afraid of the other young men of Pakistani origin in the prison.
Why? Because he had previously given important evidence in court in a case in
which a girl who had refused to marry the husband selected for her by her
parents was murdered by her father and brothers. The other young men of
Pakistani origin thought the man who had testified was a traitor to their
religion and culture; for in fact it is a religion and culture very convenient
to the young men, whom it supplies with a domestic slave and mother of children
while they can entertain themselves elsewhere. The whole evil system would break
down if any of the young women were allowed their freedom, which is why the men
must stick together. Like any form of totalitarianism, it is strong but
brittle."
And so on, with some local
politics thrown in to boot at the end. We don't seem to have these same kinds of
problems over here, perhaps because, never having been an empire, we're not
saddled with the legacies that go with them, perhaps because
we're a much bigger pool of people, nearly all of whom came from somewhere else,
and also because these days, you can wear pretty much whatever you want to
school, so long as it doesn't carry "hate speech" code
violations.
But there's something
else going on here, something I'm having a hard time capturing in my own head.
Mr.Dalrymple it seems to me, is pretending to be shocked at the smoldering den
of dark people in the midst of Merry Olde England, with their Strange Habits and
Customs. But one senses that the full picture is somewhat more
complex.
Take this thread I stumbled
across, written on a Pakistani forum, and read it all through if you have the
time. It starts with an article about the "Burgers of Karrachi" and their
lifestyle. Burgers are apparently the westernized wealthy elite over there, and
anyone who's seen OC on TV here will not be entirely surprised to learn
that
"A large number of new
generation Pakistanis have similar tales to tell...Almost 90 per cent of the
boys I speak to, as young as 10 years old, admit to having experimented with
drugs and drink, if not sex, at some point in their lives. Approximately four in
10 indulge themselves regularly, either alone at home, with a group of their
friends, or at parties. And depending on who one speaks to, it is estimated that
approximately 30-50 per cent of the girls attending the city's top private
schools, have experienced a drug-induced high - most commonly, on
dope."
Yes, I know - dreadful But
still, there's something strangely anachronistic in reading a writer so
obviously trying to preserve her detachment go on to write so breathlessly about
the rich kids "getting high, on dope." We have so had that conversation. No one
seems anymore to be very much surprised to find the children of privilege acting shamelessly, over
here. We see it, shake our heads and hope we do better. But to read further in
the thread is to open a strange window into our own 1970's, it seems to me. The
writer "skhan" seems to me to be the forum's self-appointed guardian of cultural
values and norms, he accuses the Musharraf government is sponsoring sex
education in schools (shudder!). He gets in a bit of a spat with one
"PyariCgudia," who sees things
differently:
"Abhay, even
now, the government is just trying to stabalize the damn economy. Regulating
social behavior at the grass roots level tho bohat duur ki baat hai. Have you
seen any laws or propaganda passed that demand that women no longer wear burqas?
Do you wear one yourself? And as for late night activity, that has always been
going on in KHI. You were just too young to understand what it was. Its just
that now, what has always gone on behind closed doors, is not coming out. Why?
Because people are concernfully questioning what is going on socially in the
country. People are recognizing there is a problem, and thus are trying to raise
awareness to fix it. So you're going to see plenty much more coming out. Have I
told you about the wife swapping trends, and late night orgies? Yes, I read of a
case where a professor had an orgy with his students. Plenty of more
interesting stories that are total schockers. And you have absolutely NO PROOF
that Musharraf is deliberately leading the country into this trend. Is he for
MODERATION? Yes. Is he for MODERNIZATION? Yes, but in terms of like decreasing
crime rate. You're in karachi. I'm sure you've noticed that times are more
peaceful after he came in compared to the blood bath that khi was at one time
when MQM gundays were running amock on the streets and shooting into random
houses as they drove by. He's not trying to build a society that is OPEN TO
INFLUENCES. He's trying to build a soceity where your basic rights are
protected. He's working on the economy and law and order. And he's left a lot of
freedom in the hands of people. Bottom line is - the trends you are seeing are
not from the government - they are being generated from the
people."
Anyway, I thought it a
fascinating look inside, even given that these folks are 1) writing (mostly) in
English, 2) have access to computers and the internet and so may not reflect the
full spectrum of Pakistani society. In just the same way that you and I may not,
over here. But my larger point (I think I have one) is that this whole
conversation, the drugs, booze, sex, country-is-going-to-hell zeitgeist could
have just as easily been had in San Francisco and New York in the 1970's, or
anywhere in the heartland to this day. Maybe eventually they'll come to the same
compromises we have done: Don't want your kid to see sex ed in class? Opt
out.
Parenthetically, it made me
smile a bit that Skhan, the cultural guardian, closes his posts with "our
batting and bowling rule." He's talking about cricket, and he's right by the
way. The Pakistanis are among the best in the world. But like the immigration to
England, this too is a legacy of
empire.
So, just like us,
nu?
--------------------
Well,
no.
I mean, I'd like to believe that,
but then these young men keep strapping suicide vests to themselves and blowing
themselves up amongst their own citizens, as well as the occupier. The Dutch didn't much go for that during the
mid-40's, when they were occupied by a foreign power. Neither did the vast
swaths of Russia and Ukraine , who were far more different
culturally from their occupiers than were the Germans and Dutch. And who,
because of that no doubt, were treated really hideously by the occupation
forces. Armed resistance there was, to be sure, and the murder of collaborators.
But none of your mass killing, friend and foe alike, all undifferentiated. This
is relatively novel.
And I know that
there are freaks at the margins
of every spectrum, but it's a little harder to argue against the observation
that the margins over there are wider than those over here, that the bell curve
is a little flatter.
How and why this
came to be is a complex and freighted issue, dealing I think with cultural prime
movers. Don't know if I'm ready to go there today, but I will ask you to
remember that noted Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis (excerpted here) in
"What Went Wrong?" ultimately concludes that the
Arabic/Islamic isolation of half of its pool of human talent under the burqa is
most likely to blame.
Which, in one
of those strange twists, takes us back to Dalrymple again, doesn't
it?
--------------------
What
am I obsessing over this month, from
Blockbusters?
S'good. Some rough language, and a
fair amount of bouncing bodies in various phases of
deshabillé.
Which I don't mind all that much, at all, really, so long as it's something I've
got the choice to watch, or not. Wouldn't want to see it on the street corner,
or have it thrust at me at Super Bowl half-time show, when I'm not expecting it.
Just for example.
Public square vs
private space. A useful distinction to preserve, I
think.
--------------------
Today?
We golf!
So. Sayonarra.
Posted @
08:36 AM
|
Posted in
""
|
Sendit
|
Credo
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." - John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Ceasar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friederich Nietzsche
