Israel I: Terrorball

I am an Israeli-American, holding dual citizenship in both countries. This has been nothing but grief for me, both in the narrower sense of my life not being made easier when I tell security people that I was born in Jerusalem, and in the larger sense of the stress and anxiety I have for my extended family which remains in Israel. And I am not Muslim -- I am an American Jewish citizen who has lived here since I was three months old. I cannot imagine how incredibly worse it is for Palestinians, who have to turn on the radio and hear bullshit like "All Young Muslims Should Be Strip Searched."

At any rate, one of the evidences of my heritage is that my mother and I now almost daily get into strongly worded debates over Israel and its future. My mother is a pacifist -- actually more of a pacifist than I am, since she favored immediate withdrawal from both Afghanistan and Iraq, and although I was against the war in Iraq, I believed that it was our responsibility to attempt to guarantee some functional stability before we left -- but she doesn't understand how I am against the Israeli incursion into Gaza.

This debate has been going on and on and in the end, the difference in our beliefs, both in Gaza and in Iraq/Afghanistan, boils down to Terrorball.

My mother is not happy about 1300 people killed in Gaza by Israelis. But from her perspective, how can Israel not respond to rockets falling on her country? Even the Israeli Government admits that in the year leading up to the Gaza War, only a handful of people have been been hurt or killed. The issue my mother is skirting, and which the logical problem at the heart of Terrorball rests on, is the issue of proportionality. More specifically, it deals with the One Percent Doctrine. If there's a 1% chance of terrorism, Cheney says, we have to use force. Irregardless of what the bait is, when it comes to terrorism, we have to respond with force.

Anyways, that's one aspect of the dispiriting personal conversations I've had around Israel. Most of it boils down to the fact that Avigdor Lieberman is the face and power-broker of my country.

A Litmus Test For Newspapers

I was thinking about the Wall Street Journal recently, and its seeming decline in partiality and editorial quality ever since Rupert Murdoch purchased it. Then I was wondering, "How did I come to the conclusion that the Wall Street Journal has declining editorial standards, considering I don't read the Wall Street Journal."

I realized that it is because I get my news from Google News, and in Google News I see Wall Street journal headlines and literally it is just the headlines that sometimes get me steamed enough to not ever want to crack open a Wall Street Journal again.

I wanted to come up with a litmus test for partiality in news, and I came up with a simple one that is, almost certainly, reductive beyond all belief. If I ran a newspaper, I said to myself, I would make sure that its headlines contained no modifying adjectives, and could only use action verbs relating to an event. If the headline was about someone something said, it goes in the politics or opinion section. Period.

With that in mind, let's look at the front page of the New York Times.

UN Officials Say American Aide Plotted to Replace Hamid Karzai. Notice that are not only one, but two modifiers between this headline and US Replaces Hamid Karzai, the headline of an actual event. UN Officials SAY that the American Aide PLOTTED. Is this important news? Perhaps. But is it actually true that a plan that went nowhere and might not actually have existed is the top story of today?

M.T.A. Approves Big Service Cuts In Transit. Well, I'd prefer something more descriptive than "Big Service Cuts" since it basically puts the fear of God in your average NYC person. I've also always been torn about whether the New York Times should carry local news on the front page, but I guess it is still the New York times.

That Tap Water Might Be Legal but May Be Unhealthy. Is this an opinion article? I read the article, and it bundles together a bunch of anecdotal evidence (a lack of increase in regulated chemicals) with a bunch of not-very-in-depth-examined studies about the health of tap water in America. The Times appears to be choking on impartiality. Clearly they think our water is unhealthy (as it is a front page story), but then they don't want to say "Your water is unhealthy" so they throw in a bunch of tempering words, making the article easily forgettable. The net effect of this article will probably just to be to convince more people to buy bottled (tap) water.

Pakistan Reported To Be Harassing US Diplomats. Who is reporting it? US Diplomats. In fact, most of the article appears to be an interview with "One senior American diplomat." Is it true? Well, a senior American diplomat said it, right?

I was kind of hoping that one of the Times' headlines would be a statement, like US Commits 30,000 Troops to Afghanistan (which is an event) or Bomb Kills X in Helmand Province (which is an event) or House Passes Temporary Finance Measures (which is an event).

As for the WSJ:

Insurgents In Iraq Hack US Drone (which is an event -- but bonus points for their web edition carrying Readers React - 'We Can't Be This Stupid!')

US Ready to Join Climate-Aid Fund - not an event in the present tense, but a promise of an event in the future, which I think is acceptable news.

Mexican Drug Boss Killed In Raid (event)

The only one I spot which isn't an event (or which doesn't lead with Opinion:) is:

Bernanke Foes Seek to Curtail Fed.

Well, well, I didn't expect the WSJ's headlines to do better for me than the NYTimes. Ah well.

The Future of Culture V: War Memorial II

A brief note to append to my last post, about War Memorials: I was rather struck and flabbergasted by the idea that the steel from the World Trade Center was melted down and fashioned into the USS New York.

It's odd -- in the 21st Century, it seems like in general people tend to be bored with metaphor or allegory. There's one huge exception to all this, though, which is the military realm. The military tradition, with its poetic traditions towards the flag and memorials--the 21 gun salute, the language of patches and flags, etc. There's a clear need for this language of metaphor: war is one of the largest, most consuming, tearing experiences, and this intricate dance of metaphors creates a container in which we can place and understand this experience.

When we consumed war, culturally, we didn't used to consume it directly. We consumed war stories, tales of great adventure. Then, again around World War I, something changed. We started reading real short stories, about real soldiers. All Quiet on the Western Front and Heart of Darkness. Real fear, real agony, and a shocking lack of conventional morality--courage, morality and honor, which underpinned the metaphors we had previously relied on in our war stories. When Vietnam came around the cultural war was being fought between the ideological, metaphorical frames ("containment" and "police action" and "national determination") and this new, literal view of war--live coverage.

Which is a better memorial to Vietnam -- the Vietnam memorial, or the infamous photos of brutality in the field?

To return to where I started, we still haven't made that 9/11 memorial here in New York City. In a way, the USS New York is one of our first drafts of our attempts at memorial. Oliver Stone's World Trade Center is another early draft. Stone tries to place 9/11 firmly into the "heroism of man" camp (see also: Shaara's Killer Angels for Civil War). The USS New York invokes the phoenix myth (see also: Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars).

My two favorite memorials to the World Trade Center are both unintentional artifacts. The first, at left, is Fritz Koenig's The Sphere, which is now in Battery Park--it's a sculpture of a whole golden globe, which used to sit in the midst of the Trade Center plaza, symbolizing the globalization of wealth. Which is a pretty empty symbol, to me--simplistic, hearkening back to "In America the streets are paved with gold." On the day of the disaster, rubble fell onto the Sphere, punching holes into it, revealing it to be hollow (if you look at the pre-9/11 photos, it certainly looks solid). There, you have both sides of the equation--the whole golden globe, representing the unity of the world both in globalization and in the aftermath of the disaster, and the holes knocked into it by those who were in the gaps of that golden globe, countries like Afghanistan that were left behind. They were gaps in the globe before, but because we ignored them (pretended that they were part of it), they lashed out and knocked their own hole in the globe.

The other memorial, for me, is the Cortlandt Street subway station on the NQRW line. I sometimes ride past there on my way to Prospect Park. It's a ghost station, still lit, still visible, the name is still there, but with no people. And interestingly, on the digital stop-by-stop display, they still display CORTLANDT STREET - WILL NOT STOP. It would be so easy for them to not display that, and yet they leave it there. In a quiet way, they're saying, "There used to be something there. Now it's gone." It's the Pompeii version of memorial. Quiet and empty.

The Future of Culture IV: War Memorial

In the Radiolab episode "New Normal" that I talked about in the last Future of Culture installment, the episode began with a discussion of changing cultural attitudes toward war. Specifically, it was about a man who was surveying people about whether they thought war would ever end, whether there would ever be World Peace. He says that in the early 1980s, the answer was overwhelmingly "Yes." And today, the answer is overwhelmingly "No."

This seems indicative of the modern cynicism about everything (although the early 1980s still exists in that post-Nixon, post-Vietnam era that I at least consider the modern cynical age), but what's interesting to me is that this mindset flies in the face of certain evidence.

Actually, before we go on, I want to quibble about the question -- the question should be more realistically phrased as "Will we ever reach the point where wars are rare, abnormal events." In other words, I don't know if we'll ever reach that asymptotic event, but I do think it is an asymptote--I think we will get closer and closer to having "no" wars.

Somewhere between 1900 and 2000, war left the cultural norm in Europe. In 1900, war was considered a measure of strength of nations. By the end of World War One, we were praying that this war was the "war to end all wars." It wasn't until World War Two that this seemed to be achieved in Europe. Now, World War Two is not the complete end of War in Europe -- there were some near-wars, such as the Soviet invasion of Hungary and of the Czech Republic, and two genuine wars (the last genocides of the former Yugoslavia), but those were considered to be abnormal, and in the case of the latter, Europe actually interceded and brought an end to the war.

I was thinking about this for a very specific reason. This Sunday, I walked through Grand Army Plaza at Prospect Park in Brooklyn. The centerpiece of the plaza, pictured above, is the grand triumph arch, topped with what I feel comfortable in assuming is Nike, goddess of Victory. I feel comfortable in assuming this because nearly identical arches can be seen at the Brandenburg Gate, in Brussels, and throughout New England and Europe. Every one is a memorial to victory, a triumphal memory of war.

And that's what gives me hope: we don't build those arches anymore.

If you compare post-WWI memorials to pre-WWI memorials, you'll note that they suddenly become not memorials to Victory, they become memorials to loss. Lists of names or headstones. Nearly universally in Europe. It's a sudden, 180 degree shift of our cultural conversation about war.

Even if we were to win in Iraq--win in the most unequivocal terms; a stable democracy, no car bombs, Al Qaeda surrendering in one moment "on the deck of a battleship," as they say, etc.--even the most incredibly fantastical of victory scenarios--there will be no arch of triumph. We will simply erect a memory of those we have lost.

This is just one aspect of our cultural conversation about war. There's also Rush Limbaugh, and Band of Brothers, and the Medal of Honor games, and the coverage out of Iraq. But I find it interesting that what once was a common, "cultural" expression of memory of war has suddenly shifted. It gives me hope.