A Reunion with Boredom

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Charles Simic

Jean Gaumy/Magnum Photos

Auvergne. Cantal. May 1991.

Do people still suffer from periods of boredom even with computers, smart phones and tablets to occupy them endlessly? There's also television, of course, which in homes of many Americans is on twenty-four hours a day, making it harder and harder to find a quiet place to sit and think. Even neighborhood bars, the old refuge of introspective loners, now have huge TV screens alternating between sports and chatter to divert them from their thoughts. As soon as college students are out of class, cell phones, and iPods materialize in their hands, requiring full concentration and making them instantly oblivious of their surroundings. I imagine Romeo and Juliet would send text messages to each other today as they strolled around Verona, though I find it hard to picture Hamlet advising Ophelia to betake herself to a nunnery.

These and other thoughts came to me as I sat in a dark house for three days in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene. Being without lights and water is a fairly common experience for those of us who live in rural areas on roads lined with old trees. Every major rainstorm or snowstorm is almost certain to bring down the lines, which, because of the relative scarcity of population, are a low priority for the power company to fix. We use oil lamps and most often candles, so our evenings around the dining room table resemble séances. We sit with our heads bowed as if trying to summon spirits, while in truth struggling to see what's on our dinner plates. Being temporarily unable to use the technology we've grown dependent on to inform ourselves about the rest of the world, communicate with others, and pass the time, is a reminder of our alarming dependence on them. "Nights are so boring!" my neighbors kept repeating. Our days were not much better, with overcast skies that made it even difficult to read indoors. All of this reminded me of the days of my youth when my family, like so many others, lived in a monastic solitude when the weather was bad, since we had no television. It wasn't in church, but on dark autumn days and winter nights that I had an inkling of what they meant when they spoke about eternity. Everyone read in order to escape boredom. I had friends so addicted to books, their parents were convinced they were going crazy with so many strange stories and ideas running like fever through their brains, not to mention becoming hard of hearing, after failing to perform the simplest household chores like letting the cat out.

Living in a quiet neighborhood made it even worse. Old people stared out of windows at all hours, when they were not staring at the walls. There were radios, but their delights—with the exception of a few programs—were reserved for the grownups only. Thousands died of ennui in such homes. Others joined the navy, got married, or moved to California. Even so, looking back now, I realize how much I owe to my boredom. Drowning in it, I came face to face with myself as if in a mirror. I became a spectator of my own existence, which by turns struck me as being either too real or totally unreal. I recall one day being absolutely sure that time had stopped, despite the loud ticking of the clock in my room. Everything stood still. Walking through a museum, years later, I recalled that moment in my room as I passed the statues of Greek and Egyptian gods. They looked to me as bored as I had been.

I forgot who said one is bored only in paradise and not in hell. How true, I thought at the time. I remember living in a tenement on the Lower East Side in the late 1950s. The building was so noisy; there was not a chance of being bored for a second. At almost any hour of the day, one could hear several radios tuned to different stations at the same time, husbands and wives arguing, mothers shouting at their children, babies crying, drunks cursing on the stairs and tenants gabbing and laughing on the front stoops. Everybody had complaints about something or someone. My university friends idealized humanity. Not my neighbors. They had a low opinion of almost everyone in the neighborhood. What are you studying? The old woman I was renting my room from asked me one day, and I told her: History? What kind? European, I replied. Aha, she said with a knowing look in her eye. The kings, the priests, the people being led by the nose, all scum. I didn't know what to reply. Despite her gloomy view of aristocracy, she fed me like a prince. In fact, the moment one entered our building, several ethnic cuisines came to compete for one's nose with their tantalizing smells, making it impossible, even with all the typical disappointments of youth, to feel sorry for oneself for long.

Still, thanks to the hurricane and the hours of darkness it imposed on me, I and many others had a kind of high school reunion with boredom. It brought about a sudden and unmistakable realization that we are only puppets jerked this way and that way by whatever device we think we are operating. With its strings loosened for the time being, there was nothing for us to do but slump idly in some chair with our heads dangling and our smiles fixed crooked, while Irene ran around the yard beating up trees like the riot police and in the process telling us what little regard she has for us personally and everything we've done over the years to make our home more attractive.

01 Sep, 2011

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Source: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/aug/31/hurricane-irene-reunion-with-boredom/
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The CIA’s Islamist Cover Up

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Ian Johnson

AP Photo/Ben Curtis

Members of the Muslim Brotherhood outside a Cairo court, February 2007. Internal CIA documents describe the movement as a potential ally against Islamist terrorism.

The tenth anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington will be accompanied by the usual solemn political pronouncements and predictable media retrospectives. Pundits will point out that the West's own economic mismanagement of the past decade has done more to weaken Europe and North America than the Islamists' attacks. Some others will note how radical Islamists are still strong in Afghanistan and point to the recent downing of a military helicopter with dozens of US troops dead. Still others will use the anniversary to pontificate on how our concerns about Islamism have given racists an excuse to tarnish an entire religion. We will also hear about how the democratic uprisings in the Arab world—Libya being the latest—have undermined Islamists (by providing the region's disgruntled masses with examples of positive, instead of destructive change).

All of these points are well and good and worth hearing again. But they shouldn't distract us from a very precise and practical problem that hasn't been addressed: the refusal of the CIA to disclose the details of its involvement with Islamist groups. In recent weeks, the agency has tried to block sections of a new book that deals with its handling of al Qaeda before and after September 11. But this is only one part of a large-scale cover-up that Western governments have been perpetrating about decades of ties to Islamist organizations. Until we clarify our murky history with radical Islam, we won't be able to understand the background of the September 11 attacks and whether our strategies today to engage the Muslim world are likely to succeed.

Of course some of this history is well known. The blowback story—how the US armed the mujahedeen, some of whom morphed into al Qaeda—has been told in book and film. We are also getting a sense now of how parts of the US-backed Pakistani military-intelligence complex have actively supported radical Islamists. Collusion between Britain and Islamist movements over the past century has also been explored. And of course, Israel's support for Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian Liberation Organization has gone down as one of the great diplomatic miscalculations of recent history.

But compared to the full scope of the issue, these insights are meager. To date, the Central Intelligence Agency continues to block access to its archives relating to radical Islam or cooperation with Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. In the course of researching my book on the Brotherhood's expansion into the West, I applied numerous times under the Freedom of Information Act to see documents concerning events in the 1950s, some of which had been confirmed by already declassified State Department cables. Inevitably the CIA responded with the blanket exception of "national security" to justify denying access to any files.

Despite the CIA's information blockade, it is clear from interviews with CIA operatives and other countries' intelligence archives that the CIA was courting groups like the Brotherhood as allies in the US's global battle against communism. In Egypt, the charge was often made by the government of Gamel Abdel Nasser that the Muslim Brotherhood was in the CIA's pay. This was also a view of some Western intelligence agencies, which flatly declared that Said Ramadan, the Swiss-based son-in-law of the group's founder, was a US agent. The agency may have—but for this we need access to its archives—colluded with Ramadan in attempting a coup against Nasser.

The CIA certainly did help the Brotherhood establish itself in Europe, helping to create the milieu that led to the September 11 attacks. The mosque in Munich that Ramadan helped found, for example, became a hotbed of anti-US activity. The man convicted as a key perpetrator of the 1993 attack against the World Trade Center had sought spiritual counseling at the mosque before leaving to carry out his attacks. And in 1998, the man believed to be al Qaeda's chief financial officer was arrested near the mosque and also sought spiritual counseling from the mosque's imam. An investigation based on this arrest traced radical Islamists right to a second mosque—the al Quds mosque in Hamburg—where three of the four 9/11 pilots worshipped, it but failed to make the final link. This isn't to say that the CIA was behind the September 11 attacks but that US collusion with Islamists in the Cold War bore bitter fruit in later years—making it imperative that we understand exactly what happened in those seemingly distant years of the 50s, 60s and 70s of the last century.

More recently, despite Washington's sometimes hostile public rhetoric toward to the Brotherhood, it is clear that the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama have tried to court the movement. Internal CIA analyses from 2006 and 2008, which I obtained, show that the Brotherhood was viewed as a positive force and potential ally—this time not against communism but Islamist terrorism: the Brotherhood was considered a moderate Islamist group and thus able to channel grievances away from violence toward the United States (even if Brotherhood theoreticians did not renounce violence against Israel or US soldiers). The State Department also used US Muslims close to the Brotherhood to reach out to Islamists in Europe. Such support has given these groups legitimacy in the United States and Europe.

The CIA is blocking the release of information because the subject remains sensitive—both for the West and the Muslim world. In Washington, the CIA could come under fire if its own archives would confirm and fill out the current sketch view of history. For the Brotherhood, amid its current re-emergence as a major political force in Egypt and other countries, it would be extremely damaging to know that illustrious figures in its history were working for the country that most exemplifies the decadent, imperialist forces it has struggled against for decades.

Revealing this history could be painful but necessary to strip away the doublespeak that both sides have used to describe their dealings with each other. This isn't to say that releasing information should be used to bash cooperation with Islamists. Clearly the United States and other Western countries need to deal with groups like the Brotherhood, and perhaps in some situations even to support them: for example if the Brotherhood really were to come to power democratically in Egypt, the United States would be obliged to deal with such a government. For the Brotherhood a case could be made that in past decades, when its members were so badly repressed by authorities in the Middle East, that some sort of help from the West was necessary to avoid destruction by the authoritarian governments that persecute it.

These are legitimate arguments. But they can only be made if the full history of these relationships is made known rather than kept hidden. To do this will require action from Congress. The CIA did not release documents concerning US intelligence dealings with Nazi officials, for example, until it was forced to by the passage of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998. This piece of legislation compelled US government agencies to release all files on their dealings with the Nazis during and after the war. It lead to an incredible flood of information on the topic, helping us understand, for example, US collaboration with ex-Nazis after the war.

We need a similar law today. This is not to draw a parallel between Islamism and Nazism—an argument is tendentious and counter-productive. The only parallel is that the US government has dealt with these questionable organizations and is so unwilling to admit this that it will take specific instructions from Congress to make these dealings public. Whatever the merits of these policies they are based on a long-standing, but still mostly secret, strategy. As Western governments seek to distinguish between "good" and "bad" Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or between the Muslim Brotherhood and more radical groups in the Middle East, understanding this strategy—and its efficacy—has never been more urgent.

31 Aug, 2011

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Source: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/aug/30/cia-islamist-cover-up/
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What the Taliban Want

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Ahmed Rashid

Al Jazeera

Mullah Mohammed Omar

An important message by Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan, has been released on the occasion of Eid—the end of Ramadan. It is the longest and by far the most forward-looking political message he has ever sent, offering the Taliban's latest views on several central issues that are uppermost in the minds of US and NATO leaders, Afghans, and governments around the region as the US begins a withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.

Mullah Omar does not rule out negotiations with the Americans or sharing power with the present Afghan government and he emphatically says that the Taliban have no interest in monopolizing power. For the first time he admits that the Taliban have been negotiating with the Americans, but he insists these talks have been about the release of prisoners and are not a political dialogue:

IE [Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan] considers [the] establishment of an independent Islamic regime as a conducive mechanism for sustainability of religious and worldly interests of the country and the countrymen. For this purpose, every legitimate option can be considered in order to reach this goal. The contacts which have been made with some parties for the release of prisoners can't be called as a comprehensive negotiation for the solution of the current imbroglio of the country. However, the Islamic Emirate, as an efficient political and military entity, has a specific and independent agenda in this regard which has been elucidated time and again.

An AP report on August 29 that quoted some US and Afghan officials as saying the talks have stalled is completely wrong according to my well-informed sources, who insist that they are continuing despite leaks to the press, as well as threats to the security of the participants and other problems. The talks have dealt with prisoner releases as part of confidence building measures to create the right atmosphere for a wider and more sustained political dialogue.

By acknowledging that there have been contacts with the Americans, Mullah Omar is sending a clear message to his fighters that future political talks are a possibility, while signaling to the Americans that he may eventually be prepared to broaden the scope of the dialogue and those already participating in it.

He categorically accepts that "all" ethnic groups "will have participation" in governing Afghanistan in the future and tries to play down the position taken by some non-Pashtuns in the former Northern Alliance that they will never negotiate with the Taliban. He opposes long-term US bases in Afghanistan and does not accept a limited withdrawal of US-NATO troops; he wants the US and NATO to "immediately" withdraw all their forces. He hopes to be at peace with his neighbors and the world, he writes, and he will do nothing to aggravate tensions. But the Taliban will not accept an imposed regime and they demand complete independence for Afghanistan. (This is as much a message to Pakistan as it is to the US.)

Significantly, no abuse is heaped on the government of President Hamid Karzai as has been done in past messages. Mullah Omar urges government officials only to end their cooperation with the "invaders." He places great importance in his message to his fighters to respect the Layha or Taliban code of conduct toward civilians, women, and children. The Taliban have been stung by repeated criticism from the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and others that much of their violence is directed toward Afghan civilians. Coming at a time when violence is at its worst and bloodshed in Afghanistan being committed both by US forces and the Taliban, this message seems a hopeful sign that talks and a negotiated settlement to end the war are a possibility.

30 Aug, 2011

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Source: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/aug/29/what-taliban-wants/
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Eyes Above the Street: The High Line’s Second Installment

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Martin Filler

Friends of the High Line

Rarely do additions to works of architecture or engineering by the same designers who created the originals attract as much comment as the initial installments. Thus there was some question as to just how much excitement could be generated by the debut this June of the second segment of the High Line, which runs between West 20th and West 30th streets.

Happily, the same elated reaction that greeted the first segment occurred again this summer, as the newly completed middle portion of the High Line revealed that rather than being simply more of the same, the park is evolving into a much more varied experience than many had anticipated. The newly completed half-mile stretch feels different from the first in that its route is straighter and narrower (two tracks wide as opposed to four in the southernmost section). It makes fewer jogs and lacks the extravagantly sweeping arc of the northern end of the viaduct, which will bring the High Line to a dramatic culmination when the entire project is finished.

Because all the park's components are being executed by the creative team comprised of two New York-based architectural and planning firms, James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, along with the Dutch landscape architect Piet Oudolf, the High Line feels wholly consistent and yet never repetitive throughout its entire mile-and-a-half length. For example, at West 26th Street, Diller Scofidio + Renfro has created the Viewing Spur, a bleacher-like observation perch that is a virtual cousin of Tenth Avenue Square, the much larger wooden amphitheater at the viaduct's widest point on West 17th Street. But the Viewing Spur differs from the Tenth Avenue Square because of a huge, empty oblong metal frame (the size of advertising billboards once mounted on the trestle's parapet) that playfully demarcates the vista onto the street below like the outline of a movie screen.

Once again, Oudolf's selection of botanical material is superb. This summer it featured such flowering perennials as allium, catmint, coral bells, cranebill, rosemary, salvia, and yarrow, along with trees and shrubs including chokeberry, holly, magnolia, redbud, roses, sassafras, and shadblow. His random-looking (though deliberately composed) planting beds simultaneously pay homage to the wildness of the High Line in its gone-to-seed phase and seamlessly accommodate the many functional requirements of a heavily trafficked pedestrian concourse.

The new segment also remedies one of the few objections the first phase of the design raised among environmentalists: the use of ipê, a tropical wood that activists have deemed ecologically destructive and unsustainable. Since then, the designers have specified reclaimed teak, which possesses the same weather-resistant properties as the controversial earlier selection.

Particular areas of the High Line have been given evocative names reminiscent of the Romantic nomenclature that Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux bestowed on Central Park's Belvedere Castle, Harlem Meer, Mineral Springs Pavilion, Rambles, and Sheep Meadow. Thus in the southernmost section of the High Line we find the Gansevoort Woodland and the Washington Grasslands, while in the newly opened center portion we now have the Chelsea Thicket, the Radial Bench, the Wildflower Field, and the Falcone Flyover—the latter a raised steel walkway that refers not to raptors on the wing but its donors (a high-flying hedge-fund manager and his wife).

Friends of the High Line

The High Line's founders and prime movers, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, offer an absorbing account of their heroic undertaking's genesis and implementation in High Line: The Inside Story of New York's Park in the Sky. The pair met in 1999 at a local community board meeting and there discovered their shared fascination with the disused elevated railway spur, which was constructed between 1929 and 1934 to bring raw materials and wholesale goods to the third-story receiving docks of warehouses, manufacturers, and food-processing plants near Manhattan's Hudson shore.

The collaborators' decade-long evolution from amateurs—David had been a magazine writer, Hammond a consultant to start-up companies—into seasoned urban planners is an uplifting coming-of-professional-age story in which two somewhat naïve and comically inexperienced enthusiasts wise up and learn what it takes to get things done in the City That Never Sleeps. Throughout, these oft-thwarted civic crusaders remained cheerily undaunted as they and overcame opposition from every quarter—an obstructionist neighborhood group called Chelsea Property Owners that inveighed against their plan, and hostile city officials who tried to thwart it.

A turning point came in 2001-2002, when the photographer Joel Sternfeld took a compelling series of images of the picturesquely decrepit train bed—a veritable urban prairie lush with nodding wildflowers and shimmering grasses—that are to the High Line what the muckraking photojournalist Jacob Riis's depictions of New York City slum dwellings in the 1890s were to the cause of housing reform: strong artistic statements but also irresistible sales tools for agents of civic betterment.

The economic benefits New York City has reaped as a direct result of the High Line are significant. The first two of the project's three segments have cost $153 million ($115 million of which has come from the municipal funds, with the balance donated by private and corporate sponsors) and, in a remarkable return on investment, have spurred some $2 billion in ancillary development, primarily housing adjacent to the park, about 2,500 apartments thus far. Those units have been selling for an average $2,000 per square foot, nearly twice the Manhattan median of $1,028.

Prices in several of the new architect-designed apartment buildings near the High Line—which include designs by a roster of celebrated avant-garde figures including Neil Denari, Jean Nouvel, Lindy Roy, and Annabelle Selldorf— have lately rivaled the most expensive residential real-estate transactions in any other part of the city. For example, the penthouse atop Shigeru Ban's eleven-story Metal Shutter Houses condominium of 2008-2011 on West 19th Street sold this summer for somewhere in the range of $13 million.

In addition, about a half-million square feet of new office space (the finest being Frank Gehry's iceberg-like IAC building of 2003-2007 on West 18th Street) and a thousand hotel rooms (the best of which are in the Mexican architect Enrique Norten's Hotel Americano of 2008-2011) have been added to the surrounding neighborhood. The High Line thus far has drawn more than four million visitors (about half from the New York metropolitan region, the rest domestic and foreign tourists), greatly benefiting local restaurants and retail businesses, and creating 12,000 jobs since 2009, an impressive figure during a period of soaring unemployment nationwide.

The "park in the sky" has also had a salutary effect on the local crime rate, with not a single serious offense reported on the High Line since it opened. That is largely attributable to Parks Enforcement Patrol officers who issue one quality-of-life summons every other day on average, mainly for drinking, but also for bicycles and dogs, which are prohibited atop the structure.

Another, less quantifiable means of crime control on the High Line is what the influential urbanologist Jane Jacobs termed "eyes-on-the-street": day-and-night pedestrian traffic and a healthy contingent of neighborhood busybodies lead to fewer opportunistic offenses, both minor and major. Because the transformed viaduct threads its way through such a densely populated district, with many apartments and hotel rooms overlooking the walkway, Jacobs's principle of informal but effective civilian surveillance is confirmed yet again.

This phenomenon's flip side has been experienced by nonplussed High Line visitors who have been treated to exhibitionistic displays by guests at Ennead Architects' Standard Hotel of 2005-2008, which straddles the walkway near the park's southern terminus. One assumes that some residents in the many new apartments that face directly onto the viaduct's midsection will follow suit.

Understandably, several American cities are attempting to replicate the High Line's enormous success, an analog to the so-called Bilbao Effect after the sensation caused by Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao of 1991-1997. In Seattle, James Corner Field Operations has been asked to replace a tumbledown elevated highway on the city's waterfront with a sequence of parks and recreation facilities, while in Atlanta the firm is undertaking a $2.8-billion conversion of the 22-mile-long railway loop that surrounds the city. But as James Corner himself has cautioned, "The High Line is not easily replicable in other cities. It's not just 'Build a cool park and they will come.' It's 'Build a cool park and connect it to a framework.'"

Other communities have realized that it can cost less to recycle defunct infrastructure than to rip it out. A Philadelphia business improvement coalition has estimated that the city's old Reading Viaduct could be rehabilitated for $14 million less than the $50 million it would take to knock it down. Those plans are tied to the recycling of an adjacent office tower into apartments, anticipating a real estate ripple effect of the sort experienced not only in the environs of the High Line, but also along New York's Fifth Avenue a century and a half ago after the creation of Central Park.

David and Hammond's High Line is above all an inspiring case study of how major city planning initiatives can be realized without either the authoritarian methods of Robert Moses—New York's mid-twentieth-century public works czar, whose pursuit of vast infrastructure and urban clearance projects often ran roughshod over democratic procedures and working-class neighborhoods—or today's characteristic commercially driven redevelopment schemes. The new book's pictorial second half includes frightening images of the Metropolitan Transit Authority's abortive 2007 attempt to redevelop the old Hudson Rail Yards—the largest remaining open parcel on the island—directly north of the High Line's upper terminus. The byzantine Hudson Yards boondoggle, which would have resulted in yet another unneeded enclave of high-end office space and luxury housing, was everything that the High Line is not: inhuman in its colossal scale, undemocratic in its exclusivity, and geared to private profit rather than public benefit.

That controversial scheme was halted by an unlikely coalition of entrenched real-estate interests—for whom this speculation by a group of insiders went beyond even their compromised notions of transparency—and community activists who saw this as a corporate land grab. Without any unnecessary editorializing, Joshua David and Robert Hammond offer the image of that postmillennial Alphaville as a clear choice between two very different visions of their city, whose strength resides in its constant self-reinvention as an Isle of Joy for all.

26 Aug, 2011

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Source: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/aug/25/eyes-above-street-high-lines-second-installment/
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Letter From Rome: Scandal Among the Plutocrats

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Ingrid D. Rowland

Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images

Piero Marrazzo at the Rome Film Festival, October 15, 2009

Italy, from many standpoints, is in dreadful shape. The news is out and inescapable. People in the rest of the world wonder why, in the face of a stagnant economy and pervasive corruption, the country continues to keep Silvio Berlusconi as its Prime Minister. The reasons are many, from inertia to resignation to the conviction that at last the man can stew in his own juices—and he certainly looks awful enough to suggest that he is no longer enjoying the position to which he clings with limpet-like tenacity.

The reasons for Italy's inaction also, however, include a well-founded fear that the left will not be able to do much better. Take, for example, Piero Marrazzo, the former presidente (governor) of Lazio— the region (roughly equivalent to a state in the US) that includes Rome. A member of the Partito Democratico, the largest party of Italy's center-left, Marrazzo gave an interview on August 15 to journalist Conchita de Gregorio of La Repubblica, addressing the scandal that pushed him out of office two years ago.

In July of 2009, Marrazzo, who had been governor since 2005, was favored for reelection the subsequent March, but then he was photographed by a gang of corrupt carabinieri (the national police) in the squalid, cocaine-filled apartment of a Brazilian transsexual. He had come in his official car, and he forked over about five thousand euros for the night of fun. After a few days of pledging to "fight on" once he had been exposed (in his undies, no less) he resigned from his position. In March 2010, the governorship went to his right-wing rival, Renata Polverini. Marrazzo's competent vice-president, Esterino Montino, had run for president in his stead, but by that point not even Romulus himself could have saved the Partito Democratico's campaign.

The scandal turned even more sordid when two of its protagonists died in circumstances that could at least raise questions. "Brenda," the transsexual prostitute with whom Marrazzo had been caught, was immolated in her tiny apartment by a fire. The Italian pusher who supplied the cocaine, severely overweight, died of an apparent overdose—or was it a heart attack?—in a suburban hotel. The four carabinieri who set up the sting have since been convicted of blackmailing Marrazzo—they wanted money to keep quiet about his special friends—along with four transsexuals associated with the sting and with the two deceased.

Marrazzo came to politics by way of television, the setting in which he met his second wife, who bravely kept up her on-camera career as a television reporter right through the media tsunami and has since discreetly left him, taking their daughter with her. (As photographs show, he wore his wedding ring at the interview.) After going into a religious retreat for two months at the ancient Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino, Marrazzo has returned to making documentaries for RAI, the state television network, which is also the family firm; Marrazzo's father, Giuseppe "Joe" Marrazzo, was a famous TV journalist, and his son claims to have entered the studios for the first time with his father at the age of 9.

What does he have to say about himself today? Twenty-four times in the course of the Repubblica interview, De Gregorio reports, Marrazzo's message was "I'm the son of Joe Marrazzo." He will admit that he made a mistake, though De Gregorio cannot push him too far on what the nature of that mistake might be.

Q: Was your mistake going to [Brenda], going there with your official car, taking drugs, trusting the wrong people, not understanding what was going on, not having told someone who could have understood, not having reported the blackmail? What mistake are you talking about?

A: A mistake bigger than any of these. My deep-seated fragility, a private need that's so hard to explain, a weakness. A man who enters public life can't have weaknesses. He should keep them under control. That's why I resigned, even though I was the victim of a felony… a victim, not the guilty party.

De Gregorio points out that two people are dead in the wake of the events that brought him down (along with his party and the campaign), but Marrazzo is on another track entirely.

Q: You talk about how hard it is to live up to expectations.

A: I know it's not nice to hear this, and it's not easy to say it, but a prostitute is extremely reassuring, an inviting presence that doesn't judge you. [Remarkably in the gender-loaded Italian language, Marrazzo manages to put all this discussion into neuter]. Transsexuals are women to the nth degree, they have an extraordinary nurturing power. That's why I came to them. Of all the paid relationships, it's the most restful. Excuse me for what I'm saying, I know there are aspects of this that are morally reprehensible, but that's how it is. A rest. I wanted to ring that doorbell every so often and have the door open.

The other issue that infuriated Lazio's voters, was, of course, the money that Marrazzo threw around as the blackmailers caught him on a hidden camera. He tells De Gregorio that this was his personal money, earned as a journalist (five thousand euros?). He fails to see that retreating to Monte Cassino, one of the great monasteries of Christendom, might smack of hubris as much as humility. He wants the public to know: "I am not a homosexual. I'm not bragging about that, I simply am not. That's how it is. I've only loved women. A lot, and with frequent reciprocity." [frequente reciprocità sounds as stilted in Italian as in English]

De Gregorio finally nails him:

Q: You were vulnerable to blackmail; that seems to me to be the point.

A: I was vulnerable to blackmail, yes. In fact it all went the way it went. But I still want it to be remembered that I resigned, that it was a private weakness, that didn't hurt anyone but my family.

(As the people who pay the governor's tax-free salary, car, driver and security detail, we taxpayers of Lazio might beg to disagree.)

To think that this pathetic creature once held the reins of an entire Italian region! Marrazzo reminds his interviewer that, "as she has just heard," people are asking him, "Presidente, when are you coming back?" It is that complete lack of connection with the real world that is condemning Marrazzo's side of the political spectrum to the same deep mistrust and seething anger that afflicts the ruling party in these dog days of August—traditionally a vacation time, but few ordinary Italians can afford much of a vacation this year. It is easy to understand why many have concluded that the entire political class is corrupt, entitled, and self-serving, incapable of running the country in any direction except into the ground. These days, when a government car goes by, someone on the street will mutter "Fascist" or something more pungent (venduto, "sellout", is one of the cleaner epithets).

Earlier in the summer, I overheard some proposed solutions to the mess, offered by two of the richest people in Italy, at a restaurant in the shadow of the Pantheon. One owes a nice portion of her family wealth to an American textile fortune, one has US citizenship and a close connection to Detroit that is saving the dynastic business; their dinner companion was unknown to me. On their other side, meanwhile, sat the US Ambassador to the Holy See. It was a particularly fertile ground in which to cultivate their discussion, which consisted in blaming the state of the economy on the Chinese and "the Americans."

Americans, they reminded one another, care only about preserving the privileges of the ruling caste. Americans keep preaching about human rights, while the homeless sleep on their streets. Americans don't realize that the Chinese own their debt. In America, money is the only thing that counts. It simply never occurred to these people that their Italian conversation, conducted increasingly loudly as it gained momentum, might be generally intelligible (like any other Romance language with Indo-European roots spoken in a European city), or that it hewed to a line one used to hear in the 70s and 80s from hairy young Communists rather than spoiled plutocrats—except the bit about the Chinese and the US debt. That, at least, evinced knowledge of current events.

In a posh coffee house a block or two down the street from the scene of this disquisition, on two occasions in the past few years, juicily indiscreet political conversations been overheard and blazoned all over the papers the following day. There is no need for Twitter in the center of Rome; a little vino will open untold floodgates. But it will take more than wine and tweets to open the eyes of the people who belong to what Italians now routinely call "la casta"—the Brahmins—to what is happening around them. (Including homeless people sleeping on the streets right here in Rome, not just amongst the Americans). Berlusconi looks awful because he is no longer having fun, not because he gets it. Marrazzo, I had heard in the days before his August 15 interview, was hoping to make a comeback.

We ordinary people are looking forward to at least three years of serious privation, thanks to an attempt to settle the Italian national debt that puts the greatest burden, as always, on salaried employees, who cannot cheat on their taxes because their incomes are registered on the computers of the Agenzia delle Entrate, the Italian IRS. And so we retreat as best we can: into the beauties of art and nature—threatened though these are by rampant speculation and criminal neglect—and the joys of food.

Like that on offer at Il Buco Toscano, Via di S. Ignazio, Rome. As we listened to the litany of American sins, we ate tagliolini with truffles, and more recently have eaten linguine with truffles and porcini mushrooms, watered (well, wined), it goes without saying, with Tuscan red. The fluffiest, most obese cat in Rome presides over the premises, but then Rome's ancient Temple of Isis, with its sculpted marble cat, is only a block away. Fortunately, the conversations are usually more brilliant than they were on that particular evening, when the plutocrats came down from Olympus.

24 Aug, 2011

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Source: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/aug/24/letter-from-rome-scandal-among-plutocrats/
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China’s ‘Liberation’ of Tibet: Rules of the Game

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Robert Barnett

Xinhua

Audience members at the ceremony for 'the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Tibet,' Lhasa, July 19, 2011

Much of the talk about Vice President Joe Biden's four-day visit to China last week centers on the man who is hosting him: Xi Jinping, expected to become the country's next president in 2012. Biden's office has said that the principal purposes of his visit are "to build a relationship with Vice-President Xi" and "to get to know China's future leadership." But working out the thinking of China's leaders has always been extremely difficult, and Xi is no exception.

Apart from an unusually rambunctious speech in 2009 when he lambasted foreigners and their "full bellies," Xi's political inclinations remain a black box. His public speeches have mostly consisted of boilerplate prose. In his most recent major speech, for example, delivered on July 19 in Lhasa, he began by saying that "the people of all ethnic groups in Tibet are chanting merrily to express their happiness and joy" and ended with a call to "fight against separatist activities by the Dalai clique." The rest was mainly about China's achievements in boosting the economy in Tibet—standard fare for Chinese leaders.

But the Lhasa speech was broadcast live on Chinese state television, an exceptional event and an indication of its national importance. Watching Xi deliver it gives a much more complex impression both of him and of China: the visual information largely conveys the opposite of Xi's words.

The footage shows that Xi delivered his speech from a viewing platform erected in a vast new square in front of the Potala Palace, the Dalai Lama's former residence in Lhasa. Banners above the stage show that the speech was part of the ceremonies marking what China calls "the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Tibet," a reference to China's assumption of sovereignty over Tibet in 1951 following its invasion a year earlier. There are frequent shots of the audience in the square, which included, according to the official Chinese media, "more than 20,000 Tibetans of all walks of life."

But the footage does not support this claim. For one thing, only two monks are shown among the 20,000 people in the audience—one of them is shown repeatedly—suggesting that Tibetans from a "walk of life" that is integral to Tibetan society were not invited. As for women, there are many in the audience, but among the 200 or so senior Chinese and Tibetan officials who are shown seated on the viewing platform, all but five are men.

Another detail stands out too: No one in the audience has a chair.

According to China Daily, Xi Jinping had brought with him 300,000 cold-proof stainless kettles, 710,000 stainless pressure cookers, 60,000 quilts, and 150 computers as gifts for the Tibetans. But, apparently, not chairs.

The audience is seated on little plastic stools, about nine inches off the ground, arranged in straight rows in the vast new square, without a single broken line in either direction. They are arranged in blocks according to their profession or ethnicity, and thus to the color of their uniform or costume. One block of six hundred or so is green, which means it is the soldiers; another block is white, which is the doctors in their lab coats; a third block is light blue, which is the primary school children in their uniforms. The black block is that of junior officials wearing suits, most of whom seem to be Chinese, and the red block is Tibetan women from some area or group who have been assigned to wear Tibetan robes of the same color.

Plastic stools arranged in front of the Potala Palace

I recall that when the stools were introduced for audiences at these mass rallies held to welcome state leaders in Tibet some ten years ago, they were seen as a sign of progress and a concession to the spectators, because presumably everyone had sat on the ground before. In the rural areas it remains like that, and official television news broadcasts in Tibet still show local leaders in county towns seated in chairs beneath lavish banners with slogans about development, lecturing Tibetans who are sitting silently in rows on the road.

The ceremony included speeches by three other Chinese leaders and one Tibetan, a local village chief, as well as a parade of marching students, militia and the military. It lasted for at least 147 minutes, according to the television footage, during which time everyone applauded on cue, at the end of each section of each speech. It must have been quite hot or tiring because some Tibetans in the square can be seen holding their heads in their hands and being comforted by other members of the audience. Occasionally one or two people get up and move, but for the most part, no one leaves his or her assigned spot. At the back of the crowd one can even see synchronized displays—words spelled out by rows of people holding up different characters that form huge slogans saying "We thank the Chinese People" and "Tibet's Future Will be Better." One could be forgiven at times for thinking that Lhasa had been taken over not by Beijing but by Pyongyang.

I was at the university in Lhasa in 2001, the last time an equally important Chinese official—Hu Jintao himself—spoke at such an event. He came to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the "liberation" and gave the same speech, almost word for word. I had seen it then on television, and the ceremony looked identical as well. In 2005 I was at Tibet University again during yet another ceremony (it was my last, because the cooperation program for our students from Columbia and other US universities was ended without explanation one year later) which that time marked the anniversary not of liberation but of Tibetans being given autonomy. Most of the Tibetans who were selected to be at that event were only told the night before that they were required to attend the ceremony the next day because of supposed security concerns. We foreigners were instructed not to leave the university until the event was over, and once we did, "not to look at anything we should not look at," though we were not told what that was.

Those who were selected had to be in the square by about 5 AM, four hours or so before the ceremony started. Some of the rules of attendance during these events are known from a unique documentary called 16 Barkor Street South, made by the brilliant independent Chinese filmmaker Duan Jinchuan when the same ceremony was held in 1995 (again, to celebrate autonomy). In his film, an official is shown ordering the Tibetans who have been selected to go to the square not to drink too much beforehand because they will not be able to go to the toilet during the event. They are also ordered to wear Tibetan clothes. And they are told that if they wear clothes that have patches, it will be a "political offense," which usually means a crime. And, at least as shown in the film, only Tibetans were required to attend, not local Chinese residents.

This year, the Tibetans in the square would again have been selected from their work units or residential committees and ordered to attend, and no one else would have been allowed to enter the square. This is at the heart of the interpretative problem surrounding the event: the crowd in the square was dwarfed by giant slogans saying "We thank you, CPC Central Committee." How to explain that choice of slogan given that most Tibetans in the audience had been forced to be there? Wouldn't most of them expect Party leaders to provide development and roads, and know that they are paid quite well to do so?

And why would Xi insist that "ethnic unity in Tibet has steadily enhanced" when the number of political protests and arrests in Tibetan areas has risen sharply in the last three years, or that "the religious beliefs of the people are fully respected and protected," when all Tibetan students and Tibetan government employees in Tibet, including those in the audience, are forbidden from any Buddhist practices at all?

Some aspects of these events cannot be seen from the television footage alone; one has to be there on the ground. After the ceremony in 2005, we were all allowed out on the streets once the formal events had ended, and so I went to the Post Office, near the exit of the square, and joined a vast crowd of curious Tibetans to watch the participants as they left. But what we saw coming out of the square had not been visible on the television screen: hundreds of armed troops followed by armored personnel carriers, riot control vehicles, water-cannon trucks, barbed-wire laying machines, vehicles with gun turrets and other forms of military hardware.

The military vehicles and the troops were not visible in the footage of the ceremony this year either, but they were surely there again. Perhaps there is an underlying view that all Tibetans are rebels thirsting for a war. If so, it would explain why the head of China's army had been sent to sit next to Xi Jinping on the stage during the ceremony. It would also explain why there were no chairs: presumably they are seen as potential weapons in the hands of imagined Tibetan rioters, more threatening than plastic stools.

Everyone can understand why China is proud of improving Tibetan infrastructure and wants to maintain its rule over Tibet, but it is not clear why its leaders, or even ordinary Chinese, expect forcing Tibetans to stage rituals of mass gratitude to Xi Jinping and the Chinese government not to fuel resentment. In any event, resentment seems to be spreading among Tibetans: last week on August 15 another Tibetan burnt himself to death, others say they have been tortured after staging minor protests, at least three of the 13 Tibetan areas in China remain closed to foreigners, and the state's officially selected Panchen Lama cannot visit a monastery without a major security operation to prevent unrest.

How does Xi Jinping rationalize the practice of mass displays of forced gratitude, or the decision not to allow his Tibetan audience to sit on real chairs? Scholars talk of these rituals as a throwback to imperial traditions, as the legacy of Leninism, or as China's way of dealing with the non-Chinese nationalities on its borders. But no one knows how leaders justify these practices to themselves. Joe Biden and the other US officials tasked with fathoming the logic of governance in China will not find the answer in their current visit. But at least they will get chairs.

22 Aug, 2011

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Source: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/aug/22/chinas-liberation-tibet-rules-game/
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