Left Flank

I've watched coverage of Senator Obama's relationship with Reverend Jeremiah Wright pinching my nose. Perhaps, as Ross Douthat argued in another diavlog, the MSM's coverage and performances, showcasing a midrange between platform wonkery and character, are as good as Americans can expect.

Yet, I'm still dismayed. I expected more honesty about all the communities in America, and I expected Obama to lead the discussion. His dismissal of Reverend Wright smacked of opportunism, from a candidate, who, although speaking of transcending race, has the rhetorical ability, intelligence, and pulpit now to distance himself from his opponents. He could speak his mind to the people, as the people speak truth to power. If Douthat is right, Obama has a much steeper hill to climb for me to trust him now. Instead, he's balking.

I worry about the compromises I will have to make between the two Democratic candidates, between two politicians whose platforms I do not fully support. Both support universal health care, so I can hold my nose and vote Democratic. But, I'll be holding my breath for four years, on foreign and fiscal reforms.

Here's an excellent discussion about Reverend Wright, probably the best I've read or heard in the past few days.

Niece's First Birthday Party

Last Wednesday, my niece had her first birthday, and family, friends, and my brother-in-law's colleagues—who paid for the feast at a Busan buffet restaurant—got together for the ceremony.

For Koreans, the first birthday is very important because historically few children survived into childhood and adulthood. Families, friends, and colleagues have a celebration. The highlight of the party is when the child chooses between symbolic objects: pencil (education); money (prosperity), and thread (long life). The favored choice is for education.

BTW, she chose the pencil!

Someone should tell Bill Maher that laughing is neither good comedic form, nor an intelligible argument. But, Richard Dawkins is more than funny, and intelligible, enough to compensate.

The older I get I just return to my undergrad days and what I too quickly heard and read then—including about discussing God.

One would think Thailand could have at least solved its Muslim problem in its southern provinces during its period of military rule. Especially, that is, when one considers that the southernmost provinces were supposedly one cause for the 2005 coup Thailand is just now recovering from.

Violence has flickered in the south ever since Thailand annexed the region, which was formerly an independent sultanate, in 1902 and began trying to assimilate its mainly Malay-speaking Muslim people into a Thai-speaking, Buddhist nation. In the past three years, more than 1,700 have been killed by suspected militants, the security forces and unknown assailants. Three days before this week's anniversary, a soldier was killed by a bomb as he guarded monks begging for alms in Narathiwat city, the capital of the province in which Tak Bai is situated. Four days later, gunmen opened fire outside a mosque in a nearby village, killing an imam.

Earlier this year, Thaksin Shinawatra, the then prime minister, gave the army commander, Sonthi Boonyaratglin, «full authority» to quell the unrest. But General Sonthi, a rare Thai Muslim in a senior post, wanted to negotiate with the rebels; Mr Thaksin did not. This may have been one reason for the coup that the army chief led last month. Surayud Chulanont, a retired general and now interim prime minister, promises a softer approach to the conflict.

In the past week he has toured neighbouring countries, seeking advice on the conflict. In Jakarta, Mr Surayud said the peace process under way in Indonesia's breakaway Aceh province would serve as a model. In Kuala Lumpur, he won promises of co-operation from Abdullah Badawi, the prime minister of Malaysia, which Mr Thaksin used to accuse of sheltering militant leaders. It was revealed that Mr Badawi's predecessor, Mahathir Mohamad, had been brokering secret talks between Thai officials and southern separatists even before Mr Thaksin's downfall.

But, General Surayud lost to the Buddhist hardliners.

Former Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont, a retired Army general, won praise in 2006 for apologizing for past government abuses in the south, including the breakup of a demonstration in 2004 that led to the deaths of more than 80 Muslim men in Army custody.

He also promised broad reconciliation and a redress of past injustices, raising hopes of a judicial reckoning for security forces implicated in abuses.

But a string of setbacks and political infighting caused his olive branch to wither, leaving Army hard-liners a free hand to go back on the offensive. "Surayud said the right things," says a Western diplomat in Bangkok. "It was a nice symbolic gesture, a step in the right direction, but there was no follow-through."

Now, Thailand is back to the original idea: provincial autonomy. And, fighting between the civilian government and the military.

It's as if two years never happened!

I'm undecided about buying former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's posthumously published plea for Islamic and civilizational «Reconciliation». Mostly, I can't forgive her for abetting A.Q. Khan to build his uranium bomb (and, recall her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, got Khan started), but The Economist is about as even-handed as I care to read about Ms. Bhutto and keep considering a purchase.

Much of this book's argument has been rehearsed before. Bhutto defends Islam's liberal, tolerant traditions. The first person to embrace the religion, she points out, was a woman, Bibi Khadijah, later to become the Prophet's wife. And she debunks as “convenient and simplistic” the notion that Islam and democracy are somehow incompatible. Yet her own political overview of Muslim countries tends also to be rather simplistic.

She tackles head-on the thesis of Samuel Huntington's essay and book, “The Clash of Civilisations”, declaring herself a “reconciliationist”, not a “clasher”. She even proposes her blueprint for reconciliation: a kind of Islamic Marshall plan, using the petrodollars of the Gulf and the riches of the West, Japan and China to assist “the Islamic world to leap into modernity”.

The observation that economic backwardness fuels anti-Western feeling and fanaticism, however, is hardly new. Familiar, too, is her analysis of the culpability of the West in propping up dictators where they seem strategically useful, undermining its claims to be promoting democracy. The victims of this hypocrisy include, of course, her own country, which, like a recent cover of this newspaper, she calls “the most dangerous place in the world”. Her effort to make it safer led her last year to negotiate with Pervez Musharraf, the president she had long reviled as an unprincipled military dictator. She recounts the pragmatic haggling that enabled her return, at the expense, her critics would argue, of the unity of the civilian democratic opposition.

Here as elsewhere in this book and in Bhutto's autobiography, “Daughter of the East”, there is a tension between the fervour of her expressed ideals and the reality of her political life. Her refusal to acknowledge any mistakes during her deeply disappointing stints as prime minister may be inevitable in a campaigning politician. But it made it hard to share her enthusiasm for what she might achieve at the third attempt.

But, yes, she was brave.

The day started at 8 am with ddeok mandu guk and side dishes, makgeoli, bowing completely to the floor three times twice in a row, and holding a baby. It's ending quietly with a book.

Interestingly, I found this January 10, 1972 Time article featuring President Richard M. Nixon and the significance of the Year of the Rat,

"…a time of timidity and meanness."

May we all find our fortune somehow this trying year!

Two aspects of Black Robe stand out.

Firstly, there is the irony, that the Hurons, converted to Christianity by French Jesuits, are subjugated by the Iroquois. The ending notes leave this illogical impression, post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Secondly, most of the narrative takes place within the dream of an Iroquois.

Considering that tribes from Virginia's Powhatan to the Creek used European states and the US to pit against their enemies, Black Robe deserves its surreal reputation.

I read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy because of an unflattering review of the movie, The Golden Compass. in The Atlantic. What first impressed me about that article was the author's canny honesty about his role as the original author on a Hollywood movie using an adapted script.

In discussing the film, he chose his words carefully, acknowledging that his role now is to be «sensible» so that the next two films get made. Nonetheless, he was honest about what was missing: «They do know where to put the theology,» he said, «and that's off the film.»

Long silence. Then, «I think if everything that is made explicit in the book or everything that is implied clearly in the book or everything that can be understood by a close reading of the book were present in the film, they'd have the biggest hit they've ever had in their lives. If they allowed the religious meaning of the book to be fully explicit, it would be a huge hit. Suddenly, they'd have letters of appreciation from people who felt this but never dared say it. They would be the heroes of liberal thought, of freedom of thought … And it would be the greatest pity if that didn't happen.

«I didn't put that very well. What I mean is that I want this film to succeed in every possible way. And what I don't want to do, you see, is talk the other two films out of existence. So I'll stop there.»

I did watch the movie, and I can only say, that Sam Elliot and Nicole Kidman are Lee Scoresby and Mrs. Coulter.

And then, I learned the books were based on Pullman's appreciation for John Milton, and the Enlightenment. Having studied Milton in college for a seminar one semester, all his poems and political works included, I chose immediately to read the first children's fiction I've read since I was actually a child. I only read the first book of C.S. Lewis' Narnia series, which I cannot really recall distinctly, and only Tolkien's The Hobbit. The first of Pullman's trilogy, The Golden Compass (all three books are named for idiosyncratic gizmos essential for understanding), is mostly set in the snowy sub-arctic wastes, like the other two volumes, and, although I recognized the allusion, I labored to keep reading. What Amanda Marcotte says, that the "...books are incredibly imaginative, so I churned right through them, even when the prose was tepid" is an experience I can second. Unlike a child, I bent my head into the reading for the payoff at the end.

Instead of allowing Pullman to hit me over the head with what Marcotte rightly calls the "Christianist temper tantrum", I concentrated conscientiously on the themes of "...attachment to self and to others and how religion struggles to turn people against themselves and against each other so that we're weak and stupid and easier to control." The child who reads Harry Potter will not like Lyra Belacqua or Will Parry. Both girl and boy are precocious pre-adolescents with self-consumed parents, either for good or bad reasons, and have endured fuller lives stuffed with lessons both have mastered alone. The child who dreams of running away and finding the gypsies, or just wonders what homeless people do at night, not just despising his/her parents for their apparent conformity, is the target audience. In the end, religion is as much a crutch as a cause.

Those readers who have found the last installment, The Amber Spyglass, disappointing, are only half-right. The problem is that the second book, The Subtle Knife, doesn't pull its weight, leaving the third book to cover the chronology at a gallop. Pullman could have introduced Mary Malone, Lyra's and Will's ostensible mentor, earlier. Lord Asriel also seems to disappear until the third book. The mechanics of multi-dimensionality could also have been explored more fully. In The Amber Spyglass, as a result, Lyra's trip to the Land of the Dead is compromised. Here was a series of scenes with classical and biblical allusions that gave Pullman a chance to rebut Dante, and he balked. Resolving the conflict with the harpies guarding the dead by means of resolving Lyra's childish habit of telling lies is also excellent. If for nothing else, Lyra revealed torn from her soul, or shape-shifting daemon, caused me pages of anguish wondering if the two would ever meet again. Similarly, the battle sequences seemed narratively threadbare. Only Pullman's diction slowed down the rushing torrent of the badly scripted chronology.

Unfortunately, Pullman failed to update Milton for 21st Century, and leaves Dante the field for bold visions of the afterlife. Scripting God as an archangel tortured by Enoch, reinvigorated as the archangel, Metatron, with a role as a puppet ruler and forbidden to die, is a small flash of brilliance swamped by poor strategic judgment. There are also some wonderful characters, like Lee Scoresby, Farder Caram, Mrs. Coulter, and Iorek Byrnison. Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter are the archetypical self-consumed adults whose service to the universe is small compensation for the harm inflicted on their daughter, Lyra.

No matter what other readers might have felt, I thought the ending was surprisingly brilliant, although that doesn't compensate for the strategic mistakes getting there. Explaining first love without resorting to fairy tales that teach girls and boys to sacrifice themselves in ways adults cannot is laudable. Narrating the sequence of how a relationship begins and grows, and then ends, is also important. The picture of Lyra, resolute to live her life, yet grateful for the love given her, is a fortunate ending worthy of many new stories in many new worlds.