30 December 2013
Does Anyone Care?
http://m.spiegel.de/international/world/a-940969.html#spRedirectedFrom=www&referrrer=http://t.co/5zESIxzSfw
28 August 2013
Steely Dan Live at the Nokia Theater August 25, 2013 - A Review by Randy Shiner
Steely Dan at the Nokia last Sunday night, August 25, 2013, was nothing short of masterful in every way. I was awed by the musicianship I have been listening to since Can't Buy a Thrill (1974), live for the first time. The consistency in Steely Dan that still makes them (it?) relevant today is Fagen and Becker's continuing demand for excellence in each individual band member (they have created enemies over the years because of this) whom they employ, and of course those fat Fagen/Becker riffs and lyrics that are, for lack of a better word, timeless because they deal with universal, sometimes seemy human issues that will never, ever, be replaced by a computer. A computer will never know the Cuervo Gold or the fine Columbian.
Especially noteworthy to me, in addition to, obviously, Fagen and Becker, was the playing of Jon Herington on guitar. He played the guitar like Jimi Hendrix when the occasion warranted it, and like Wes Montgomery when the time was right to go off on a jazz solo, and did so as if he was at the Vanguard in front of 50 people, not several thousand.
Keith Carlock on the drumset was nothing short of rock solid in his attack and timekeeping, and went off on many beautiful, creative flourishes that were just awesome to behold. I couldn't imagine, at times, what I was seeing, as in the lengthy drum solo about three-quarters the way through "Aja". The sound of his bass drum came through my chest 29 rows back in CC.
The wonderful thing about this live performance is that they allowed themselves the artistic freedom to explore well-known Fagen/Becker phrases on their own, much as a hard bop jazz musician take the head of a piece and improvises musically on that theme, eventually circling back to the theme itself. What a magnificent performance.
Setlist
Blueport
(Gerry Mulligan cover) (The Bipolar Allstars only)
Your Gold Teeth
Aja
Hey Nineteen
Show Biz Kids
Black Cow
Black Friday
Time Out of Mind
Daddy Don't Live in That New York City No More
(Walter Becker sings)
Deacon Blues
Bodhisattva
Rikki Don't Lose That Number
(Tour debut)
Do It Again
I Want to (Do Everything for You)
(Joe Tex cover) (Band Intros by Walter Becker)
Josie
Peg
My Old School
Reelin' in the Years
Encore:
Kid Charlemagne
Untouchables Theme
(Nelson Riddle cover) (The Bipolar Allstars only)
Especially noteworthy to me, in addition to, obviously, Fagen and Becker, was the playing of Jon Herington on guitar. He played the guitar like Jimi Hendrix when the occasion warranted it, and like Wes Montgomery when the time was right to go off on a jazz solo, and did so as if he was at the Vanguard in front of 50 people, not several thousand.
Keith Carlock on the drumset was nothing short of rock solid in his attack and timekeeping, and went off on many beautiful, creative flourishes that were just awesome to behold. I couldn't imagine, at times, what I was seeing, as in the lengthy drum solo about three-quarters the way through "Aja". The sound of his bass drum came through my chest 29 rows back in CC.
The wonderful thing about this live performance is that they allowed themselves the artistic freedom to explore well-known Fagen/Becker phrases on their own, much as a hard bop jazz musician take the head of a piece and improvises musically on that theme, eventually circling back to the theme itself. What a magnificent performance.
Setlist
Blueport
(Gerry Mulligan cover) (The Bipolar Allstars only)
Your Gold Teeth
Aja
Hey Nineteen
Show Biz Kids
Black Cow
Black Friday
Time Out of Mind
Daddy Don't Live in That New York City No More
(Walter Becker sings)
Deacon Blues
Bodhisattva
Rikki Don't Lose That Number
(Tour debut)
Do It Again
I Want to (Do Everything for You)
(Joe Tex cover) (Band Intros by Walter Becker)
Josie
Peg
My Old School
Reelin' in the Years
Encore:
Kid Charlemagne
Untouchables Theme
(Nelson Riddle cover) (The Bipolar Allstars only)
09 June 2013
Is God Listening? (Written July, 2010)
There was a movie a fairly long time ago starring Ralph Fiennes cast as a futuristic drug dealer in a city, I think it was a dystopic, futuristic Los Angeles, that was mainly colored in shades of gray, dark, dank, smoky choking gray. The title of it was "Strange Days". That's been the theme of several memorable trinkets of artists' minds for, I'm guessing, centuries. Everyone, regardless of the era in which they then find themselves, thinks their days are strange.
In 1980, I thought it was weird that a movie actor could be elected President of the United States. I dutifully protested, but it was no use - we Americans love our celebrities and Ronnie was only the beginning of a trend that would see celebrities transmogrify into politicians, and conversely saw the rise of artists staying artists, but becoming more political, and the worse the country got, the more political they seemed to get. It's not always with relish that I remember the Bush II years, but who can remember the Dixie Chicks getting slimed by the Republican Party and the howling conservative punditry whine and moan that a country act could actually be against a war. What I thought were strange days in 1980 when a middling B-movie actor rose up from the Hollywood walk of fame to the White House and changed the way that my generation viewed economics, politics and money, not that the latter two are separable, for it's accepted wisdom, no secret, that campaign funds and their contributors don't always give money to a political candidate for wholly altruistic reasons.
Barack Obama has, in the first half of his presidency, done more to alter the course of history - the final results are unknown at this point - than any President since Reagan and in all honesty, as a 19 year old during the 1980 primary season and election, I didn't really understand the impact of his brand of conservatism until after my catastrophic surgery, or, more accurately, the catastrophic combination of a poor economy coupled with being a sole practitioner lawyer coupled with an infected incision from my fourth major abdominal surgery since I was 17 years old that resulted in being attached to a wound vacuum for 6 months, most of that time flat on my back with a gash in the middle of my abdomen. Today, I have a beautiful abdominal hernia as a constant reminder of the harsh reality of not only the paper-thin fragility of my health but the extent to which the course of history was changing, a course for which I was utterly unprepared. My generation, children of the 70s, was a little too giddy with the notions of richness to which we were all deluded into thinking, without much thought, we were all entitled by virtue of our Americaness. Our Americanity.
We scoffed at our grandparents who knew the hardships of world war, of depression, and of incurable illnesses that we now take for granted can be cured or at least have death delayed. But the pain for those who lived is just now coming home to roost like Reverend Wright's chickens in the form of a reshaping of our lives and expectations for not only ourselves, but of our children, who are growing up in a world that is changing so rapidly, so inexorably, as it always has, just not at the speed of light with the help of silicon chips in combination with natural curiosity and evil, all of which has spread throughout a world in which those speaking for boundaries that do not correspond with ethnicities and religions which find a harder sell to the public, at least without force, as in the case of the so-called People's Republic of China, Myanmar, Chechnya and too many other places where old nation-states, formed as the result of wars in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, mean less than ever.
Where Reagan spoke of the power of the individual, we have seen what too much individuality has cost the USA: a loss of focus on the necessity of community, of the collective, of the greatest good for the greatest number of people. A government that gets completely out of the way of individuals to carry on naturally results in the few being able to create systems of government that work for them, for the privileged few at the expense of and on the backs of ordinary people who are unable to recognize, nevermind being able to game, the systems that they had no part in creating and in fact which are completely against their interests, despite advertisements that convince them, us, that wealth would eventually trickle down to quench the thirst of the middle class for success as they have had it defined for them. And what is left? A country and a people lost, at the beginning of a fork in a road that no-one knows the route of. Displacement. Devastation. Educations that served only to continue a system that for too many people no longer exists.
If these diffuse thoughts seem confused, it's only because they are. I have to admit that I've never been more confused about life than now. What is the meaning of money for me? I haven't come to a firm conclusion, but it's way different today than it was 10 years ago. Going hungry for awhile, forced to eat only two meals a day, and learning to love the variety of Lean Cuisine meals, losing my apartment, my car and everything that I used to own that was in storage (sold out from under me without my knowledge last Tuesday, July 9, 2010) will do that. Hard times and lived suffering, as opposed to reading about it or seeing it on television causes life to be whittled down to its bare essentials. I know what's important in this life. But even that knowledge sometimes isn't enough to explain what has happened to our collective consciences.
Beaten up. Body decaying. Religion meaningless. Is God Listening? Are we talking loud enough? Can we understand finally what our grandparents were speaking about from their tales of the 1930s? Thank God for Studs Terkel, but _Hard Times_ could only be appreciated, sadly, if you've lived it yourself. Reading and being are definitely not the same. Just ask me.
In 1980, I thought it was weird that a movie actor could be elected President of the United States. I dutifully protested, but it was no use - we Americans love our celebrities and Ronnie was only the beginning of a trend that would see celebrities transmogrify into politicians, and conversely saw the rise of artists staying artists, but becoming more political, and the worse the country got, the more political they seemed to get. It's not always with relish that I remember the Bush II years, but who can remember the Dixie Chicks getting slimed by the Republican Party and the howling conservative punditry whine and moan that a country act could actually be against a war. What I thought were strange days in 1980 when a middling B-movie actor rose up from the Hollywood walk of fame to the White House and changed the way that my generation viewed economics, politics and money, not that the latter two are separable, for it's accepted wisdom, no secret, that campaign funds and their contributors don't always give money to a political candidate for wholly altruistic reasons.
Barack Obama has, in the first half of his presidency, done more to alter the course of history - the final results are unknown at this point - than any President since Reagan and in all honesty, as a 19 year old during the 1980 primary season and election, I didn't really understand the impact of his brand of conservatism until after my catastrophic surgery, or, more accurately, the catastrophic combination of a poor economy coupled with being a sole practitioner lawyer coupled with an infected incision from my fourth major abdominal surgery since I was 17 years old that resulted in being attached to a wound vacuum for 6 months, most of that time flat on my back with a gash in the middle of my abdomen. Today, I have a beautiful abdominal hernia as a constant reminder of the harsh reality of not only the paper-thin fragility of my health but the extent to which the course of history was changing, a course for which I was utterly unprepared. My generation, children of the 70s, was a little too giddy with the notions of richness to which we were all deluded into thinking, without much thought, we were all entitled by virtue of our Americaness. Our Americanity.
We scoffed at our grandparents who knew the hardships of world war, of depression, and of incurable illnesses that we now take for granted can be cured or at least have death delayed. But the pain for those who lived is just now coming home to roost like Reverend Wright's chickens in the form of a reshaping of our lives and expectations for not only ourselves, but of our children, who are growing up in a world that is changing so rapidly, so inexorably, as it always has, just not at the speed of light with the help of silicon chips in combination with natural curiosity and evil, all of which has spread throughout a world in which those speaking for boundaries that do not correspond with ethnicities and religions which find a harder sell to the public, at least without force, as in the case of the so-called People's Republic of China, Myanmar, Chechnya and too many other places where old nation-states, formed as the result of wars in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, mean less than ever.
Where Reagan spoke of the power of the individual, we have seen what too much individuality has cost the USA: a loss of focus on the necessity of community, of the collective, of the greatest good for the greatest number of people. A government that gets completely out of the way of individuals to carry on naturally results in the few being able to create systems of government that work for them, for the privileged few at the expense of and on the backs of ordinary people who are unable to recognize, nevermind being able to game, the systems that they had no part in creating and in fact which are completely against their interests, despite advertisements that convince them, us, that wealth would eventually trickle down to quench the thirst of the middle class for success as they have had it defined for them. And what is left? A country and a people lost, at the beginning of a fork in a road that no-one knows the route of. Displacement. Devastation. Educations that served only to continue a system that for too many people no longer exists.
If these diffuse thoughts seem confused, it's only because they are. I have to admit that I've never been more confused about life than now. What is the meaning of money for me? I haven't come to a firm conclusion, but it's way different today than it was 10 years ago. Going hungry for awhile, forced to eat only two meals a day, and learning to love the variety of Lean Cuisine meals, losing my apartment, my car and everything that I used to own that was in storage (sold out from under me without my knowledge last Tuesday, July 9, 2010) will do that. Hard times and lived suffering, as opposed to reading about it or seeing it on television causes life to be whittled down to its bare essentials. I know what's important in this life. But even that knowledge sometimes isn't enough to explain what has happened to our collective consciences.
Beaten up. Body decaying. Religion meaningless. Is God Listening? Are we talking loud enough? Can we understand finally what our grandparents were speaking about from their tales of the 1930s? Thank God for Studs Terkel, but _Hard Times_ could only be appreciated, sadly, if you've lived it yourself. Reading and being are definitely not the same. Just ask me.
03 January 2012
13 December 2011
06 December 2011
This is Israel?
This is Israel? Not the one I love | The Jewish Chronicle
This is a messed up, sad, situation.
30 November 2011
02 September 2011
Religion as Idolatry
Today I read that eight people were killed in Afghanistan after a pastor in Florida conducted a mass burning of Korans. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/world/asia/03afghanistan.html?hp
The pastor is claimed to be feeling vindicated because it showed how evil radical Islamists are. I would agree with Pastor Jones that radical Islamists are evil, or deluded people. To me, the burning of a book isn't worth killing anyone over, though I am reminded of Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, the night of broken glass that was sponsored by the Nazi government in Germany that marked the beginning of the Holocaust - the mass, efficient killing of Europe's Jews. That said, I wouldn't leave the classification of deluded only to radical Islamists. Their deluded Jewish and Christian brethren who hold views that I can only call religious idolatry are as guilty of promoting hate and violence among the world's peoples.
My Ishmaelite cousins got really, really pissed off not too long ago at some European newspaper cartoonists who they felt drew the prophet Mohammed in an unflattering light. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
People died because of this bullshit. And to me, there are enough fanatics of every faith who fail to see the allegory that is inherent in religion and seek to find every single article of the truth of life in words that were written thousands (in the case of the Jews and Christians) and 800-900 years (in the case of Muslims) of years ago that describe circumstances that are physically impossible.
In the case of this play, enough zealous, fanatic Christians, of the sort who think that killing doctors who perform abortions is acceptable, will latch on to calls such as yours and start doing exactly what you noted at the bottom of your email - bomb threats and the like.
To me, no religion, at least not one that can speak to me, can have any kind of human form, for that, to me, is not what God is as I think of him/her/it. God is a formless creator and it's only because people many years ago (beginning with the Jews who founded Christianity) could not deal with such abstract notions that somehow actual living, breathing men like Jesus and Mohammed became deities. Moses is not a deity, so please do not confuse his status with that of Jesus or Mohammed.
Please don't take offense at what I have written - it's not intended that way but is, I assure you, what is in my heart and why I am and will always be a happy Jew. We don't have any problems with blasphemous drawings or art because our one God (and yours - I am not sure of how exactly Jesus got to be a deity) is a formless creature, without human characteristics as we understand them, except and apart from the soul which he/she/it imparted to every one of us here on this earth.
The pastor is claimed to be feeling vindicated because it showed how evil radical Islamists are. I would agree with Pastor Jones that radical Islamists are evil, or deluded people. To me, the burning of a book isn't worth killing anyone over, though I am reminded of Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, the night of broken glass that was sponsored by the Nazi government in Germany that marked the beginning of the Holocaust - the mass, efficient killing of Europe's Jews. That said, I wouldn't leave the classification of deluded only to radical Islamists. Their deluded Jewish and Christian brethren who hold views that I can only call religious idolatry are as guilty of promoting hate and violence among the world's peoples.
My Ishmaelite cousins got really, really pissed off not too long ago at some European newspaper cartoonists who they felt drew the prophet Mohammed in an unflattering light. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
People died because of this bullshit. And to me, there are enough fanatics of every faith who fail to see the allegory that is inherent in religion and seek to find every single article of the truth of life in words that were written thousands (in the case of the Jews and Christians) and 800-900 years (in the case of Muslims) of years ago that describe circumstances that are physically impossible.
In the case of this play, enough zealous, fanatic Christians, of the sort who think that killing doctors who perform abortions is acceptable, will latch on to calls such as yours and start doing exactly what you noted at the bottom of your email - bomb threats and the like.
To me, no religion, at least not one that can speak to me, can have any kind of human form, for that, to me, is not what God is as I think of him/her/it. God is a formless creator and it's only because people many years ago (beginning with the Jews who founded Christianity) could not deal with such abstract notions that somehow actual living, breathing men like Jesus and Mohammed became deities. Moses is not a deity, so please do not confuse his status with that of Jesus or Mohammed.
Please don't take offense at what I have written - it's not intended that way but is, I assure you, what is in my heart and why I am and will always be a happy Jew. We don't have any problems with blasphemous drawings or art because our one God (and yours - I am not sure of how exactly Jesus got to be a deity) is a formless creature, without human characteristics as we understand them, except and apart from the soul which he/she/it imparted to every one of us here on this earth.
In sum, I really hope that fanatical Christians just take this all in stride as they have in the past. I am reminded of the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit many years ago at, I believe, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where he exhibited a piece of "art" which was an acrylic box with a glass of urine in the middle of it, with a cross placed in the glass. To me, that was an artist's expression, as is this latest trifle that is evidently causing quite a stir in the Muslim community. I just hope no-one dies on its account. Life is too precious.
19 April 2011
Thoughts on Richard Goldstone on Passover : Je VOUS accuse!
Thoughts on Richard Goldstone on Passover: Je VOUS accuse!
Richard Goldstone is literally a lily livered traitor to mankind as well as the Jewish people. On the completion of the first full day that we celebrate our freedom from horrible slavery, we are reminded that he has given our enemies the material they could use to not just enslave us, but to question our very existence. Let us hope that there is a God on this night because the Jewish people are in trouble in so many ways, and Goldstone is partially responsible for giving our enemies a particularly and sadly effective weapon against us: world public opinion that only listens to the loudest noise, and then only for a 24 hour newscycle.
I am quite positive that in his arrogance, born of growing up in an environment where apartheid was law, he convinced himself that if he could make peace between blacks and whites in South Africa, he could make peace between the Arabs and the Jews. Such arrogance led him to commit treason against mankind in general and his own Jewish people in particular. If he wasn't Jewish and my own brother, he should do the honorable thing and commit hari-kiri, if of course you could assume he has any honor left.
I really don't think so, and his article in the Washington Post was just a bunch of diplomatic bullshit to try to get his people's affection back by stating what was then obvious and is moreso now: that no more then, and probably less now, could the IDF ever be capable of institutions run by people who would systemically attack civilians intentionally. We are Jews. Jews don't commit those sorts of crimes systemically or intentionally without punishment. People expect too much from us and therein lies the hatred fanned by the traitor Richard Goldstone.
Richard Goldstone is literally a lily livered traitor to mankind as well as the Jewish people. On the completion of the first full day that we celebrate our freedom from horrible slavery, we are reminded that he has given our enemies the material they could use to not just enslave us, but to question our very existence. Let us hope that there is a God on this night because the Jewish people are in trouble in so many ways, and Goldstone is partially responsible for giving our enemies a particularly and sadly effective weapon against us: world public opinion that only listens to the loudest noise, and then only for a 24 hour newscycle.
I am quite positive that in his arrogance, born of growing up in an environment where apartheid was law, he convinced himself that if he could make peace between blacks and whites in South Africa, he could make peace between the Arabs and the Jews. Such arrogance led him to commit treason against mankind in general and his own Jewish people in particular. If he wasn't Jewish and my own brother, he should do the honorable thing and commit hari-kiri, if of course you could assume he has any honor left.
I really don't think so, and his article in the Washington Post was just a bunch of diplomatic bullshit to try to get his people's affection back by stating what was then obvious and is moreso now: that no more then, and probably less now, could the IDF ever be capable of institutions run by people who would systemically attack civilians intentionally. We are Jews. Jews don't commit those sorts of crimes systemically or intentionally without punishment. People expect too much from us and therein lies the hatred fanned by the traitor Richard Goldstone.
02 April 2011
Elmo Hope
Elmo Hope was one of New York's finest jazz pianists who sadly died way too young of a heroin overdose in 1967. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmo_Hope
09 February 2011
La Nevada Blues by Gil Evans
Just back from Bloomington where I saw Mitch in concert. This is video from last semester's concert at the Musical Arts Center, so you can get an idea of where he's playing and how he's progressing as a musician. It was just so amazing to see him progress to this level and the sky is literally the limit for him. Oh to be young AND talented.
29 November 2010
Airport Security: Let's Profile Muslims
View from the corner booth: Enough politically correct BS and playing Masterpiece Theater at the nation's airports. If we want to get serious about airline security, we will do this in a precise, targeted way. How disgusting is it to see a little old purple haired lady from Des Moines getting patted down or taken to secondary inspection. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the lines and aggravation the flying public go through every day is a joke, meant to make us feel good, giving us the illusion of security. Perhaps it's worked. We haven't had any more 9/11 - type disasters, but taking off shoes because some genius terrorist figured out how to put explosives in his shoes? Touching our private parts, scanning us to see if we haven't jammed a hand-grenade into our Fruit of the Looms or Victoria's Secret panties? Let's just all fly naked and be done with it. The evidence, and it is evidence, is in: most, if not all of the current threats come from Muslims from particular countries. If we don't do this, we're just dumb. Flying should be a pleasure and I shouldn't have to feel like a criminal when I go through an airport. Read this article and make up your own mind.
Randy Shiner
Airport Security: Let's Profile Muslims
by Asra Q. Nomani Info
Asra Q. Nomani is the author of Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam. She is co-director of the Pearl Project, an investigation into the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Her activism for women's rights at her mosque in W.V. is the subject of a PBS documentary, The Mosque in Morgantown. She recently published a monograph, Milestones for a Spiritual Jihad: Toward an Islam of Grace. asra@asranomani.com
In the wake of yet another Muslim terror plot, we can't ignore the threat profile any longer—or the solution. Asra Q. Nomani argues the case for religious and racial profiling.
For all those holiday travelers negotiating the Transportation Security Administration’s new cop-a-feel strategy, there is a difficult solution we need to consider: racial and religious profiling.
Passenger Angela Johnson talks to reporters about security and Thanksgiving holiday travel at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, Georgia on Nov. 24, 2010. (Photo: Chris Rank / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
As an American Muslim, I’ve come to recognize, sadly, that there is one common denominator defining those who’ve got their eyes trained on U.S. targets: MANY of them are Muslim—like the Somali-born teenager arrested Friday night for a reported plot to detonate a car bomb at a packed Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in downtown Portland, Oregon.
We have to talk about the taboo topic of profiling because terrorism experts are increasingly recognizing that religious ideology makes terrorist organizations and terrorists more likely to commit heinous crimes against civilians, such as blowing an airliner out of the sky. Certainly, it’s not an easy or comfortable conversation but it’s one, I believe, we must have.
This past week, as part of a debate series sponsored by the New York-based group Intelligence Squared, I argued that U.S. airports should use racial and religious profiling. (Taking the opposite stand was a “debating team” that included the former director of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff; Columbia University scholar of Pakistan, Hassan Abbas; and Debra Burlingame, a former flight attendant whose brother was a pilot of one of the planes hijacked on 9/11.)
I realize that in recent years, profiling has become a dirty word, synonymous with prejudice, racism, and bigotry. But while I believe our risk assessment should not end with religion, race and ethnicity, I believe that it should include these important elements, as part of a “triage” strategy that my debate partner, former CIA case officer Robert Baer, says airports and airliners already do.
Profiling doesn’t have to be about discrimination, persecution, or harassment. As my debating partner, conservative columnist Deroy Murdock put it: “We are not arguing that the TSA should send anyone named Mohammad to be waterboarded somewhere between the first-class lounge and the Pizza Hut.”
In an online posting of the Intelligence Squared video, a Muslim viewer called me an “Uncle Tom.”
And more Americans, it seems, are willing to choose racial and religious profiling as one part of keeping our skies safe. At the beginning of the debate, 37 percent of the audience was for religious and racial profiling, while 33 percent were against and 30 percent were undecided. By the end of the debate, 49 percent of the audience was for religious and racial profiling, 40 percent were against and the rest were undecided, meaning that that the motion carried. Of course, this “victory” in a scholarly debate doesn’t mean that the motion would necessarily win any broader popularity contests.
In the debate, I said, “Profile me. Profile my family,” because, in my eyes, we in the Muslim community have failed to police ourselves. In an online posting of the Intelligence Squared video, a Muslim viewer called me an “Uncle Tom.”
But to me, profiling isn’t about identity politics but about threat assessment.
According to a terrorism database at the University of Maryland, which documents 60 attacks against airlines and airports between 1970 and 2007, the last year available, suspects in attacks during the 1970s were tied to the Jewish Defense League, the Black Panthers, the Black September, the National Front for the Liberation of Cuba, Jewish Armed Resistance and the Croatian Freedom Fighters, along with a few other groups.
In each of these groups’ names was a religious or ethnic dimension. For that time, those were the identities that we needed to assess. Today, the threat has changed, and it is primarily coming from Muslims who embrace al Qaeda’s radical brand of Islam.
Data in reports released over the past several months from New York University’s Center for Security and the Law; the Congressional Research Service, and the Rand Corporation reveal that over the past decade not only are many defendants in terrorism cases Muslim, but they trace their national or ethnic identity back to specific countries.
According to the Rand study “Would-Be Warriors,” the national origins or ethnicities most defendants came from was Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Jordan and Egypt, with a handful from the Muslim areas of the Balkans.
To be sure, according to New York University’s Center for Security and the Law “Terrorist Trial Report Card,” an analysis of terrorism cases prosecuted between 2001 and 2009 reveals that identifying race and ethnicity doesn’t mean stereotyping according to country. Among the hundreds of defendants in the study, most held U.S. citizenship. Still, many of the Americans were ethnically connected to Pakistan, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt.
The track record of Muslim plots against airliners and airports is clear, starting with the 1989 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. After the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, Ramzi Yousef schemed with his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a Muslim of Pakistani Baluchi ethnicity, to blow up 12 jetliners traveling from Asia to the U.S., intending to kill as many as 4,000 people. The plan fell apart in 1995 after a chemical fire caught the attention of police in the Philippines, but a test run had already killed one passenger seated near a nitroglycerin bomb on a Philippine Airlines Flight.
Three years later, Osama bin Laden threatened to bring down U.S. and Israeli aircrafts through the International Islamic Front for Fighting Against the Jews and Crusaders, warning the attacks would be “pitiless and violent” and announcing that “the war has begun.”
“Our response to the barbaric bombardment against Muslims of Afghanistan and Sudan will be ruthless and violent,” he said in a statement. “All the Islamic world has mobilized to strike a prominent American or Israeli strategic objective, to blow up their airplanes and to seize them.” A declassified CIA memo written in December 1998 warned: “Bin Ladin preparing to hijack U.S. aircraft.”
In 1999, we had a “Millennium bomber,” targeting Los Angeles International Airport. And, in a case that became very personal to me, on Dec. 24, 1999, a group of Pakistani Muslim militants hijacked an Indian Airlines jet from Kathmandu, Nepal, diverting it to Kandahar, Afghanistan, killing one newlywed passenger. In exchange for the passengers, India released Muslim militants, including a Pakistan-British Muslim militant named Omar Sheikh. Sheikh went on to mastermind the 2002 kidnapping of my friend, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, whom Khalid Sheikh Mohammed later confessed to killing.
After the Kathmandu hijacking, we had the 9/11 attacks. And since then, we’ve had the “Torrance Plotters,” the “JFK Airport Plotters,” the Glasgow, Scotland, bombers, and the “Transatlantic bombers,” all targeting airlines and airports. More recently, there was the attempt by the “underwear bomber,” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who last Christmas attempted to blow up explosives in his underwear—a foiled attack that brought the pat-downs of today. In addition to the Portland plot, most recently, we had the package bomb attempt out of Yemen last month.
Victor Asal, a political science professor at State University of New York at Albany, and Karl Rethemeyer, a professor of public administration and policy at SUNY at Albany, have studied 395 terrorist organizations in operation between 1998 and 2005, and Asal concludes, “What makes terrorist organizations more lethal is religious ideology. When you combine religion and ethno-nationalism, you get a dangerous combination.”
Asal, the son of a Tunisian father, says there hasn’t been enough research done for him to take a stand on racial and religious profiling, but favors “behavioral profiling,” which assesses risky behavior like buying one-way tickets with cash and flying without checked baggage.
As attorney R. Spencer MacDonald put it in an article in the Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law, we can have “rational profiling.”
I know this is an issue of great distress to many people. But I believe that we cannot bury our heads in the sand anymore. We have to choose pragmatism over political correctness, and allow U.S. airports and airlines to do religious and racial profiling.
Asra Q. Nomani is the author of Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam. She is co-director of the Pearl Project, an investigation into the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Her activism for women's rights at her mosque in W.V. is the subject of a PBS documentary, The Mosque in Morgantown. She recently published a monograph, Milestones for a Spiritual Jihad: Toward an Islam of Grace. asra@asranomani.com
Randy Shiner
Airport Security: Let's Profile Muslims
by Asra Q. Nomani Info
Asra Q. Nomani is the author of Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam. She is co-director of the Pearl Project, an investigation into the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Her activism for women's rights at her mosque in W.V. is the subject of a PBS documentary, The Mosque in Morgantown. She recently published a monograph, Milestones for a Spiritual Jihad: Toward an Islam of Grace. asra@asranomani.com
In the wake of yet another Muslim terror plot, we can't ignore the threat profile any longer—or the solution. Asra Q. Nomani argues the case for religious and racial profiling.
For all those holiday travelers negotiating the Transportation Security Administration’s new cop-a-feel strategy, there is a difficult solution we need to consider: racial and religious profiling.
Passenger Angela Johnson talks to reporters about security and Thanksgiving holiday travel at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, Georgia on Nov. 24, 2010. (Photo: Chris Rank / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
As an American Muslim, I’ve come to recognize, sadly, that there is one common denominator defining those who’ve got their eyes trained on U.S. targets: MANY of them are Muslim—like the Somali-born teenager arrested Friday night for a reported plot to detonate a car bomb at a packed Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in downtown Portland, Oregon.
We have to talk about the taboo topic of profiling because terrorism experts are increasingly recognizing that religious ideology makes terrorist organizations and terrorists more likely to commit heinous crimes against civilians, such as blowing an airliner out of the sky. Certainly, it’s not an easy or comfortable conversation but it’s one, I believe, we must have.
This past week, as part of a debate series sponsored by the New York-based group Intelligence Squared, I argued that U.S. airports should use racial and religious profiling. (Taking the opposite stand was a “debating team” that included the former director of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff; Columbia University scholar of Pakistan, Hassan Abbas; and Debra Burlingame, a former flight attendant whose brother was a pilot of one of the planes hijacked on 9/11.)
I realize that in recent years, profiling has become a dirty word, synonymous with prejudice, racism, and bigotry. But while I believe our risk assessment should not end with religion, race and ethnicity, I believe that it should include these important elements, as part of a “triage” strategy that my debate partner, former CIA case officer Robert Baer, says airports and airliners already do.
Profiling doesn’t have to be about discrimination, persecution, or harassment. As my debating partner, conservative columnist Deroy Murdock put it: “We are not arguing that the TSA should send anyone named Mohammad to be waterboarded somewhere between the first-class lounge and the Pizza Hut.”
In an online posting of the Intelligence Squared video, a Muslim viewer called me an “Uncle Tom.”
And more Americans, it seems, are willing to choose racial and religious profiling as one part of keeping our skies safe. At the beginning of the debate, 37 percent of the audience was for religious and racial profiling, while 33 percent were against and 30 percent were undecided. By the end of the debate, 49 percent of the audience was for religious and racial profiling, 40 percent were against and the rest were undecided, meaning that that the motion carried. Of course, this “victory” in a scholarly debate doesn’t mean that the motion would necessarily win any broader popularity contests.
In the debate, I said, “Profile me. Profile my family,” because, in my eyes, we in the Muslim community have failed to police ourselves. In an online posting of the Intelligence Squared video, a Muslim viewer called me an “Uncle Tom.”
But to me, profiling isn’t about identity politics but about threat assessment.
According to a terrorism database at the University of Maryland, which documents 60 attacks against airlines and airports between 1970 and 2007, the last year available, suspects in attacks during the 1970s were tied to the Jewish Defense League, the Black Panthers, the Black September, the National Front for the Liberation of Cuba, Jewish Armed Resistance and the Croatian Freedom Fighters, along with a few other groups.
In each of these groups’ names was a religious or ethnic dimension. For that time, those were the identities that we needed to assess. Today, the threat has changed, and it is primarily coming from Muslims who embrace al Qaeda’s radical brand of Islam.
Data in reports released over the past several months from New York University’s Center for Security and the Law; the Congressional Research Service, and the Rand Corporation reveal that over the past decade not only are many defendants in terrorism cases Muslim, but they trace their national or ethnic identity back to specific countries.
According to the Rand study “Would-Be Warriors,” the national origins or ethnicities most defendants came from was Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Jordan and Egypt, with a handful from the Muslim areas of the Balkans.
To be sure, according to New York University’s Center for Security and the Law “Terrorist Trial Report Card,” an analysis of terrorism cases prosecuted between 2001 and 2009 reveals that identifying race and ethnicity doesn’t mean stereotyping according to country. Among the hundreds of defendants in the study, most held U.S. citizenship. Still, many of the Americans were ethnically connected to Pakistan, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt.
The track record of Muslim plots against airliners and airports is clear, starting with the 1989 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. After the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, Ramzi Yousef schemed with his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a Muslim of Pakistani Baluchi ethnicity, to blow up 12 jetliners traveling from Asia to the U.S., intending to kill as many as 4,000 people. The plan fell apart in 1995 after a chemical fire caught the attention of police in the Philippines, but a test run had already killed one passenger seated near a nitroglycerin bomb on a Philippine Airlines Flight.
Three years later, Osama bin Laden threatened to bring down U.S. and Israeli aircrafts through the International Islamic Front for Fighting Against the Jews and Crusaders, warning the attacks would be “pitiless and violent” and announcing that “the war has begun.”
“Our response to the barbaric bombardment against Muslims of Afghanistan and Sudan will be ruthless and violent,” he said in a statement. “All the Islamic world has mobilized to strike a prominent American or Israeli strategic objective, to blow up their airplanes and to seize them.” A declassified CIA memo written in December 1998 warned: “Bin Ladin preparing to hijack U.S. aircraft.”
In 1999, we had a “Millennium bomber,” targeting Los Angeles International Airport. And, in a case that became very personal to me, on Dec. 24, 1999, a group of Pakistani Muslim militants hijacked an Indian Airlines jet from Kathmandu, Nepal, diverting it to Kandahar, Afghanistan, killing one newlywed passenger. In exchange for the passengers, India released Muslim militants, including a Pakistan-British Muslim militant named Omar Sheikh. Sheikh went on to mastermind the 2002 kidnapping of my friend, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, whom Khalid Sheikh Mohammed later confessed to killing.
After the Kathmandu hijacking, we had the 9/11 attacks. And since then, we’ve had the “Torrance Plotters,” the “JFK Airport Plotters,” the Glasgow, Scotland, bombers, and the “Transatlantic bombers,” all targeting airlines and airports. More recently, there was the attempt by the “underwear bomber,” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who last Christmas attempted to blow up explosives in his underwear—a foiled attack that brought the pat-downs of today. In addition to the Portland plot, most recently, we had the package bomb attempt out of Yemen last month.
Victor Asal, a political science professor at State University of New York at Albany, and Karl Rethemeyer, a professor of public administration and policy at SUNY at Albany, have studied 395 terrorist organizations in operation between 1998 and 2005, and Asal concludes, “What makes terrorist organizations more lethal is religious ideology. When you combine religion and ethno-nationalism, you get a dangerous combination.”
Asal, the son of a Tunisian father, says there hasn’t been enough research done for him to take a stand on racial and religious profiling, but favors “behavioral profiling,” which assesses risky behavior like buying one-way tickets with cash and flying without checked baggage.
As attorney R. Spencer MacDonald put it in an article in the Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law, we can have “rational profiling.”
I know this is an issue of great distress to many people. But I believe that we cannot bury our heads in the sand anymore. We have to choose pragmatism over political correctness, and allow U.S. airports and airlines to do religious and racial profiling.
Asra Q. Nomani is the author of Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam. She is co-director of the Pearl Project, an investigation into the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Her activism for women's rights at her mosque in W.V. is the subject of a PBS documentary, The Mosque in Morgantown. She recently published a monograph, Milestones for a Spiritual Jihad: Toward an Islam of Grace. asra@asranomani.com
23 November 2010
A Conversation Between Friends
Preface: Eric Reed is a world-class Jazz pianist and a "Facebook Friend" as well. He was Mitchell's ensemble instructor at the 2004 UCSD Jazz Camp and was and still is a great example of someone who tries to put back into life some of what he has taken out by doing educational programs all the time. He is evidently a very religious man, something that I respect. I am very interested in whether anyone thinks I went overboard in my comments about bowing down to Jesus and your opinion of the whole conversation in general. Please let me know in the comments here or privately if you're so inclined.
Randy
Randy
Back to Life
It's been a long time since I posted anything on this blog, which, during the elections of 2008, was getting a lot of activity, from me as well as from the rest of the world. Unfortunately, since August 19, 2010, I've been a little busy fighting off polycythemia vera and Crohn's Disease, for which I had surgery on October 8, having very much enjoyed that moment in time when you come back from the dead, and wake up in so much pain, you can hardly utter the words "morphine now". Nothing like waking from major abdominal surgery with a 12 inch zipper in your belly, but nothing like real physical, horrible pain to remind you that you're alive.
Suffice it to say that after a second hospital stay - from October 20-24 owing to the fact that my guts weren't working - I am really feeling a lot better, looking good - I lost 40lbs. and am into a 34" waist pant - a size I haven't seen in almost 20 years, and I am really, really trying to get back into the swing of things, and with some help from some dear friends, I am starting to swing, and swing hard. There's no choice, because whether I'm sick or not, I'm the only one who can put food in my stomach, so I have had to be somewhat productive, or at least try, from the moment I woke, unfocused and moaning in pain, from my surgery.
Tonight as I write this, I am awaiting the arrival of my beautiful boy (who is, he reminds me, 19 years old) from Bloomington, where he is attending the IU-Jacobs School of Music as a Jazz Percussion major - talk about focus! - and where he is, according to all I am hearing and reading, really on his way to his goal of being the greatest percussionist in the world, on a par with Elvin Jones, who was, some of you may know, mostly known for his work on the drumkit for John Coltrane. But he doesn't stop there, oh no. His drive knows no bounds and he's become not only outstanding on the drumkit, but a monster on the vibraphone and the timpani as well. I am linking to three videos of his in the waning golden wonderful days of high school:
1: Mitchell's Arrangement of Nardis by Miles Davis
2: Mitchell playing "Concerto de Aranjuez - Adagio on Marimba
3: Mitchell playing John Bergamo's "Four Pieces for Timpani, Movements I & IV
1: Mitchell's Arrangement of Nardis by Miles Davis
2: Mitchell playing "Concerto de Aranjuez - Adagio on Marimba
3: Mitchell playing John Bergamo's "Four Pieces for Timpani, Movements I & IV
The point is two-fold here. One, he is my pride and joy, words my mother, may she rest in piece, used to call me, the meaning of which eluded me until Mitchell was born. Two, it will pay him, and everyone in these troubled, chaotic times, to be as versatile as he can be.
All I have ever expected of him is to be the greatest at what he loves to do, and get paid for doing it. As the Joker in 2009's "The Dark Knight" said with respect to robbing banks, "if you're good at something, never do it for free". Lacking passion in one's work is a recipe for a miserable, robotic life, lacking real drive or energy to excel. Why would you want to excel at something you don't really believe in? To me, that's a commonsensical precept, but one which, I think, was lacking in a lot of our boomer upbringings, at least Jewish ones, where we were expected to go to school to get a "job": a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, and blah, blah, blah.
I'm working my way through an excellent biography of Thelonious Monk entitled _Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original_ and there is a passage (at p.178) in which Thelonious recounts taking his eldest son, Toots, at the time, if I remember correctly about 6 years old or so, for shoes and being told by his wife Nellie what kind of shoes to get for Toot. He replied - "I am going to take him to the shoe department - and he can pick his own style - he's the one that has to wear them, not me." And, of some more urgency of late, the very forward-thinking parental notion of letting his son be who he really is, another commonsensical parenting precept that I have drilled into Mitchell's head since he's been able to understand metaphysical concepts such as that of being. He's his own man. He is who he is, nobody else. And the beautiful thing about what he's doing - Jazz - is that it commands that the artist always be who he is, since every improvised note is intentional, demanding that he always mean every note he plays, being who he is in that moment in time. The combination of his career choice and not being afraid of being himself wherever he goes is, I know, going to keep him away from psychiatrists and antidepressants and psychotropic drugs for the rest of his life.
He's a star. Now it's time for his old man to get a life, too, because Mitch has his own life and in all honesty, my focus needs to be back on what I am going to do for the rest of my life and with whom. I have screwed up so many relationships in the past, so many great women I could have and should have settled down with, but I wasn't ready evidently, just to be who I am, because in all honesty, I don't think I ever had occasion to really think about that for myself. It's only been as the result of being Mitch's dad that I have learned how to live myself. It's time to put into practice what I've been drilling into his head over the years. It's obvious that I can't do this life alone, and that everyone needs somebody to love. I could quote the title of every Beatles song ever written (and John Lennon in particular) and they would all be right - life is nothing without someone to share it with. Nothing. What is it but simple narcissism to focus one's attention completely on your own needs? For me, it's a matter of two being better than one. The words "soulmate", "life partner" mean oh so much more these days than in the past when I was under the severe delusion that I could do anything by myself, a sad and lonely victim of belief in my own graying frailty, unaware of just how happy you could be if you could focus yourself in large measure on making one other person in the world happy, and she me. And between the two of us, we totally rock (or, being a Jazz dad, swing) together.
These are the thoughts that cross my mind as I try to reenter life again. If there's one thing that I have learned over the course of the past three years since my last visit to the surgeon, it's to never give up. Never. I'll give up when I die, and that is, I hope and pray, a long, long time from now. In the meantime, back to life.
19 August 2010
What it Means to Be An American - A Commentary on the Mosque at 51 Park Place
What is it that distinguishes Americans from the rest of the world's populations? Answer: All of us come from someplace else, except for native Americans who were chased off their lands by white men looking to conquer the entire continent. Those who arrived on these shores at Jamestown in 1642 were looking to escape religious persecution themselves, as were the millions upon millions who followed them here. Irish, Germans, Russians, Polish, Jews, and of some consequence nowadays, Muslims from every land in the world.
As a Jew, I think back on the times I know about, albeit not personally, that Jews in this country were denied access to universities, housing, jobs, land, everything that everyone else arrived in America to seek: a better life for their families and their descendants. I ought to know. I am one.
The conversation about the mosque/community center in lower Manhattan has turned absolutely black, ugly, bringing back as it does memories of discrimination faced by Jews for many, many years. It is truly bothersome to me and, I hope, to others, that the ugliest of nativistic and xenophobic tendencies all too common in today's world have taken hitherto rational people and turned them into sounding boards for the most ignorant, yet the loudest, among us such as the Glenn Becks, Rush Limbaughs and other purveyors of divisiveness and hate. That includes Abe Foxman of the ADL, who has stained that organization with his knee-jerk reaction against the construction of the community center/mosque/Muslim gathering place.
This is a difficult time in America. Our economy is swirling around the global toilet bowl, people's trust in a system that has worked, and worked generally well for over 200 years is bashed and scraped, and confusion about what's next reigns supreme. And then we have a group of (from all I can tell) well-meaning Muslims who just want a part of the American dream and all that goes with it, including freedom from and of religion. The Young Men's Christian Association was a funny place for me to play basketball in when I was a kid (not that I would have played any better in a JCC) but it never bothered me that the organization was there as a place for wayward souls, demarcated Christian.
The fear, and let there be no doubt that the fury that has arisen because of the proposed Muslim Center in Lower Manhattan is precisely because of the fear of the fact that "Muslim" in today's world, connotes "terrorist". So people are afraid that there will be meetings of jihadis within the walls of the building at 45-51 Park Street, in the shadow of what was once the World Trade Center, where good old fashioned American litigation and greed have held up the construction of a simple memorial to the 3000 that died that fateful September day not to mention the reconstruction of the towers that stood there since 1976. Their failures are stoking the controversy on lower Manhattan: that is without doubt. That a Muslim organization could get its act together before the various parties who own "ground zero" is a stain on them and us.
Whose fault is this? In part, it is the fault of well-meaning Muslims who have not been forceful or loud enough in their condemnations of suicide bombers and other forms of terror that some of the more fundamentalist Muslims use as a means of going home to meet Allah. Had this country's imams and other Muslim leaders been louder and forceful in their condemnations of Muslims who tolerate this kind of trash in a free and liberal society, the word Muslim might, might, not be a synonym for the word "terrorist". They never truly tried. They too reap what they sow.
When we were treated to scenes in Muslim lands after 9/11 of people partying in the streets at our carnage and our horror, the only possible outcome for Americans was disgust and hatred of a religion that would tolerate and even celebrate such barbarity. We can talk all we like about the plight of the poor Palestinians and other oppressed minorities, but the bottom line, at least for me, comes in the form of what the writers Bat Ye'Or and the late Oriana Fallaci called "Eurabia".
For the vast majority of Americans who do not have a passport and have never been to Europe, allow me to tell you that the face of Europe has changed, and changed forever, due to very lax immigration and welfare laws, all put in place after WWII so that there could never again rise the sort of social tumult that gave us the Third Reich.
Go to France, where their history is very much alive, and you will see tens of thousands of "pieds noir" - "black feet" - who came to France from its former colonies in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria and with them, their Islam. And they have not assimilated. They have fought it tooth and nail, which has given the right in Europe, France and Britain in particular, a strong base from which to launch anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim measures, not the latest of which was the French ban on the burqa which, to this writer's sensibilities, has no place in a liberal society, nor do Islamic laws that call for the treatment of women as cattle. I have walked to synagogue and gotten very mean looks from idle Arab kids in Cannes who didn't apparently like the fact that I was wearing a outward sign of my Jewishness - a kippah - on Yom Kippur. And I stared right back into their black eyes. If looks could kill, we would both be dead. I am sure of that.
Suffice it to say that I, like so many other liberals, am torn between the American way, the way of toleration, freedom, respect of others and the like. But I am also very aware of what has happened to Europe in the last 30 years with the influx of Muslims there. It is a dangerous situation in Europe that, frankly and honestly, I do not under any circumstances want repeated here.
The jihadi elements, the fundamentalists among the Muslims in this country, would be more than happy to use our own freedoms (as they did in Europe) to change the face of this country, change the face of our politics and none of it will be good. The evidence lies across the Atlantic. I hope and pray that the Muslim community center, mosque included, will be a step forward for the American Muslim world to join the 21st century. This is why, I am convinced, that most Muslims even came to this country - for the same reasons that all our forebears came here - to get away from the centuries old hatreds, prejudices and intolerance that they felt and got in their own lands and to just live their lives in peace.
I am reminded of a small incident in an Arab-owned pizza place right here in San Diego, where the owner for some reason knew that my lunch companion and I were Jewish - I think we asked for pizza without pepperoni. He began conversation about what trash there is running the country from which he and his family fled, Iran, as I recall, how he was able to start his own business here, and was trying to live out, as we all are, the American dream, whatever that is in 2010. One thing is for certain: we can never give up trying to make the American experiment more perfect, and if it takes a little pain in granting a people whom we (and that includes American Jews) do not know at all, then that is the price we must pay for living in the greatest country on earth.
This is not to say that the American-Muslim community should not do more to tell the world, to tell America, that they denounce the violence carried out in the name of Allah. That they denounce the denial of the Holocaust. That they do not wish to establish a country within a country, that the ummah is a dead concept, that there will never be another Caliphate here on these shores. When I start hearing Muslim leaders in the mainstream media say these things, and tell their followers that jihad has no applicability for 2010 America, I will feel a lot safer every time a building permit for a minaret is pulled, no matter where. I will know that they have about as much evil intent as a church or a synagogue, which is to say none. But the leaders have left us to guesswork about their intent, and American Muslim leaders are at fault for not framing themselves in the best light possible, a feat that I don't know can be achieved, at least in the shadow of the World Trade Center, at least not now. We will see what transpires.
Randy Shiner
20 May 2010
Death and the Dishwasher
- May 7, 2010 | 12:00 am
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Roger Rosenblatt
Making Toast: A Family Story
by Roger Rosenblatt
By the rules of American book reviewing, I ought not to write about this beautiful book. I am hobbled by the most damning disqualification of all: I have a conflict of interest. Not the appearance of one; an actual one. It is not that I once met a man whose second wife went to school with a woman who had a drink with a cousin of the dentist who treats the children of the book's copy-editor, which would have been damaging enough. It is that I know the author of Making Toast. Worse, he was my predecessor in my distinguished position, which is distinguished not least because he once held it. Still worse, he has been my friend for over thirty years. Worst of all, I adore him. So I am hopelessly compromised. Like many people who are about to do something that makes them feel bad, I could read a few pages of Niebuhr, feel sad about feeling bad, and get on with it; but I do not use the great man as a salve, and I do not feel bad when I say that Making Toast is a beautiful book. The judgment is true. I do not think that Making Toast is extraordinary because of my friend; I think that my friend is extraordinary because of Making Toast. I would admire the man who had the inner resources to produce such a book even if I hated him. Anyway, impartiality is no guarantee of honesty.
I should add that I wish this book had never been written, because it is the account of an unbearable sorrow, and I wish it had never befallen Roger Rosenblatt. On December 8, 2007, his daughter, Amy Rosenblatt Solomon, thirty-eight years old, the mother of three children, a pediatrician, collapsed at home in Bethesda and died. Rosenblatt and his wife (make that two conflicts of interest) immediately left their home on Long Island and drove to their mutilated family. When one of his little grandchildren asked how long he is staying, Rosenblatt replied, "Forever." This book is the journal-like narrative of the first year-and-a-half of Rosenblatt's new life, of his broken-hearted and soldierly attempt to hold his family together. It is a collection of anecdotes about parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, relying upon love for their improvisations against loss. It is written with modesty and with calm—with a restraint that it is itself a great achievement in the aftermath of a cosmic cruelty. Rosenblatt's powers of observation—his descriptions of his family have an Ozu-like clarity-were unimpaired by his pain. Indeed, they seem almost to have been sharpened by it. He understands that the first challenge of sorrow is cognitive. Making Toast is a small glowing jewel in the literature of grief.
Rosenblatt is a learned and literary man, and his bereavement is punctuated by philosophical and psychological reflections. He is repeatedly brought back to the most crushing feature of death, which is its finality. "Nothing will ever be normal again." "We will never feel right again." He notes about himself that "anger and emptiness remain my principal states of mind." "My anger, being futile, flares in the wrong places and at the wrong times." Sometimes his anger extends to the metaphysical: "my anger at God remains unabated." "I cursed God. In a way, believing in God made Amy's death more, not less, comprehensible, since the God I believe in is not beneficent." But generally Rosenblatt is not inclined to such speculations. He records that he and his wife "avoided religions ourselves and reared our children without one," and so in the wake of his daughter's death "God was not with us." There is nothing complacent about his reluctance to explore these matters any further. He is simply too wounded for disputation. The problem with theodicy, and with the arguments against theodicy, is that it is all so abstract. Brilliance is for the whole days, not the broken ones. When one buries one's dead, one's first thought cannot be that Leibniz was wrong, even if Leibniz was wrong. And so Rosenblatt does not write here as an intellectual. He writes as a father and a grandfather; as a man with chores.
The chores are Rosenblatt's real subject, and the reason that his book is so affecting. Here is an example:
I wake up earlier than the others, usually around 5 a.m., to perform the one household duty I have mastered. After posting the morning's word [a game he invents to improve the vocabulary of his grandchildren], emptying the dishwasher, setting the table for the children's breakfasts, and pouring the MultiGrain Cheerios or Froot Loops or Apple Jacks or Special K or Fruity Pebbles, I prepare toast. I take out the butter to allow it to soften, and put three slices of Pepperidge Farm Hearty Whites in the toaster oven. Bubbies [his youngest grandson] and I like plain buttered toast; Sammy prefers it with cinnamon, with the crusts cut off. When the bell rings, I shift the slices from the toaster to plates, and butter them.
Making toast, in other words, is a spiritual exercise, but its spirituality is to be found entirely in its concreteness. Rosenblatt's book is a tribute to the consolatory power of the concrete. "MultiGrain Cheerios or Froot Loops or Apple Jacks or Special K or Fruity Pebbles": the inventory is the point, the naming of nourishing things, the amassing of small particulars against a big particular, so that the facticity of life becomes a retort to the facticity of death. In an existence viciously robbed of its banality, Rosenblatt brandishes the banal, it is his defense against disorder and despair. It represents a kind of triumph-not over death, which has already won, but over suffering, which can still destroy. But not if he empties the dishwasher! If he empties the dishwasher, life wins.
In his chronicle of dailiness, his humble catalog of quotidian gestures, Rosenblatt discovers the anti-apocalyptic potency of the ordinary. He has written what Tzvetan Todorov, in a penetrating study of seventeenth-century Dutch painting, calls an éloge du quotidien. Like those still lifes and those genre scenes, Rosenblatt's account of the saving force of domesticity is a kind of argument. It argues that the integrity of the inner world may sometimes be secured by the integrity of the outer world. The subject may sometimes be rescued by objects. You feel this method of fortification working again and again in Making Toast. As he recognizes that he cannot protect the members of his family from their melancholy thoughts and moods, Rosenblatt learns that he can at least serve them, and with his diligence and his wit keep their world continuous and intact. For the mourner, though I can hardly imagine mourning my own child, there are no higher ambitions than continuity and intactness. And so the battle for meaning is fought, and occasionally won, in the kitchen.
There are circumstances in which prose is poetry, and the unornamented candor of Rosenblatt's writing slowly attains to a sober sort of lyricism. But this is more than just a moving book. It is also a useful book. Perhaps because beauty is the antithesis of use, there is something especially marvelous about useful beauty. Making Toast, a memoir of helpfulness, may actually help some of the people who read it. There are not many books that are important in this way: Helen Garner's The Spare Room, a shatteringly honest and artful account of assisting a friend through her dying, is another such book. The epigraph to Garner's austere masterpiece, from Elizabeth Jolley, captures also the large spirit of Rosenblatt's book: "It is a privilege to prepare the place where someone else will sleep." Rosenblatt's children and grandchildren chose their father and grandfather well. His toast is buttered with wisdom.
Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic.
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