The Vol Abroad reviews some stuff

Sometimes I wish I was good at film or book review. Maybe it’s years of built up resentment from the school book report, but what I really want to do is say “I read it. I thought it was boring/ok/pretty good/great. I would (not) recommend it.” Strike out as appropriate.

Film:
We saw Borat. Rubbish. Can’t believe I spent money on the DVD. He should be slapped for rudeness. The character on his old show was pretty well conceived – but in the movie it was executed lazily. Only the bear head and the line “We support your war of terror,” were any good. And continuity…did anyone notice he went to DC and then to a local tv station in Jackson, Mississippi (without naming it – but they did show the weather chart – and everybody knows that Yazoo City is in Mississippi) and to Virginia and then to Jackson.

He’s goin’ to Jackson and people gonna stoop and bow.

We saw Magicians. Written by the writers of a British tv series Peep Show – one of those Brit specialties in cringe humor – so funny sometimes I couldn’t breathe while watching it – and co-starring Robert Webb and David Mitchell – the stars of same Peep Show – it plays off some of the same riffs. Not quite as uncomfortably funny, it was still pretty good, enjoyable. Watch it.

Last night on broadcast tv, we watched The Queen. It was watchable. Interesting reliving the time after Diana’s death. Helen Mirren was soo much better than all the rest of them, why did they get that James Cromwell guy to play Prince Phillip. I normally like him, but he just couldn’t wear the part.

Books:
I’m reading pretty slowly these days. Buddy has started to take an interest in the things we take an interest in. Like the tv remote control or books. Buddy likes to grab books. Buddy likes to tear pages. Buddy likes to eat books. But I have fairly recently completed Wicked. I thought it was pretty good. If you kinda like the whole Oz thing and maybe have read one or more of the original books and you’re over the age of 14 – like a mature 14 – then I would recommend it.

Old friends

I don’t have a lot of time to read right now and my attention span is pretty limited. But I usually need to read a little bit before nodding off to sleep.

So, I’ve gone back to an old friend; my pal Trav. He lives at Slip F-18 Bahia Mar on a houseboat he won in a poker game.

The Travis McGee series of mysteries. Easily digestible. But full of little nuggets and interesting characters. Originally introduced to me by another old friend. I’ve probably read them all at least twice. I’ve probably owned all the books at least once – and I’ve always regretted giving them away. There’s been a gap of quite a few years since I last read one of the series. So I managed to get through the first one I went back to, The Long Lavender Look, without remembering too much (except, oddly enough, the crucial twist). And now I’m reading A Tan and Sandy Silence, and all of a sudden, a few pages in, nearly the whole story came back to me, but I’ll soldier on.

You don’t forget old friends just ’cause they keep telling the same stories.

Mao Tse Tung thought

Growing up in the American South at the apogee of the Cold War, I was surrounded by knee-jerk anti-communist sentiment. Looking back, I still can’t be sure how much of that anti-communism, anti-socialism was knee-jerk and how much of it was a considered position. But I do remember wondering why this accepted wisdom was so pervasive. Occasionally I heard stuff about writers being silenced in Soviet Russia or people queueing hours for bread, clutching their string bags in the deep cold of a Moscow winter. But when occasionally one heard about the great strides in literacy or the abolition of true hunger or a greater sense of equality and fairness – and it was difficult to make an accurate judgment about the right or wrongs of communism. Particularly when those rights and wrongs were being judged by a young and idealistic mind. Why not focus on the true goodness of human nature – perhaps the right system could help foster that rather than encouraging the competitive, ruthless and essentially artificially harsh nature of the spirit under a capitalist system?

I certainly hadn’t met any card-carrying members of the Communist party. Even amongst the more radical kids I’ve met – most of them only espoused a sense of wanting some aspects of socialism introduced into the US to a greater or lesser extent.

Once in England, however, I did begin to meet Communists. Yes, card carrying members of the Communist Party. I met members of the Socialist Workers’ Party. Many of these people are very sociable and very nice, with nice clean middle class looking homes. Some of these were people who I would gladly have lunch with and might even discuss politics with over sandwiches and cups of tea.

At one such lunch I had with one of these CP or SWP members, at a bijou joint serving vegetarian soups and overlooking the picturesque ruins of Kenilworth Castle, we started talking about China. I can’t remember how we got started on that – but perhaps there had been a serialisation of Jung Chang’s Wild Swans – or another book which covered the period of famine during the Great Leap Forward. I remember expressing horror at the needless human suffering on a truly monumental scale.

My communist luncheon companion said so cooly and dispassionately “Sometimes there must be sacrifices in order to make progress.”

I was revulsed. I really didn’t know what to say. I think I said something about not wanting to be one of those individuals sacrificed – but whatever it was it was completely inadequate. Yes, I’d heard the concept before, and on the face of it – it makes sense. After all, I must sacrifice expensive work day lunches if I want to go on a nice vacation. But that’s not the kind of sacrifice we were talking about and she knew it. Along with Mao, she had consigned millions to the charnel house of history in her defense of hollow Communist ideals.

By this point, the Great Leap Forward had been so sufficiently identified as a failure that the any sacrifice hardly seemed worth it. I was then of the belief that Chairman Mao didn’t know that millions were starving each year, but that because of the nature of the system his underlings in the know were too afraid or too callous to say so. I had never, ever heard anyone defend the deaths of millions of Chinese people. This was an important moment for me. To me this would have been like saying, – you know all those Jews and Gypsies that Hitler killed – well, sometimes sacrifices have to be made for the greater unification of Europe. Absolutely horrific.

It wasn’t until a number of years later that I read Jung Chang’s family history – Wild Swans which was her grandmother’s, her mother’s and her own stories as intertwined with 20th century Chinese history – arguably among the most tumultuous of our times. I could read about the effects of Maoism on one family and the complete failure of Maoism to deliver anything like improved literacy, ending hunger, etc.

Jung Chang and her husband, Jon Halliday, have since published Mao: The Unknown Story. This provides evidence from previously hidden sources about how much Mao knew about the effects of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The book has been criticised for painting Mao as a cardboard cut-out version of evil, and I’d certainly agree that there were opportunities for painting a more nuanced picture of Mao. This was a man certainly not without talent for political machinations and for population control. One has to respect that kind of genius, much like holding awe for the destructive power of a hurricane. The authors don’t seem to want to grant him any credit for a monumental (though monstrous) achievement – getting to and staying at the top of the world’s most populous country.

I finished the book some time ago and have been meaning to post about it for quite some time (the original draft of this post is dated 25 March). But my thoughts on the matter are complex and convoluted and a little difficult to pull together. I’ve retrieved this post because last night I watched a documentary called Mao’s Bloody Revolution: Revealed – it was about the cultural revolution. This was a slightly more balanced approach to Mao though acknowledging that the Cultural Revolution was violent, destructive and chaotic. But it bought into the radical line that destruction must be achieved before we can re-construct a better world – though we may need near-perpetual revolution before that’s achieved. Actually, I’m not sure Mao had in mind a better world at all, I think he revelled in the unending meat-grinder. And that’s basically the argument that Jung Chang and Jon Halliday put forward. Mao was a monster.

About the book
Mao: The Unknown Story is very long, very complex and though I know this sounds terribly ethnocentric there are so personages with difficult to remember Chinese names (I feel bad saying it, but it’s kinda true). But it was gripping. I started to carry this brick of a book with me on my daily commute despite the fact that weight was beginning to tell in my developing pregnancy.

_______
Mao: The Unknown Story – reviews on other blogs

The scales fall from student’s eyes.
An Israeli sees Chang and Halliday speak on a book tour.
Chiang Kai-Shek a revised hero and nice guy? (Not sure about that!)

The soulful science

Being at home, I’ve got BBC Radio 4 on all day. It’s talk radio for the chattering classes. So I get to hear all kinds of interesting things. Like yesterday, I heard a piece on the Soulful Science.

What do you think the soulful science is? Is it the study of saxophony? Is it the discipline of understanding the lurve connection between lustful adults? Is it economics? Yes, you guessed right. It’s economics.

Economics is perhaps best known as the dismal science, but Diane Coyle wants to rebrand the study as The Soulful Science. She says that economists are misunderstood. Yesterday she enumerated those misunderstandings:

• economists are heartless/ don’t care about people
• economists only care/ think everything is about money
• economists don’t understand how people really behave
• economists don’t understand the complex realities of real life
• economists know the price of everything and the value of nothing

…and so on. I’ve been told all these things to my face, mostly when I was a graduate student in economics. And that might have hurt me, had the screwed up little dark spot in my chest not already been dried to dust by the too much microeconomics.

Just kidding.

I kept saying “No, you don’t understand…” or “Money’s only a points system, it’s not about the money.” But that got me pretty much nowhere. And when one of the econ professors in our department said all economists share two traits – a fondness for high school geometry and a cynical view of human nature we couldn’t find any student amongst our number who bucked his theory. And frankly, cynical geometry buffs don’t sound very soulful.

Dr Coyle says that everything has changed about economics though…

Coyle shows how better data, increased computing power, and techniques such as game theory have transformed economic theory and practice in recent years, enabling economists to make huge strides in understanding real human behavior. Using insights from psychology, evolution, and complexity, economists are revolutionizing efforts to solve the world’s most serious problems by giving policymakers a new and vastly more accurate picture of human society than ever before.

I’m not so sure that economics has changed. I always thought that the power of economics was its ability to predict human behaviour and inform policy and decision making. Economics, like any academic discipline, is pretty diverse. And while I didn’t think much of Freakonomics, I did appreciate that it helped bring a more “human” face to economics. And I guess, it’s easier to sell books on an argument of revolution rather than evolution.

t-28: dual heritage

I’ve got behind on the Cletus countdown posts. I’ve been busy having fun with my friend visiting from San Francisco.

I just hope falling behind doesn’t make Cletus late.

Guess what else was late, the first book the my husband ordered the baby. In fact, it was about four months late.

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The Vol-in-Law ordered a book called Our Island Story – basically British imperial propaganda for small children – in its centenary edition. He ordered it before Christmas for baby Cletus – to make sure that he’s properly proud of his British ancestry.

Unfortunately, the book did not arrive and did not come and there was no sign of it for months. But this morning, there was a knock on the door – and a package was handed over – and it was Our Island Story.

I had a quick flip through, and suggested that we might have to skip the chapter called “How America was lost,” lest there be any conflicting messages for the young boy.

My husband immediately began to read aloud from the book and such phrases rang from my ears:

• But the Americans were not meek at all. They made ready to fight.
• The colonists looked upon Britain as their mother-country…and now for a want of a little kindly feeling and understanding between them, mother and children were fighting bitterly.
• [The war minister Pitt advised] “You cannot conquire America. They are of our own blood. If I were an American as I am an Englishman, I would never lay down my arms – never, never, never.”

And he said, “I don’t think you need to censor this at all.”

Anyway, I guess this was our first cross-cultural parenting “discussion”.

28 27 days til baby Cletus

Day T Minus 39

…and so I continue the countdown.

Today Naomi Wolf’s Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood arrived in the post. Naomi Wolf – for the unenlightened is a feminist author. Probably Feminist with a capital F type author. She’s the kind of writer who sort of spends a lot of time pointing out all the crappy things that happen to women. It’s not that these things don’t happen, it’s just that she makes a living pointing these things out. It’s kinda negative.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of negativity. I used to support audit and inspection and regulation – so I know, negative can be positive. But is negative what you really want to read at D-Day -39? Well, I certainly sat down to read it.

And yeah, negative can be good. If it all already confirms your choices. Medical intervention can be, you know, medically necessary. But sometimes it’s done for other reasons, obstetrician convenience, profit, well-intentioned but misplaced worry. Ms Wolf’s book was a combination of her own personal journey in pregnancy – and catalogue of horrifying interventions and deliberately obscured data on agressive interventions (c-sections and episiotomies).

I’ve decided that I really prefer at little intervention as possible. I have a delicate disposition – but one that’s much more suited to enduring pain than enduring indignity and other people’s stupid rules. And that’s why I’m choosing a home birth. We had our “booking in” section on Sunday – a senior midwife came round to take a look at our house. We seemed to pass, despite our rather disorganised approach to organisation. (We’d done a bit of a tidy before she came round).

One thing about booking a home birth was that we were assured we’d actually get more one-on-one care from midwives than we would if I laboured in hospital. We’ve booked a doula as well, to help smooth the relationship between us and the medical professionals. Where I live, the NHS operates a team midwife approach – it’s quite likely that I’ll meet the person who delivers Cletus on the day that she does so.

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I spent some time reading out the bits of Naomi Wolf’s book that would annoy him most. Particularly a section about women subverting their choice to give their baby their own surname.

I knew that would send him absolutely spare. He’s never totally accepted the fact that I never changed my name. I’ve never totally accepted that he doesn’t accept it.

Anyway, Naomi Wolf points out that many women are surprised that even men who are “feminist” are strongly of the opinion that their offspring should have a patriarchal surname. I’m not surprised. Not in the least. After all – as I told the ViL “Mama’s baby, Daddy’s maybe” – the surname thing provides the man reassurance and acknowledgement that the child is his. And no matter what anybody says, that’s an important thing. To the man and probably to the child, too.

When I asked the ViL if he would mine a hyphenated name, he did surprise me. He said he wouldn’t mind. Actually I don’t want to. My surname is kinda hard to spell. And we will be using it as one of Cletus’s middle names anyway.

Sweet viburnum

Are you a gardener? In the South? Do you need a life long literary companion, a Bible of shrubs? Then look no further than Dirr’s Manual of Woody Landscape Plants. Referred to by students of horticulture simply as Dirr, i.e.

“Wonder what’s wrong with this hydrangea?”
“I don’t know. Have you checked Dirr?”

I don’t have a copy of Dirr. But then again, I don’t live in the South. Michael Dirr, I believe, is/was a professor of horticulture at the University of Georgia (but we won’t hold that against him). I did give my mom a copy many years ago. It’s essential if you’re planning to build up a garden of woody landscape plants, perhaps over a long time living with a garden.

When the Vol-in-Law and I toured RHS Wisley this weekend, one of the first plants that greeted us was a viburnum. I don’t know what kind, but it was one of those early blooming sweet smelling varieties – not the giant leafy kind with great panicles of white blossoms (a snowball bush).

Oh, the fragrance was lovely. It’s so sweet, but so strong. You may not want to stick your nose right in it.

I haven’t laid my hand on a copy of Dirr in years – but I do remember this: Dirr said that no Southern garden is complete without a viburnum.

Last King of Scotland

Nicole in London reviews the Last King of Scotland. She thinks it’s worth seeing. I believe her. But I won’t be going. See, I already read the book. I read the book, I can’t see the film. This is something I learned about myself a long time ago.

I only get annoyed by the pesky differences and perceived dimunition of the work. I feel compelled to tell my companion(s), “See, in the book this what happened.” Or “I can’t believe they left ______ out. It was a pivotal moment in the book.” Or “Now, you see that didn’t happen in the book – it couldn’t have happened because the X couldn’t be the killer, oops sorry – you didn’t know that…” So then not only am I annoyed, so is my companion and potentially everyone seated around us.

And then I walk out of the cinema saying “Man – I wish I’d never gone, the book was much better and now it’s all twisted up in my head.”

By the way, Giles Foden’s Last King of Scotland is an excellent book. It’s been a while since I read it, so I can’t give a comprehensive review. But it was powerful and compelling, exciting and disturbing asked what cost of going along with the flow?

Submission, tolerance and death: A review of Murder in Amsterdam

For Christmas, VolMom bought us a copy of Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance.

Theo Van Gogh was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri, a radical Islamist. Van Gogh, a controversial Dutch filmmaker, was shot then stabbed when he cycling home one day. Mr Bouyeri then had a shoot out with Dutch police, was captured alive and later convicted of murder. Mr Bouyeri was not particularly poor and had received a good education. He had turned to radical Islam and then to murder.

But how could this happen? The Dutch pride themselves on their tolerance. A tolerance bred in native Dutch and inculcated in the immigrant populations.

Ostensibly, Van Gogh was killed over this film – Submission: Part I. A film he directed and which was written by Ayan Hirsi Ali – a Somali born asylum seeker – who eventually became a Dutch citizen and member of parliament. Go and look at the film and see if it was worth all that trouble – Van Gogh’s death and Hirsi Ali’s life spent on the run, the threatened removal of her Dutch citizenship, the end of her political career in Holland. Go and have a look at this deliberately provocative film, written by a Muslim woman. Bear with it – it’s only 10 minutes long – and don’t be put off because it starts in Arabic with Dutch subtitles; it quickly switches to English.

Ian Buruma, the author of Murder in Amsterdam is a journalist and academic living in the US, born and raised in Holland, and with a similar privileged background in the same area the Theo Van Gogh was raised. He went back to Holland after the murder to find out what had happened to the tranquil Dutch sense of tolerance – first abruptly ended by both the success of anti-immigration, anti-Muslim politician Pim Fortuyn and then by his assassination by a radical vegan. (Yes, that’s right – fur is murder.)

Although Mr Buruma explores questions of identity, faith, politics, and tolerance in Holland – those living in Europe – particularly those in moderate, cool Northern Europe will see reflections of what is happening in their own countries. Perhaps in Holland, the situation is magnified, because of the peculiarities of Dutch culture and history, in particular the dichotomy between the bravery of some individual Dutch during WW2 in protecting the Jewish population but the stark reality that most Dutch said nothing and most Dutch Jews were exterminated.

The Dutch are proud of their role in the Enlightenment, their tolerance, their progressiveness. In many ways, rightly so. And this book explores how many on the left as well as the “Enlightenment right” (where I am increasingly placing myself) have begun to have deep suspicisions of not just political Islamism, but also Islam itself – and how it may roll back the hard-won advances in universal civil liberties.

Questioned about his hostility to Islam, [Pim] Fortuyn said “I have no desire to have to go through the emancipation of women and homosexuals all over again.”

But the book also explores how second generation, Dutch-born Muslims can turn against the nominal, moderate or “village traditional” Islam. The problem of Islamism in Europe is not just a problem of immigrants and zealous converts, but a problem with a source in the host culture as well. What is it about European culture that prevents it from assimilating immigrants and bringing them into the host culture – at least bringing them in enough.

I am an immigrant to the UK myself – and though white, well-educated, Protestant and partly English by heritage, I can never become English. I could never become English the way my British husband could become American if he chose to embrace it. English people are shocked (but pleased) when I tell them I’m an ardent England football fan. Ethnicity and race and nationality and culture are too intertwined in Europe. So how much harder must it be for the brown, the truly foreign (at least the English don’t consider me truly foreign), and the differently faithed to really integrate? Not that immigrants don’t have a responsibility themselves to respect and interact with the host culture.

Buruma asks these questions, but he doesn’t provide any answers. For a book of reportage, it curiously suspenseful.

What others have said:

Kevin Breathnach at Disillusioned Lefty leaves the book off his essential reading list because it doesn’t cover the tenents of radical Islam:

…Buruma delves not into the world of radical and political Islam (that is ‘Islamism’) as explicated by Paul Berman. Not once do we read of Sayyid Qutb, Ayman al-Zarahiri, Hassan al-Banna, Abu al-Mawdudi or even Osama Bin Laden. These are the key figures in the history of fundamentalist Islam; to know them is to at least begin to understand the threat the West faces.

Well, yes. But almost as much of the book deals with the Dutch reaction to National Socialism and it doesn’t expose the basics of Nazism either. Radical and political Islam isn’t treated as a “well, maybe it’s ok” – Buruma clearly does not approve of it. Radical Islam is not the topic of the book, the book is about how we in the West accomodate, tolerate, ignore or battle against Islamism.

Piers Dorsman at Peaktalk, understands that Buruma’s, but rightly calls him on his failure to make the link between the fundamental teachings of faith (or philosophy) and the eventual extremes a faith or belief may take.

There has been a fair bit of criticism for Buruma, most notably that he failed to take a clear moral stance and was not sufficiently judgmental in taking sides in the conflict between free societies and nascent Islamism. To be frank, I was relieved to for once have a book in my hands that did not do that. Buruma is clear enough in what he thinks about jihadism, and instead gives us equal access to the Dutch and Moroccan cultures, and more specifically to Theo van Gogh’s life and Mohammed Bouyeri’s life.

…snip…

In the end of the book Buruma tries to explore ways where tolerance could neutralize the perils of radical Islam and hopes that religion can ultimately become the subject of reasoned debate, even for Muslims. This quote from the writer makes it clear where the boundaries between the Koran and fundamentalism are:

“Revolutionary Islam is linked to the Koran, to be sure, just as Stalinism and Maoism were linked to Das Kapital, but to explain the horrors of China’s man made famines or the Soviet Gulag solely by inviting the writings of Karl Marx would be to miss the main point”

Yes, correct, but this conclusion can also be explained in another direction by arguing that however well-meaning the basic tenets of Islam are, they have the potential to be turned around into a deadly totalitarian ideology. Theo van Gogh in his own distinctive way was not given to this type of socio-political analysis, but instinctively understood the dangers of history in the making. Yet at the heart he remained a Dutchman, a little too complacent and somewhat oblivious of the immediate perils. One can only imagine the panic he must have felt when he was butchered to death on an Amsterdam street.

And Richard at The Peking Duck said:

Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance is a slender volume with big type and lots of white space that nevertheless forced me to challenge some of my most cherished liberal principles. I loved this book because it made me think. It showed me a side of life in contemporary Europe that I didn’t know much about. Yes, I had an idea of the Muslim ‘ghettoes’ that have become a standard feature of many great European cities, but I must admit, I hadn’t realized how serious a threat they now pose.

…snip…

But Buruma goes on to describe the unique feature of many Islam immigrants in Europe that does indeed place them in a special category – a disrespect for the laws and values of their host nations. Living in Amsterdam’s ‘dish city’ is one thing, but when young Muslims start to throw bricks through the window of a gay bar on the fringe of the nieghborhood and threaten their patrons, a great big red flag is raised. It’s one thing to bring your culture with you. It is quite another to disrespect the culture and laws of your host. In the eyes of the radical Muslims Buruma describes (and he describes many types of Muslims, from the most tolerant and liberal to the most obsessively deranged), homosexuality is expressly denounced in the Quran and it cannot be tolerated. Do we welcome into our borders those who can rationalize the murder of gays?

I think this final point from Richard is important. The left must start to recognise that acceptance and tolerance do have their limits. And we risk throwing away the important social progress that has been made in the 20th century if we allow a radical political Islam to flourish by turning a blind eye to what it means. (And if you have any doubts, read this draft constitution for the caliphate).