The Breaking Time

The Rundown: Ringing in the new year

Police and protesters fight in Athens as another demonstration turns violent. Couldn't find the photo credit for this image, unfortunately.

Welcome to 2013, readers. Here's a quick parcel of "may you live in interesting times" items to start off your new year.

• Greeks feel unfolding social and humanitarian crisis "There is an anger against the national government which hasn't yet expressed itself, and it's building up like water behind a dam, waiting to break out. They're going to start smashing shop windows and grabbing things, and ultimately I wouldn't put it past the Greek society to storm parliament."

• Tea estate owner, wife killed by workers in India The article refers to what was going on as a "labor dispute," but dispute seems too mild a word for "an army of 700 workers gets together, armed with bows and poison arrows, and set the plantation owners on fire."

• Police arrest teenager for doodling Remember my fear that, because dealing with real problems was hard, Newtown's aftermath would see zero-tolerance return with a vengeance? Yeah, that's happening.

• Slavery's global comeback A brutal piece about how slavery's made a return around the globe (and in many places, never went away). A reminder that even as the future rolls in, many of the past's horrors are still very much with us.

• "Arrest us all" As the protests — some violent — in India have drawn attention to the horrific levels of rape in that country, this is not a new problem. In 2005, a mob of 200 women marched into the Nagpur district court and brutally killed a serial rapist that the police had let go scot-free for years.

Worth remembering that when a justice system fails widely enough in its duty to mete out vengeance, people will eventually start doing the job themselves. While I personally think the women in Nagpur were completely justified to kill their tormentor, vigilantism gets real nasty when it becomes increasingly endemic.

• Interfaith unions on the rise in UK Marriages between Muslims and Christians are becoming more frequent in the UK. Remember this the next time someone tells you that Muslims — apparently uniquely among all types of immigrants — are all fanatics who won't ever change in response to a secular society.

• China removing addicts' pleasure centers In the next stage in China's march towards dystopia, some doctors are "treating" drug addiction by burning out the pleasure centers of addicts and the mentally ill. As if that wasn't enough, China's also ramping up its internet censorship. Malevolent robot overseers are probably just a few months away.

History repeating: some fears about Newtown's aftermath

Confiscated guns packed into Philadelphia's evidence room, which can't hold them all. Photo by David Miailetti, Daily News.

Unless some of my readers are just emerging from a cave, I don't think I have to tell anyone about the horrific shooting at Newtown. If you're looking for some practical ways to help that community, here's a list.

In the days since, just about every aspect of gun violence has come up for discussion. As NSFW Corp editor-in-chief Paul Carr rightly predicted after the news broke, we've been subjected to perspectives "smart, trite, academic, contrarian, annoying, brilliant and all variations between."

But there's still a few assumptions worth tackling.

For context, I've covered crime in my city for over five years. I've seen cases where firearms stopped murderers and where they enabled them to do terrible damage. I'm also a gun owner who feels the black helicopter crowd is a cultural cancer that makes mature discussion of issues of violence and self-defense in this country nigh impossible.

Further, I believe it's possible to craft laws recognizing a basic ability to own a firearm (not military ordinance or a damn arsenal) while making it more difficult for violent maniacs to walk around with machine guns. Perfect systems are impossible, but we can have a far better one.

But my fear — and I hope to hell I'm wrong — is that we come out of this with some unenforceable mess, more surveillance, the return of zero tolerance at schools, a stigma against autism, another push to ban violent video games, and nothing that solves any real problems.

From drug epidemics to Columbine to 9/11, our country's track record for enacting sweeping measures in the wake of tragedy is terrible. There were real problems in all of those situations, but the attempted solutions didn't fix them, or even made things worse.

In the discussion of gun control after Newtown, there's too often an assumption of the efficiency of the legal apparatus, that it's simply a matter of deciding to enact properly strict laws, and we'll get down to the low levels of violence seen in other nations. I don't think that's merited.

Practically, we're not the UK or Japan, where civilian guns were never pervasive and laws restricting weapons date back centuries. We're not Australia, which had about 3 million guns for 18 million people when its government put major restrictions in place back in the mid-90s.

Instead, there are 270-310 million guns in the United States, almost one for every man, woman, and child. This isn't just a situation that no other industrialized nation has ever encountered, it's never happened in human history.

Whatever your opinions on gun control, whether you own a firearm or find them disgusting, that's the reality: 300 million guns is a hell of a foundation for a potential black market.

Don't believe me? Last year, over 100 guns went missing from Asheville's evidence room. A few years before, the same happened under county Sheriff Bobby Medford, who ludicrously claimed he'd buried some assault rifles in the walls of the local jail. Medford's currently doing a 15-year stint in federal prison, but the guns are nowhere to be found. My area ain't alone in this problem.

My fear is that sloppy policy creates a larger opportunity for corruption, including among some of those charged with enforcing any new rules. Many evidence rooms already can't handle the volume of weapons they take in, and that situation means it's easy for them to disappear.

I'm trying to have some hope too. For well over a decade, violent crime in America has declined rapidly. Hell, it's one of the only positive social trends we have. While firearms aren't going anywhere, the culture around them can change.

Paranoids who want to keep loopholes open, allow drunks to go armed in bars, and prevent doctors from informing people about gun safety don't represent many — even most — gun owners, and it's far past time more of us said so. The crazier parts of gun culture grow because they all too often find reinforcement instead of stigma.

It doesn't have to be this way: a country where gun ownership is viewed with adult responsibility instead of adolescent power fantasy will be a less violent place. That sort of cultural shift is trickier than passing a law, but it's essential.

While we're at it, let's look at halting the mental health system's decades-long free-fall. Let's look at why the legal system doesn't take domestic abuse and rape seriously, letting violent scumbags out repeatedly until the day they finally empty a clip into someone.

And yes, let's look at gun laws. But let's do so carefully, without pretending that fixing violence in a sprawling country with a mess of social issues is just a matter of writing a rule, and remembering the limits of law enforcement.

The urge to do something in the wake of a tragedy is laudable, but getting this shit wrong has consequences. I hope this isn't just history repeating.

Paul Kagame and colonial mentality 2.0

Rwandan President Paul Kagame, repeatedly condemned for running an effective country.

An interesting War Nerd piece argues that once again, the U.N. and the array of NGOs in Africa have stopped a "Tutsi Empire" from developing and that this is, in fact, a bad thing:

The real bad guys in the Congo are what most people call the good guys, the meddling fools like Bono and the UN and all those NGOs and “International Peacekeeping Missions.” Those guys stopped a decisive war of conquest dead in its tracks. And yeah, that is a bad thing. A very bad thing. If they hadn’t stopped the natural course of the war, Central Africa would be a single state, maybe not as dead calm as an American suburb but as peaceful as, say, any region of the Roman or Mongol Empires—and remember, under the Mongols, travelers could ride from Tbilisi to Baikal without fear of robbery.

To show you what I mean, imagine that there’d been a United Nations, a lot of NGOs, and a noisy meddlesome “international community” to barge in when we were starting our Civil War in 1861. How would the Civil War have ended? Simple: it wouldn’t have. The “peacekeepers” would have intervened exactly when one side was starting to win—say, the summer of 1863—to freeze the two sides in position, “halt the killing,” and encourage a stalemate that left everything up in the air.

I can almost see the headlines and the photos that would hit the media if Sherman had started out on his march through Georgia in our time: “Refugees Flee Blue Advance,” “Thousands Starving,” and plenty of pictures of skinny towhead Dixie kids looking scared, with pillars of smoke from burning barns in the background.

As usual with his columns, it makes for interesting, pitch-black reading and has some pretty devastating analysis. I think a Tutsi Empire is a bit far-fetched, but his basic point is right. In fact, there's an even more clear-cut example to the north, in Rwanda.

There, Paul Kagame leads a regime founded by the army that actually ended the '90s genocide through the innovative solution of shooting the people committing it until they stopped. In the ensuing years, Rwanda's gone from a post-apocalyptic wasteland to one of the most stable countries on the continent.

Kagame's also engaged in relatively good government, encouraging a wrenching but necessary reconciliation, offering amnesty and rebuilding the society in a way that is slowly breaking the ethnic divisions that plagued it before.

He gets a lot of credit for that, rightly, even from the "do-gooders" the War Nerd column blasts.

At the same time, Kagame's relentlessly gone after the remnants of the genocidaires that slaughtered over a million people. These have included wiping them out even if they're hiding in refugee camps that the UN stupidly set up to give them cover (after neglecting to do a damn thing to stop the original genocide).

For this last part, he's gotten tut-tutting from lots of international institutions and worries that he's being authoritarian.

In fact, it makes perfect sense. Kagame's executing a classic "hand and fist" strategy. His country has a nasty ethnic division, and going after every Hutu that participated in the genocide isn't possible. All-out revenge, appealing as it may be, would just cause a repeat of the same scenario.

At the same time, he has to make damn sure that genocide doesn't happen again because the same leaders who committed it the first time build up their own army and undo all that hard-won stability. That requires crushing them. If that means intervening in the politics of the Congo, so be it. National sovereignty's always been more honored in the breach, anyway.

Instead of some regrettable deviation, this is the exact sort of politics war-torn regions need more of: neither bloodthirsty or endemically weak.

To keep the Civil War analogy going, it's a lot like Lincoln signing off on both "let 'em up easy" and Sherman's march. "Take this amnesty" gets way more appealing when followed up with "or we'll keep shooting you." To use a negotiated truce as an example, it's doubtful we'd have peace in Northern Ireland if the IRA hadn't shown they could bring London's financial center to a screaming halt.

Sometimes NGOs and even the UN do good work in an area. If peacekeepers are putting an exclamation point on an existing, stable deal, for example, they can actually be effective (the fact they're not usually used this way partly accounts for their horrific record). But in this situation, the colonial mentality is alive and well: what Kagame's done is nothing out of the ordinary for any sane government, and would be quickly recognized as such if he wasn't leading an African nation.

The Rundown: Old concepts on wikipedia

The Commissar Vanishes...

A few interesting concepts and tidbits that I've found more about on Wikipedia. This is one advantage to a crowd-sourced encyclopedia: after awhile, it gets into the nooks and crannies of human knowledge.

• Damnatio memoriae — The strangely enduring concept that a person can be erased from history. Pursued by almost every civilization in some form, from Romans striking faces off mosaics to Stalin's comrades disappearing one by one, becoming, in Orwell's words, "unpersons." Widely considered impossible in eras of much more widespread documentation.

But with more media becoming electronic however, this paradoxically might become easier. Ironically, a version of Orwell's works recently disappeared from Kindle. 

For the lower class, decentralized equivalent, see Going Ghost.

• King in the Mountain — Once upon a time, we had a leader who led us to victory against the odds, with more to come. Then a tragedy happened. But the leader was too great to die, we know that (somehow).

The leader must be sleeping, somewhere, waiting. Someday they will come back. The good times will come again, and everything since reduced to a bad dream, a footnote in a golden age.

• Terminus — In Latin: "boundary stone." Sooner or later everything ends. Every country has its border, every life its final day (unless they're sleeping under a mountain, naturally). The Romans were bright enough to turn this into a god. It's the basis of every tragedy (everyone reaches their limits) and every sense of relief (this will eventually end)

The original name of Atlanta was Terminus, and in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, Terminus is a planet that serves as the final refuge of humanity's knowledge in the face of a dark age. For awhile, anyway.

A simple proposal for better Presidential debates

'Nuff said

Despite my general love of political wonkery, I've never particularly liked Presidential debates, regardless of what year it is or who's running. They generally end up such garbled, stage-managed bits of kabuki theatre that there's little real substance, and the campaign is decided elsewhere.

So here's a basic proposal to improve the three debates* and update them for the modern era:

First Debate: Voight-Kampff test Remember Blade Runner? I doubt we can truly know if someone is fit for office until they've answered a series of relentless, disturbing questions. Forget Jim Lehrer, the moderator needs to be an ex-cop with a trenchcoat and deep identity issues, preferably drunk.

The goal is to goad the candidates into psychological breakdown or, alternatively, reveal that they're a replicant. Robots, being inherently untrustworthy, should never be allowed near political office.

Second Debate: Musical showdown I'm surprised this hasn't happened before (and no, Clinton playing the sax doesn't count). The candidates trade barbs in tune, resembling one of those terrible old school musicals or, more brutally, Sam Shepard's classic duel in The Tooth of Crime. Chorus lines required by the Supreme Court.

Third Debate: Thunderdome The third debate will give the masses of this country what they've secretly been yearning for since Andrew Jackson killed all those people in duels: a bloody, one-on-one fight between the potential leaders of this great land.** The blow-dried-hair-and-suit look will be replaced by post-apocalyptic armor and rockin' battle scars. Pundits can pore over whether the choice of a chainsaw or a tire iron to maim one's opponent secretly represents a candidate's true views on foreign policy (or possibly healthcare for seniors).

I promise, the debates will lose no relevance with this new format.

* The Vice Presidential debate, sideshow that it is, will now consist of a drinking contest followed by the two candidates hurling the vilest insults they can muster for an hour.

**If a primary, the final debate will be settled by Hunger Game.

Coptic saints and old bargains

An Egyptian Coptic monk before a 2009 Easter Mass. Photo via Getty Images.

There's a bleak, interesting piece over at NSFWCorp (to which you should subscribe) by Gary Brecher on how a Coptic emigre came to cooperate with Protestant fundamentalists in turning a YouTube video into a weapon. It's a glimpse to the absolutely fucked-up mentality that a history of pogroms and capricious authority inflict.

But there's a part I have issues with (I also disagree that the region's swinging towards jihad, but that's another post), when Brecker talks about the Arab Conquest of Egypt, way back in the grand 'ol seventh century:

Egyptian Christians have been trying the other way, the turn-the-other-cheek way, from the beginning. When the Arab horsemen took on the few Greek garrisons in Egypt in the 7th Century, the Egyptian Christian civilians reacted the way peasants everywhere react to kings hacking at each other: They stayed out of it and figured it didn’t make much difference whether it was a Greek or Arab profile on the coins, since they weren’t likely to have any either way.

What the fellahin (peasants) found out too late is that this was one of those invasions that really does make a difference. That’s one of the hardest judgment calls anyone has to make: a peasant deciding whether to fight or let the guys who can afford swords use them on each other. Most times, the right answer is “stay the Hell out of it,” but there are times it’s worth helping your local vampire lord, because something worse is coming over the horizon. For Egyptian Copts, there were about 1370 years of bad times—and counting—in the dust cloud behind that Arab cavalry.

This is not exactly how things played out. The Copts actually had really good reasons for not helping out the Byzantine Empire and equally sensible reasons for not just turning the cheek but actively cooperating with the Arabian invaders. It actually worked: the Copts got a much better deal from the Caliphate than from the Byzantines.

For awhile, anyway. It's an interesting story, and a reminder of how much of the world is littered with the consequences of old bargains.

Ain't no saints in politics, including Abraham Lincoln

Do not screw with Honest F'ing Abe...

An interesting tidbit in the New Yorker profile of William Seward — Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State and wheeler-dealer — on the lengths Lincoln went to in securing re-election:

“Nineteenth-century elections were played by rough rules,” Stahr writes laconically, and Seward knew exactly how to exploit them. After the New York Draft Riots, in 1863, and a string of defeats by Union troops, many people in the North began agitating for peace. As the election of 1864 approached, even loyal Republicans considered calling for a convention to nominate another candidate. That August, Weed went to the White House to tell Seward and Lincoln that the election was lost. Seward disagreed, and deployed Weed, the consummate party boss, to activate what Gideon Welles aptly described as the “vicious New York school of politics.” Welles’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy was enlisted to tell workers at the Brooklyn Navy Yard that if they didn’t vote for Lincoln they would lose their jobs. Lincoln did his part, too, appointing “a few Seward-Weed men to key posts in New York City.” Welles, meanwhile, scribbled in his diary about the “miserable intrigues of Weed and Seward.” Outmaneuvered by his nemesis and undercut by a subordinate, Welles wrote after the results came in, “Seward was quite exultant—feels strong and self-gratified. Says this Administration is wise, energetic, faithful, and able beyond any of its predecessors."

Doesn't exactly fit the narrative does it? Lincoln has long-since been enshrined in the secular pantheon, and when that happens, one's more brutal moves get glossed over.

That's unfortunate, because the reality is more revealing. It's not that Lincoln's positive traits are a lie, it's that they co-exist with others. This is, after all, the man who prosecuted an extremely bloody war, suspended habeas corpus, and kept a lock on his own party through constant manipulation of his rivals.

But the above shines even more light on Lincoln's ruthless streak. When you believe, with good reason, that your opponents will lose a war and ruin the nation, who gives a shit about threatening some dock workers and handing out bribes?

This is the reality of power: even when used for noble ends, it's never pretty. Those who do it well, like Lincoln, had some lines they wouldn't cross (he adamantly refused to suspend the election) but didn't stint from doing damn near anything else to get victory.

If you need another example, remember that the civil rights movement guarded its leaders' homes with machine guns and used fear tactics to keep the troops in line. Pretty? No. Justified? Absolutely.

That's why our tendency to turn people like Lincoln (or Anthony, Gandhi, King the list goes on...) into secular saints is such a damagingly dumb thing to do. It obscures the reality of how positive change happens — with all the ruthlessness sometimes required — and replaces it with a narrative where heroic figures prevail through personal purity.

Then, when someone looks to these past successes for inspiration, they miss the reality and go straight for the myth, which doesn't work. When they assess their own politicians, they hold them accountable to a fiction. And when they try to actually win a battle, they get their ass kicked.

So please, whatever your cause, let's not have saints. This is not the place for them.

Poems for Friday: The History of Red

Cave paintings in Borneo, Indonesia

I'm heading out to the woods for some birthday R&R. This week's been excellent on both the traffic and discussion fronts, and I'm happy to see the Breaking Time grow on a number of fronts. I can't thank all of you enough.

To close out the week, here's this amazing, epic poem from Linda Hogan:

 

First

there was some other order of things

never spoken

but in dreams of darkest creation.

 

Then there was black earth,

lake, the face of light on water.

Then the thick forest all around

that light,

and then the human clay

whose blood we still carry

rose up in us

who remember caves with red bison

painted in their own blood,

after their kind.

 

A wildness

swam inside our mothers,

desire through closed eyes,

a new child

wearing the red, wet mask of birth,

delivered into this land

already wounded,

stolen and burned

beyond reckoning.

 

Red is this yielding land

turned inside out

by a country of hunters

with iron, flint and fire.

Red is the fear

that turns a knife back

against men, holds it at their throats,

and they cannot see the claw on the handle,

the animal hand

that haunts them

from some place inside their blood.

 

So that is hunting, birth,

and one kind of death.

Then there was medicine, the healing of wounds.

Red was the infinite fruit

of stolen bodies.

The doctors wanted to know

what invented disease

how wounds healed

from inside themselves

how life stands up in skin,

if not by magic.

 

They divined the red shadows of leeches

that swam in white bowls of water:

they believed stars

in the cup of sky.

They cut the wall of skin

to let

what was bad escape

but they were reading the story of fire

gone out

and that was a science.

 

As for the animal hand on death’s knife,

knives have as many sides

as the red father of war

who signs his name

in the blood of other men.

 

And red was the soldier

who crawled

through a ditch

of human blood in order to live.

It was the canal of his deliverance.

It is his son who lives near me.

Red is the thunder in our ears

when we meet.

Love, like creation,

is some other order of things.

 

Red is the share of fire

I have stolen

from root, hoof, fallen fruit.

And this was hunger.

 

Red is the human house

I come back to at night

swimming inside the cave of skin

that remembers bison.

In that round nation

of blood

we are all burning,

red, inseparable fires

the living have crawled

and climbed through

in order to live

so nothing will be left

for death at the end.

 

This life in the fire, I love it.

I want it,

this life.

Poems for Friday: Politics

There are some days where I just don't have the words. Today, Randall Mann's will have to do:

This is what he dreams of:

a map of burned land,

a mound of dirt

in the early century’s winter.

 

A map of burned land?

A country is razed

in the early century’s winter.

And God descends.

 

A country is raised

because of industry.

And God descends,

messengers rush inside

 

because of industry,

in spite of diplomats.

Messengers rush inside

to haunt the darkened aisles.

 

In spite of diplomats,

the witnesses know well

to haunt the darkened aisles,

experimentally—

 

the witnesses know well

that ushers dressed in black

experimentally

lurk by the cushioned seats.

 

That ushers dress in black

should tell you something:

lurking by the cushioned seats,

the saved and the terrible.

 

I should tell you something:

this is what he dreams of,

the saved and the terrible—

a mound of dirt.

11 years later...

I'll keep this short. I've written at some length in this space before about my thoughts on 9/11, along with where I was that day and how it impacted my generation.

It's worth remembering that the targets of terrorism are the living, with the goal of getting them to react out of fear in a way that suits the perpetrator's aims. The antidote to that, as it is with personal trauma, is to remember and act as necessary, but to refuse to let it define the survivors' future. That's a way of giving really horrible people way too much power, even after they're dead.

So going forward, don't forget, but let's not let 9/11 define how we deal with the world, especially not by allowing its memory to keep us in a culture of constant panic. We are, I know, better than that.