WhirledView

The Ahmadinejad Missive

By PLS

A couple of weeks ago the national temperature reached boiling point as pundits were reacting more or less vehemently to Iranian President Ahmadinajad’s letter to President Bush. The next big noise was over immigration. Who knows what tomorrow's controversy du jour will be? Something else deserving of more thoughtful consideration, no doubt.

I want to return to the Ahmadinejad letter, but let me establish some cultural context before I get out the dissecting knife.

I attended a thrilling recital of Iraqi classical music recently. The performers were superb, Iraqi oudist Rahim AlHaj and Lebanese percussionist Souhail Kaspar. They were presenting material they’d recorded for a soon-to-be-released Smithsonian Folkways CD—look for it!—and, of course, there was human interest patter before each piece.

Rahim AlHaj is married to woman from Syria. “She’s beautiful and she’s in the audience,” he announced, “and she likes to tease me about Iraq and Iraqi music. ‘Syria’s more civilized,’ she says. ‘Our music’s more sophisticated.’ But I put it to her—and you: who invented reading and writing over two thousand years ago?”

I wonder how strenuously the Bush administration pondered the implications of deep pride in one’s ancient heritage, whatever its contemporary disarray, before invading Iraq.

Iran didn’t invent writing, but the ruins of Persepolis are more impressive than anything that will remain of an American city in two thousand and more years. Not that the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran will ever hold a champagne party there as the benighted “Shah” once did, but the ayatollahs aren’t pulverizing the friezes of ancient Persia either.

Iranian culture is the contemporary version of Persian civilization, which clearly inspires pride among modern Iranians. Well-founded self-respect is not a contemptible thing. A healthy psyche needs it. The question is whether, in the case of Ahmadinajad, we’re faced with megalomania.

Head Aega, Tallinn!

by CKR

Well, it's time to leave.

I've turned in the rental car, and my plane leaves early tomorrow morning (late tonight if you're in the United States).

I didn't buy any amber, but I did find some yarn to knit my own sweater in Estonian colors.

For my last night in a hotel, I bought these anemones and lilies of the valley. They are perfuming my room . They don't come home with me.

Frost Wasn't for Fences!

By PLS

Senator Jeff Sessions recently quoted from Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Fence” to support the idea of building a concrete wall hundreds of miles long between the US and Mexico, the unthinking person's approach to solving the problem of illegal immigration. "Fences don't make bad neighbors," insisted the Republican Senator from Alabama.

Either the Senator is unable to understand the poem, in which case one is embarrassed for him, or else he is identifying himself with someone who behaves like stone age survival or a brainless robot.

Here is the relevant part of the poem:

‘....Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down’....I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s’ saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says it again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Such simple language. Such resonance. It’s hard to understand how anyone with a reasonable quota of intelligence or good faith could misunderstand Frost’s strong critique of crude efforts to build barriers between people.

The Immigration Dilemma: Some Common Sense Please

By PHK

The W administration has yet to see a chance to play the “fear” factor card that it hasn’t used.

After 9/11, the search for Osama Bin Laden’s head competed with color coded terrorist alerts to raise the specter of fear in American minds. Yet, Bin Laden - remember him? – seems to have all but vaporized from the scene along with those orange, red, yellow and green Candyland alerts thanks to the administration’s decision to play down that policy failure and invade Saddam’s Iraq which harbored neither Al Qaeda nor WMD and thus embark the country on yet another policy failure.

Unfortunately but all too predictably, the administration’s adroit Bin Laden fear-factor disappearing act was obligingly bought by the MSM. After all, it’s harder to report on something that isn’t, than something that is – especially when reporters, columnists, editors and the like are bombarded by US government spokesmen and women touting the latest administration “successes” on an hourly basis.

Today, however, the administration’s queen of spades is neither Bin Laden nor Saddam Hussein but illegal immigrants. The ride-em-cowboy vigilantes on our southern border who have attracted the media cameras – only to disappear in their gas-guzzling SUVs and souped-up pickups when those cameras fade into the sunset according to a friend who lives near the California border – have fueled the administration’s latest Furies. But let’s get this straight. Illegal immigration may be a problem – but is it any worse than it always was? And why should there be such a fuss anyway?

Wednesday Scenery Blogging

by CKR

I get rather carried away with my flowers and birds, and I forget that most of WhirledView’s readers have probably never been to Estonia and might enjoy seeing what I’m seeing. I’m also finding so much to think about and possibly to write about that I get overwhelmed. I have at least three or four weighty posts, but I don’t have the time or the real opportunity to do them just now.

So here’s some scenery, with a little commentary. Click on the photos to enlarge them.

The tower is the town hall in Tallinn’s Old Town. Until two years ago, the spire was dirty gray rather than white. Then they sandblasted the limestone clean. After the Soviet Union collapsed, you could see that sort of filth in all the republics and satellites. Factories belching smoke were a symbol of the industrial progress of the Union. To be fair, the free world also believed something like this. I recall a stamp commemorating some anniversary of the American Chemical Society in the 1950s or 1960s that featured smoking chimneys.

On the horizon, you can see the apartment houses of Lasnamäe. The Soviets built the houses for workers, mostly Russian, immigrating into Estonia. The apartments have all the charm of the “projects” in American cities, although they have not been trashed in the same way.

Guess I'll Stick with You, Qwest, for a While

By PLS

Thank you for respecting the Fourth Amendment, Qwest. The one against unreasonable searches and seizures. The one that NSA has massively abused at the behest of the constitutionally tone deaf Bush administration. The one that should prevent the compliant NSA director from being confirmed as the head of the CIA, which should (duh!) be independent of executive interference in the collection and analysis of intelligence.

I’m often annoyed with Qwest, my local phone company. Its marketeers keep offering bundles of add-on services not life-enhancing enough for me to want to pay for them. Supposedly I’ll be getting more for less. In fact, I’ll just be paying more.

It’s like this: All I want from Qwest is a reliable way to talk to people I want to talk to—and super high speed internet connectivity—but that’s not enough for Qwest or any other communications company, evidently.

Yes, I understand the business world’s imperative to improve the bottom line by ingeniously inveigling me into believing that more and more peripherical communications goodies are essential. I even sympathize. Theoretically. Which means I don't intend to play along where my own budget is concerned.

Checkpoints

by CKR

I've been offline for a few days, so today I'm catching up.

When I came to the Washington Post's lead story on President Bush's plans to send the National Guard to the Mexican border, I immediately thought of a conversation here with some of my friends.

We were driving back to their home on the Viimsi peninsula, east of Tallinn. The road is newly improved, with a separate bicycle and pedestrian path.

"This is the place we had to show our documents," my host said, gesturing toward a small Soviet-style building that had survived the roadbuilding. "And this is the office where I had to come many times when I did not have my documents as a teenager." The office was a larger building, same style, on the other side of the road.

In the Café

by CKR

Tallinn has a new art museum. It’s quite the building, designed by a young Finnish architect, perched above the President’s house, symbolically and physically opening a route from the largely Russian Lasnamäe district to the centers of Tallinn’s cultural and political life.

Estonian art participated in the major European movements. Estonia and Latvia might have even led in the early twentieth-century Art Noveau and Art Deco movements, had not the Russian Revolution and consequent wars for independence intervened. Paintings from that time introduce elements that I haven’t seen elsewhere, or haven’t seen done so well. But I’m quite an amateur in art.

I went first to the fourth floor, where art from the end of World War II to restoration of Estonia’s independence is displayed. The current exhibition is called “Difficult Choices.”

For some reason not at all clear to me, I have always responded deeply emotionally to the loss of freedom and imposition of dictatorship, with nightmares when I was a child. My response to these paintings wasn’t different. I say this because I’m not at all sure that my criticisms go beyond projection of my current concerns about America.

An emotional tone evolves through the paintings in time: horror to disgust to absurdity. These artists continued to see choices, with full knowledge of the consequences of those choices.