WhirledView

Something to Make You Smile

posted by CKR

The language is Ingrian, the location Estonia. Ingrian is one of a group of Finno-Ugrian languages nearly extinct. Veljo Tormis has collected and arranged many folk songs from that group of languages.

Update (10 am): And even more so! The roadrunner is back, sunning in her usual place! I hope I didn't scare her...

The Bloggers Develop Nuclear Weapons Policy – The First Round

by CKR

Update (1/8/08): Consensus statement here.

Next post in this series (1/6/08)

First, some procedural stuff. I invited bloggers and others to contribute their thoughts to the development of US nuclear weapons policy. The next step, the one you see here, is that I would summarize the ideas, agreements and disagreements. Although I think my leanings on this subject are obvious to those who have been reading WhirledView, I have tried to do this in an even-handed way. I have rephrased some of what’s been said, but I don’t want to misrepresent. Please comment or send me an e-mail if you think I’m too far from what you said.

This summary is a bit lumpy. It's not yet possible to smooth everything out; we need some negotiation. I’m asking that contributors try to work toward a consensus in their next round of posts.

I have promises (promises, promises!) from a few more potential contributors. Contributions are still welcome, starting from scratch or responding to points already raised, on a single point or a grand unified theory, from bloggers, commenters, or others who want to participate. You can send a contribution to me via e-mail or post it on your blog.

I’ll summarize our progress again on January 7, unless more earthshaking events intrude.

My questions and comments are in italics. I have divided up topics somewhat arbitrarily, but I think they make sense. This probably does not represent a final organization.

Contributors so far:
Michael van der Galien

Dave Schuler

James

Deichmans

Jason Sigger

Non Partisan Pundit

Phila

Jeffrey Lewis

Jaan Kross, 1920 - 2007

by CKR

One of the world's great writers died this week. Jaan Kross was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature a number of times. Much of his work has been translated into English.

The Tsar's Madman and Professor Martens' Departure, the two of his novels that I have read, deal with some of the same themes of The White Ship. Aino Kallas was writing before the Soviet occupation, and Kross after, so his novels contain an additional layer of history through which Estonia's nineteenth century is seen.

His writing is exquisite, the characters strongly drawn so that we feel their conflicting loyalties and necessities. Anselm Hollo is an outstanding translator. I can only claim to having read Kross's work in English, but I recommend it highly.

Some photos here.

Update from Eric Dickens: For a longer list of the novels that Jaan Kross wrote (of the 16, only three are available in English translation) please have a look at the Three Percent website, run from Rochester University, New York State, where I have recently posted a quick overview of all the main novels he wrote.

Other people have written, in English, in more detail about specific books, but I wanted to also mention the books that have never appeared in English, plus his 600-page autobiography, which appeared in 2003.

I myself have translated two books by Kross into English; Anselm Hollo, the Finnish-American poet, a further two. But that's all there is in English. There are six of Kross' works in French, some also in German, Swedish, Dutch, Russian and in Finnish, which language closely resembles Estonian.

Further update by CKR: The link that Eric gives us is an outstanding overview of Kross's novels. Suur tänu, Harra Dickens! I'll also add to the list a lovely little volume that I picked up somewhere, either Milwaukee or Tallinn: The Rock from the Sky, five of Kross's short stories (novellas?), probably translated to English through a Russian translation of the Estonian. It was published in 1983 by Raduga Publishers.

A review of one of Kross's books translated into English.

Tänan väga Giustinol. Sketch from Postimees.

The Bloggers Develop Nuclear Weapons Policy – Deadline Delayed

by CKR

We’ve got a great response so far to my call for a blog-tank on nuclear weapons policy. But there are still a few more folks I’d like to hear from, some of whom have directed their attention to Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.

I have finished reading all of the books I mentioned in that earlier post, except the last chapter of Jonathan Schell’s The Seventh Decade, and I may weave some of their insights into my compilation. I also watched “Dr. Strangelove” again as part of my preparation.

The discussion is open to anyone, not just bloggers or non-specialists. I wanted to start with people who think about policy but who aren’t necessarily specialists in nuclear policy. I wanted to get a discussion going that could spread to ordinary voters. But if there are specialists out there just aching to get a word in edgewise, I welcome you, and I’m sure our discussants will as well. If you have a longish contribution that you want to e-mail, please do.

Thanks to everyone who has participated so far, especially those who have been spreading the word, and nudges to those who haven’t.

I’ll start working on my compilation. I hope to have it completed by the end of the weekend.

Holiday Cold Blogging

by CKR

My outdoor thermometer read three degrees this morning before sunrise. Then the wind came up. I’m not even thinking about scraping the inch of snow that fell last night off my stairs and driveway. Fortunately, the wind is helping to clear it. The temperature is going up fairly quickly; it’s twenty degrees at about noon, and tomorrow is supposed to be warmer.

One day last week, the birds snarfed down an entire brick of suet in a single day, so I figured that the cold weather meant I would need more suet. I loaded two bricks into the net feeder before the worst of the storm hit, and this morning I put hot water in the birdbath.

For me, I made bread yesterday and soup today. I also got out the underwear I bought at Stockmann’s in Tallinn on the way to Moscow one December.

I thought I was seeing at least one female Cassin’s finch (Carpodacus cassinii, first photo above), and yesterday I saw the male, too. The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology has a nice page on how to distinguish house, purple and Cassin’s finches, which are fairly similar. I find that the most distinctive markings are the female’s darkly striped face and the male’s relative unstriped breast.

There was a western bluebird, (Sialia mexicana) too, just for a short time, gone when I returned with the camera. Probably drawn to the suet, so I’ll keep alert.

No roadrunner lately. I’ve got a dish of insect-flavored suet pellets (yum!) out for her. Something eats the pellets from time to time, but I haven’t seen it. She showed up first on Christmas last year, but it was much snowier then.

And then there’s the stickler for accuracy. It’s a bird feeder, right? So this sharp-shinned hawk, Accipiter striatus (or maybe a Cooper’s hawk, Accipiter cooperii) says he’s a bird, and the feeder has some of his favorite food: juncos, bushtits, house finches….Yeah, after reading this, I think it’s a sharp-shinned hawk.

R.I.P. Benazir Bhutto

By PLS

She was ambitious. She was intelligent. She was articulate. She was beautiful. She was brave. She is dead.

The news was shocking—and somewhat expected.

Of all the aspirants to power in Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto was the most implacable in her opposition to regressive Islam. As a highly educated and sublimely confident female politician, she posed a danger to the militant Islam project in Pakistan in a way the Islamist-pandering, on-again-off-again secularist Musharraf never did. Nor did her arch-rival Nawaz Sharif, a follower of the very conservative, missionary-oriented Tabligi Jamat. Nawaz accepted exile in Wahabi Saudi Arabia, after all, while Benazir Bhutto in exile was at home in London and, on the Arabian peninsula, in the far more tolerant Emirates.

One thing no one has mentioned (to my imperfect knowledge anyway) in the course of sketching Benazir’s route to death in Rawalpindi yesterday, is that she encouraged a resurgence of the arts in Pakistan during her second prime ministership. A feminist poet who had to seek refuge in India during the puritanical military dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq not only returned to Pakistan but was given a position in the government’s cultural hierarchy. Female artistes were able to present classical dance programs in public, not only Kathak, which flourished in Muslim courts, but Bharat Natayam, which is a South Indian dance form. Painting thrived, too, with modern miniatures, some very witty and contemporary, pouring out of the art schools of Lahore. Non-religious classical music could also be enjoyed in public. People breathed freely. Well, some did. Others gnashed their teeth and insisted that female leadership was inconsistent with Islam.

Benazir was so articulate that one was tempted, at times, to think of her as glib, as if the word democracy might be falling a bit too trippingly from her tongue these days. But during her last term in power, there was indeed an opening up of life in Pakistan, the sort that’s consistent with the individual freedom that underlies the vital functioning of democratic institutions. Indians recall that she sought rapprochement with Pakistan’s huge neighbor, too. No doubt she was mightily constrained by the Pakistani army (as was Nawaz Sharif, when he was in power). And there were those corruption charges! Of course, even the Pakistani army is not exactly pure when it comes to extra-curricular financial opportunities, but the charge always resonates, as indeed it should.

I was more than a little amused during those long months when the Bush administration pushed for the never credible shotgun marriage that a Bhutto-Musharraf government would have been. Suddenly Benazir Bhutto had become the last best hope for democracy in Pakistan. What a turnabout! Ten years ago, when I was in Karachi and Benazir was in power, my diplomatic colleagues denigrated her as a hysterical ineffectual female and hailed Nawaz Sharif as a reality-based businessman America could work with. When I suggested that my dear male colleagues might be confusing style with substance, they pooh poohed the very possibility of sexism tainting their reports. Ha!

If the personally secular Musharraf has been a bit two-faced about his relationship with radical Islam, in the border areas and elsewhere, Nawaz Sharif is personally and openly of a conservative stripe as a Muslim. I found myself speculating (uncomfortably) as to whether, in the drive toward victory in the upcoming parliamentary elections, Nawaz might have made an unholy alliance with potential Islamist assassins. I am, now, convinced that such was not the case. I’ve watched the clip showing his reaction to the assassination at least five times. The anguish in his face is too total and too nuanced to be phoney. The man is shocked and distraught. The facial expression of “President” Musharraf, on the other hand, is stony and unreadable. Anything is possible, as Benazir herself suggested, openly. However, Musharraf's declaration of three days national mourning seems fairly striking. That’s high honor paid to an upstart woman. It’s not likely to increase his popularity with those who have tried to kill him in the past.

So what will happen with those elections? Was Benazir’s assassination a rather nasty way to get them called off? Was her death instrumental—or the whole point of the matter? I don’t know.

Finally, if Benazir had lived and become PM again, would she have been more broadly successful than previously? Only if critical elements of the army had chosen to support her and her goals, for a change. Would they have? That, too, I do not know. Nothing in Pakistan is more opaque than the collective thoughts of the all powerful army which poor George W. Bush naively thought he understood and could use for his own purposes. Billions and billions of dollars later, he knows better, I hope.

Passport Update: What’s In Store for 2008

By PHK

I’m not good at crystal ball gazing but it seems to me that although the State Department managed to get its act together enough to play passport issuance catch-up over the past six months to the point where the wait-time is reportedly four to six weeks for regular processing and no more than three weeks for expedited processing, whether this will last is something else again. Why it took Congressional pressure and media criticism to force State to clean up the mess last summer is beyond me – but nevertheless, the outside pressure is clearly what made the difference.

State’s new Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy, Moira Hardy, the Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Consular Affairs, and everyone else involved should thank their lucky stars this holiday season that Congress put its foot down and told the administration and its recalcitrant Department of Homeland Security to postpone the full implementation of the Western Hemisphere Initiative (WHTI) until June 1, 2009 or later - like it or not. At least someone has some common sense.

When the WHTI is fully implemented everyone who crosses the US borders by land or sea as well as air will be required to have a valid passport or a “smart card.” This could quadruple the number of American passport holders and yet again inundate the passport agencies unless the State Department is prepared to ramp up its passport issuing office capacity substantially yet again between now and then.

Why DHS’ continued urging that this final piece of the law be implemented sooner rather than later is beyond me. Exactly how many of the 9/11 hijackers, for instance, came into the country sans passport and across a land or sea border from Canada, Mexico, Bermuda or the Caribbean? Not one. If I remember correctly they entered on questionable student visas issued by private American flight schools where they learned to take-off but not land. Who exactly monitored that rather bizarre behavior – where was the FBI when we needed them? I’m also not convinced that a piece of paper makes a difference in the overall scheme of things. Then again, it’s not exactly as if we don’t have our home-grown terrorists either – think Oklahoma City bombing. What does seem to make a difference, however, is strong intelligence work and alert border officials. That’s where I’d put my money if I lived in 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, NW.

I suppose, however, if a would-be terrorist happened to cross the US border by foot sans passport, it would make DHS look bad. Frankly, I think this passport-by-land requirement is foremost nonsense and essentially a bureaucratic CYA game – but that comes from my cynical nature having worked for the U.S. government for 27 plus years and having experienced more than my share of terrorist alerts, scares and disasters overseas.

Christmas Thoughts

by CKR

In contrast to the recent political smoke-blowing over religion, I’d like to suggest a meeting-ground within and between religions.

Spiritual/ethical/religious conviction is rooted in experiences that tell us yes, this is how the universe should be. The experience may be a lifetime in an established religion and family that provides an ongoing feeling of rightness, or it may be a revelation that utterly contradicts what has gone before.

Our religious texts document these varieties of enlightenment. The Old Testament prophets, Gautama, Muhammed, Jesus, and their followers, and many more. Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez. The names that most of us recognize are those of people who saw that the social system needed change and did something about it. The quieter recognition that one’s own life needs changing doesn’t make the headlines but it is just as real.

But the experiences have much in common: the feeling that this is the way things are meant to be. That may mean that something is wrong, it must be changed, and somehow I will have the strength to make the change. Or it may mean that I must work harder to spread the good I have received. The feeling is so strong that it seems like it must be coming from outside the self.

But in order to share it, or even to explain it to oneself (because we humans do mull these things over and over), we must use words, and experience never fits completely into words.

Actions can supplement and reinforce the words, but even this combination is insufficient to explain or to convince. The experience may have been within a community, and the community may already have scriptures or stories that provide ways of talking about the experience.

Even though the words are not enough, repeating them reinforces that they feel right, and being in a community keeps some of that experience alive even as what doesn’t fit is sheared off, forgotten. It is not far to believing that my community only understands, and the others are mistaken.

If the people in the community need to feel that they are special, another of those feelings that we humans so easily fall into, they will see the pieces of experience they have sheared off in other communities and condemn them for emphasizing wrong experience, wrong words, heresy.

That is what we see today. Those who are content with the words and who must feel they are special find it easier to be vocal than those who recognize the insufficiency of words and the necessity of humility.

But we need more voices for the commonality of our experience, that we are related by our experience, and for the responsibility that flows from that experience.

“Do not be afraid. Listen, I bring you news of great joy, a joy to be shared by the whole people.” By the whole people, the angel said.

Some of today’s related thoughts:
E. J. Dionne

Michael Gerson

New York Times Editorial Page

Los Angeles Times Editorial Page