Chris Brauer Media Project [BLOG]

At 700+ pages Life a User's Manual (1978) by French author Georges Perec is a solid long read but well worth it if you are looking for a relatively hidden and delightful gem of 20th century literature. Critics see it as one of the most fascinating experiments in form ever penned.

Each of the 99 chapters tells the story of a flat and resident(s) in a fictional Parisian apartment block. Perec's method is based on formal arcana that orders and organizes every aspect of the novel's structure. For example the sequence of chapters, and hence flats, is determined by use of the Knight's Tour in which a knight visits every square of a chessboard only once in succession. In Six Memos for the next Millennium, Italo Calvino tells of how he spoke with his fellow member of Parisian literary group OULIPO (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentiel) on several occasions about the 42 different elements (characters, objects, situations, literary allusions, etc) that feature consistently in each chapter of Perec's text but Perec playfully revealed only a handful of the building blocks for the contructivist approach to writing his most celebrated work.

Perec died at the tender age of 45 in 1982 but many are now discussing him in the same class as Proust, Sartre and Duras as one of the greatest French writers of the 20th century. Next time you visit Paris or find yourself in a bookshop strong on classic literati pick yourself up a copy of this work of art into being.

Labels: literature

Some of life's most valuable lessons are learned the hard way. No rocket science in that statement. But sometimes hard learned lessons don't offer much value at all. Like shopping for titles in an airport bookstore. No matter how many times I am disappointed by my choices I still turn up minutes before departure, make a snatch and grab purchase, and regret it the following week. The biggest problem is usually those damn top-ten bestseller fiction lists. Who buys those books?? Is it a similar phenomena to why truly brainless and predictable blockbuster films attract such massive audiences? Recently it was my great misfortune to pick up copies of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka and The People's Act of Love by James Meek. Here's a brief synopsis so you don't make the same mistake.

• A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is inexplicably supposed to be a funny book. That's why I bought it for a bit of light summer fare. Well if you think eastern-Europeans-trying-to-speak-english and asides on the flippy-floppy organs of old men are funny this is your book. It reads like a first novel in the sense of a weekly suburban meeting of amateur sparetime authors and less like a candidate for major literary awards. Tentative explorations into identity and gender are cliche and uninspired. I won't even bore you with the plot. The only problem is that after selling millions of copies we might have to brace
• The People's Act of Love is one of those strange books that should have been a movie first. It has all the elements of a terrific action-adventure big screen lollapalooza. Guardian journalist Meek has a real knack for translating words into visual imagination and the story ambles on convincingly enough. A critical plot device is the strategy of a Siberian prisoner to bring along a fellow prisoner on an escape plan so he can eat him when he runs out of food. Another is how a group of voluntary eunuchs relate to Czech soldiers led by a madman stationed in their town. There is plenty of romance, some sex, wars, escapes planned and foiled, magic, swordfights, children in distress, communists, czars, princes, revolutionaries, heroes and heroines. It's not that I didn't like this book it is just that I wasn't turning the pages with angst or hope. Like watching a blockbuster when introduced to the characters you could guess their fate. Coming soon to a Cineplex Odeon near you.
• ourselves for the release of The Long History of Tractors in Ukrainian sometime next year. If so I suggest we add reading this book to the banned list of human rights anti-torture laws emerging in the world courts.
  

Labels: culture, literature

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

The first paragraph of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep is legendary in crime fiction. It has been a long time since I picked up a Philip Marlowe mystery, maybe even ten years since The Long Goodbye ('Alcohol is like love,' he said. 'The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you just take the girl's clothes off.').

Pulp fiction meets classic tragedy in Chandler's works and the reader hoovers up Marlowe's cynical drawls: "Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead". But there is a quiet heroism that attracts from a time when honour, loyalty and truth were not loaded terms but terms loaded with meaning. And you just might find yourself quipping at the next mercenary merchant rip-off on the cold streets of 21st century urbanity: "Wrong play pal. Innocence will get you nowhere".

Labels: literature

Most of the hype about new projects on the Internet focuses on integrating new technologies or processes into daily life. But there are countless examples, like BookCrossing (or BXing), of how use of the Internet can inject new life into old technology.

If you are not familiar with the phenomena, the premise is fairly straightforward. Person A registers a copy of a book with the BookCrossing website, scribbles the registration number on the inside jacket, and leaves the book in a public place. Person B finds the book, reads it, visits the bookcrossing website to enter the registration number and jots down a journal entry of their experience (eg. where they found it, if they liked it, where they left it). Person B then leaves the book in a public place, Person C finds it and the cycle of sharing continues.

The website was started in 2001 and was inspired by similar initiatives like phototag.org with disposable cameras (Squid goes around the world in 99 days ... view Squid's pictures), and where's willy or george tracking small currency movements. The idea is to release objects into the "wild" like tracking tagged animals or birds and follow movements and associated narratives through the Internet.

Quite sad to see that the book business is as scared as the music industry of change. According to Caroline Michel, publisher of HarperPress: "book publishing as a whole has its very own potential Napster crisis in the growing practice of book crossing". This approach seems especially absurd in the week that pop history is made by the first single to achieve number one on the UK singles chart based solely on computer downloads. It's just another case of a business model coming under threat, not a business.

Fortune and friends of similar literary taste brought me two copies of Tom Robbins' debut Another Roadside Attraction over the past couple years so it seems like a good place to start. It is already registered with a BookCrossing ID so now I just need to decide the best place to introduce one of my favorite texts into the wild Londinium streets. Maybe on one of those benches in the courtyard of St Paul's Cathedral, or on a bar stool in a ragged southeast London pub, in a capsule of the London Eye, or dropped off the Hammersmith Bridge onto a passing fishing trawler. If you happen to stumble upon it, soak up every word of a cracking read, and release it to the wild once more. Abraham Lincoln could just as well have been describing BookCrossing as books when he said: "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like".

Labels: internet, literature

Just finished reading the Seven Daughters of Eve by Brian Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University. It weaves a fantastic account of human history as revealed by the mitochondrial DNA inherited from mothers to daughters. Sykes finds that "almost everyone of European origin is descended from one of seven ancient women" who lived 45,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Every person on earth is, in turn, the descendent of one of only 33 women, who are themselves the matrilineal ancestors of "Mitochondrial Eve", a common ancestor of all living humans.

So it turns out that as factions in the world continue to tear each other apart along perceived racial, geographical, economic, and religious grounds, we're actually all brothers and sisters from the same mother. And while we are reaching back in time to learn from modern science, why not grab some language from the epic poet Homer: "A sympathetic friend can be quite as dear as a brother". Be sympathetic and compassionate with your fellow human beings. We're all in this together.

Labels: history, literature, science

What could possibly bring together the new Pope, Lance Armstrong, Hermann Hesse, astrophysics, and the little German town of Tubingen? Hop on to our lightspeed mad bicycle to find out!

Researchers in the department of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Tubingen, Germany have developed a speed-of-light simulator, that takes you through the streets of Tubingen in southwest Germany, at near light speeds. It opened on May 7th through the end of 2005 as an exhibition at the Deutsches Museum, Munich providing museum-goers the opportunity to hop on a stationary bike, accelerating to 30km/h to witness the effects on perception of travel at 99% the speed of light as the view is projected on a large screen in front of you in real time. The engineers have created a correlation between traveling 30km/h on the bike and witnessing light speed on the screen. That provides the seedling idea for this thought experiment.

Everyone knows that six-times Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong can ride a bike forever at incredible speed. He reaches speeds in excess of 75km/h on descents. So what would happen if we put Armstrong on the exhibition bike and instructed him to tide forever at incredible speed? Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity provides some clues.

For example if your spaceship were to leave earth traveling at 98% the speed of light, the pace reached by any biker experimenting with the Tubingen simulation, and you took a one year journey, when you returned five years on earth would have passed. But that's taking us in the wrong direction. While it might be interesting to explore participation in an accelerated future, what about journeying to the past? Aren't the technical challenges insurmountable? And why might we want to do this, especially if we were only able to navigate the winding cobblestone paths of little Tubingen?

There are likely countless good reasons why visiting this German town in the past on our light bike could be interesting and enjoyable. Near the borders of Switzerland and Austria and overlooking the Neckar and Ammer rivers, Tubingen is richly vested in history and an ideal site for time travel. For our purposes we will concentrate on two key personalities who touched ground in the town, already connected over boundaries of time and space - the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and author Herman Hesse.

But first just how possible is our little thought experiment?

We are after all speaking of generating an infinite source of energy to drive our infinite mass (as objects approach the speed of light mass increases with velocity, going to infinity at the speed of light). Also approaching light speed means that thoughts, heart beat and movements would slow as well. But we were never thinking very quickly anyhow and surely there is nothing more massive than Lance Armstrong's thighs. Plus we have already seen Captain Kirk, Superman and even Chubaka of Star Wars fame reverse time with a flick of a switch or cape so it is clearly possible, despite what any 'earthbound' physicist might say.

Those physicists who dare to explore thought experiments in violation of the laws of physics, like Doc Brown in Back to the Future, suggest that if we could exceed 140% of the speed of light time will go faster than the stationary frame, in effect reversing time. With Armstrong traveling furiously over 200% the 30km/h speed of light requirement in the German museum we look well set to exceed that threshold. And now for the real kicker. He would pedal backwards, clearly a recipe for taking us backwards through time.

So that's sorted out and now on to our personalities. Pope Benedict XVI is already 78-years-old so we'd be unlikely to encounter him if we started Armstrong speeding back to the future. He's probably a fairly interesting character to meet in current time 2005, setting the stage and foundation of beliefs for over 1 billion Catholics worldwide. But to truly understand the essence of the man who would be pope we might need to travel back to 1968, a point in history often signaled by biographers as a critical juncture in the development of his philosophical perspective.

Joseph Aloysius Ratzinger was teaching at Tubingen when Marxist student protests broke out in the late 1960s, the European equivalent to the student protests in Italy, France and the US at the same period. As power was questioned in all its forms Ratzinger was scared by the upheaval and became gravely concerned with the consequences of a system free of a strong hand of structured order. He called the revolts "a radical attack on human freedom ... a deep threat to all that is human".

Shortly after he is said to have adopted the Conservative views that led him to his taskmaster position in the Church under John Paul II, effectively the Party Whip.

Charles Moore in the Daily Telegaph muses that "his experience of the subsequent turmoil in the Church has taught him that Western culture is profoundly hostile to the message of Christianity".

According to Moore, Pope Benedict XVI is said to be fascinated with Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf, with its portrait of Harry Haller embracing the meaninglessness of life. If this is true, and we have no reason to suspect otherwise, perhaps Ratzinger feels special affinity for the character who balances self-affirmation with self-destruction and individuality with convention.

Perhaps he also feels special affinity for author Hesse who apprenticed for four years at the Buchhandlung Heckenhauer (still standing today in Tubingen on the Holzmarkt Square) from 1895-1898, in a common practice for young writers. Hesse led a wandering life but, like Ratzinger, was crucially formed by his contemplative years in the Black Forest bordertown before the start of WWI, against which Hesse furiously spoke out in Switzerland. Ratzinger deserted the German army during WWII and was briefly held by American forces as a POW.

Hesse received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946 after his works had been put out of print in Nazi Germany from 1939-1945 by authorities. His literary canon is defined by a range of beautiful texts but it is Siddhartha, a fictional account of the early spiritual wanderings of Gautama Buddha, and Steppenwolf that must have touched Ratzinger.

And so it is with great ferocity that Armstrong pedals our lightspeed bike backwards to 1968 to find the young theologian deep in a Martin Luther-like trance, driven to action but now feeling the weight of consequence, searching for a reconnection to God.

In a Time Magazine interview with a friend, Wolfgang Beinert, working in Tubingen at the time, Ratzinger's dilemma emerges:

"Ratzinger had advocated -- was known for advocating -- a greater openness and a loosening of ecclesiastical authority, the Tubingen strikes triggered a huge fright. Ratzinger believed that he was in some way responsible, guilty of the chaos, and that the university and society and church were collapsing."

Did he clutch Steppenwolf to his chest and chart a new path of authority and strict convention, his reputation as a institutional disciplinarian strengthened with each new promotion within the Church hierarchy?

Perhaps we should accelerate Armstrong's reverse still further, calling for one of his mythical climbs on Alpe d'Huez to take us still further back to Hesse, sitting contemplative, a lonely figure publishing his first poems in 1898, "melancholy neo-Romantic lyrics expressing Hesse's uneasiness with the world".

But a closer look sees figures clasped hand in hand across a table and over Hesse's shoulder, shadowed faces flickering in the firelight. Steppenwolf and Siddhartha sat cross legged speaking in turn.

SW: Our whole civilization is a cemetery where Jesus Christ, and Socrates, Mozart and Haydn, Dante and Goethe were but the indecipherable names on moldering stones; and the mourners who stood round affecting a pretense of sorrow would give much to believe in these inscriptions which once were holy.

SH: All the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together is the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life...then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om - perfection

Hesse doesn't seem startled by our presence: "We won't bring them," motioning towards his characters. "Ratzinger already knows them."

A whirl of the pedals and Armstrong has us on our way back to unite the characters of our Tubingen time-traveling drama, over time and space. Ratzinger doesn't seem startled by our presence.

Hesse: People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest

Ratzinger: Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism... Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and 'swept along by every wind of teaching,' looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards.

Hesse: Yet it is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard

Ratzinger: Because in today's world the theme of truth has all but disappeared, because truth appears too great for man, and yet everything falls apart if there is no truth. We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires.

Hesse: Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.

Shortly they fade from view and earshot, walking arm and arm, no longer two isolated, inspirational men but now joined forces, stretched by lightspeed over Tubingen.

One can't help but think that commuters in the congested cities of the world like London, Tokyo, Los Angeles or Mexico City, might benefit more from getting around on a 'bike' traveling at light speed than the 85,000 residents in this idyllic old town. But the next time you visit Tubingen allow your senses to open and seek the Om that came that day when Pope Benedict XVI and Hermann Hesse met and walked together, speaking in turn, listening all the time.

As for us, we sped off on our lightspeed bike in time to get it back to the Deutches Museum before opening the next morning. It's there waiting for you when you're ready to conduct your own thought experiment. But you better get out practicing on your bike as Lance Armstrong has a seventh Tour de France to win this summer and he's a little busy.

Labels: literature, religion, science

"My dear Amanda," intoned the family lawyer, "it has come to my attention that you are increasingly seen in the company of extremely weird individuals."
Brushing a cigar ash from the attorney's somber necktie, Amanda corrected him. "There is no such thing as a weird human being. It's just that some people require more understanding than others."

So we, lucky readers, are introduced in the first few pages of Another Roadside Attraction, to the majestic character of Amanda, so vibrant in voice and aesthetic as to break the somnabulistic spell cast upon fiction readers the world over by dark and brooding tales of contraction. Step inside the mind of Tom Robbins' greatest character in his first and greatest work circa 1971, dancing a philosophical jig with an uncontrived and natural rhythm:

When she was a small girl Amanda hid a ticking clock in an old rotten tree trunk. It drove woodpeckers crazy. Ignoring tasty bugs all around them, they just about beat their brains out trying to get at the clock. Years later, Amanda used the woodpecker experiment as a model for understanding capitalism, communism, Christianity and all other systems that traffic in future rewards rather than in present realities.

The text is pulsating, optimistic and stylized without irritation (according to Rolling Stone "garbed colorfully in the language of Joyce" while the Los Angeles Times compares it to "the style and humor of Mark Twain" in audacious but fitting literary parallels), as plucky Plucky Purcell, the intense Tarzanesque John Paul Ziller, Nearly Normal Jimmy, and the self-titled narrative-weaving Marx Marvelous, whom like the four largest moons of Jupiter, rotate faster around the planet Amanda than she does on her axis. In the words of Marx Marvelous:

Nearly Normal Jimmy once described Amanda as a "religion-unto-herself" and I readily admit that there is something beatific about her gentleness, her poise, her radiant face, the way she seems to float several inches above the ground. However if she is a saint it was the pope of gypsies who canonized her. My God! What colors she wears, bangles and bracelets and beads. Rings on each finger, on every toe. Her dark hair appears singed by campfires and she moves always as if to music; her manner mixes action and dream.

Don't miss your chance to float away on her celestial femininity, leaping from the pages of the text. This is a carefree but poignant tale, providing insight in the undisturbed fashion of a reconciliatory neighbor. A recent review on Amazon bemoaned the fact that Amanda is such a fantastic character that it made the reader so sad that she wasn't real. Perhaps though she is real, needing only to be sparked and lit in our imagination, the way the flames of a campfire seem to always crackle and lean towards passing rivers, bubbling with the watery metaphysical companion to the fiery embers. After all, according to Amanda: " ... it had long been her theory that human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another."

Labels: literature

In the spirit of whimsical lists upon which the Media Project has made its name, I humbly offer five suggestions for your bedside table. They are all funny, very well written, and simply great reads.

• Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole :: If you haven't read this comic masterpiece consider yourself lucky. But don't wait another moment to savor the journeys of Ignatius Reilly in New Orleans. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
• The Restraint of Beasts, Magnus Mills :: Often overlooked tale of a Scottish fencing crew sent to England with the best laid plans and hapless consequences. No less than Thomas Pynchon calls it "a demented, deadpan-comic wonder".
• Flashman Papers, George MacDonald Fraser :: Follow Harry Flashman, cad extrodinaire, as he stumbles through the great moments of the 19th century. You love him and hate him at the same time.
• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams :: About to smash on to the mainstream cultural radar as a series of films, this first book in the trilogy will make you laugh until your belly hurts. Really.
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S Thompson :: Another great author who kills himself (and the second on this list along with Toole) which isn't funny. But this book, his classic text, has taken on its own cultural presence and a thorough read will still leave you shaking your head and opening your eyes wide.

Labels: literature

There's a part in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 (a nice piece of partisan editing but little more) where soldiers on screen admit to listening to the Bloodhound Gang's Roof on Fire (Burn Motherfu**er Burn) while shooting to kill Iraqi soldiers that I assume is meant to shock us that soldiers should behave in such a fashion. For those who have read Michael Herr's masterpiece Dispatches this is pretty tame stuff. Herr, who also wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket, takes you inside the fray of fear, fire and fufilment that is the bloody hell of war like no other.

"Two hundred meters away, facing the Marine trenches, there was an NVA (North Vietnamese) sniper with a .50 caliber machine gun who shot at the Khe Sanh Marines from a tiny spider hole. During the day he fired at anything that rose above the sandbags, and at night he fired at any lights he could see. You could see him clearly from the trench, and if you were looking through the scope of a Marine sniper's rifle you could even see his face. The Marines fired on his position with mortars and recoilless rifles, and he would drop into his hole and wait. Gunships fired rockets at him, and when they were through he would come up again and fire. Finally napalm was called in, and for ten minutes the air above the spider hole was black and orange from the strike, while the ground around it was galvanized clean of every living thing. When all of it cleared, the sniper popped up and fired off a single round, and the Marines in the trenches cheered loudly. They called him Luke the Gook, and after that no one wanted anything to happen to him."

Imagine not wanting anything to happen to someone who is trying to kill you day and night, trying to give you some. There is nothing simple or straightforward about being a soldier at war. Pick up a copy of Herr's war correspondence to catch a glimpse.

I must admit I am not the first to trumpet this underappreciated text. In the words of John Le Carre, it is "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time". And no less of a trubadour for the 60s than Hunter S Thomspon admits: "We have all spent ten years trying to explain what happened to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived -- but Michael Herr's Dispatches puts all the rest of us in the shade."

Read about Daytripper and lucky Orrin, Mayhew and the standoff against 40,000 invisible VC, lots of tracks going in, none coming out. Spend three weeks trying to take a hill where you believe 4,000 enemy are battling, take the hill and find four spooky bodies on the top. I'll let you read the rest.

Warning: Not for the feint of heart or the easily indignant.

Labels: film, literature

Some thoughts on the second presidential debate at Washington University in St Louis. Not very well evolved thoughts. Like a sprinkle of thoughts.

It seems you have to be a $$billionaire$$ to run for president. Possibly just a millionaire but preferably a billionaire. It was such a touching moment during the 2nd Presidential debate when billionaire Kerry found common ground with billionaire Bush and surprising contender "Charlie" (ABC moderator Charles Gibson) as the three people in the room who might suffer financially from rolling back a Bush tax cut for the rich.

You can't help but think that there is a bit of common ground lost with the voting public when all the candidates are billionaires. And it is not just in the USA. New Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin is either a millionaire or possibly even a billionaire. The reason is that it is hard for a non-billionaire primarily concerned with the rolling fortunes of a risk-infused bank balance to adopt the mindset of a billionaire.

So what you have with these debates is a schooled at Yale billionaire's boys club performing in front of a nervous general public audience struggling to read Q-cards, often mispronouncing their own questions. You feel Bush's backroom boys told him to be assertive. Sometimes it seemed Bush walked that fine line between assertive and scary, out-of-breath, crazy-eyed fiend. You had to wonder if Bush didn't dip into a stash of some nasty hydroponic Canadian BC Bud when he was practicing but opted not to on national tv and paid the price. It seemed even more possible when he disclosed:

"When a drug comes in from Canada I want to make sure it cures ya and it doesn't kill ya. My worry is that it looks like it comes from Canada but it comes from a different part of the world."

So the obvious answer my friends is to sample. Just a thought. And from that assertive occasionally raged into crazy-eyes. Kerry took a different approach, playing with the farce, like a billionaire plays with solid gold juggling balls. He got a question from an audience member asking him to look straight into the camera and declare he won't raise taxes. So Kerry looked straight into the camera which had to be looking straight at him because of the nature of the question. Hence he grabbed some straight in the camera time with America. Tricky. Tricky. But not so tricky that your average viewer doesn't see straight through it. It's easy to dislike Bush's machismo but poor Kerry remains difficult to like.

I think one of the problems with attacking tax cuts for billionaires is that this is the stable of the American dream. By going after the top 1% of financial earners Kerry is going after the Valhalla, Eldorado, and Graceland of citizen aspirations. It's like introducing a new lottery by describing how the winners will be persecuted and asking for the support of all the participants. Nobody wants to go after a winner because secretly we all be believe we will be winners one day. It is one of the often unspoken pillars of capitalism. By nature of 1% there's limited room at the top but we secretly think we can all fit in there, like high school kids into a Volkswagen. Take that pillar away and the game gets a lot less attractive for a lot of players.

Everyone has an opinion on Iraq ranging from crooked and illegal occupation to the libertarian deliverance of freedom. It really is the trickiest topic to address. But couple it with the pathetic responses Kerry and Bush gave to Jim Lehrer on the topic of Sudan during the first debate (both agreed studiously that it was genocide, shaking their helpless heads) and you can frame these topics. Political leaders massaging the levers of power should recognize that rhetoric of any kind is only as believable as the maxim of their actions. As in Emmanuel Kant's epic categorical imperative: "Always act so that you can will the maxim of your action to become universal law". What a beauty! Implicit to this moral law is that there are two universes: the phenomenal world of experience, and the noumenal world of reason. We live in these worlds and experience good and evil. An act that you would by willing that anyone or everyone should perform is a good act. His law demands that everyone act at all times as though he/she were the ruling monarch of the universe and the principle of his/her action would automatically become the principal of the action of everyone. IIt sound like a free pass to become leader of the free world.

And as such we can look to the opinions on Iraq and Sudan expressed by Bush and Kerry during the first two debates in this philosophical light. Kerry scores first by attacking Bush in a bully light. The underlying text decrying the possibility that at some future date, in India/Pakistan, North/South Korea, China/Taiwan more bullies will emerge, pointing to precedent. You went unilaterally into Iraq to protect your interests and we are now doing the same. We are also too strong to be stopped. Bullies on the rampage all licking their lips at the savaging of the UN that occurred under Bush's watch.

But when we look further to the issue of Sudan, Kerry's false start on Iraq crumbles, and the maxim of his action descends to dwell with dour and hostile Bush. Neither man distinguishes himself in dodging questions on the topic, speaking of non-existent African forces, and shaking their heads with such a serious shake.

Kant's law demands that we set the standard for others through our actions. So the standard is that we can walk in anywhere we like and bully whoever we like over whatever we like. And the standard is also that we will not come to the aid of those in desperate need of our available support unless there is an obvious advantage to our interests. Oh please. Why do you have to set the bar so high? Whatever will future generations do to improve these lofty standards?

For a better example you can return to the Crusades of the 12th century described brilliantly by James Reston Jr in Warriors of God:

"The King was a very giant in the field, and was everywhere in the field -- now here, now there, wherever the attacks of the Turks raged the hottest," reported a chronicler until unbelievably he was unhorsed!

"Sire, see him there! On foot!" one of the Arabian Sultan Saladin's sergeants shouted to his lord excitedly. Saladin had seen it all.
And turning to his brother el Melek el-Adel, he said "Go. Take my two swiftest Arabian horses and lead them to him. Tell him that I send them to him, and that a man so great as he is should not be in parts such as these, on foot, with his men."

"It was the crowning act of chivalry in the entire Third Crusade. The present was 'for the brave deeds he had done and all the prowess he had won,' el-Adel said when he reached Richard in the melee. He requested only that the King remember the gift later should he be so lucky as to return from the battle alive."

So not only was Saladin victorious in vanquishing the crusaders from Holy lands but he also established precedent in a maxim of action. The bar needs to be set high by nature of leadership. Saladin and Richard the Lionheart understood that but do the current presidential candidates? What if a candidate suddenly announced that they were heading to Sudan to restore the people and land to safety in the interest of a common humanity. Their suffering is our suffering, your suffering is mine. Would it blow the lid off the rhetoric or would the polling numbers crumble. I have no idea. But I'd like to find out.

Labels: literature, politics

I've been reading about a great clash of two powerful historical figures, the reverberation of which echoes today. The victorious, cultured and calculating Sultan Saladin, hero of Arabia, Egypt and Syria and the magnificent - and bisexual (not that there's anything wrong with that a la Seinfeld) - Richard I, King of England, known as the Lionheart of modern Robin Hood fame. The years are 1187AD-1192AD and Lionheart is in a lover's spat with King Philip Augustus of France. But that's not what is on his mind.

But it is one of the juicy tidbits that can be found in the riveting text of James Reston Jr entitled Warriors of God. It's the story of the Third Crusade (Crusades totaled about 7 in all and occurred from 1100AD-1350AD) but somehow it seems nobody is studying the lessons learned. It turns out that the world has been battling over the heart of the Middle East for a rather long time. The battles of the Third Crusade occur across modern Libya, Syria, Palestine, Israel, Jordan and Cyprus. All of the Crusades are focused on a clash between the Christian and Islamic worlds, territories changing hands in recurring drama. There were five major crusades but only the first can be seen as successful for the Christians. If by successful I mean they took Jerusalem, the constant target, and the battles as usual over the Wailing Wall, the Dome of the Rock, etc.

The question is whether we are part of a very long history (thousands of years of recurring conflict in the region) or a single event (bring democracy to Iraq). Interpretations of the neo-conservative agenda in Washington range from pragmatic prevention to Holy War. Probably the greatest universal fear of all stakeholders in the drama unfolding in Iraq - save the fanatics on all sides - is that the relatively isolated conflict will explode into a global religious war, suddenly unified from Chechnya to Yemen, Iraq to Afghanistan, Iran to Pakistan.

The Crusades accepted no quarter, one spiritual philosophy would survive and the other would be vanquished. In the case of Saladin and King Richard, the Islamic hero was amazed to see women in full battle gear taken before him as prisoners of war, dressed in the enemy armor. He questioned them and then summarily cut off their heads (reminiscent of anything?). Not just the women of course. And not just Saladin. After an exhausting siege of the city of Acre Richard tired of Saladin's negotiations for surrender and executed the thousands within. The streets run with blood in these stories. Blood and bravery really as fighters on both sides declare Jihad and run each other through. All very grotesque and modern. The current scenes from the school in Chechnya, headcutters in Iraq, burning buildings in Sadr City, and suicide bombs in Jerusalem sound more like a reverberation of an old echo than a neo-tune.

My favorite story of the crusades strikes a different chord. I heard it as a political science student at Herstmonceux Castle in Surrey, England. A guy who looked like James Dean told it around a pub fire and there was rapture. A prince is born in a battling kingdom. His father is a fighter but he is a poet. He takes jousting lessons but also takes walks in the forest to observe nature. One day he is walking in the forest when he comes upon an apparition holding a cup more beautiful then anything he has ever seen. The Prince reaches out to grab the cup and when he does he looks straight into it and burns his hands and eyes from the heat and light. As he looks back through a bleary gaze the cup has disappeared. He returns to his kingdom eager to tell his father what he has seen only to find that the King has died in his absence and his coronation is scheduled for the next day. The King is dead. Long live the King. So the Prince who is now King comes to his throne obsessed with the cup he has seen. Contrary to his poetic nature he sends his best and brightest knights all over the world, Crusading to find the elusive Holy Grail. They burn and they plunder in their pursuits but the cup is nowhere to be found. The Prince who would be King grows older and the burns on his hands and the blindness in his eyes worsens with each passing day. One day he sits on his thrown, frustrated and bored with his darkening world: "Fool," he shouts. "Get me a glass of water!" jester in the court retrieves water and brings it to the Prince who would be King. As he brings the cup to his lips the King finds his burns on his hands healing and his sight returning. He looks at the cup in his hands and realizes he is drinking from the same cup he saw in the forest. Less shiny, scrubby really, but the cup nonetheless: "Fool! Fool! How can you have found what my best and brightest knights have searched every corner of the world in pursuit?"
"Sire," the fool explains warily. "All I knew was that you were thirsty."

I love that story. Let's quench our thirst for water before blood. People are dying every day in pursuit of shiny cups that turn dull on receipt. And not for the first time.

Labels: literature