DIJ v.3

Albany Bulb

2009-11-19T06:42:00.000+02:00

Today K dragged me out of the house and we explored the Albany Bulb, this blob of land that sticks out into the Bay. Here is the Golden Gate Bridge on a sunny day from the Bulb. It was perfectly warm (thanks global warming!), and we walked around the trails and met lots of happy dogs. We've been sick this week. I think K gave us the Hamthrax, but he seems to think that I brought it home (even though he was sick first).

This is looking back toward where we live. We live behind that Target store there, next to the freeway. Despite the location, this is a nice part of the world.

Somewhere toward the right you can see the bell tower at Cal. They just took the scafolding off of it this week. So you can sort of tell where we live in relation to Cal. It's 2.6 miles.

This is looking at the Bay Bridge. You can see the new east span next to the existing bridge that will be torn down in the next 4 years. Or, it may just fall over before then, as it has been attempting to do since we moved here. If you squint and look at Treasure Island, you can see the new S-curve, where a temporary road joins the new and old spans. This was installed a few months back, and is the current source of accidents as sleepy drivers forget that they now have to swerve as they enter the tunnel toward the west span. Even though the old bridge is a death trap, I think it has much more charm than the new bridge. But, the new east span will have a seperate bike path.

Not Bay area related, but this is the best crossiant I've ever made. Looket the layering! I made this before K made us sick.

Some Free Advice

2009-09-16T00:39:00.004+03:00

As I was finishing my dissertation this past June, a book arrived in the mail at the last minute. Published in 1993, this collection of articles details various ways that increasingly religious states organize and remake themselves. One in particular about Afghanistan jumped out at me, because author Oliver Roy argues in the second paragraph that the 1989 Mujahidin victory over the Russians represented “…the first liberation war won by a movement which proclaims Islam, not nationalism or socialism, as its goal” (491). My dissertation is about Palestinians who have become increasingly religious in the last few years. In doing so they downplay the importance and legitimacy of the state while lifting up their own crappy status as refugees. Initially I saw this social project as anti-political, but quickly I realized that what actually happens on the ground is much more complicated. I argue in the dissertation that the religious being represents a threat (at least in Jordan) because his allegiance is unclear. Does he honor God or King? He may pursue a political path to a more rewarding religious life, or he may use religion to boost his social status for political ends. Religion can be a social means to a political end, and the indirect path to political action or aspiration makes each religious person less legible to the state. So when I read Roy’s article it really hit me that what we’re watching in the Middle East right now is substantially different that many post-1948 conflicts there in one substantial way: strife focuses less and less on political goals like repelling the Orientalist state, and more and more on constructing a religious identity.

I argue in my dissertation that, very broadly, there are two strands of Islamism. The first I call 1948-Islamism, and by this I mean a religious/political response to a political confrontation such as the Nakba, 1967, 1973, 1990, or 2006. These are conflicts in which the opponents are more or less easy to define, typically the West/Zionists versus Sunni Arabs, and the conflicts are pretty political. The second strand I call Afghanistan-Islamization, or 1989-Islamization, by which I refer to conflicts that accelerate the desire of fundamentalist Sunni groups to establish a religious state not just because religion can occasionally repel outsiders, but because theocracy is simply the end goal.

Roy points out that Afghanistan has a long history of jihad (I use this word in its true sense: Struggle. I don’t mean this as hysterical American’s use it), but this was always linked to the political aims of the state. Muslim resistance to the communist government, as we all know, prompted the Russians to send in troops in 1978. The rest is history. 1978 was not the first time that Muslims took over a country, but previously those resistance movements were linked with a political ideology (i.e. Algeria). Further, as Roy reminds us, “purely Muslim upheavals” always failed as forms of governance in the past. As much as the rank and file may be enamored with resistance movements in the throws of politics, it’s not too long before they become agitated because no one is around to pick up the garbage. Governments do have to carry out some small forms of governance, after all. Despite this history of failure, Afghans successfully thwarted the Russians in a pure religious resistance movement. I think we have seriously underestimated how much this fuelled the rise of a strand of conservative Islam that ultimately birthed the Taliban. I also think there is little coincidence of timing in the post-1978 changes in this part of Asia: The Islamic Revolution in Iran soon followed, Pakistan adopted more strict and religious laws, and on and on.

Of course nothing is totally divorced from politics. Between 1978 and 1989, both Saudi Arabia and Iran, Sunni and Shia’ states respectively, became increasingly interested in preventing competing versions of Islam from seeping into their states. Both Iran and Saudi wished to secure the interests of their particular religious worldview in order to erect a buffer against possible foreign penetration, and to further their aspirations for an Islamic state of their own. Both countries interfered in Afghanistan by funding Islamic organizations that held like values. Not until the defeat of the Russians seemed eminent did these organizations begin seriously to question what the final aims of the revolution needed to be. While the Saudis pushed not so much for revolution as for a renewal of their conservative religious values, the Iranians pushed directly for an Islamic revolution, an experiment they had not yet tried. The Afghanistan Sunni camp, increasingly disenchanted with Saudi interpretations of the religion, turned away. The Saudis lost their first ideological battle with Iran. More directly: The Sunnis lost their first war with the Shia’.

I know, I know, the Sunni and Shia’ have been at each other's throats since the Thabi’un (first generation of post-Mohammad Islamic folks) were in business. Yes, I know, Ali, Hussein, all that stuff. But this is different to me than the post-Mohammad struggles in Islam that resulted in the strand of those who follow Ali and the Umayyads. Those battles took place before globalization existed. Those battles occurred before George Bush called America’s efforts against “Islamic Terrorism” a “Crusade,” thus resulting in a bajillion young previously secular Arab men dedicating their lives to Salafi Islam. All of that happened before man perfected the ability to kill millions of people quite easily. Those battles revolved around how to be a Muslim. They did not focus on repelling or defeating a completely alien enemy from halfway around the world. Nevertheless, the ideological (not to mention actual) feuds between the Sunni and Shia’ still provide ample friction for the two strands, and that has survived quite well into today. Thus, we have tension and indirect conflict between Saudi and Iran in Afghanistan. Young Muslims in both countries may have felt like the weight of some serious-ass history was at work in that political struggle in the 70s and 80s, and they were right.

Now we have two Sunni fundamentalist groups competing to be the most crazy: The Taliban and al-Qaeda. Analysts often refer to these groups as “radical,” a label I reject. They are conservative. They wish to “restore” those around them to the glory days of the Shahaba (the companions who lived with the Prophet Mohammad). There is nothing radical, to me, about seeking a 7th century utopia. Here, for my money, is the big difference between the two groups. The Taliban emerged from a post-Soviet Afghanistan, perhaps in response to Mujahidin corruption. As I read their goals, they seek a pure Islamic state, and could care less about articulating their religious demands to earthly politics. Al-Qaeda, on the other hand, has an Islamic rhetoric, but remains an elitist and political organization. The Taliban seek Islam for the sake of Islam, while al-Qaeda uses Islam to seek their political objectives. In other words, the Taliban represent the next step in 1978-Islamization while al-Qaeda represents the same for 1948-Islamization. Here, in my opinion, is the So What to all of this: The Taliban’s religious objectives are not something that secular governments can do anything with; al-Qaeda has fairly secular objectives (albeit cloaked in a religious discourse), secular governments can actually understand their demands. The Taliban seeks to propagate a Shahaba-style world, how can one engage with this? Al-Qaeda wants to curb American imperialism. By transmitting this political message in religious terms they recruit followers who may not understand the political implications of a U.S. military presence in Arab countries as well as they understand “infidels” in “Muslim lands.” To be sure, neither OBL nor az-Zawahiri have any religious credentials. In contrast, Mohammed Omar, an Arabic-speaking Afghani, is the “Commander of the Faithful,” and allegedly has a background studying Islam and later teaching it at a madrasa in Quetta. Thus the name of his organization, “Taliban,” is named for the “Students” who first joined him to form the organization after the Soviets left town. Mohammed Omar and OBL have enough in common that the former apparently sheltered the latter, but they likely differ quite a bit about how to implement an extraordinarily narrow conception of the Sunnah (the teaching of the Prophet). In other words, it’s worth asking why these groups haven’t joined forces and become one big group. I think the answer is because they actually have very different goals, and the Taliban’s should alarm us more than al-Qaeda’s.

Al-Qaeda will not remain in the hands of OBL and Zawahiri forever, and we should ask what a new al-Q might look like. Given that the Salafists have done a smashingly good job of adopting technology such as Facebook and using these things to spread their message and recruit new folks, it’s a good guess that many of those just now coming into the fold are young. That’s also a good guess because thus far that seems the case, and because the population in the M.E. is really young anyway. These are kids born well after 1978, let alone 1948. Jarret Brachman just wrote a piece in Foreign Policy arguing that what’s to come may be much worse than what we’re currently witnessing. Like me, he believes that al-Q is an elitist organization, meaning that a great deal of information is guarded by a few rather than dispersed in order to empower the masses. However, a younger devotee named Abu Yahya (Yahya = John the Baptist, bil 3rabee) has positioned himself to become the likely inheritor of al-Q in the future. Contrary to OBL and Zawahiri, he aims to reach out to young folks and dazzle them with his apparently engaging personality. As Brachman writes, “…Abu Yahya offers the global al Qaeda movement everything that its old guard cannot.” So what? Glad you asked.

To return to my insightful, but crappily written dissertation, I argue that because the aims of al-Qaeda are political we have something to talk about. This, again, is in opposition to the Taliban whose views and aims are so ethereal as to be, well, irrelevant to this world. How can one reason with men who spend time arguing that ants are made of glass? So, when Brachman points out that in the not too distant future we may find ourselves clashing with an al-Qaeda that acts more like a crazy religious fundamentalist organization (i.e. the Taliban, or the American X-tain Right) than like al-Q, that’s the kind of shit that should keep you up at night.

In 2006 Brachman co-authored a report for the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) in which the authors point out, “…there has been a shift in intellectual influence from laymen in Egypt (like Sayyid Qutb) to formally trained clerics from Palestine (often living in Jordan) and Saudi Arabia. While it is unclear if this correlates with new developments in Jihadi theory, it certainly indicates a trend toward shoring up that theory with religious credentials.” I'll skip ahead for you: Yes, it is a new development; Islamism of this form transitioned from a group to an international movement. They indict Palestinian-born Jordanian al-Maqdisi as the single most significant living “Jihadi.” Al-Q's interest in Sayyid Qutb (an Egyptian), al-Maqdisi (an Urdustenee), and now Abu Yahya (a Libyan) all indicate just how viral and transnational this movement has become. In 1964 Qutb, the grandfather of this line of thinking, wrote: “The establishing of the dominion of God on earth, the abolishing of the dominion of man, the taking away of sovereignty from the usurper to revert it to God, and the bringing about of the enforcement of the Divine Law (Shari’ah) and the abolition of man-made laws cannot be achieved only through preaching” (58). Well, then, down with the Jahiliyyah (those who live in ignorance of god’s wisdom). Point is, whatever OBL envisioned, it seems that the movement and message behind al-Q has transformed the organization into something that young, un/underemployed folks in the Muslim world can grasp. What oppressed Arab actually embraces despotic rule?

And here’s a difficult question for Americans: Why shouldn’t young unemployed, often educated men in the Muslim world find the message of resistance alluring? I don’t ask this to offer support to al-Q, but to ask, Holy crap, what else have they got? Over my fieldwork in Jordan I watched young men with literally nothing to loose become more and more and more and more religious. I couldn’t blame them, though they frequently irritated me with their neverending focus on the minutiae of religion. They were young, refugees, most educated, politically aware, multi-lingual, and unemployed. They had a choice: live as shat-upon refugees in Jordan, or become Salafists and watch their social status soar in a day. Surprisingly little knowledge of Islam and the Qur’an allowed them to henna their beards and patronize their too-secular parents, wives, and me. Given their status in Jordan, I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t engage in something that allowed them to rule over their lives even just a little. Men bragged in front of me about taking additional wives, and one even lied to his friends about a mosque supporting his family so he could study. (His parents paid his rent upon monthly threat of having their granddaughter turned out onto the street.) As much as they irritated me, I’ll admit that if I were any of them, I’d do the same thing. This particular path, the religious path, seemingly allows the trampled to be something much better: a moral man. That those I interviewed expressed admiration for al-Q (though a strong and universal dislike for their violence, I’ll add) this social movement does not indicate, I argue, anything more than the appreciation of an opportunity to be something other than a marginal person for most who follow. All of the people in my dissertation were as secular as I am before 2003. All of them.

While Brachman is right, I think, about the dangerous transition of al-Q into something more Taliban-like, I think we should stop a moment and ask Why people are enamored with this stuff. Sure, they really are god-fearing folks. But that actually has been corrupted by people like OBL in order to mobilize political action, including violence. When America continues to fight Islamic violence, we are often actually fighting the impoverished. Not always, of course. Plenty of ridiculous people exist, but I think even more reasonable people than that exist. Want to stem the violence? Give them jobs. (Same is true in America for Americans, I’d bet.) We have to act quickly before al-Qaeda reinvents itself as a movement unwilling to make political (earthy) demands.

Rose Garden, Cont.

2009-08-29T07:25:00.000+03:00

I took a few pictures today while it's sunny here:

And from Sonoma County:

"Libalism is a mental disorder"

Berkeley

2009-08-28T00:08:00.002+03:00

We've been here 3 weeks today. Wow.

Here is K at Boalt Hall, where he is currently chained to a desk. That's actually not an indirect John Yoo joke, it's just the policy for first-years. We biked over there last weekend (see bike in picture for proof) and K almost died.

Now on to Yoo. On the first day of school last week about 100 protesters came to Boalt to let the school know that Yoo should be fired. They actually went into the building and disrupted his classes. Several were arrested. The local NPR station had pretty good coverage of it; the Dean was on for several interviews. Subsequent to this, the sign below showed up in the window, and the Deal sent an email explaining that though he personally thinks Yoo sucks, Yoo cannot be fired unless first convicted of a crime.

Today I biked over to Cal for another protest. I missed getting a picture of a man in a black hood and black gown thing with "CAL" on his chest. I watched several people attempt to hand out leafeletts with information while students ignored them. It was like being in the 909, seriuosly. K defends the students. He says that there are so many people handing out so much shit that people just shut down while walking through there. Perhaps, but still, how can you miss these folks?

K doesn't know this, but there can be a life in Berkeley outside of Boalt. Please refrain from informing him of this, though. I've been biking, and found this place after quite a climb:

The Berkeley Rose Garden was some sort of WPA project or something. It opened in 1937 (give or take). We live across the street from the Bay, and this place is up in the hills, and boasts a view worthy of the bike ride up there.

Among the fog, and you'll have to trust me here, is a Bay. It's the glimmery thing there in the middle. They have fog here! I can't get over it. I saw that it's 108 in Rivercity today, and the usual smog is made more awful with the fire smoke funnelled in to the valley. Yeah, it's going to hit 79 up here today. I actually put the sun shade in my car window this morning. It's just awful. OK, but the rose garden:

Yesterday I picked up K and we drove across the bridge to pick up S who is visiting her sisters and working on her tenure letter. We went to the Monk's Kettle and had good local food with beer that make K happy. It was a great and too-short visit. S is headed to Jordan in October, and I wish her a safe and productive trip.

The Heat is on: An I.E. Retrospective

2009-08-23T06:51:00.002+03:00

Yes, we turned on the heater today. In August. It all started when we moved to Berkeley 2 weeks ago for K to attend more school. By noon it was 66 degrees in our small apartment in Family Student Housing, and we turned on the heater. It has been so weird trying to get used to living on the coast after years of living in the stinking desert.

So, let me now post pictures and thoughts about the Inland Empire, or as we remember it: The 909.

This is Highway 18 approaching the turn off to Crestline. You can see the smog that rolls in daily from L.A. We drove down into that 5 days a week to go to school to gets smarter and stuff. Some mornings K and I would look down at that from our mile elevation and he would note: "They could all be dead down there." Still, we drove on.

The San Bernardino valley:

Here is were K and I met in 1998:

This had to be both the best job I ever had, and the worst. It was great, because crazy people worked there. I've never worked with such a group of characters before or since. I was hesitant to leave San Diego and move to San Bernardino County for a job that I figured early on likely would not work out. But I found that Redlands was actually a nice town, and I really liked all those I worked with at the SBCM. Where else can one spend time with people like Jim and Star, or Steve, or Seth, or Julie, and of course Barbara ("Stupid man!")? I even learned some stuff. I found a bobbin lace group there on Wendesdays and learned about all sorts of hobbies I didn't know I needed. Even when the work stopped K and I ended up back in the IE so I could go to grad school. We spent 9 months in San Diego before moving back.

Here is Mr. J's Donuts:

Home of the frosting-filled donut [!], my husband mistook this for food for many, many years. Ahhh, youth.

The Blues:

K found this an acceptable place from where to procure jeans to wear to work. He alledges that one day before work, the ass blew out of a pair he was wearing. He likely finished his cheese fries, and then claimed to walk in there in his assless jeans and calmly buy another pair. He further alledges the staff was nonpulssed.

A pizza place with acceptable beer:

I like this picture because we spotted an SUV with a "NOTW" sticker on the back. What are the odds of that!?!

OK, now one that matters to me:

I first had Cuca's at the Museum. I was working in the lab, and it was a rainy day. Quintin offered to go and pick up food for everyone. When asked what I wanted I told them I didn't really care for Mexican food. True at the time, they gasped. Seriously. In unison. Barbara told me that I was eating their food, and I would like it. I protested, and finally Tina and Barbara simply paid for my food and ordered me a BRC (Bean, Rice and Cheese burrito). Green sauce on the side. "I don't like that either," I told Barbara. Again, she forced the issue. I capitualted, and my life was changed on that day. In all seriousness, and I type this with as much love for Cuca's as embaressment at my life choices, I chose the grad school I did in large part because it was close to Cuca's. Don't even tell me there are other considerations when choosing a Ph.D. program, cause' that's not true. I miss this place so much. Don't get me wrong. Berkeley has great food. In fact, today we went to a great place with a hard-to-remember name (behind the Peet's on 4th? Anyone?), but it was no Cucu's. It was healthy, and gourmet, and really good. But, Cuca's! Here's how it works. I go up to order my BRC and iced tea. I pay (in 1999) 1.83. They call my number, and I ask for green sauce. First, Maria with the barely-there eyebrows tells me that I should have ordered the green burito. I appoligize profussely, and ask for green sauce. She informs me they are out. I can see it on the shelf behind her. I ask her to fill some containers with the sauce right behind her. She rolls her eyes, and gives me green sauce and an iced tea with a fly in it. Oh fuck, I love this place! Even the worst Cuca's burrito and the occasionally horrid service still pale in comparison to the sweet ambrosia they roll into a tortilla. I fricken' went to Cuca's on my wedding day! I have for years now just called in my order as I'm on the way, and K kindly goes and pays and dishes out beat-down for the green. I had my last Cuca's burrito over 2 weeks ago now, and as I held the last bite in my hand I sighed. Finishing that food signaled that things were about the change.

Joe Greensleeves:

We had dinner there the night we were married. A bit less than a year ago K and I spent several evenings going through a big jar of change and rolled it. We had well over 100 bucks. We went to JG and had a great meal and paid for it with our decade of change. It was like eating for free.

Before I lived a small BART ride from Britex, this place supplied me with much of my fabric diet. One day I went there with Star to look at potential 1880s dress fabric. At one point, he was feeling a particular fabric, and told me, "I just love the cottons in this store." Again, I ask, when am I ever going to work with such crazy people???

A view from the Valley up to where we lived:

From Loma Linda looking right up to our hood.

Our favorite Indian food:

We had dinner there with Barbara for our last meal there. Where the waiters have beautiful eyebrows, and they have 2 televisions either playing Indian music videos, or When Animals Attack (seriously). I will miss them.

Lake Arrowhead:

The local and mostly acceptable Mexican place which K always called "Papa-gay-ooos." One waitress told K he looks like a priest in South America somewhere who was kicked out of the church for having multiple wives.

Here is the view from my house in the fall:

I will also miss the dogwoods.

A view toward the front of my house:

Early this summer a mama bear and her cub came to spread trash all over our parking deck. Seth and Julie were minutes away from arriving for dinner. The two bears found stuff to eat, and hurried up the hill right before S and J arrived.

What I will not miss:

Rivercyde on a pretty day:

Here's the thing about the 909, and the thing is: It's hard to live there. The place is hostile in myriad ways. Many of the residents are Jebus-loving asshats. Many of the SUV-driving war hawks that shared my commute on the 18 really, really, REALLY, didn't know how to drive on a curvey mountain road, and typically went 10-30 miles under the speed limit on the 18. Once on a residential street where the speed limit was 15, they went 30. What manly men. They are generally racist and hostile toward all the brown people, and often attempt to link the migrant workers (whom they hire) to terrorists. Seriously. It's smoggy. It's hot all the time. When K and I lived in Rivercyde I walked to school from the above parking lot on 23 December 2002. I called him and asked him to come an pick me up because it was so hot I didn't want to walk back without water. It was, I learned that day, 100 degrees. What kind of X-mas is that?!? Racist, hot, smoggy, and really conservative. And, that's why I'm glad I lived there. It was so awful that it made me a better person. Every day was such a challenge that I realized early on that I was either going to die, or deal. I think I died a little, but mostly I learned that I can live any where, and even learn to appreciate it. I actually miss it. I have no desire to live there again, but I will always have some place in my heart for the 909.

There is something about a place this hostile that somehow shapes people into interesting and even neat people, like those at the Museum. People like that can't live in Berkeley. It's easy to go on here without trying much. It was probably not even 70 degrees, and it's beautiful, and everything tastes good, and the people are nice. What kind of character building can come from this? But the 909, well. People used to shout at us, or try to ram us with their large American cars if we attempted to back out of a parking space after picking up our mail. Stop for a pedestrian? Only if you hate America, by god. Bike? Please. That's for sissies. The 909, where they picked up our trash on MLK Day even though it's a holiday. Where they stole my trashcan and BBQ. Either you give in and turn into to one of them, or you rise above it and become the kind of person everyone wants to spend time with. The 909 made me into a person who now realizes that friendship can form the better part of a coping strategy. I value that, and I valued my time there. Once culture is sucked out of a place, as it is there, individuals create it for themselves. My most creative years so far were spent there.

And there are good people there too. I realized in the winter of 07/08 when I went for a walk up my snow covered street that it's not as white there as it feels. I have brown neighbors. I have mixed-race lesbian neighbors! How cool is that? My hope for the 909 is that when the loonies start to argue that the migrants are smuggling dirty bombs, my neighbors speak up and say No, they are people just like all of us.

Your Call is Important to me

2009-07-06T04:40:00.005+03:00

I am done. After seven years my parking permit has expired, and I don’t need a new one. I’ve turned in my keys. I have no office. There are no more forms for them to sign. There are no more forms for me to sign. It has got me to thinking about the things I’ve learned here in the last seven years. Graduate school didn’t teach me much of what I thought it would. This process has taught me far more than I expected. In part my mistake was assuming that I’d learn a lot of facts. I knew going in that I’d have to learn a language, and read a lot of theory. But I never quite understood going in how much I would learn about how people think, and why we do what we do. I both value this knowledge and understand it’s the exact kind of knowledge that people easily disregard as fluffy or too subjective.

More recently I’ve been thinking about the paradox of this knowledge. There is something about this degree that makes people want to
1. Quiz me in hopes of catching me in a mistake; look, I just don’t know what year the Spanish American war ended. Deal.
2. Criticize my major choice and/or my university choice,
3. Accuse me of being self-indulgent to the point of embarrassing myself, and
4. Reassure me I’ll never find work, and I’d die in the poor house

The paradox is that people work diligently to undermine what I’ve done, and yet seem intimidated by what I’ve done. Which is it? I had no idea how isolating this would become. In part this is isolating because the further I delve into my topic the more I know and the less others still have interest or knowledge to talk with me. And in part this is isolating because people just don’t see me as the same person for some reason. Directly or indirectly, I have lost all but two of the friends I had when I began this. It has been pretty painful to learn who among those I care for is willing to discuss directly my perceived “lavish lifestyle,” and admonish me to “live in the adult world and get a job.” I must have missed the Lavish part of this. I taught for five years here for 1500 bucks a month. Teaching douche bags here has never seemed lavish nor well-paying, but I assure you it has often felt like tedious labor. What really irritates me is that if I told people I was having a baby, people would express happiness and well wishes, and likely never once point out what a self-indulgent thing that is, or caution me that raising a child will likely cost a million dollars or more. Lavish? Self-indulgent?

I expected I’d enjoy the same emotional support I received as an undergraduate, and the opposite has turned out to be the case. It has been very difficult to hear people I care about say really stupid things to me about what choices I am making. Few people have congratulated me. Almost all those I speak with have asked me if I’m going to actually get a job, or if I’m ready to live like an adult. Wow, I would never say such things to those who have said stupid things to me.

And yet, I wouldn’t change a thing. I love what I’m doing, and I expect this is the biggest reason people are willing to say crappy stuff to me. I no longer feel remorse over lost friends because I’ve met some wonderful and encouraging people along the way. I would do anything for those folks I could, as they already have for me. I have an amazing committee, and I’m astounded at what they have helped me to learn. They are generous, funny, and kind. When I finished my dissertation defense they had a meeting, and then came in and hugged me and congratulated me, and had a bottle of vodka for me. I really am hard pressed to imagine what more I could ask for. I wouldn’t change a thing.

I also really underestimated how much I would learn about myself throughout this. I remember at the end of my Masters talking with a student one year ahead of me. She’d done all I had in addition to teaching. I could not at the time fathom doing as much plus teaching three classes. She said, “You’ll be amazed at what you can do.” I’ll never forget that. And I am amazed. I don’t know a lot of facts, but I’m good at explaining why people do what they do, and I can put that on paper and go to two conferences, and write a zillion seminar papers, and teach three classes, and grade 75 crappy essays, and still have time to knit and watch DVDs with K.

As this time comes to a close, I’ve been reflecting on what I’ve learned in the past seven years.
1. Who my real friends are
2. I can live well in a place I dislike
3. I’m pretty good at “learning on the way”
4. I can live on one cup of coffee a day
5. I can live on 20 cups of coffee a day
6. How to weave
7. I’m a good teacher
8. Though I’m still terrified of public speaking, most people don’t realize this when I’m speaking in public
9. I can teach a class even if I’ve done none of the assigned reading
10. Graduate students generally have only two ways of responding to questions in seminars: “I thought this part was interesting because…” or, “No, I didn’t like this article because I didn’t see how it fits with my project.”
11. Upper division, undergraduate classes are a million times more educational than a graduate seminar
12. I can shop at Whole Foods even on my salary
13. Graduate students have a lot of time, despite what they claim
14. The library is actually a phone booth
15. I can read a book a day and retain information that interests me
16. Intelligence is no requirement for finishing a Ph.D., but focus is
17. That ordinary people aren’t stupid at all (despite how they tried to convince me of this when I worked in retail in a past life)
18. People are inherently good
19. My decisions are now on trial
20. There is no greater threat to human rights than religion
21. People will believe what they want to
22. Anderson was right: “Whatever you can imagine, people do that; whatever you can’t begin to imagine, people do that too.”
23. Business majors cheat more than any other major. Then, they lie in their feeble attempts to extract themselves from their own homemade shit storm
24. Business majors resent learning more than any other major
25. The social sciences are much harder than the natural sciences because they require critical thought, not just memorization
26. I can reinvent myself in my 3rd year of graduate school and still finish on time (so there!)
27. People with Ph.D.s can still be nice and down to earth
28. Melville knew everything

I Can't Escape From Charlie Sheen

2009-03-29T07:41:00.003+03:00

Here we are in Santa Cruz, and we were sitting at a brewery having samples of beer when Two and a Half Men shows up on the TV!

Macaron (a day late)

2009-03-22T07:01:00.000+02:00

Happy Macaron Day

2009-03-21T04:36:00.000+02:00

Effin' Snow

2009-02-13T07:02:00.001+02:00

I gave K a snow shovel for Valentine's Day.Up to the window! Seriously, no one should have to move so much frozen stuff. I'm filled with fear as I look out the window. More on the way.

Shoot

2009-02-07T00:12:00.000+02:00

We missed it. We sat in traffic for 4.25 hours yesterday. Stoopid rain.

5 Weeks to go

2009-01-29T22:16:00.003+02:00

Until I have to turn the beast in.

So, here's what I've been doing:

First bread made in the basket-thingie. It turned out better than I figured it would.

Cheese and egg. Ummmm.

First laminated dough:

They uncurled and turned into weird triangles...

Second laminated dough. One chocolate, one roasted bell pepper, cheese, pesto and black sesame seeds.

Different shape, still second dough:

Drinking and dominoes:

Jasmine tea macaron. First made from my new favorite book "Macaron," by the big guy.

Lots of dishes too.

You will not be missed

2009-01-20T21:01:00.000+02:00

Tecate Beer

2008-12-27T07:22:00.004+02:00

Today Kareem and France's mom, and Frances went to Tecate, Mexico. It was awsome. I drove the mom-mobile there, and we went on the 3 o'clock Tecate Brewery tour. Amazing...

So, um, the 3 o'clock tour began around 3:10. First we were given tickets for "free beers" which we mostly consumed on the lunai while speculating about the "SouBeerNear' sign attached to the building housing the restrooms. Then at around 15:15 we went into a theater where we watched a movie about the good deeds the brewery does, and how "green" they are. As best as I understood the movie, which was in Spanish, they use the run-off water from watering their lawn to brew the beer, thus making the product "green," as it were. Then we watched a safety film which informed us that we should not wear rings on the tour (?). Then we lined up for headphones. Kareem was in front, and the young man behind the counter did not give him headphones, but instead gave him a hard hat and told him, "You'll need to wear this. Exit that way." We walked to the right, and lined up.

The tour began, and we walked up a million stairs. At the multi-lingual sign explaining how beer is made I heard a tour guide speaking American, and I hung back with mom and Kareem. The tour guide didn't mind us listening in, but he wanted to know why mom and I didn't have hard hats. Apparently only the round-eyes had to have them. None of the Spanish speakers with head phones had to wear them! How fucking cool is that? Only the Americans had to wear special helmets! Wow! New Tour Guide (NTG) called for someone to bring two hard hats for me and ma, and we proceeded.

NTG informed us that Tecate brewery used to sponsor a bike race, but they stopped because people were showing up to drink, and then would not race. We saw the first kettle (made of copper) built in 1947. We learned that all the grain (all two pounds!!!) is imported by train from Wisconsin. We learned that all the brewing equipment is from Germany. And we learned that they brew every day of the year because they brew so effing much that they can't shut down, or people might riot. Oh yeah, in the into video we also learned that 4 out of every 10 Cokes are consumed in Mexico, if I understood (which is unlikely). Sweet Jebus!

We were hustled through. I was reminded that Americans walk very slowly. It was much safer than the Laugnitas Tour in which they gave K about 18 pints of beer, and then sent us out onto the floor while the bottling line was up and running. Wow. At Tecate, everything was behind glass, and we were told to walk inside the lines! They only gave 2 beers, but then it was free and so much fun.

While watching the incomprehensible video my mom pointed out to me that David Foster Wallace would have loved the entire experience.

It was a fun day.

Carmela Soprano

2008-12-25T03:34:00.002+02:00

I've decided to shop here from now on.

Kanafa Life-Cycle

2008-12-09T06:55:00.000+02:00

Oh dang, I miss that stuff.

Election Day

2008-11-04T20:08:00.001+02:00

There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life's July and left standing in the piercing chill of an Alpine November.

-MLK

American Foreign Policy

2008-10-29T21:58:00.001+03:00

Student Papers

2008-10-18T23:08:00.001+03:00

"Freud hated birthdays because he was only getting older, and was going to die."

Disappointment

2008-09-21T07:27:00.001+03:00

Years ago, say when I was in my mid-twenties, a good long-time friend sat across from me at breakfast acting particularly melancholy. We were camping east of San Diego, lots of good friends were there, and I couldn’t make out his mood. I asked him what was wrong, and he asked me if I’d ever been disappointed by someone I look up to. Not just a little, but profoundly and suddenly made aware of just how human our hero’s are. “Not really,” I told him. He had come to realize that a man he looked up to, a man who in many good ways replaced his father, was kind of a dunce. I think he told me there are two general issues here. One is that our expectations for those we esteem may be unreasonable, and we have control over this. The other issue is that we’d like to think that because we admire someone, that person is actually worthy of our esteem. Bestowal of esteem signifies that we have good judgment, and that another person is worthy of our good opinion. So, when a person lets us down it’s doubly crushing because it reflects an error in our judgment. To say the least.

Depending on your perspective I was either sheltered enough, or lucky enough that I didn’t really understand why my friend pushed his breakfast around the plate instead of eating it that morning until I was 32 years old. And when that finally did happen it was shocking, for it was a person I least expected. I learned that a person I’ve liked and whose company I have always found enjoyable, and whose intellectual accomplishments and wit I’ve always looked up to deserved much less of my esteem for the latter capability when he sent me an idiotic and patronizing email filled with emotional pleas and befuddled reasoning that was quite directed at trying to take me down a notch or ten. I felt foolish as I read it the first of two times because I really did think it was a joke. When at the end of the email he invoked the recent death of a close family friend as proof that I’m an asshole I realized it was not in humor at all. I reread the screed and found myself aghast that I’d ever considered him intellectually formidable, and then I did feel like an asshole for thinking that. I never expected anything like that from him, and it really shook me up. I was living in Jordan then, and this person sent an article about Islam that I took issue with. I went through the arguments bit by bit and dismantled them quite in the style that he does with regularity. When he responded to my screed about political Islam by invoking a recently killed friend in Iraq, I felt myself drifting out into a space I’ve never been in before. Now more than a year later I still think back to his response and wonder, what the fuck was that all about? The obvious answer is that he was in no mood to read something from a smug graduate student about the war which I directly argued is without justification just days after learning of A’s death. But, then, I wonder, why invite speculation on the causes of Middle East conflict in the first place? Why ask a question you’re not prepared to have answered? My argument was based on facts, history, precedent, and fieldwork. His response was based on emotion, and it was a tantrum. We have not communicated directly since then, though we are family. When several of us got together a few weeks ago for a vacation, he said little to me, not even asking me how my fieldwork went, or how my dissertation is. That’s ok. I don’t need anyone to be my cheerleader. The only thing he said to my husband was: “Hi K, still full of shit?” And that’s it. How did I get to be the asshole here?

Having had plenty of time to analyze that incident, I was still unprepared for the next installment from his younger brother. Let me describe what happened. We watched Fox News (why?). I complained about having to be exposed to O’Rilley when my shots are not up to date, and he told me to get a grip because this is the conservative opinion, and when O’Rilley is over we will have the liberal side. In no way do I consider “Take a look at this video of an SUV crashing into a 7/11 in Denton Texas,” to be news. Then, Giuliani started his speech, and my relative was sitting near us. I expressed fatigue at the bullshit, and he accused K and I of being too partisan and indirectly accused us of being naïve because “They all do this.” Having listened to his pronouncements on politics for years, I figured all of us in this family yell at the TV, and that’s just how we roll. Then that idiot Giuliani began to justify the term “Islamic Terrorism,” and by this time my uncle had moved away from K and I. I said, “This is so offensive, it’s Ramadan!” at which point my uncle stood up and said, “Oh come on! Those people came over here and killed 3500 Americans, so fuck your politics and fuck you!” Within that sentence he stood up, pointed his finger at us, and slammed the door behind himself, leaving his wife to say hasty good-byes and run after her ride home.

Now is the moment where I believe I take a different bus than my female relatives. Now having had two conservative uncles direct completely inappropriate tantrums at me, my aunts quickly began to engage in all sorts of verbal calculus thus making the incident either “no big deal,” or, “something expected, after all we were all drinking.” Here is what his different aunts told me:
“Well, we’d all had too much to drink, and I wasn’t exactly proud of my behavior…”
“We do that… Politics and beer don’t mix, we just have to remember that.”
“No politics tonight! [said the next night]”
“We should call them tomorrow and make peace.”
“You can’t get mad at everyone for everything. Where would we be if we didn’t forgive people? We’d have no friends.”
I am really at a loss here. When this happened in 2006, I was too far from the others to be exposed to the ways in which the women accommodate this behavior. But this time I saw it, and I like that less than being told to fuck off. Again, at the moment he pointed his finger at us, I thought he was joking, and then “…Fuck You!” and a slamming door. The next night I sat at a different table for dinner, and did not say good-bye at the end of our time together.

I need to return to my friend from the beginning of this. I learned from him that our perceptions of others are in large part our own responsibility. Like it or not, if I look up to a jerk that’s not a good plan, and that is my fault. A different long-term friend, who no longer is, taught me a valuable lesson at a terrible time in my life. Living in Jordan, and in no need of grief from home, she served up a boatload of torment to me at a time when I least needed it. What I realized, and I do thank her for this lesson, is that being friends with a jack-ass is stupid. Let me be more subtle in my analysis. She often asked of me things she should not have. Not smart enough to be friends with people who would never ask for so much at such a difficult time, I paid a price for my own lack of judgment. The lesson? Payback for being friends with a person who is too needy, or too selfish, or who is reliably ungrateful, or snotty, or whatever is obvious! I got what I deserved because I failed to responsibly pick people to be around me. Learning this lesson at that time in my life turned out to be really good for me, because my time in Jordan also pushed me to be both firm in my beliefs, and to derive my value from myself. Like I said, I need no one to be my cheerleader. I came back from Jordan with a conviction in myself, and a conviction in my intellect. Now months away from my PhD, I actually do know a lot about the Middle East, and about politics, and about humans in general. I know my history, I’ve read the critical social theory, I read a dozen news sources in English and Arabic every single day, then I go and read the Jordanian blogs to find out what’s really happening, I lived there, I’m a published author; I am not merely a passive political speculator.

Now add my education and the concomitant hubris to my area of specialization (the Middle East!), and I have something to say about political Islam and about the War. And, my opinions are based on good research and experience. I can defend Salafi Islam until the end of time, and yet I’m an atheist and really, fundamentally don’t get the religious experience. I think this culminates in a person who is really knowledgeable and yet emotionally detached. I can go on and on, and I am right, and yet my ego isn’t anchored to this stuff. I love my dissertation, and I love what I do in school, but this is not all of who I am.

And so when I sit with dear family members who unknowingly (or directly) patronize me by trying to explain something about the M.E. to me, I sit and take it because I’m a nice person. But since my fieldwork experience, this is very hard, and perhaps well-meaning people don’t fully understand that I am doing them a favor by not bursting out and asking them if they are a fucking idiot or what. I am nice enough that when people ask me if I have a real job yet, or why I want to avoid life by hiding in school, or grossly underestimate (misunderestimate?) how much my fieldwork took out of me, I smile and give an answer that moves the conversation along instead of telling them what I want to. And this pushed me closer to that dilemma I understand so keenly about surrounding myself with people who deserve my company, and avoiding people who suck life out of me. I know very well that we must pick our fights, but I also know that we must pick well or be trampled, but I sometimes don’t know when is which. For example, regarding often-made statements about my fieldwork:
“[bold statement not even touched by knowledge]”
Me: “Oh yeah, just like 'summer camp,' everyone sits around making SMOREs.”
Most of the time, it’s not worth potentially embarrassing the person I’m speaking with to correct them. Do I speak up every time? Never? When I can’t take it anymore? Now I’m older, and more educated, and I’m in this weird social place in which I know, dare I say, a lot more than many people I look up to. The thing is, they seem to only know that I look up to them, and they didn’t get the memo about how I’m almost done with school and all that stuff. So when Giuliani makes inflammatory statements that I know are worthy of ridicule, I will say so when among family. But this turned out to be too much, and I ended up at the business end of an F-bomb.

That’s easy for me to process, having had practice with his brother a year earlier. There is no excuse for talking to me like that. Man-up and address me with facts and an actual argument, or STFU. Don’t act like a jerk, and then never bring it up again.

Here is the really sticky part for me: what the heck is going on with the women in this family? Their diligent work to provide a continual open space for the men to act like bullies is stunning to me. Who decided that we are not accountable for our behavior? I certainly know I am! Perhaps that’s another good thing about being in graduate school. I am responsible not only for every single thing I do, as a teacher, as a student, as a writer, but I am responsible for everything I think. I am surrounded by people who make a living asking me to justify what I think. They continually amaze me by pushing me further and further, well beyond what I’d imagined possible. So it seems odd to me when people are permitted to talk with out backing up anything they say. I currently don’t live in that world and have not for several years. I’d also like to think that I’m improving my skills at deconstructing arguments too. And that comes at a cost that I am willing to pay, I just should not be asked to pay it.

Dinosaur

2008-08-26T07:46:00.001+03:00

Why I don't hate poor people

2008-07-16T20:16:00.004+03:00

In coming to my understanding of poverty, that is How people descend into poverty, and What keeps them there, I inevitably move back and forth between different scales of inquiry: the collective and the individual. I think it’s important to point out that at various points in our arguments we tend to focus on one of those to the exclusion of the other because it supports our point. Thus, we make conclusions that can seem perfectly logical when applied to a group, but may be in error when applied to an individual and vice versa. I also point this out because I tend to focus on the individual, and of course those who oppose me will lament that my anecdotal evidence cannot be used to make conclusions about a group. I would reply: So what? For one thing, as a cultural anthropologist I understand that Logic is not often well-applied to human because we often act illogically either because we are innately illogical, or more likely because structural circumstances compel us to act against our own interested (i.e. poor people voting Republican). As an alternative, I’m interested in discussing what I call Cultural Logic, and this is a model that acknowledges that structure does exist, it is compelling, it often defies “logic,” humans are complex, and humans are more or less smart. Cultural Logic allows me to focus on both the individual experience (by way of understanding and beginning to explain collective beliefs and actions) and translate that to an understanding of a group. Is this imperfect? Of course, but to exclude individual experiences so we may with one gesture sum up a collective and declare something about all of them leads us not only to the same logic fallacies that anecdotal evidence can, but also excuses an awful lot of discrimination that should never be excused, let alone ignored and indulged.

Let me share with you some vignettes of people I’ve met recently. What I hope you gain from spending time with these people is that Poverty is a complex process that embodies issues of habitus, socialization, racism, sexism, and of course money.

Vignette 1:
S is almost 60 years old. She is raising her 3 granddaughters, and has been for just over a decade. Her daughter, the mother of the 3 children, lived with S until one day she announced that she was taking S’s car to go get some cigarettes. She never returned, and S over the next week began to realize that she was now the only caregiver for 3 minor children. In addition to the emotional impact of this (at the very least S had her car stolen, she had NO idea what happened to her daughter, she was not emotionally prepared for such a dramatic and abrupt transition), S is a widow; her husband was killed in the Viet Nam war. S had a reasonable job as a bureaucrat, and as a single woman lived an economically comfortable but not cushy life.

In the following weeks S began to realize there would be problems with her job. She had 3 kids under the age of 10 in her house, and no babysitter, and could not afford day care for 3. She began using her sick time and vacation pay so she could stay home with the kids. I’ll skip to the end here and tell you that in a matter of months S had used her savings, and all her vacation pay and was fired from her job because she had become “undependable” to her employer. Why “undependable”? Let’s be clear, it’s not because she had babies out of wedlock, not because she was on drugs and wanted to sit around high all day, not because she was lazy. She was fired because she had to make a choice between working and caring for kids, one of whom was a toddler at the time. Anyone of us would (or should, at least) choose family over work in a situation like this. This seems to me the only moral choice. S attempted to enroll for government services, but found that while she could get coverage, the 3 kids could not. They were not her legal children, and she did not have legal guardianship of them; they were still her daughter’s kids after all. So, using her check for 560 dollars a month, S and her 3 grandkids tried to live month to month while S tried to adjust to her new life as a mom. Over the last decade S’s health has become increasingly compromised. Now, she is legally blind, has arthritis that requires pain medication she cannot afford, and high blood pressure. She told me that when all of this began years ago the government did not understand the complexities of grandparents raising grandkids. Now she, simply because of passage of time, has legal guardianship of her grandkids, and now they receive just over 800 dollars a month (this is in 2008) from the government.

S told me that when her oldest granddaughter began ditching school the state began deducting money from her monthly check. She said, “They want to make the kids go to school, and some parents are so irresponsible that the only way to make sure they act like adults is to take their money, so when kids miss school, it costs a lot.” S called the school and explained what the situation was, and asked what could be done. She cannot afford to lose any money. But the school representatives explained that because S was not at that time the legal guardian, they could not talk to her. Yet, they have the authority to deduct money from S’s monthly check because the kids are registered at this particular address. What a great loophole! To review: S can’t legally be allowed to address the attendance of her granddaughter because she was not at that time the legal parent, but she is still financially responsible for her granddaughter’s attendance. Thinking on her feet, S demanded some form of redress, and was told that she could attend “parenting classes” a couple of nights a week at one of the district high schools. The classes begin at 8 at night. S, who was blind by this time, responded that she couldn’t do that because none of her neighbors were available to travel with her on the bus, something she needed because she was adjusting to her recent blindness, and because by this time they had moved to an unsafe neighborhood where she could afford the rent. She continued to have money deducted from her monthly check until her oldest granddaughter stopped ditching classes.

For over a decade S has lived in poverty. She was, by her own account, plunged into poverty by a situation that was not of her making. She is not in poverty because she failed to boot-strap herself into a more promising position; she is in poverty because she made a responsible choice when her daughter failed to. I know S because she is a student of mine. Through all of this, she is going to school, and her oldest granddaughter will start college this summer. S had to miss class one day because she had to submit her Section 8 paperwork by a certain date, and did not have the 3.20 in postage she needed. Her bus pass is paid for, so she took the only option she had which was to miss class and go to the office and turn in her paperwork. That is a choice I cannot imagine making, and this has little to do with S being lazy or me being hardworking.

Vignette 2:
C is in her 40s, and her health is failing. She is in a wheelchair, has diabetes, hypertension, carpel tunnel, and just about everything else too. Her husband of many decades is also suffering from failing health. Both are on disability, and have been for almost 20 years. C was a nurse before her health began to fail. C is a white woman who married a black man before that was socially permissible (if it even is). She and her husband lived in Watts after they were first married. She told me that they were often pulled over by the cops. They would pull her husband out of the car, search him, and ask her if she was ok. She would ask them what they were doing to her husband, and the often-surprised police officer would respond with confusion, telling C that he assumed she was being kidnapped or raped. C and “the brother,” as she calls him, have 3 kids. One is a lesbian. C, a devout Christian, told me that she has come to understand after years of facing racism that “Mixed families are mixed families are just mixed families, and that’s all! We all make relationships that are meaningful to us, and often most others won’t understand.” Though initially uncomfortable with her daughters declaration that she is gay, C told me that her daughter told C that she was not going to hear anything negative from her mom who had chosen a marriage that few approved of back then. C, wiser than most of us, realized her daughter was right, and they all eat Christmas dinner together now.

C and her husband, because of their terrible health (I can attest to this personally) have been receiving social security benefits for 2 decades now. C’s wheelchair, for example, was paid for by the state. A few years ago C’s oldest daughter got a job at Wal-Mart. Her daughter was a senior in high school, and she wanted to have some spending money and to pay for her prom expenses. The money was not going to come from C, as it is she and a neighbor are sharing diabetes medication because the two neighbors cannot afford the full and proper doses. C’s daughter made 8000 dollars in one year, and quit at the end of her last year of high school. Not long after this C got a letter from the government informing her that because 8000 dollars of income came into that home, she would need to repay the government, and they began to garnish her check. C and her husband gave up all of their medications; their health further declined. C told me recently that after years the government was finally taking the last bit of money out of her check. She said, “They are taking the last payment, and it’s normally 100 dollars, but there’s just 20 dollars left.” I said, “That’s great, just 20 bucks!” She looked at me like I’d said it in Arabic, and then I realized that she doesn’t have 20 bucks, she certainly didn’t have 100 bucks. She was lamenting the 20 dollars, not telling me she’s glad it’s only 20. I felt like such an ass. C told me that the government wants to be paid back for all they have given C and The Brother. If, for example, they wanted to buy a house, they would first need to pay back all the benefits. Same if they wanted to start a business. In other words, it’s actually impossible (in fact, it ends up being illegal) for them to crawl out of this.

Now, I don’t know the legal ins and outs of this. Perhaps all of this is perfectly avoidable for C, but neither she nor I is aware of how this could be avoidable. What I realize about people like C and S is that they are quite smart, and they are more than willing to work. But they are tired. They are too tired to explore the various legal ways they might avoid being penalized for being poor.

Said a different way, it is expensive to be poor. Because people have to share medication (!!!) they become increasingly sick, and can work less, and so on. Because people don’t know how to shelter their assets from liability they lose what little they have, and for some it’s not a big fall into the kinds of poverty from which they cannot extract themselves. The big point here is that some of us are closer to catastrophe than others, and whatever margin there may be is not always a direct correlation to how hard we’ve worked. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that most of the time that margin is more easily explained if we turn to the structural barriers that prevent class mobility for most, instead of turning to the degree to which we work or boot-strap ourselves.

More on structural barriers:
There are 2 books out now worth reading. For the record, they are both copyrighted for 2008. The first is called “A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery.”
Author E. Benjamin Skinner tracks slavery all over the world, including the land of the free: the U.S. Using data gathered from fieldwork, from the U.N. and the United States, Skinner gives us some shocking things to contemplate:
1. More slaves are imported into the United States each year than during all of the time combined that slavery was legal.
2. A child in Haiti can be purchased for 50 USD. During the time of legal slavery in the States, a slave cost between 40,000 and 60,000 (adjusted for inflation), thus indicating an appalling devaluation of human life in the last century.
Let us be clear about what slavery means in this context. “Slavery” refers to the practice of depriving a person of his/her rights to his/her sexuality, to earn a wage in exchange for selling labor, to determine one’s course in life (i.e. to attend school, get married, have kids, take vacations), and to remain free from violence. I suspect few of us would argue too much about this definition, but when we apply it to, say, a poor person in the U.S., people can become pissed-off, not to say self-conscious. Let’s look at S. She has been denied the ability to determine her financial future, as the State has stepped in to garnish her wages while still telling her that she has no rights, or limited rights, to contest this on legal grounds. She wrote in a paper that, “I haven’t been out to dinner in 15 years. And dating? Forget it! Who wants to date a woman in her 60s with 3 young kids?” Her sexuality is denied because raising kids must take precedence. Now, is she being legally denied these rights? No. Is anyone standing at her door and preventing single men from talking to her? Of course not! But, here we meet the important distinction between legality and social reality. While nothing is legally preventing S from dating, or working, it’s just not that simple. And while slavery is no longer legal, we see that it happens more than ever. In fact, I’d argue because something is not legal, that merely makes it harder to detect, yet no less prevalent.

Book 2:
Douglas Blackmon (who is a white mon) looks at what he calls Neo-slavery, that is, the ways in which African Americans have been compelled into servitude even after the Emancipation Proclamation. The Books is “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II”

Why he stops at the second World War, I don’t know, as I see this as an on-going issue. Typically the ways this is carried out is by compelling blacks into the prison system. The prison industry, a complex of large corporations driven by profit, lobby successfully to target specific populations by making specific activities illegal and punishable by longer sentences than others. For example, targeting specific drugs (instead of all of them equally) that have higher use rates by non-whites for longer sentences. Interestingly, Blackmon argues (backing his argument up with actual data for all you positivists our there!) that prisons are not even good for the communities they operate in; they in fact do not contribute significantly to the tax base, or by providing jobs. In other words, crimes that target blacks and keep them in the prison system only benefit the corporate prisons, not even the poor whites that work in the prisons benefit in the long run.

Another person I met recently has been in and out of the prison system, and I see for him that serving his time (which he did) is not enough. He will be tied to this system and will be financially responsible for his own abuse. Yesterday he told me about the group home where he is required to live. He said, “They call themselves Christians, and then they send me out to work for them. I have to go up to the desert and dig ditches while some 16 year-old tells me I’m a nigger! What is that now?” Some day I have to post about his story. He has shown me that prison is most definitely for punishment and not rehabilitation.

My point here is that race and class become pretty tangled up, and giving an issue such as Poverty simple treatment certainly ignores the real constraints on people, and more importantly it enforces racism and sexism and all those other isms. I have been alive long enough to understand that ignoring something ends up being the same as condoning something.

In class a few weeks ago I was playing devil’s advocate, and I argued that a crime is a crime, and no one is holding a gun to someone’s head and making him or her steal something. One student responded [rightly] that any one of us would steal if we needed to do so to feed our kids, she went on to point out that this is simply what it comes down to for too many families even in SoCal. Sure, a crime is a crime, but what is the harm in asking What compels people to behave as they do? In other words, is there a cultural logic that explains why the poor behave as they do? There is. And by ignoring it and making simple claims (or Hasty Generalizations for you fans of logic fallacies) that these people got themselves into this, and we should not feel compelled to address the bad decisions that others make is not just off the mark. It is cruel.

There are lazy people everywhere, and there are certainly assholes everywhere. My concern, turning to the collective from the individual, is that we seem to have lost (if we ever had) a sense of collective concern. In my archaeologist days I learned about Reciprocity. PJW once said in class “Reciprocity is the single most important reason we are all still here. It’s gotten us through millions of years together because people either all lived together or died together.” Now we have this bizarre hard-on for the rugged individual, and to heck with the others. Why would we abandon a strategy that is time-tested and that we know from literally millions of years of prehistory actually works? What is it we fear or loathe so much about occasionally helping someone else? I ask these as rhetorical questions, for I have answered them for myself. I direct these questions at those who actually manage to ask with a straight face: “Why should I help these suckers who got into mortgages they can’t afford? I’ve worked hard for my money!”

I’ve also worked hard for my degree. But, turning to structures that prop up instead of push down, I understand that in addition to my hard work I have benefited from White Privilege. “What a bunch of psycho-babble,” you charge? Well, Peggy McIntosh provides us with a check-list of everyday, taken for granted things we should ask ourselves before dismissing this. Here are a select few from a list that spans almost half a dozen pages:
1. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I want to live.
2. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
3. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.
4. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
5. I can be pretty sure that my children’s teachers and employers will tolerate them if they fit school and workplace norms; my chief worries about them do not concern other’s attitudes toward their race.
6. I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty or the illiteracy of my race.
7. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.
8. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
9. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.
10. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its politics and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.
11. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the “person in charge”, I will be facing a person of my race.
12. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.
13. I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.
14. and on and on.

Of course it isn’t illegal to make most toys look white, and it isn’t illegal to pull someone over for speeding. At interest here to me are the ways in which we deviate from what we say we do as a society and what we actually do. Truly, only the oblivious walk around thinking that just because we all get to drink from the same fountain, and sit at the same lunch counter that prejudice is no longer a problem, and that the civil rights and women’s rights movement have equalized everyone, and so those who don’t succeed are losers.

Let me also be clear here that the examples I have given are not intended to prove my point, only to illustrate it. Suffice to say that it is clear to me that there are many barriers that work well at keeping large segments of this population in peril, and sometimes those barriers are subtle and social, and sometimes they are direct and legal.

The other day C reminded me that “You [middle-class folks] don’t have to see what it’s [poverty] like for us,” and she is right. I’m just now beginning to realize that all the talk of a weak economy is simply irrelevant to people like her. What has changed for her in the last 2 years? Not much. She takes the bus, so gas costs don’t hurt her. She has had marginal access to the medications she needs. It’s not like she’s fussing over smaller returns on her investments. I, on the other hand, am feeling the pinch. I can’t sell my house right now, my insurance company just informed me that they won’t renew my policy because we live in a “fire hazard area,” and the gas prices are killing us. It seems to me the economy is in a crisis to the extent that people like me are feeling more and more marginal. But what about people like C who have felt this for decades? Why is that not a crisis to us? There is no logic, to me, in defining something as a crisis when just a few of us at the top feel threatened.

Freedom

2008-06-03T04:54:00.000+03:00

Freedom isn't free, but it is discounted this weekend.

I’m from Seattle

2008-05-20T06:21:00.005+03:00

Years ago (or maybe it was just a few months ago…) I worked at Starbucks. Though I worked in SoCal it didn’t take long before we noticed this funny habit some customers had. Once in a while someone would come in and order the most ridiculous drink we’d ever heard of. Figuring that the customer just had no idea what s/he was ordering, we would suggest what we thought they might have meant. “Oh, did you want the whatever? That’s similar [but not nearly as nasty or stupid],” to which the customer would reply: “I’m from Seattle.” Initially I had no idea what the heck this had to do with ordering a stupid drink, but over time I came to understand it was a short hand intended to tell me that they knew good and well what they were ordering because they are from the birthplace of Starbucks, and therefore had a much more in-depth history with espresso drinks than my little brain could possibly understand. It became a joke among those of us who worked there. If a co-worker demanded an explanation for something, we could opt out completely by just saying, “I’m from Seattle!” In essence, history becomes authority and excuses the speaker from needing to explain anything.

Now, the version of this that dominates my life is “Look, I’m Palestinian.”

This year at school I’ve noticed a lot more muhajabees than we’ve ever had in this conservative part of California. Over the winter I went for coffee and stood in line with a woman who had the worst 7ijab I’ve ever seen. No stranger myself to wearing one, I giggled when I saw her (and mentally apologized to her). She had a too-small scarf placed around her head, and a big plastic comb (like a big plastic lobster claw) stuck to the top of her head barely keeping the thing on. She looked not only self-conscious, but like she just decided that day over her lunch hour to begin wearing the 7ijab and looked around her office and made due with what she had on hand. I know the look of a woman who is not used to wearing that, I’ve seen it in my own eyes.

Coincidently I’m sitting in on a class on the Qur’an. Not coincidently, many of these young women and their male counterparts are also in the class. I figured this would present an interesting opportunity for me to get an explanation about why there are so many more women wearing the 7ijab now. The professor, a Sunni Muslim from Indonesia (who speaks and writes Arabic really, really well), initially made a good go at keeping the class secular and focused. But as the weeks have passed, the class has also become a platform by which the Muslim students can have affirmed for themselves that, Yes, they do know the Truth, and do practice the True Religion. Each class is full of great ethnographic moments.

Let me share with you some vignettes:

Vignette 1, from guest speaker Dr. E:
“Islam is a religion of peace. In order to understand your religion you have to step back and suspend some of your own beliefs so that you can challenge yourself. If you can do this you will see, through study, that Islam is the Right Path. Those who challenge the existence of God are literalists, and we can’t talk to them, they have no ability to understand… Political ideologies are based on rejection; religious ideologies are based on peace.”

Notes I took:
“[N.B. some dumb white girl brought a dog to class! She brought a dog to class!] All the Muslims students are nodding emphatically. Dr. E seems to be arguing that facts are necessary, but only to a very limited point…”

Later I was looking over some of my field notes. This day in class was not the first time I was told that I needed to suspend some of my beliefs to understand the peaceful message of Islam. I was intrigued though out my fieldwork with the ways in which the message was homogenized. Here is an excerpt from an interview I conducted with a self-defined Salafi Palestinian in February 2007.
“Islam is not a religion of violence! It is a religion of peace. You know when we talk about Jesus, we know he is a prophet, and we have to say ‘Peace be upon him’! We respect the People of the Book [Muslims, Jews, Christians]… Islam is a challenge from God, and if we don’t study we will not understand what Allah wants us to live as. It takes knowledge, and we must study. We have to sit outside of ourselves and try to understand the message. We can’t do it if we don’t study and talk with each other! If, y3anee, if you don’t try and learn you will never hear the Truth.”

The key here is that Islam is not easy to understand, it takes work and skill. So, if we think we understand Islam, then we may congratulate ourselves for also being good students. Props come from working to understand the challenge of religious knowledge. Smart people are Muslims.

Vignette 2, from the lecture about sexuality in the Qur’an:
Notes I took from the lecture:
“The Q reformed, but did not replace the existent patriarchic Arab system.
Miriam is the only female mentioned in the Q.
(Q 4:11) Sons get twice as much inheritance as daughters.
7adiths are more specific about sexuality and family than the Q.
Nikah: marriage is done between a groom and a female’s guardian.
No more limitless marriages, the Q limits a man to 4 wives.
(Q 2:223) ‘…go into your fields whenever you want…’”
Prof A: “This is the verse in the Q that some interpret to mean that men can do what they want to their wives, but through 7adiths and convention [?] we know this does not condone violence or rape against women.”
Student: “Well, why is violence against women prevalent in Arab culture?”
A.H. [female, muhajabee, Palestinian]: “Can I say something? It isn’t, you know? There are governments that are corrupt, or what ever, but, like, that doesn’t happen that much. You know? I mean, it [domestic violence] happens here [in the States] too, you know?”
Student: “I’m not saying anything against your culture, but I feel like it happens more in Muslim culture, but I don’t know really.”
Prof A: “Ok, any other questions? Or can we move on?”
Student: “Do women get 4 husbands?”
Student 2 [Saudi-born Palestinian male]: “Oh, I’d like to answer that one. [giggles] No way, man. And, the reasons are many. First of all, it’s important to know who the father [of potential children] is, and, I mean, if she’s with different men there are no way to know. Also, it’s for her health.”
Me: “What?!?”
S2: “Yeah, you know.”
Me: “[yes, I do know you pervert] No, I don’t know. Explain it to me.”
S2: “You know, she can’t satisfy that many men, you know what I mean?”
This degenerated into a discussion about my vaginal health. I found this nothing but offensive. Said S2, quite exasperated with me: “Look, all I know is that it’s from God, and that’s all I need to know, ok?”
In the interest of disclosure, I find the obsessive focus on women’s sexuality quite offensive. In a subsequent discussion about rape and patriarchy several of the muhajabee students defended the Saudi legal decision a few months ago that punished a female victim of rape more harshly than her rapists. I will say in their defense that the female students had a fundamental misunderstanding of the facts of the case (making them good Americans), and had a version of it that implicated the Saudi woman more than she should have been. When I expressed horror at their ease at publicly defending rape, they deployed their best defense: I don’t understand the religion, and I’m probably racist any way. Plus I’ve never been to the Middle East [interesting what they assume about me], so how could I understand the culture?

Vignette 3, in which we watched the first 40 minutes of Paradise Now:
[We watched up until the two Palestinians make their martyr videos.]
A.H. (you remember her from above): “You guys, I just want to say that you all need to go there, because that totally looked like Filisteen [unaware that it was Nablus], and that’s totally what it’s like there [violence].”
Non-Arab Student: “How come, do you guys think, they go for the weak people like that? I mean, that sucks that they recruit people like that. I guess they have nothing to loose, it is an occupation, but it seems like a terrible thing that these men are left with that.”
S2 (from above): “You have to understand it IS an occupation, and this is what they have to fight with. I’m not saying it’s ok to go and do that, but those guys, what do they have? They were, like, mechanics, or whatever. You know?”
A.H.: “Ok, you guys, I just want to say that I’m Palestinian, and that’s just what it’s like for our people, you know?”
Another student: “No!”
Sunni-Iraqi male student: “It’s no different that how a certain country that will not be named works. You know, within that country they give cash and bonuses to people if they agree to join the army and go to war, and this is the same thing [alluding to the scene in which a man assures the two Palestinians that their family will be safe and compensated?].”
A.H.: “Wow, I never thought of it like that.”
S2: “I’m Palestinian too, and it’s true, you guys, you don’t know what it’s like there.”

They’re from Seattle:
I realized that the reason I think there are so many more students who wear 7ijab or are willing to grow beards is because they are done apologizing for Islam, and they are going to be Muslims, or Iraqis or Palestinians damn it! What I like about the reactions from the Muslim students is that they, simply by being Arab (all Palestinians save one Iraqi and one Egyptian) own the authority to speak about these issues. There is one Arab female in the class who is Coptic, and yet even she came to class a few weeks ago wearing a Muslim Student Union shirt. [Incidentally, the same students who wear the MSU shirts alternate days with their Students for Justice in Palestine shirts, and that’s why I’m using Muslim and Palestinian practically interchangeably.] And, on one hand I’m so glad about this. It’s about time Arabs/Muslims feel free to live here and that they don’t have to go around day after day giving the ajnabees the “Islam is a religion of peace… We wept on 9/11 too” speech. I like that, as we saw in the first vignette, they create what I call a Cognitive Community; they are a religious group of people who have to be smart enough to know that they have the best group in town. And, it’s about time they feel free to turn to me in class and call any of us out if they think we’re racist, or we don’t understand Islam. I think more changed while I was away last year than I realized at first, and for the most part it’s better.

On the other hand, it’s too easy to look at me and declare that “You don’t understand our religion, and I think you’re racist.” What am I supposed to say to that? No, I’m not? Instead of trying to understand what I’m arguing, I’m written off; I’m shut down because I’m not Palestinian. And just as I used to make fucked up drinks for Seattleites, I just nod and take furious ethnographic notes in this class. I worry that the boldness these students have today will quickly fade if it’s not refined into something more sophisticated than “you guys, I’m Palestinian, and it’s totally like that there.”

On May 15th, the 60th anniversary of the Nakba, people were supposed to blog about Palestinians. All I could think of that day was how pissed off I was at that 19 year old Palestinian dude in my class who thinks his penis is tougher than my vagina. I didn’t want to blog about that, though I did consider it at first. And while I am glad that more people feel daring enough to assert their Arab-ness, I’m also frustrated. A.H. is going to see American Idol this week, but I don’t understand her religion?

Spring

2008-05-14T23:28:00.002+03:00

Remember this from February?

Now it looks like this:

Dogwoods are neat.