More Gripes About Other People's Writing

As everyone knows, I had a problem with “Eat, Pray, Love.” I tell people I didn’t like Gilbert’s voice, but what really goaded me was her premise. To wit: that somehow, travel can be extrapolated into memoir.

The best bit of travel writing I ever read was this, culled off a B-grade MySpace page one depressing evening: “No matter how far we travel, we stay in the same place, unless we are willing to change.”

There is a part of me that refuses to accept that people who explore the world are doing anything other than exploring the far reaches of themselves. And perhaps travel is an impetus to change, but it’s probably even more the other way around. Feel free to take a walk on the wild side of your personality, but why should that be the wild side of the world? And then, what sublime foolishness to think that somehow, the little corner of your brain you’ve carved out and mapped is the world!

But most of all, it’s the well-wishers who peeve me. The “you must do x before you die”-ers, the Bucket List-ers, you know the type I mean. The ones who wear you down with the insidious suggestion that if you’ve never stood before the bleached face of the Taj Mahal in the waning light of the moon you’ve never known love or beauty, the ones who assume that if you’ve never rafted the roaring Mekong you’ve never known breathlessness or adventure.

Maybe I’m bitter, and a little jealous. The truth is that I started traveling to escape the world I knew, which I later realized was myself, which I later realized would never happen.

Here’s another excellent bit of advice I once got about travel, from my seventh grade English teacher: “you don’t have to leave your home to do it.” I believe this. For that assignment I read “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” which may be one of the best adventure novels of all time.

This, the inward travel, is both difficult to know and probably impossible to master. I know I’m not far along that path. I also know that I could never teach or preach the way to the trailhead to anyone else. And perhaps it’s true that other authors – the infamous and insufferable Elizabeth Gilbert, for one – acknowledge that they don’t know the whole truth either. But doesn’t the very act of writing a book suggest you should be listened to, that you feel you hold some perspective other people don’t? (For that matter, doesn’t a blog? Yes, ok, you may have me there…)

The point is, in adapting the world for our own enlightenment, don’t we leach it of its complexity? Isn’t that process abrasive and wrong? The great yogis of Hindu tradition achieved enlightenment without moving. They sat in the snowmelt, or under spindly trees, or in the middle of a cattle fair – wherever, really – and in the moment between closing and opening their eyes their brains managed to span the cosmos.

That would make for one hell of a travel memoir. The rest of us, I think, should stick to plain old travel writing.

First Generation Blues

I have a problem with people who write about India. I realized it today while reading AA Gill’s “A Short Walk in the Hindu Crush” which is perhaps the best travel essay I’ve ever read about India, and a great travel essay to begin with.

I have a problem perhaps because I feel as if India sleeps in my bones, a latent tiger, or at least a chemical reaction I can neither predict nor control. It irks me because all my life people here have said to me “You’re Indian” and what do they know about that? “Foreign-ness” is a mantle that doesn’t sit easy on anyone, and when I meet other first generation children I’m drawn to them for this reason. Whether they’re from Cuba or China or Guatemala, it doesn’t matter. We have that same energy, that same sense of waste-not inherited from parents who had nothing to waste. We’ve been called something, whatever it is, but not American. We’ve been called it for so long that we’ve begun to believe it’s true. The most interesting thing I realized while in India was that I was, in fact, American.

And to some people this will seem naïve, but my question is, how can you sit around a table with friends you’ve known for years, and listen to them talk about the post-9/11 world and the general justifiability of racial profiling, and not feel like the Other? How can you ignore the elephant in the room, the elephant in the form of you? How can everyone else ignore it, is the question. And then, they write about India as if they know what it means.

Well, I have news for you Tigger, you can’t have it both ways.

Obama Earns A Living, Too

Ryan Lizza has a long article about Barack Obama in The New Yorker. You can read the full 15 pages if you like, but his opening interview with longtime Illinois Alderman Toni Preckwinkle seems to be the scoop. Preckwinkle, who’s known Obama for years, seems shocked by the guy’s meteoric political rise, and she goes so far as to suggest Obama has lost his personal integrity.

I know. Some friend.

But Lizza’s article exposes a fundamental Orwellianism that we need to get straight. Despite the fact that he is running for President, there still seem to be people out there who are shocked – shocked! – that Obama behaves like a politician.

People, the man is a politician. As a very wise columnist once wrote, “they’re not like the rest of us.”

Of course, Obama is not entirely clean himself. (And no, I’m not referring to that misfit moment in his autobiography when he admitted he’d done cocaine.) If anyone is responsible for this “Obama is not a politician” belief, it’s Obama himself. In that galvanizing speech, the one that launched the Obama cult of personality, he said, “If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It is that fundamental belief -- it is that fundamental belief -- I am my brother's keeper, I am my sisters' keeper -- that makes this country work.”

It’s still one of the greatest speeches in modern history. It ranks up there with MLK’s “I Have A Dream,” and the similarities are not to be discounted.

Why is it so heartbreaking to accept that those words came out of the mouth of a politician? The difference between Obama and every other politician we have isn’t that Obama claims to be a different breed (normally, they all do) but that many of us believed him (normally, we never do).

But maybe that exposes a deeper cultural insecurity, a “Politician-Human” complex along the lines of the “Virgin-Whore” complex that stymied feminism. The Politician-Human complex might have evolved when we trusted the promises of politicians only to be painfully misled.

But it runs deeper than that. It hearkens back to the Founding Fathers. Nothing put George Washington’s wig in a knot like politicians, whom he described in his famous farewell letter as “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men…enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.”

Which is a shame, since Washington, in addition to being our first President, was also our first politician.

Merriam-Webster defines a politician as: “a person experienced in the art or science of government; especially: one actively engaged in conducting the business of a government.”

Meanwhile, the most popular definition on Urban Dictionary has a different take: “A person who practices politics. "Politics" is derived from the words "poly" meaning "many", and "tics" meaning "blood-sucking parasites."” Incidentally, this is also the politest definition on the page.

Our nation’s bizarre love-hate relationship with its elected polity is more than I can unpack in a blog post, even one as irresponsibly long as this one. Suffice it to say that being a politician has, over the course of history, taken on many associated meanings, whether justified or not. We consider politicians selfish and utilitarian, or dishonest and insensitive. We consider “politician” to be a mindset, a personality and a social class.

But at the end of the day, it’s also a job. Obama’s job.

The (Underestimated?) Genius of Gamers

In the course of work I came across this quote about science education in America:

"Even those classrooms that do engage in inquiry typically provide in "simple inquiry tasks" rather than inquiry activities where the outcome is in genuine doubt, a hallmark of authentic inquiry (Chinn and Malhotra, 2002).

It comes from a study of – of all things – role playing games, by Kurt Squire and Mingfong Jan.

Reading the quote brought me to a strange realization. In order to graduate high school, I had to do a lot of things. But what about the things I didn't have to do? For example, not once did I engage in a scientific inquiry where the outcome was in genuine doubt.

I engaged in plenty where my competence was in genuine doubt, which led to a whole host of dubious outcomes. But even in in the depths of the darkest Methyl Blue haze, I knew what was supposed to happen.

But of course I didn’t design experiments, you’re all thinking. Hell, if I did things like that I would be Einstein! Newton! Confucius! (Maybe not Confucius…) That guy who won the Nobel Prize recently because he did something with something and now other scientists can do something else with something!

The thing is, the way those experiments worked, the entire experimental process was redundant.

When I was a kid, the opposite was true. I started life knowing nothing. If I came up with a plan involving my little sister and a sled made from a box, and the plan didn't work, then I had to come up with a new plan involving a trash can lid and a box, and if that didn’t work, then I had to find a new hill altogether, and so on.

If this is also how scientists learn, that explains why so many of the world’s greatest inventions have been mistakes. Invention isn’t what happens when you go to the drawing board, it’s what happens when you go back to the drawing board.

But wait, you’re thinking. Most schools don’t have the facilities to support higher-order scientific inquiry.

This might not the case. One of my most interesting high school experiments involved dropping an egg from a great height. In order to determine how impact acted upon the fragile egg, my partner and I had to make some diagrams, come up with an impulse estimate, and then design a little “egg-carrier.” The egg, ensconced in carrier, was ceremoniously dropped two stories.

Our egg survived. Others were not so lucky.

But what if all those people who weren’t so lucky had to go back and re-design their egg carriers? What if we all had to do that when one of our experiments didn’t work?

The reason role playing games reflect this process so well is because they offer no guides or guarantees. Playing one is like stepping into a new world. It’s like the day you were born. You don’t know the rules. You can only experiment, and through experimentation, survive.

Philosophers, as any good IB knows, recognize two forms of knowledge. Knowledge gained through being told (don’t touch the electrical outlet) and knowledge gained through experience (really, don’t touch it).

Is knowledge gained through experimentation different? Does it fall under experiential knowledge, or is it something else altogether? A fusion of those two forms? I’m sure the pros (Plato? Mill? Aristotle? That guy who said something about something?) have tacked this one. I’m just bringing it up.

And here’s my other question: remember all those computer and science nerds people made fun of in high school for their gaming ways? What if all that time, all those kids were learning how to think? What if some people have a gift for original inquiry, and those people are drawn to gaming, with its complex world of unintelligible rules?

I, for one, have never played an alternate reality or role playing game. But maybe I should start.

I don't like Jhumpa Lahiri. Actually, it's her writing I don't like. Everything else is (probably!) fine.

Now that I've gotten that monkey off my back.

I've read every one of her books. I've given nearly $100 to her publishers' children's college funds.

But that charity appeal no longer moves me, because the truth is I don't think she's very good. If the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Pulitzer Committee don't know good writing, what the hell do I know?

Good question. Here's what I do know: reading Interpreter of Maladies reminded me of seeing the "Mona Lisa." I nearly broke my neck staring up at the Sistine ceiling of Renaissance fame, and at no point was I disappointed. But some things are almost too famous for their own good. If I'd come to Interpreter tabula rasa, I might have felt I'd found a diamond in the rough. As it was, I felt I'd unearthed copper ore - during the Gold Rush.

The Namesake, plot of which boasted more whimsical turns than a country lane, ran long, but at least the destination was interesting.

But in her new collection, four "No Longer a Short Story, not Quite a Novel" types, what was once fresh has started to go stale. Her characters, much like married couples who have been friends for years, have started to resemble each other more than is entirely permissible.

Lahiri describes the same family over and over in (too) spacious prose. They're all Bengali, the mothers wear saris, the fathers seem a bit befuddled, the children speak English and marry WASP's, despite their parents' chagrin.

This may seem like a lot. But it actually gets quite predictable. I'm not saying Lahiri must speak for an entire diaspora, but she could do a better job capturing diversity even within the slice of Indian-Americana that she's cut for herself. And because the characters are flat, the stories themselves don't have much lift or heart.

With some writers, the whole story is much more than the sum of its words. Whereas with Lahiri's writing, the whole has somehow become less.

Mugabe in the Lurch

"The end of hyperinflation is always and everywhere a fiscal phenomenon."

This statement is true - or so I learned in econ class. So the government can end a hyperinflation, but what begins one?

I remembered this lesson when I read about the recent election woes in Zimbabwe, a nation previously infamous for its record-breaking inflations.

Many hyperinflations start when hard currency grows faster than real output - which means that a dollar today is much, much more than a dollar tomorrow. Needless to say, people start to expect that their money will be worthless in the future, which means it is (by a vicious feedback cycle) worth less today.

The fact that there is excess liquidity in the economy (think the opposite of the liquidity crunch recently experienced in the United States) means that money markets fall out of equilibrium, and an unstable market is nobody's friend.

But MORE simply put, hyperinflations start when a military leader (Mugabe?) prints cash to pay soldiers. He prints too much cash, prices start to go up, suddenly everything's awhirl. And yes, chaos breaks out of confinement that easily.

Now, of course, Mugabe's up a real creek. He's wrecked the economy (and let's not mince words: the recent troubles have as much to do with him as anyone) and his friends want to call in their debts. He's unpopular at home and abroad.

But short of matriculating at the George W. Bush Center for Men Who Can't Lead Good, what options does he have? And what option does Zimbabwe have? Regardless of whom they elect, they face a terrible and uphill battle. The climb down from an inflationary spiral is often more torturous than the ascent, and involves recessions so deep they feel endless. (See Argentina in 2001. Ending hyperinflation there resulted in a poverty rate over 50%.)

The problem with political upheaval is always one and the same. A constantly changing and ineffective civil service in turn leads to poor administration and enforcement. Production declines when regular citizens live in fear and the absence of opportunity, and eventually, the government in power attempts to pay its cronies through seignorage. Hence: hyperinflation.

This timeline does not absolutely apply: there must be exceptions. But the link can't be denied. A government facing a fiscal deficit can only finance itself through one of two options: seignorage or borrowing.

Governments that cannot borrow (poor credit, instability) resort to seignorage. Governments with an excellent credit rating (the United States) choose to borrow.

In fact we might have more in common with Zimbabwe than we realize. The United States, too, fights an uphill battle in Iraq, and our government faces mounting unpopularity at home and abroad. And we've mortgaged ourselves to the hilt. Meanwhile, Mugabe has leveraged himself past the point of no return in order to pay for his war.

I wonder how it'll all end up?

The Things We Do Not Know

I shouldn't be posting this.

Today I learned that a friend of a friend of mine was court martialled and released from the Army for the alleged torture of Iraqis.

I'm not close with this person, it would be safe to say that we met once, very briefly, and exchanged maybe five words the entire time. I can't say much more than that.

The legal documents are accessible online, but out of a (passing) respect for the privacy of the situation, I won't link to them. There were so many US soldiers found guilty in those trials that it doesn't give much away to admit to this acquaintance.

Let me be brief. It's shocking - and uncomfortable - to be in the presence of someone even dimly associated with this. The pictures of prisoner abuse horrified America, but what was worse was that we most likely didn't see the worst.

Looking through the trial documents of multiple soldiers online, however, what emerges is a more fragmented and difficult picture: a portrait of the moral no-man's-land of war. There are several facts that, by virtue of their historical persistence, we can accept for the truth.

1) Some of the US soldiers who were punished were innocent.
2) Some of the guilty soldiers went free.
3) Some of the torture incidents were exaggerated in later reports.
4) Some of the torture incidents were underexaggerated, brushed under the rug, or never reported at all.

But the question that remains, long after perusing the online archive, is this: was this part of the general hideousness of war, which permits abuse in a world where the consequences of someone's actions depend on national or ethnic origin rather than on absolute morality? Was it a systematic element of US operations in Iraq, an element implicitly encouraged by Pentagon higher-ups as a method of demoralizing a difficult enemy? Was it a demonstration of the ugliness of the race and class barriers that lurk within all people? Was it Heart of Darkness?

These are all things that, years later, we do not definitively know. They are things that some people would say do not matter. Except that war has an aftermath. Iraqi memories are going to be longer than ours, perhaps because their innocents suffered in this war even more than ours did (after all, the war took place on their soil. Saddam, for all the rumors, did not launch an official attack on the United States).

What this all boils down to is that years from now, some Americans will be scratching their heads, wondering "Why do they hate us?" A lot of the media like to mock these Americans. Who is "they" ask the mockers. Do those poor shmucks even know?

But we know who "they" are. Do we know who "we" are? Do we know, any of us, what exactly has or hasn't been done in our name? Is it easy to be moral when you don't have to fight for your life? Or is it harder?

A nation should be aware that its conduct in wartime is a part of its spirit. In a few short years, we squandered a (perhaps mistaken) reputation built on years of staunch advocacy of certain "universal rights." Wars, by their nature, erode those rights.

What I am saying, of course, is that the toll on all concerned is almost too vast to comprehend. The United States has paid for Iraq in the lives of US soldiers (those who died, those who lost their reputations, those who were rightly or wrongly accused, those who served and were injured), the lives of Iraqi civilians, the lives of Iraqi soldiers, its international reputation for human rights and the massive opportunity cost (education, scientific research, Social Security) of the billions and billions of dollars we've spent on it.

We've paid a lot. That kid I met once, briefly, has paid a lot. And by extension, so have most of us. What did any of us get out of it? That's another thing we might never exactly know.