Entries from April 2007 ↓

update: this post has been updated.

My son borrowed my camera the other day.

“What are you documenting?” he asked when he saw the pictures I’d taken.

Good question. I’m not quite sure, except to say that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction—in this case, the bold and fast-paced transformation of a (formerly sleepy seedy, then sleepy) neighborhood via striking (and sometimes strikingly incongruous) architectural statements (some of which are artful and most of which are gut-wrenchingly bad) have propelled me out into the streets of Lower Manhattan with my camera.

When the inevitability of change gets in your face every time you walk out your door, it seems like a natural reaction to want to document those changes freeze the present, at least temporarily. I didn’t set out to hold off the future but rather to preserve my memories of the present (because we always think we will remember how things were, but we never do).

There is nothing conservative about me. I come from a long line of rebels. I am not afraid of change—as long as the rush to change isn’t so great that we are tempted to throw out all of the old to make way for all of the new. The old and the new can not only coexist peacefully; they can live together in harmony.

So: I have taken to documenting the changes in my photographing my backyard. I thought I was documenting the change, but that makes it sound too much like I’m trying to hold off the future. Which I’m not. I have always been intensely curious about the future.

This intermittent photo diary is an accompaniment to the hints of change that I’ve been picking up in the culture but cannot possibly document because of the dizzying pace and odd trajectory of that change. Are we taking two steps backwards at the same time that we claim we’re making progress?

the Gwathmey building at Astor Place, viewed from Cooper Square

NoHo, corner of Bond and Lafayette, looking north

April 2007

I’ve been keeping a brutal pace and I’m beat. Like Roger L. Simon, I’m also feeling that after paying way too much attention to politics (not my natural milieu), I need to take a long, hot shower. And I would be lying by omission if I didn’t also note that the Egyptian Sandmonkey’s announced retirement from the blogosphere has me in a deep funk.

In “Done,” the Sandmonkey explains that he has been too cavalier about his personal safety:

One of the chief reasons is the fact that there has been too treet and asking questions about me since that day. I ignore that, the same way I ignored all the clicking noises that my phones started to exhibit all of a sudden, or the law suit filed by Judge Mourad on my friends, and instead grew bolder and more reckless at a time where everybody else started being more cautious. It took me a while to take note of the fear that has been gripping our little blogsphere and comprehend what it really means. The prospects for improvment, to put it slightly, look pretty grim. I was the model of caution, and believing in my invincipility by managing not to get arrested for the past 2 and a half years, I’ve grown reckless. Stupid Monkey. Stupid!

No—not stupid. He was reckless in his pursuit of liberty. Born freedom fighters are like that sometimes. In the police state of Egypt, where the Sandmonkey lives, that is indeed dangerous. I worry for him.

I hope to come back refreshed after a breather. Meanwhile, I leave you with a message from New York City.

and here it is in context

corner of Thompson and Bleecker, April 2007

Anguish over abducted BBC correspondent Alan Johnston grew this week.

Dozens of foreign and Palestinian journalists held simultaneous demonstrations on both sides of Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, calling for the release of a British Broadcasting Corp. correspondent who was kidnapped by Palestinian gunmen six weeks ago. …

“We have not forgotten his plight and we will not stop until he is freed,” said Simon McGregor-Wood, chairman of the Foreign Press Association, reading a statement for the group. “There has been precious little reliable information as to his well-being or whereabouts.”

Here is a smattering of the headlines currently on Google News:

Abbas says knows whereabouts of BBC Gaza reporter
Swissinfo, Switzerland - Apr 27, 2007

Demand freedom for Alan Johnston
Arab American News, MI - 9 hours ago

EU lawmakers urge more efforts to release BBC reporter in Gaza
EUbusiness (press release), UK - Apr 26, 2007

Cyprus calls for release of BBC reporter kidnapped in Gaza
People’s Daily Online, China - 3 hours ago

Multi-faith appeal for BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston
Journal Chrétien, France - Apr 27, 2007

EU parliament calls on the PA to secure the release of BBC reporter
International Middle East Media Center, Palestinian Territories - Apr 26, 2007

This festering, unresolved situation is deeply damaging to the Palestinians. No matter how sympathetic people may be to the cause, no Westerner is going to forget about a kidnapped BBC reporter missing in Gaza for six weeks. It cannot be glossed over.

The top story quotes Abbas as saying that “the British journalist Alan Johnston is with a group of rebels.”

Rebels? That’s a new one on me.

Is that like the “deviant group” of that, according to Saudi officials, the 172 miscreants rounded up in Saudia Arabia? The NYT fills us in:

Saudi security officials said Friday that they had broken up a vast terrorist ring, arresting 172 men who planned to blow up oil installations, attack public officials and military posts, and storm a prison to free terrorist suspects.

The wide-ranging plot was uncovered over seven months, officials said, as one lead yielded another, allowing authorities to seize a cache of weapons buried in the desert and more than $5.3 million in cash.

The government referred to the ring as a “deviant group,” the phrase often used to describe the ideology of Al Qaeda.***

The Saudis now acknowledge that there is a war (against al Qaeda) going on inside the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And that’s not all. Tomorrow’s Times is reporting that the influence of Prince Bandar, who was called home to the kingdom a year ago or more, is on the wane. He was the lubricant of the Saudi-Washington relationship for 20 years (and a particularly close friend of the Bush family).

As for what it all means … who knows? After 50 years of stability in the Middle East (which Brent Scowcroft lauded as a success, because “we had peace”), there is no doubt but that we now face chaos and unpredictability. The cautious platitudes spouted by the Democratic candidates at the debates the other night were hardly encouraging if you’re looking for guidance from one of the people who might soon be president (November 2008 only seems like it’s far off in the future).

To me it looks like a chain of unpredictable events was unleashed in the Middle East by the toppling of Saddam—beginning with the liberation that turned into an occupation, which attracted an infestation of parasites, who feed on the carcass of that catastrophic debacle (which was most recently described by Hitchens thus):

I was among those who thought and believed and argued that this example [of the no-fly zone that enabled Kurdistan to blossom into a success story] could, and should, be extended to the rest of [Iraq]; the cause became a consuming thing in my life. To describe the resulting shambles as a disappointment or a failure or even a defeat would be the weakest statement I could possibly make: it feels more like a sick, choking nightmare of betrayal from which there can be no awakening.

The world is upside down. Everyone is searching for a historical template, a frame, a prism through which to view and thus easily explain the tumult and chaos and suggest a way forward. No one has a clue.
——–

*** see this post about the possibility of an al Qaeda angle in the Johnston kidnapping story.

at Barnes & Noble today

Stumbling on Happiness

Once Upon a Country: a Palestinian Life

The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable

Suite Francaise

The view from Pier 40.

Bond Street, NoHo, April 2007

A while ago, I said I was going to start taking pictures of downtown Manhattan, which is undergoing a massive transformation under my nose. I took my camera with me today, but what I felt like photographing wasn’t new.

It seems to me that there are an awful lot of hopes pinned on plan A—and I do mean all over the place.

John McCain:

Senator John McCain said that the buildup of American forces in Iraq represented the only viable option to avoid failure in Iraq and that he had yet to identify an effective fallback if the current strategy failed.

”I have no Plan B,” Mr. McCain said in an interview. ”If I saw that doomsday scenario evolving, then I would try to come up with one. But I cannot give you a good alternative because if I had a good alternative, maybe we could consider it now.”

George W. Bush:

The president would not discuss what he would do if [Petraeus told him in September that the surge wasn't working].

“The Plan B is to make Plan A work,” [Bush told Charlie Rose].  “You know, the problem is you start talking about Plan B, that’s where everybody defaults.”

And here Martin Kramer, in a fascinating piece on the “Geopolitics of the Jews” asks some pointed questions about what Israel plans to do when (not if but when) the tide of history changes, as it inevitably must, because that is what history does:

Seventy years ago, the Jewish world was centered in Europe. Now we mostly just fly over it. The United States and Israel are today the poles of the Jewish world, because some Jews sensed tremors before the earthquake. When the earth opened up and Europe descended into the inferno, parts of the Jewish people already had a Plan B in place. We are living that Plan B.

Today the Jewish people is in an enviable geopolitical position. It has one foot planted in a Jewish sovereign state, and the other in the world’s most open and powerful society. …

Yet as we all should know, history stops for no man, and for no people. … What is, will not be. Balances of power will change. Identities will be recast. Eventually, too, the map of the Middle East will be redrawn.

When we worry, we tend to focus on apocalyptic scenarios. But I invite you to think for a moment about five long-term trends that could erode the status quo, but that fall short of a mushroom cloud. I will proceed from the far to the near, and I will focus on the Israeli side of the equation.

Read the whole thing. And bookmark and check out Kramer’s excellent and frequently updated site.

This reliance on plan A is a guy thing, I’m afraid. Women always have a Plan B. 

(with a tip of the hat to Frank Luntz)

So: Kevin Drum is very annoyed, because no Democrat has stood up to make an effective rebuttal to an effective statement and speech by Giuliani:

Yesterday Rudy Giuliani said the country would be safer if it elects a Republican in 2008 — especially if that Republican is him:

“If any Republican is elected president — and I think obviously I would be the best at this — we will remain on offense….I listen a little to the Democrats and if one of them gets elected, we are going on defense,” Giuliani continued. “We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation and we will be back to our pre-Sept. 11 attitude of defense.”

He added: “The Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us.”

So I was curious: how would the Dem candidates respond?… Unbelievable. Neither [Obama nor Clinton] took the chance to do what Rudy did: explain in a few short sentences why the country would be safer with a Democrat in the Oval Office.

Later, Drum updated to a response to Giuiliani posted at Electioncentral at TPMCafe, from the DNC’s Karen Finney:

How can the man who failed to prepare NYC for a second attack after the first one, quit the 9/11 commission because he was too busy raking in money from sketchy business deals, can’t assess if the surge is working or if Iran and North Korea have nuclear weapons claim that he will keep America safe?” 

To which a commenter promptly responded with the only thing you can possibly say [e.a.]:

Karen Finney needs desperately to seek assistance in Strunk & White or the Chicago manual of Style. That sentence is a hot mess.

It sure is! But that’s not all that’s wrong with the anti-Giuliani and pro-Dem forces. This (Drum’s advice) is what’s wrong with them [e.a.]:

While it’s true that the liberal position on making America secure is a little more complicated than the schoolyard version of foreign affairs beloved of Bush-era Republicans, it’s not that complicated. …

Whining just reinforces the message that Democrats are wimps. The real way to be “hard hitting” is to explain why Giuliani is wrong and what Democrats would do instead — and why the average Joe and Jane would be safer and better off without guys like Giuliani bumbling recklessly around the globe leaving a stronger al-Qaeda and a weaker America in their wake.

Um, no. You don’t “explain” why your opponent is “wrong,” especially not in great detail. If you’re explaining, you’re merely repeating his talking points and allowing your opponent to frame the debate—and in this case, it means you’re framing it in a way that ensure you can’t win.

If you have a case—and Drum claims the Dems do, but I have yet to hear it—what you do is start an entirely new line of attack that frames the debate in your favor.

Father Bernays said: the most effective way to fight PR (that is, good PR for your opponent) is with more PR (that is, better PR for you). The Dems don’t have to answer Rudy—they have to top him.

(Good luck to the Dems! Rudy knows all the words that work. He knows how many to say, what order to put them in, and when and how to end a sentence and a thought. He knows how to talk circles around his opponents, too.)

One shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, I know. Nevertheless…

David Halberstam was a nasty human being and a miserable piece of shit. Everyone is writing laudatory things about his journalism. Fine. Whatever. He was obnoxious and wretched to everyone he worked with behind the scenes in New York City—from editors at the New York Times Book Review to editors at his many different publishing houses (he moved around a lot, because no one wanted to work with him twice).

Also: he was a good reporter, but he was a terrible, terrible writer. Couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag.

Thanks for listening. Now I feel much better.