La Grenouille dans le Fauteuil

My thoughts, explorations and opinions about Music, Philosophy, Science, Family life; whatever happens. Shorter items than on my web site. The name of the blog? My two favorite French words. I just love those modulating vowels.

My Web Home Page

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Libby; a poison pill for the press.

Am I missing something?

A lot of commentators today, after the Libby indictment, are saying that Fitzgerald has shown that there was no attempt to deliberately “out” Valerie Plame, since he has brought no indictment on that charge at all. This is, apparently, some sort of exoneration of Rove, Bush, and co. Even on the Tim Russett show, there was a clip from Fitzgerald saying that he “is making no allegation” about outing Valerie Plame, having already explained that, if he is not bringing an indictment, he makes no comment. This was interpreted by all at the table as Fitzgerald declaring that no such deliberate ‘outing’ had occurred.

Huh?

Determining whether or not a deliberate ‘outing’ occurred was indeed the original purpose of the investigation, - the judicial process, the carrying out of justice. At the end of this stage of the investigation, Libby has been indicted on 5 counts, two of them specifically “obstruction of justice”, all of them concerned with obstructing justice, and clearly committed with the intention of hiding the truth. So, if any of these charges hold, then justice actually was obstructed. Libby is not just accused of naughtiness, but of truly, significantly, impeding the investigation. He is being indicted because his actions had consequences - the obscuring of truth.

Fitzgerald did not bring indictments about an outing, but explained most eloquently that his investigations had been obstructed. So two possible situations exist:

There was no deliberate outing, but Fitzgerald could not determine that.
There was a deliberate outing, but Fitzgerald could not determine that.

Is not the whole point of regarding obstruction of justice as serious, the reason for prosecuting it, the fact that, because of Libby, Fitzgerald was unable to find out if a deliberate outing crime was committed? That is the nasty thing about cover-ups. They cover things up. So to say this exonerates those not accused is to take the side of the up-coverers. All we can truly say is “we don’t know. The truth was covered up!”

All that Fitzgerald implied about whether or not a deliberate outing occurred is that he doesn’t know - - yet.
-----------------------------

It was a cool move by Libby though, in a brilliantly Machiavellian way. You have to hand it to him. The press are now all confused and troubled that the indictment of Libby is bad for them, since it compromises the freedom of the press, through attacking the promises of confidentiality they make to sources. Some of them even seem puzzled that Libby would use the press, since he hates them so much.

But it was brilliant, under the circumstances. Libby interwove his alibi with the press’s “confidentiality of sources” doctrine. He inserted it like a virus. “The press told me!" So he knew the press would be extremely unwilling to blow his cover. And they were. Judy Miller even went to jail to protect Libby’s right to tell lies injurious to the security of the country without being exposed. As Fitzgerald said, it was the conversation with the press that was the crime itself.

The press do need to be able to protect the identity of honest whistle-blowers, but does that inescapably commit them to protecting the identity of malicious liars? If the press, as they are having to do, turn on Libby and reveal their conversations, a huge hole is blown in their future promises of confidentiality.

Therein lies Libby’s brilliance. It was very likely that the press, for their own reasons, would fight hard to preserve Libby’s alibi. They did. But if that didn’t work, at least he could take the press down with him.

My Web Home Page
My "pondering music" blog
My Agent
©ajm 2005

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

The Story of New Orleans

Part Two

What Katrina over New Orleans unmasked was the heritage of slavery. “Racism” is too general a term, and too much pre-occupied with the common humiliations of current times. Whether or not the abandonment of so many at the Superdome and Convention Center was a matter of racist actions, conscious or unconscious, is largely in the eye of the beholder, and passionate opinions run deep on this issue. Prejudice, by definition, is an unconscious disposition, so people acting from prejudice are always unaware of the fact, angrily denying the accusation. That is why it is hard to root out. Doing so contradicts people’s “objective” knowledge of the way the world works.

But there is history acting here, too. New Orleans was one of the great trading and importation centers for slavery. Many slaves entered the country here. Physically, New Orleans has always been compressed into a small area because of the water all around it; the delta to the south and east, Lake Pontchartrain to the north, the bayou to the west. The fact that the French Quarter was so little damaged by Katrina is testimony to the wisdom of the original French and Cajuns, building their city in exactly the right place. In effect, New Orleans was an island. Not an island surrounded by open water like Manhattan or Venice, but an island in that it was surrounded by uninhabitable wetlands. It still is, though the fact is masked by modern technology and drainage, hence the difficulty of escaping as the hurricane approached, and the vulnerability of almost all areas except the French Quarter and the Garden District once the hurricane arrived. New Orleans has always had that “turned in upon itself”, slightly incestuous quality that is so common in island communities - the buzz of Manhattan and of West Berlin in the days when it was surrounded by East Germany, the intensity of Venice and Amsterdam, the San Francisco Peninsula, the islands of Singapore and Hong Kong. All these places have intense cultural lives; there is no escaping them, all the energy that might be dispersed into the hinterlands of a place like Los Angeles, London, Paris or Chicago, feeds upon itself and generates something unique and prized, such as the jazz that came from New Orleans.

And a central part of that culture, as New Orleans grew, was slavery. Slavery that was less dispersed than in the plantations of the wide lands of the south. Slavery in a dense urban setting. And it was especially complicated in New Orleans by the fact that there was an unusually large community of free blacks there: confusingly, many of them slave owners themselves. New Orleans was specifically excluded from the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Yet, of course, these free blacks were in no way acceptable to the white population. Perhaps this is a major source of the legendary blatant corruption of Louisiana politics. If the law said you had to treat these blacks as equals, then just ignore the law. No need even to hide it. The whites were, right up to Katrina, in the minority. They had to hold their power somehow.

When slavery ended, the slaves were “freed”, but there was nowhere for them to go, and no obvious jobs they could catch to put food on their tables. Most of them stayed where they were, and became partly the poor underclass, partly servants of the white people, and even the black people, who had, perhaps, owned them. So ex-slaves and ex-owners remained closely bound. Not just in terms of employment and local customs, but in actual physical proximity. This was still clearly visible in most of New Orleans, throughout the French Quarter, the Garden District, Uptown, Faubourg-Marigny. In the Garden District there would be one block of grand white-folk houses, and then, before the next such group, there would be an area of poorer black houses. Unlike the towns of the north, Detroit or Cleveland, where blacks had migrated in large numbers to seek relief from destitution, in New Orleans they always remained intermingled, like a patchwork quilt. There were no clear divides between the white areas and the black areas. This is why tourists look curiously at the grandiosity of the Garden District, and notice with surprise how poor and dilapidated many of the homes are, cheek by jowl with the iron-fenced, magnificently gardened houses we know from “Suddenly Last Summer” or “The Witching Hour.” Many modest homes have their slave quarters still, and even uptown, where the opulence is less, black and white populations alternate, almost like a chess board.

We mistook this for integration. Getting to know the local black people, having a black nanny for our children, and having not lived through the oppressive history, we got used to the way things were and assumed everyone was pretty happy with the arrangement, enjoying the cultural mix. When you get used to things, you don’t really notice them anymore. And many impoverishments do alleviate themselves through time. Besides, the unofficial philosophy of the town seemed to help: when in doubt, get drunk. But the historical roots continue, and have their consequences, even when we pay little attention to them.

Consider what the blacks lost in being enslaved. They lost everything. They were robbed of their very souls. Nowadays we are aware of people of different and varied cultures, who do not necessarily feel comfortable in the pervasive Protestant European expectations that form so strong a part of the texture of this country. Many groups have suffered deprivations, and ever since the civil rights movement there has been increasing awareness of the need to admit the individuality of these people, acknowledging their cultural background as exactly that - the background against which they find their personal identity. This is not stereotyping, not limiting any personal aspiration; - it enables people to recognize and perhaps understand where they came from - not where they are destined to go. It is simply wrong to assume that racial or cultural identity predicts the destiny of an individual - that way prejudice and racism lie. But it is important to a person’s settled image of themselves to know where they came from, and what historical achievements and traditions are linked to them. Christians speak of the body of the church, meaning the community of people reaching back over 2,000 years, all united in membership of the same organism. We are beginning to learn the history of different divisions of Islam, and the powerful sense of identity that rises from that.

Although the Jews suffered uniquely in the holocaust, those persecuted and killed were singled out because they were Jews, and so it did not stop the survivors from being Jews. The Jews who survived were strengthened by their long tradition and intense identity. It has been the main force in enabling them to restore themselves so effectively and clearly. There is reason for the fear of assimilation, lest it weaken that clear identity.

It is fascinating to explore the history and achievements of the Chinese, the Japanese, the Latinos, and serious attempts are made to learn about the native Americans, a people desperately damaged by the fragmentation of their culture, and subjugation to other systems that migrated into their land.

But the blacks, what is the culture and history that they have and can cling to in seeking where they came from? That is still mainly supressed and dispossessed. In order to make slaves, blacks were not just uprooted from their homes, they were forbidden to practice either their own religion and customs, or even those of their owners. They were not despised because of who they were, they were deprived of who they were. Nobody even cared who they were. Their identities were amputated. And this is not even comprehensible as a black/white thing, since many of the slave dealers in Africa were themselves black. The slaves simply were not, in the eyes of their owners, human. Memories and customs of their original homes were ruthlessly suppressed.

To maintain this, and protect against rejuvenation, it was necessary to deride and despise whatever spiritual life and community they may have come from. We laymen know quite a bit nowadays about Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Shamanism, as well as the various sects of Christianity, movements of the enlightenment and so forth. But what do we know of the spiritual life of black Africa? What name do we have for it except “voodoo?” Just typing the word, I feel the instantaneous sense that this is just not going to be taken seriously. But why not? I do not mean the voodoo of James Bond movies or witch-doctor parodies, but whatever the richness of spirituality may be that lies behind the name. It is not so long ago that Jewish customs were regarded as absurd and evil, and many have a hard time facing Islam. The current cliché about the “Judeo-Christian ethic” is just a little mantra cooked up to disguise how recently the Christians were utterly intolerant of the Jews. It’s a bit of guilt avoidance. Sub-Saharan traditions include, in some places, tales of Moses that were not transmitted as part of the Christian tradition, in places that are not Jewish. There may be independant membership of the Abrahamian descent hidden there.

I know little about African spirituality, but I do not suppose for a moment that the black people enslaved and shipped from Africa were less spiritually perceptive, less spiritually skilled, less possessed of genius than we are. Do you? Why then the cloud of ignorance?

To make slaves, suppression of identity and background had to be carried out to a wholly different degree than would have been necessary in the case of people you merely decided to exterminate. And the job was well done. What are we familiar with that deserves to be taken seriously in the spiritual lives of freed slaves and their descendants? At first, Negro Spirituals; an adaptation of the forbidden Christianity of their masters, the only spirituality visible to them. Then on to the Black Baptist churches, and more recently, the espousing of Islam. Borrowed religions all. So even now, the ancient background from which blacks rise up and achieve their individuality is one largely cut off from their knowledge. The problem of identity often persists. The deprivation of slavery is unique. It doesn’t mean that clinging to that wound helps any individual now, but it certainly does alter the starting point, both for themselves, and for those of us secure in a tradition of a thousand years or more, trying to be enlightened.

And when the hurricane came, the lid was blown off this secret disregard. The easy relationship between blacks and whites in New Orleans was shown to be far more delusional than we knew. The joys of New Orleans, the jazz, the food, Mardi Gras, had arisen in a place where blacks had wonderfully developed their own individual skills, set aside from the standard white traditions, but nonetheless essentially doing their thing for white audiences. Jazz did not arise just as a "blacks amongst blacks" thing, but in the cosmopolitan pressure cooker of all the different peoples passing through the port of New Orleans, or stuck in New Orleans putting a brave face on things.

When the blues singer sings the blues, it is real misery he is singing of.

It is, was, a wonderful town; the glories of the music and the food are real, and it is important to eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die. But in the aftermath of Katrina, we saw how unresolved are the evil forces that created that energy, that gift, that is New Orleans.

My Web Home Page
My "pondering music" blog
My Agent
©ajm 2005

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Remember, remember, the fifth of January?

In an email from philosophersmag.com


Hi there

It's Thursday morning here in the UK, and I've been thinking about
mnemonics. Specifically, I've been trying to figure out how many days there
are in each month using that '30 Days Hath September' thing. And I've got to
say it is quite the worst memory aid ever invented. Okay, so it's pretty
clear that September hath 30 days, but then what? It could be anything.
July, maybe? Or December (that would rhyme, right?). But oh no, it turns out
to be April. Right. Well how the hell does knowing that September hath 30
days lead to April? It's absurd, and it should be banned...


Nonsense! O Silly Person! (meant amiably)


The point of a little rhyme, that scans rhythmically and uses rhyme, is that it becomes memorable precisely through the facts of meter and rhyme. The content has no part in this. It doesn't appeal to logical calculation, but to musical memory.


If there were a logical way to reconstruct it, there would be no need for the rhyme.


No, it cannot be July, because July has a stressed second syllable, whereas April has a stressed first syllable, which is what is needed. The only possible mistake here would be August, the only other two-syllable month with a stress on the first syllable. There is (counter to my own argument) an easy way to figure that it cannot be August; simply remember that there are no two adjacent 30-day months. Invoking that, it has to be April, and then, since the scansion requires a one-syllable month next, it has to be June, since the only other options are March and May, which are both adjacent to April. As to September and November, any of the last four months would do. But if you can remember the first line, then the only error you could make would be December instead of November.


Ban it? Pshaw!


Philosophical analysis and re-synthesis is hardly the only mode of thought worth using, and certainly not the only one to yield useful results.


Some things we just have to learn - such as, for instance, the arrangement of streets in our home town, such as Islington or Milwaukee. Repetition is the way - repetition and familiarity. How else could we learn the alphabet? Or learn to read at all? How else to learn German vocabulary, or your part in Hamlet, or Beethoven's Eroica?


It isn't a mnemonic at all.


So a neatly tripping rhyme is an excellent technique for tying together reliable, but a-logical information.


It renders itself open to parody, of course, as in my favorite ditty to calculate Easter.


"No need for confusion
If we but recall,

That Easter
On the Sunday immediately following the first full moon after the vernal equinox
Doth fall."



My Web Home Page
My "pondering music" blog
My Agent
©ajm 2005