Category: Culture

Oh shucks. The deadline just passed for one of the greatest possible opportunities in the field of “Advertising”. Chugging along as though the Nov. 15th scheme for caucuses etc were still going somewhere, one department in the “Coalition” Provisional Authority in Iraq has been soliciting bids for an advertising campaign,

designed to (1) inform and educate the Iraqi people about the transition to sovereignty and the caucus/electoral process leading to a democratically elected Government in Iraq, (2) encourage Iraqi participation (call to action) in the caucus/electoral process, and (3) build support and credibility for new Transitional Assembly.

Continue reading ““Ve haf vays of making you enjoy caucuses””

Wise reader Vivion commented on the previous post that in her opinion the best definition of “caucus” comes from Alice in Wonderland.
After kicking myself that I had not thought of Lewis Carroll’s reference to a “Caucus-race” first, I followed the link Vivion gave to the full text of Carroll’s late-19th-century classic. I’ll provide just a little more text than she did. But thanks so much, Vivion, for reminding us about this great description…
The story starts after Alice has fallen down the rabbit-hole, met sundry strange creatures, and wept so much that there’s been a massive flood… Many of the creatures have become wet and bedraggled…
Chapter 3 continues:

`What I was going to say,’ said the Dodo in an offended tone, `was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.’
`What is a Caucus-race?’ said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that somebody ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.
`Why,’ said the Dodo, `the best way to explain it is to do it.’ (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)

Continue reading ““Caucus”, contd.”

From my Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, p.154:
caucus (U.S.) private meeting of the chiefs of a political party XVIII [that’s the century, folks]; in Eng. use applied from 1878 to organizations for managing political elections, etc. Plausibly referred to in Algonkin cau-cau-as-u, which appears in Capt. John Smith’s ‘Virginia’ (16..) as caw-cawaasough advisor, from a vb. meaning ‘talk to, advise, urge’; but there is an earlier reference to a place ‘West-Corcus in Boston’.
… Truly, North America’s “gift” to the world! (See the bottom of this post from yesterday.)
But democratic? There, I’m not so sure…

I’m actually trying to write a column for Al-Hayat today. (First of a two-part series on interesting UN experiences in managing transitions from foreign occupations to democracy in Namibia and East Timor.) But I totally couldn’t resist writing something here, however short, about the hilarious mistake in the WaPo today.
The story in question, “Iraqi women decry move to cut rights” leads on their World News page. Pamela Constable reports (belatedly) that this week, “outraged” Iraqi women have mounted street protests against the Governing Council’s recent move to shift all personal status issues to religious jurisdictions.
There’s a B-I-G photo with the piece. (Unfortunately it’s not in the web edition; so no link.)
Thing is, though, the demonstration photographed seems to have been one of pro-shari’a women, not anti-shari’a women. All the participants are wearing hijabs [Islamic headscarves]. The veiled teenager at left front carries a sign saying “The hijab is a human right”. Behind her, a young woman carried a sign advertising the Iraqi Islamic Party and saying that it, “supports the muslim women in france.” Presumably, that is, in their fight to be able to wear hijabs to school, etc.

Continue reading “WaPo shows the way (not)”

Just saw the movie of ‘Cold Mountain’. Wept many buckets. Therefore a good movie…
I say that in spite of scenes of gross, unnecessarily large-scale violence in the first 30 minutes that, what’s worse, were accompanied by truly terrible and “theatrical” music. Made me long for “Saving Private Ryan”, where the violence was stomach-churning but much more effective because it was NOT all grand-standish and orchestrated like some grisly version of a Cecil B. De Mille masterpiece.
In fact, since I’d been writing about real violence all day I couldn’t take it, and shielded my eyes from pollution by the cinematic version until Lorna could tell me it was okay to look again. After that, the movie went from strength to strength.
True, I did find it an interesting moral challenge to have the director draw us into the bucolic lifestyle and internal social goings-on of that strongly pro-Confederate community at the beginning. (Like setting a similar kind of movie inside Bavaria in the later days of Nazism, perhaps?)

Continue reading “‘Cold Mountain’: Teague as Ashcroft”

In this December 24 post I wrote a bit about how, when I saw how “Christmas” was being widely represented in beijing, it forced me to think more about my own relationship with the Christmas story and Christian belief in general.
I also wrote about the lovely, hand-embroidered set of Christmas figures the Director of the (Palestinian) East Jerusalem YWCA gave our family many years ago. (Hey, it was good post. I hope you read it!)
But I also promised to try to take some pics of the Christmas figures. Here is a picture of the whole creche scene. Mary, Joseph, and babe in the middle. At the left, 3 shepherds in front, 3 Wise Men behind. On the right, 4 Wise Women. Yay for the YWCA!!!
The original photo was by expert photographer and spouse extraordinaire, Bill. (Thanks!) I did a bit of color re-balancing (?) Then I thought it would be good to make the pics come as Popup Images rather than Embedded Images. Do readers have a preference?

Happy New Year everyone!!!
I was feeling a bit in turmoil about something yesterday. So, since my daughter Lorna gave me a great Lebanese cookbook for Christmas, I checked out the recipe for “Fatayer bi-sabanekh” (Spinach pastries) and set to work.
I’d never made ’em before. But the work was just what I needed! It takes a yeast-leavened dough. Thwack, thwack, thwack, as I knead it down onto the kitchen counter. Then you have to chop the spinach, parsley and onions fine. Shir, shir, shir, as I rock the mezzaluna from side to side across the chopping board…. Oh, then the fun of assembly began.
Fun, well, yes; but it’s also incredibly fiddly. The dough’s risen already. You thwack it down again, then roll it out to 1/8-inch thick. (That’s thin.) You cut out 4-inch rounds. Then you put a small pat of the spinach-with-lemon-etc mix into the middle of each round, and crimp the edges up into a sealed triangular little dumpling. (Actually, in addition to the taste–one which I’ve savored for 33 years now, ever since my first visit to Lebanon–I really love the elegant geometry of these pastries. Picture below– I hope.)

Continue reading “Cooking therapy–it works!”

Wow, it’s out, and it’s heading my way! The “it” in question being a book to which, a few months back, I contributed a short essay. It’s titled THE IRAQ WAR AND ITS CONSEQUENCES : Thoughts of Nobel Peace Laureates and Eminent Scholars.
Well, I’m not a Nobel Peace Laureate. So I guess that makes me a– (she tugs “thoughtfully” on a metaphorical beard)– an Eminent Scholar.
I really do feel quite awed at the opportunity to have been a part of this project. Four or five months ago, Dr. Irwin Abrams, who has edited three volumes of Nobel Peace Lectures in the past, contacted me to ask if I would like to send something in to this new volume. Abrams has been co-editing this new volume, along with Singaporean scholar Wang Gungwu. (I guess he knew about the book I published in 2000, that was was an authored account of a great conference here in Virginia in which the Dalai Lama and seven other NPLs took part.)
I said yes.
Abrams told me he was trying to get as many of the NPLs to contribute as possible. So here are just some of the ones they got: Tenzin Gyatso (The Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet), David Trimble (MP, Leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, UK), Jody Williams (International Ambassador of International Campaign to Ban Landmines, USA), Sir Joseph Rotblat (Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, UK), Jose Ramos-Horta (Foreign Minister of East Timor, 1996), Frederik Willem de Klerk (Former President of South Africa, 1993), Mairead Corrigan Maguire (Co-founder, Community of Peace People, Northern Ireland, UK)…
Among the “Eminent Scholars” are: Chomsky, economist Joseph Stiglitz, political scientist Richard Falk, historian John Dower, Frank von Hippel (Professor of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University), Lord Colin Renfrew of Kaimsthorn (Director of McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge University), Benjamin R Foster (Professor of Assyriology and Curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection, Yale University), etc., etc.
My own contribution is a short essay titled “Dealing with rights-abusing regimes without going to war.” People who were attentive readers of JWN back in June and July (for example, of this post, or this one) will find many of the ideas in that essay quite familiar. I do, after all, tend to use the blog to brainstorm ideas with myself over time…
If you go to the link I gave above for the book, you can read the whole, intriguing Table of Contents through a link there. Plus, as a great teaser, they’ve posted the whole of the Dalai Lama’s five-page essay, “War is Anachronistic, An Outmoded Approach”, right there too.
The book costs $26 in paperback. Ordering info from the publisher is right there at the bottom of the book’s main web-page. They say they’ll donate $1 of that revenue to humanitarian efforts in Iraq. So everyone wins!
Incidentally, for my Quaker readers, you’ll be interested to know that current-day representatives of the British and US Quaker service organizations, which jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947, both have contributions in the book, too.
As a contributor, I get a princely one copy of the book sent to my home… I guess I’ll have to order myself up some additional copies!

I’ve been at a conference in Atlanta for the past couple of days. It’s organized by the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and the general theme is global religious issues.
I admit that one of the main reasons I came was because I was supposed to be on a panel with the Israeli writer Avishai Margalit and the Iranian scholar Abdel-Karim Suroush– both of them people I was interested in meeting. So neither of them was actually here. I was a bit taken aback to discover that. But as it happens I’ve met lots of really interesting people and participated in lots of really interesting discussions.
Highlights have included listening in on a discussion among African scholars of indigenous African religions and Chinese scholars of indigenouse Chinese (folk-)religions, and gaining an idea of both the hardiness and the richness of some of those traditions; participating in a workshop on religion and violence today, where some really deep and significant differences emerged; lots of conversations; a talk by UN Population Fund head Thuraya Obeid, yesterday; and a performance of jazz and gospel music by the Atlanta Community Jazz Choir this evening.
Sorry this is such a lame little report here. I’m a tired, tired person. This morning I actually gave a 30-minute plenary presentation on “Religion and Violence”, in which I wanted to present some of my Africa work to this group. Some very, very supportive reactions; some not so much so. That’s okay.
My bottom-line theseis was something along the lines of, that at and after times of intense trauma social breakdown, people often turn to religion and religions have a lot of influence over people’s lives, thinking, and behavior; at this point, religions can do one of two things: they can either work to heal people’s hurt and enrol these people in broader projects of social healing, or they can harden people’s sadness into anger and steer them toward vengefulness and punitiveness, which often come cloaked in the garb of “justice”…
Oh well, I know I haven’t expressed it well here. I talked a bit in the afternoon workshop today about the truly amazing way the Mozambican people managed to trasncend all the hurt from their lengthy and atrocious civil war by using approaches based on blanket amnesty and wide use of social healing. And this German scholar afterwards kept insisting to me, “But there has to be justice! What about justice??” What could I say? “Hey, don’t attack me I’m just reporting what they did and telling you that from every perspective I know of it surely seems to have worked. If the Mozambicans say they are satisfied with the results, what standing do you (or I) have to tell them, No it didn’t?”
L’esprit de l’escalier, here. That’s why I have the blog… Tomorrow, we go to the Martin Luther King, Jr., Museum.

How about if Americans started taking seriously all the calls in our national discourse for global democratization?
How about if our government started acting as though it represented only (a minority of) the 4 percent of the world’s population that has US citizenship?
How about if we started to figure out ways to give a real voice to the other 96?