Outis

“I feel a lot of pressure from this thing that has no shape or form,'’ she said. The New York Times, April 23, 2003

In American folklore, ghosts are said to haunt houses, forests, cemeteries and, on occasion, entire cities. Yet there are few stories of ghosts who, whether friend or foe, inhabit the very flesh of the living.

By contrast, in the tradition of Roman Catholicism, as in other Christian sects, there are, officially, no ghosts whatsoever. In their place operate an invisible army of demons whose only purpose, I gather, is to probe the souls of mortals for the smallest crevice in which to creep.

As a child, I could make no such distinctions. Nor did I care to because I already knew what to fear: darkness.

Like the ocean or a blinding fog, darkness confounds our sense of space to becomes, in itself, a place: the dark. Walking into a darkened room it is the darkness we enter first and, then, gradually, the room. As adults, we sidestep this abyss by gripping the lifeline of our memory. Thrust into the unknowable darkness, our experience serves as our guide.

But as children, our experiences are naturally limited. What we don’t know can very much hurt us precisely because the circumference of what we know is no wider than our arm’s reach.

Upon arriving to the United States, I was placed in an english-only classroom at the Incarnation Catholic school. At the time, I could speak no more than a half-dozen words in English whereas my classmates were predominantly native english-speakers. Shortly after I arrived, a boy named Ty picked a fight with me.

“Ty.” I thought. As in “ty your shoelaces?”

We never did fight. But my parents took this and other incidents to mean that I would need more than english skills to survive my entry into adulthood in this country. Within a few weeks, I was enrolled in self-defense classes at a nearby Tae Kwon Do school.

I went on to study Tae Kwon Do for another seven years, much in the same way that other children studied the rules of baseball, ballet or the major and minor scales of a piano. Yet these are hardly interchangeable skills and experiences.

Whereas other parents might desire that their children master the basic grammar of classical music or perform with pleasure under the managerial rules of baseball, my parents — and my father, in particular — wanted that I be able to defend myself, physically.

Eventually I became a teen-ager and, honoring the time-honored tradition of selectively refuting my parent’s authority, I stopped going to Tae Kwon Do classes. To this day I sometimes dream, ecstatically, that I am reunited with my second instructor, Myung Kyung Park, a beautiful man whose heavily-accented voice was as bittersweet as that of my own immigrant parents.

Nevertheless, in the five years I was his student Mr. Park did manage to teach me a great deal about self-defense, lessons have manifested themselves in my desire to lead a peaceful life. Perhaps this caution is due to the central paradox of most martial arts: the assumption that you may use only your own body, the very thing you wish to protect, in order to fend off an attack.

For me, a cautious approach to dealing with physical danger has meant rejecting the claim that actions speak louder than words.

As linguistic creatures, our ability to reason is the product of a shared language. Because language is a set of common meanings, we are fundamentally political beings. As “political animals” we leave the realm of brute force, of prey and predator, when we enter into mutual promises — compromises, sensu stricto. Action without language is meaningless. The use of force without meaning is violence. Lying, however expedient, is a suicidal gesture. When an action is described as “unilateral” but said to have a legitimate “political” objective — first “disarmament” and, then, “democracy” — language recedes into darkness and nonsense. From this perspective, the disingenuous claim that the U.S. is enacting a policy of “unilateral disarmament” by invading Iraq poses a serious threat to our political and financial stability. First, a truly “unilateral” action in a multilateral world order is inherently a non-political, if not anti-political gesture. Second, true disarmament can only take place in the clearest light of day. I will not put down my weapon unless I can see you put down your weapon — and you will not put down your weapon unless you can see me do the same. True disarmament is inherently bilateral if not universal.

Likewise, democracy is only possible in a transparent society. I am not convinced that the current administation appreciates the fundamental importance of transparency, i.e., truthfulness and accountability. Why, then, would I assume that it wishes to create a transparent society in Iraq?

Rather than the weak justifications offered above, I believe the televised subjugation of Iraq, er “the liberation of Iraq,” was meant to communicate that the U.S. is entirely self-sufficient. Not only will we refuse compromise and, thus, participation in votes and treaties that would circumscribe the interests of the current administration (even if this intransigence comes at the expense of the American people), but, we also have the military power to be able to circumvent such treaties by using force to achieve our goals. The government of the U.S., it would appear, has become possessed by the very same mendacity and hypocrisy that attacked the Twin Towers. New York, a city that is said to never sleep, a city of lights, its entrance guarded not by ravenous lions as was the case in Babylon but by a woman holding aloft a torch, should hasten to rebuild those towers draped in light. Where some saw icons of capitalism and its inadequacies in places where local governments are unable — or unwilling — to obtain the best possible deals and conditions for their resources and citizens, I now see monuments to the vast wealth and stability that can only be created under conditions of transparency and the rule of law.

[6/12/2003]

Let us not forget that the Twin Towers were not one man’s palace, not one family’s dynastic chair. They were fluid structures built out of liquidity, not monopoly. At least, so we could assert until the revelations of insider trading, stock price manipulation and wholesale accounting fraud reminded us that the so-called “free” market must, also and especially, be forever guarded against mendacity and hypocrisy. “The typical American corporation is a shareholders’ republic in the same way that China is a people’s republic.” James Surowiecki, The New Yorker, 6/9/2003

Related links

The current debacle over SARS in China has little to do with public health and a great deal to say about the perils of an “opaque” society. After decades of lying to their citizens about everything from the weather to wars, the Chinese government has been caught — by its own citizens — with its pants on fire.

Let’s talk about ghosts, shall we? www.turnofthescrew.com.

Postscript

On Iraq and the lessons learned.

It was hard not to notice the meteoric rise of American interest in Al Jazeera. Nor will I ever forget a surreal exchange between ABC’s Peter Jennings and an Iraqi professor of political science living in Baghdad in the days after the U.S. military began bombing that city. Jennings was amazed to have this voice on the other end of the line and kept saying as much while the caller, angry and sad, rebuked the necessity of an air assault.

I kept asking myself: Why the fuck didn’t they interview this guy two weeks ago?

Which led to…

What if wars were fought with overwhelming applications of transparency: with cameras and courts? Instead of one reporter embedded with a squadron of soldiers we might dispatch a squadron of reporters embedded with one well-armed soldier. Instead of cluster bombs and thousands of innocent civilians murdered as a result of bilateral criminal negligence, we might have thousands of videophones, interviews and continuous coverage of thousands of civilians, peacefully engaged by their newfound voice.

How does one deal with dangerous liars? By telling the truth. How does one disarm a violent murderer? With as much force as is necessary to facilitate a trial.

If it means the creation of an international tribunal, what of it? The U.S. has the best lawyers in the world and even they are a great deal cheaper than so-called smart bombs. Bring on the rule of law. The only alternative is the law of the jungle.

footnote
In an earlier draft of this entry, I began by addressing the ghost of torture as it impacted my own life. The person tortured was my father and he had this unpleasantness visited upon him as a result of his opposition to Castro’s government in Cuba. It is interesting to note that while Rumsfeld was serving his nation as a Representative to the U.S. Congress my father was serving a ten year sentence as a political prisoner. Earlier this year, Mr. Rumsfeld clearly favored the current war whereas my father quietly — ambivalently — opposed it.

“Just concentrate on the statue,” one Syrian man said, grinning. “We have a lot of statues here.” The New York Times, April 10, 2003

On the morning of Wednesday, April 9, 2003, I cried for a liberation that did not take place.

It was around 11 in the morning when I passed by a large television set tuned to the spanish-language Univision network. Like the other networks, Univision was feeding live images from Baghdad where a crowd of Iraqi men and then United States Marines where toppling a large statue of Iraq’s former dictator, Saddam Hussein.

The sound on the television had been turned off but a radio in the same room was broadcasting NPR’s ever cautious coverage of the war against Iraq. I stood and watched for a minute until the images on the screen blurred through the tears in my eyes.

I sat down about a foot away from the TV, indulging in the bittersweet feelings that had suddenly overcome me. In retrospect it was likely the juxtaposition of the Univision logo and their brightly dressed anchors in Miami side-by-side with the footage of the unruly crowd of men attempting to topple the statue that made me drop my guard and cry — though, sadly, not as freely as I did as a boy.

Eventually I fumbled for the volume buttons on the television set. Univision’s anchors were giving their flashy, impressionistic commentary on the proceedings. I switched the channel, first to Telemundo, then CNN and then back again to Univision. I was regaining my composure.

The facts, as it were, had started to pile up like sandbags around my heart. Just then the television flashed a group of young Iraqi men smiling and waving a large photo of Sylvester Stallone as Rocky, bare-chested and glistening, the American flag all around him. Again I started to cry.

My tears rose from deep, dark, quiet wells. From the absurdity of hope and from the hope that falls off all that is absurd like the skin of a living animal.

My parents and I fled Cuba on a jet airplane over 20 years ago. For a variety of reasons, I have never visited my homeland in all those years. Nonetheless, some early mornings, I dream that I am in Cuba. I dream of places real and remembered along with fantasies no less powerful than that of a utopian proletarian state.

After one such dream a few years ago, I woke up to find that I had been crying. I had been weeping freely in my sleep for a Cuba comprised of epic and unfinished statues, of abandoned modernist sculptures in superhuman proportions. There were no people in this dream, just concrete monuments. . . . . . 

A decade earlier, on a cold, dark morning in New York City, I watched my mother and father cry as they watched television footage of the Berlin Wall being chipped into little pieces by men and women of their own generation. Back then, I was old enough to understand their tears but too young to shed my own. Remembering that scene today, I feel the electric charge of weeping anew.

While earlier generations might proudly recite sonnets, mine is more likely to remember — and quietly reflect upon — scenes from a movie. The preponderance of both television, movie theaters and, now, the internet have spawned and nourished a visual culture that is perhaps more akin to pre-Renaissance Europe than recent analogies to Gutenberg and his famous moveable-type press would suggest.

On September 11, 2001, I awoke at around 5am Eastern Standard Time. As is my habit on nights where my need to sleep cedes to my chronic anxieties, I settled down in front of the light of my iMac and surfed the Web. That early morning, I searched for an image that had haunted me since my adolescent years: the banned album cover for the Cro-Mags’ debut record “Age of Quarrel.”

Theirs is an allegorical image, not unlike Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych Garden of Earthly Delights, featuring a nuclear mushroom cloud in the background and private scenes of public chaos all around. Dogs eating human flesh, etc. In my pre-dawn Google search, I was unable to find the controversial album cover — which, incidentally, was eventually “sanitized” to feature, simply, a blood-red mushroom cloud.

Instead, I happened upon a similar image, also an album cover, from the debut record “Contradictions Collapse” by Meshuggah, a band also similar in sound to the Cro-Mags. Later that morning, I woke up to a telephone message from my mother who still lives in shadow of Manhattan, asking me and my wife to not leave our house. There was a state of emergency, she said, the Twin Towers had been attacked.

Creepy as this chain of events might sound, there is — isn’t there always — a “perfectly logical explanation” to the coincidence. It is only natural that someone with my background would be drawn to such an image, even if it happened on the same morning that its shocking contents would migrate across the porous border between fact and fantasy.

Statues, whether concrete or bronze, are always incarnations of fantasy. This principle is true whether the statue is figurative and personal like that of Saddam Hussein or figurative and abstract like the Washington Monument or the obelisk in Havana’s Revolutionary Square — or even when it is as functional as the Berlin Wall or the Twin Towers once were.

Here is my own personal fantasy, which, out of politeness, I seldom state in public: Cuba will some day be a free country, where the rule of law is greater than any one man’s desires or fears and a multi-party political system preserves the productive tension between conservative and progressive forces. On that day, the nation of Cuba will carefully guard its autonomy while participating in the give-and-take of our planet’s geopolitical forces; not unlike a strong palm tree confronting the blustery winds of its petulant and, for the moment, all-powerful neighbor 90 mile Northeast of Havana.

However, on the morning of that day, there will be no statues to topple.

During his 44 year reign, Castro, unlike Hussein or Hussein’s alleged inspiration Josef Stalin, has carefully avoided using statues in his own image to give shape to his fantasies as a historical being. Instead, he has powerfully merged his personal autocracy with the impersonal idea of a democratic Cuban Revolution.

It should be noted that Castro’s strategy is not unlike that of our current U.S. president, George W. Bush, whose handlers have cannily draped him in the U.S. flag at just the very moment that his public role is not that of an elected representative, accountable to the electorate, but rather, as the Commander in Chief of our (loyal) armed forces.

In some cases, freedom is expressed in orchestrated and public spectacles like the tearing down of the Berlin Wall or, possibly, the toppling of one of Hussein’s statue in a Baghdad plaza. In others, freedom is expressed with new monuments — such as the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial or the Statue of Liberty.

Cuba is a nation in dire need of a statue of Fidel Castro.

For if and when Castro’s day of reckoning arrives, it is my hope — my fantasy — that his image be cast in titanium, the strongest metal known to man, and placed somewhere within sight of the Cuban national legislature.

I would like for this life-sized statue to be as realistic as possible, rendered in a somewhat natural, if subdued palette. And the exterior should be coated in something like Teflon.

I want his spitting-image to live on for time memorial.

related links
Journalism.org coverage of television coverage of the war against Iraq.

2:46pm.
further thoughts…

The Looting, “Three Kings: Part 2″

I wanted to include in this reflection some mention of the likely organized looting of Iraq’s National Museum and its broken statues. So here it is.

First, I understand why this ransacking has inspired both pithy moralizing from the Left and all-too-telling disavowals from the Right. I am largely in agreement with the protests over the Bush administration’s laziness in failing to safeguard this international “treasure.”

However, it should be noted that earlier complaints about inadequate troop numbers, lodged during the first phase of the war against the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, might very well explain why there has been so much looting in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq.

That said, I find solace in several stories. Some news reports have claimed that many important pieces where removed from the museum in anticipation of the ground war. Others have suggested that some artifacts will eventually resurface as have items stolen during previous wars. But the argument that has most captured my attention is one that reminds of the uproar that followed the Taliban’s decision to destroy a giant statue of Buddha in March of 2001.

It was said then, as could be said now, that an emphasis on a statue was overshadowing a grave humanitarian crisis. That and the words of Ozymandius help me sleep at night.

Stalin and statues
The iconicity of Josef Stalin, Hussein’s alleged hero, is brilliantly portrayed and skewered in one of my favorite movies, “WR: The Mysteries of the Organism” by Dusan Makavejev.

“The failure of the United States to capture Saddam Hussein or obtain proof of his death is hurting efforts to rebuild Iraq, the top civilian administrator in Baghdad said Thursday.” — George Edmonson, “Saddam uncertainty hurts U.S. efforts in Iraq,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 12, 2003

Iconoclasm

Some people hate statues.

Iconoclasm, the fear and hatred of images, is attractive the world over because of the inherent duality of images; their ability to simultaneously address both fact and fantasy.

But there is also an emotional experience associated with iconoclasm: a desire for secrecy along with public rituals of “shame.” We know of General John Aschcroft’s distaste for a female “Spirit of Justice” and a male “Majesty of Law” statue.

First: an exercise in nostalgia and what matters most. When I was in grammar school, perhaps three years after arriving to the United States, I often entertained myself with the following game of perspective:

Jose Marquez
142-10 Roosevelt Ave, Apt. 121
Flushing
Queens
New York

United States of America
Western Hemisphere
Earth
Solar System
Milky Way
etc.

I am one of millions of children, from around the world, who have played this game.

As I contemplate a career shift from arts and public broadcasting (in spirit when not in fact) to academic scholarship, I wonder: When was the last time you turned on the TV, wanted to know something about something, found a good looking news program, were shown and told the skeleton outline of the story and then eavesdropped on a conversation involving an academic, a skeptic, a capitalist and a leftist?

Not often. At least, not before 12am which is when my local PBS station — and current employer, KQED — has the charity to air Charlie Rose. At that hour, it’s almost like an afterthought. This despite the fact that KQED recently tried to emulate Charlie Rose without paying much attention to the details with their two-week long “On the Homefront.”

I have heard friends make reference to Charlie Rose’s verbosity and I remember when Spy magazine had an index of the amount of time Rose talked vs. his guests. I don’t buy that complaint. If I wanted to hear a speech, I’d just read the press releases that circulate in advance of television news stories.

What I miss on television is a smart conversation: I need to hear Rose engage in a discussion where the multiple viewpoints cited above (skeptic, capitalist, etc) are not clearly marked with lines of tape on the stage (in theatrical lingo, “blocked”) — you stand here, you here, no one move, EVER, OK, start rolling: “Fox News presents…”

Back to TV. It’s a sad, sad America when a program like “Charlie Rose” has to justify its (obvious) reason for being in the masthead: “I believe there is a place in the spectrum for really good conversation, if it is informed, spirited, soulful.” No shit, Sherlock.

But that’s the country I call home: a place where the “spectrum” of voices includes the equivalent of ultraviolet radiation: the non-news, the non-conversation, the non-exchange of information by way of literally scripted dialogue and focus-tested slogans that betray nothing but the listener’s confidence. And, so, Charlie Rose has to enter the fray of competition with a wink and a nod to the shit that pours out of the godless men and women who work in for-profit telecommunications.

It’s OK, Charlie Rose is a good winker.

Last Friday, 4/11/2003, Rose had on Fareed Zakaria. I smell just a hint of a liberal (read, “humanitarian”) agenda on Zakaria which puts me at ease. But in his friendly discussion with Rose of “the Road Ahead: Iraq’s democracy,” his list of potential problems left out the persistent danger that any democracy — let alone any nation state — faces within the framework of realpolitik: the law of the jungle, where dog eats dog.

I do greatly appreciate Zakaria’s precise handiwork on explaining both the varieties of democracy and the important role that the United Nations has played in fostering these whenever it has operated with U.S. approval. But, that’s just it: with U.S. approval.

Conservatives have the gall to present themselves on television and, like their partisans cousins on the left, l-i-e to the public about the history of foreign affairs with gross headlines like “The U.N. botched Kosovo.” They render verdicts for which there has been no trial, no evidence, no examination nor cross-examination. Most television viewers, without a clue as to how to find a record of this ongoing “trial,” will have to respond to these pundits words with faith rather than freedom. “I like that conservative guy’s choice of words, he must be telling the truth.”

In any case, Zakaria’s obviously been thinking alot about the big questions when it comes to Democracy. But I heard him on both Friday’s night’s Rose (Saturday morning’s, thanks KQED) and Sunday’s morning’s This Week with Stephanopoulos, and neither time did he mention that one of the nasty little factors that interfere with a fledgling democracy’s chances for reaching adulthood are its adult neighbors.

(It appears that Zakaria understands his role as a television personality quite well. He stays “on-point.” Last weekend, his point was that oil-rich countries have a poor track record when it comes to creating and preserving democracies. He cited some of the countries that prove the point — Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria — and, perhaps, this was his one nod to the law of the jungle. Sadly, “the jungle” and “the market” must be interchangeable.)

It’s not something that Americans, with the exception of the isolationists like Buchanan or Chomsky, appear to want to address: How do you interfere just so? It is the essential question of foreign relations.

Because, no nation is an island. Interference and intervention are facts of nature. Like every biological organism’s need to interact with its environment for food, so, too, do humans interact with other humans within families, neighborhoods, communities, cities, states, nations and among nations. This is the sum of the parts we call “international relations.”

Here is a piece of rhetoric that actually works: When two commercial airplanes, filled with tourists, businessmen, families and a handful of terrorists, destroyed the Twin Towers in New York City, international relations became a matter of national defense. Though the road from that point in time to the present has at times appeared crooked then straight, the unbearable lesson of that day remains no less clear to me: Citizens of the U.S., if you wish to live in peace, you must engage in international relations.

Telecommunications is one part of that. So is living with the inherently international constitution of the modern nation-state. The lowercase “constitution” refers not the single holy text but to the multiple and varied residents and citizens who literally make up the country we live in.

Last Saturday, I accompanied my wife to a low-key, bohemian and yet very successful auction (read “fundraiser“) for a local non-profit art gallery, SoEx. After an hour or two of waiting, I ran into a friend from the Bay Area Video Coalition. The story of BAVC, from a 1970s video artist’s collective to a 21st century media production non-profit, would be an interesting counterpoint to the story above. But the hopeful closing stanza is not found in the story of the nonprofit but rather its employee: my friend, Ted and his girlfriend Angie.

Ted is from Thailand. Angie is from Korea. I am from Cuba. My wife Ana is from Mexico. A few seconds after meeting Angie, she and I began to talk about Korea then Cuba. The contents of that conversation are for another story. Suffice to say that these two immigrants — similarly and distinctly shaped by the Cold War and its hotspots, its megalomaniacal and violent dictatorships, its culturally isolated U.S. participants — had a common passion for, surprise: talking about politics and international relations.

Plus, we both really enjoy — “en- + joir to enjoy, from Latin gaudEre to rejoice” — Frontline.

Angie is now a graphic design student while I work with graphic design on a daily basis. We are both young and middle class. We are a potential market that can pay its way through the airwaves. Why is it we only have Frontline once a month and Charlie Rose at 12am?

related links

New Yorker Iraq coverage (get it while it lasts) and, to be topical, this essay on television coverage of the war by Nancy Franklin.