A photographer has gone to Paris and re-photographed a number of Eugene Atget’s images of the city. You can see some of their visions of Paris side-by-side, here.
 

The contemporary photographer writes, “Atget straightforwardly documented the city with photographs that give you the feeling that all the transitory things that people do and are have washed away.”

If I remember correctly, Atget used equipment that was outdated in his time. Whether by design or financial need, his images looked old even when he made them. He photographed buildings and neighborhoods that he feared would soon be razed to accommodate the civic planner Haussmann’s vision of a modern Paris. He worked early in the mornings when the city seemed vacant. When people do appear on Atget’s streets they are often just ghostly traces. Not having stayed still long enough, their images register incompletely on the glass plate. Rather than an example of straightforward photography, Atget’s images were from the start steeped in nostalgia and loss and not too little theater.

I wonder if most any picture of Paris can’t help but look “haunting and beautiful” to an American. What do we know of things that have weathered?

Spike the aloe vera plant At long last, our aloe vera plant—I call it Spike—got replanted into a larger pot. Almost as soon as I’d gotten it into its last pot, it had seemed to outgrow it, and the bottom leaves started drying up and dying. Wounded limb In the course of transplantation, Spike lost a limb. The juice flowed from the broken leaf, making the plant seem that much more wounded. So I saw fit to bandage it up. The poor thing looks a bit off-kilter. I’m hoping that with the bigger digs, it’ll grow quickly enough to re-establish its balanced asymmetry. Original container, with mug for scale Here’s the little plastic container that the plant originally came in (with a coffee mug for scale). It’s amazing how much Spike has grown in less than two years. At first, I was a bit alarmed; it seemed nearly every day the leaves got longer, spikier, more dangerous looking. The plant began its residence in the living room, where there’s plenty of morning sunshine. But when the leaves started growing horizontally, the ledge became too narrow, and the plant needed its own perch. I moved it to the other side of the apartment, by the kitchen, where it now gets the afternoon light. These days, I’m just impressed that it’s still so robust. Shadows of its former self Growing houseplants is a low-key, low effort endeavor, if you’re not trying to grow orchids or something delicate like that. But now that I’ve nurtured the little plant through its successive homes and its almost monstrous growth, I feel a rather serious sense of responsibility toward it. Hardy, but still requiring regular care and attention, it makes its living presence felt. Ignore it for too long, and it will start to wither accusingly. I have other plants in my home and office, but none with quite as much dramatic flair. With feet, for scale

In response to E Hayot's and K Klingensmith's recent meditations on "today," I'm off to a new time zone, where it's already, but not always already, tomorrow. It will make for a great blog . . . next week.

On Friday K Klingensmith demonstrated her excellent taste by referring to something I'd written as my very first Printculture entry (ahh, those salad days! Remember the snows at Marienbad? that absurd waiter at the Olympic Hotel in Graz? No? That absinthe was stronger than I thought...). Taking a cue from Michel Foucault, I suggested that we might take our mission here as the attempt to explain what exactly today is, how it differs from other days, and how it resembles them. Encouraged by Foucault's moderated view of the present (it is neither, he had said, the greatest damnation nor the daybreak of the first rising sun), I felt, at the dawn of this minor star of the constellated internet, that such a modest goal would nonetheless be fairly difficult to achieve.

K had asked this question in the context of the Downing Street Memo, thinking it in relation to its most obvious historical parallel, the Pentagon Papers (a parallel announced in the present of late by Mark Felt's self-unmasking as Deep Throat). Putting together Harry Shearer's claim that those of who hadn't lived through the Pentagon Papers now know what it was like with Robert Redford's astonishment that none of the current Bush scandals were getting the equivalent traction with today's public (the push for a serious investigation coming from the man who acted the role of the journalist in the scandal, while the actual journalist Redford played writes White House-insider accounts more or less on the side of the current administration, is enough to make Jean Baudrillard spin around on his sleep number bed), K suggested that what is at work today is a failure to be back then, a failure for the equivalent inputs (i.e. murderous presidential corruption and deception) to produce the equivalent outputs (i.e. outrage; the end of a presidency).

It will not surprise you to hear that I'm sympathetic to the critique; the difference between like outputs seems to mark a difference in the time, one that can only seem, given what's going on, to make today worse. And you have to say that there's momentum on the scandal front, and public support for the Iraq war is making a lot of people remember Vietnam. The idea that the early 1970s might return to wreak their vengeance on a group of men who have been fighting the late 1960s for most of their political lives is certainly delicious.

A few weeks ago I had this to say (now who's showing good taste by quoting me?) about the relationship between past and present:

The problem--or one problem, anyway--is that the historical parallel, the comparison between past and present, works both ways. A few days ago James Wolcott wrote this paragraph:

I'm interested in the first part of the quotation more than the second (though I agree that putting your money where your mouth is when you're talking about killing strangers is probably a good idea). I'm struck, thinking of Churchill and those other dates, how strongly the historical argument--the one that says "today" is like "yesterday," and offers yesterday's solutions to today's problems--functions in our culture (maybe this is nothing new--during the Vietnam War, were people saying that this was going to be another Algeria? Surely.).

And so I want to say that one of the things to think about--not the only thing, but one more factor in the ongoing meta-conversation about how to think the meaning of the present and how to make the future--is this: in the initial moment of occurence, what you might call the "happening" of the event, the temptation to compare it to a historical parallel makes a great deal of sense: the shock of the new is most easily met by reducing the new to the old. So that we get 9/11 as Pearl Harbor, Iraq as Vietnam, the War on Terror as the Battle of Britain, and so on.

But as time passes what gets revealed--what reveals itself, I suppose--is that today isn't really that much like your chosen yesterday. As time unfolds, the event unfolds with it, its happening extending into the future so that its shape, like the outline of a person in the twilight before dawn, slowly emerges as a collection of grooves, of lines, of vectors and planes. In the brighter light of day these trace the figure of something, or someone, that isn't who or what you thought it was. On September 12, 2001, September 11 was, for all intents and purposes, Pearl Harbor. But today, with all we know, and with all it has made happen (including those things it has made happen precisely by being compared to Pearl Harbor), it is not Pearl Harbor or the Battle of Britain. It is, simply, itself.

And in being "itself" it is, finally, just like every other historical event. It would be good if next time we could think our present from a future that respects the slow emergence of its difference.

Some time ago, when Printculture was in its infancy, E Hayot posed the question “what is today?” That query returns like a refrain from time to time. The latest answer: today is June 24, 1971 - almost.

On June 13, 1971 The New York Times began publishing a series of excerpts from the 7,000 page Pentagon Papers. The highlight: the US government had secret plans to go war while the president was publicly promising that war would be a last resort. On June 18, the Washington Post began publishing the papers.

Sound familiar?

In this week’s Le Show broadcast Harry Shearer announced that for any of us wondering what it was like to live during the Pentagon Papers – this is it.

This is it, almost.

And to explain that difference we go to Robert Redford - Robert Redford who played an investigative reporter in the movies. Somewhere out in the Utah foothills, Redford is

Not today.

The following is testimony from Harvard Law Professor Richard D. Parker given before a House Judiciary subcommittee in May of 2003:

This is one of the most interesting arguments made by the people who testified before the subcommittee in 2003. It is certainly one of the few that makes an argument for the anti-desecration amendment per se.

The others tended to be heartfelt arguments for why people shouldn’t burn the flag, rather than explanations of why that should be outlawed altogether. The evocation of the flag draped over the coffins of soldiers is very common, suggesting that people who burn the flag are disrespecting the sacrifice of those soldiers and their families. It goes without saying, I suppose, that post-9/11 efforts to criminalize the burning of flags make connections to that occasion for patriotism. While I have a hard time understanding exactly who the congressman is referring to here:

the literal opacity of the statement is of course secondary.

Again, though I’d say these are arguments that might explain why these individuals wouldn’t burn flags, why they get mad when others do, and even, perhaps, why others might change their minds about plans to burn flags in the future, they don’t constitute in and of themselves an argument for why this mode of expression ought to made criminal.

(There is an argument that circulates in some of the pro-flag amendment discourse that suggests that flag burning doesn’t constitute expression. Better arguments seem to understand the contradiction waiting around the corner from that position. The weakest form of this argument cites Tommy Lasorda: “Baseball great Tommy Lasorda spoke to common sense, the dictionary and for 3 of 4 common Americans when he said: “‘speech is when you talk.’”)

Professor Parker, though, seems to be trying to make a larger argument that suggests that the common good is affected by allowing the flag to be burned – a version of the “fire in a crowded theater” rationale for the restriction of speech. Moreover, he argues that the ban on flag burning creates a public good – a more effective forum for public speech that focuses on the improvement of the American community.

Rather than simply denounce America – which is a pretty consistent pro-amendment read of flag burners’ intentions, when they’re imagined to have any intentions at all – Parker argues that holders of “minority and unpopular viewpoints” should embrace the flag as a passport to inclusion in the American conversation: “It helps them get a hearing. The civil rights movement understood this. That is why it displayed the American flag so prominently and so proudly in its great marches of the 1960's.”

At a certain level, of course, Parker is right, this is indeed one of the key structures of political argument in American history over the course of the last 150 or so years. Shaming America into being a better version of itself, closer to the ideals it espouses, actually has a decent track record.

The premise of the kind of protest Parker likes is that there is a gap between the experienced reality of America and its ideal. Its success comes from the ability to criticize America (never a popular move) while simultaneously praising America (that’s better). I’m not sure, though, that this approach, which likes the America concept but criticizes its execution, is really so incompatible with the gesture of burning an American flag.

The most reasonable expression I could imagine as intended by the burning of an American flag by an American citizen would be an angry declaration that America as it is does not deserve the name attached to the flag-burner’s understanding of American ideals. This flag – imbued with all of the ideals revered by those who would ban its burning – cannot represent America in its current state, and so as a gesture intended to shame Americans into living up to our best imaginations of ourselves the flag-burner robs the nation of its cherished emblem so that it can no longer offer false comfort that we are in fact who we would only like to be.

And so, however well intentioned, I cannot agree with Professor Parker’s assertions that the flag must be protected because it supersedes the specific terms of debate:

What if someone believes that America - as it is - is less and less able to sponsor the contention of opposing viewpoints?

This is the eventual problem with this kind of “dissensus” argument. While there may in certain circumstances be ways that an exogenous, ideal term like “America” can help focus critique into progress, it has to remain accessible to meta-critical evaluation if it’s also the name used to describe the state of things. To authorize the government to ban the kind of last-resort critique that flag burning might effectively convey is in the end, I think, what it seems most obviously to be: a restriction on the freedom of speech whereby citizens can openly express their views of their government and nation.

Last week, I was in New York for the big MoMA retrospective of American photographer Lee Friedlander, who’s been working steadily for over 50 years, and has produced a phenomenal body of work that even this show of more than 500 photographs can’t adequately represent. He’s my favorite photographer, I think I can say that unequivocally, even though there are many fine and fascinating photographers out there whose images I love. I missed the Diane Arbus show at the Met, so I wasn’t about to miss this one.

The show runs until Aug. 29, and if you’re anywhere near New York this summer, I urge you to go. There’s plenty of stuff written about Friedlander and his photos, (a good review of the exhibition, with an overview of his career, appeared in The New York Times and there’s a big, fat catalogue accompanying the show), and you can see a slideshow of his early work at this site. But here are a few thoughts from a fan and sporadic shutterbug: In a brochure accompanying the exhibition appear these oft-quoted lines from Friedlander, about his early experience with photography as a teenager in Aberdeen, Washington: But of course it’s not just the medium that’s generous. That all these things—these incidental details of the everyday landscape (what Friedlander described as “the American social landscape”) that might escape our notice—get captured on film is not a problem or a difficulty for Friedlander. Rather, he takes what the camera eye has to offer; he plays with the capaciousness, capacities, and limits of the medium. He consistently uses a deep focus, so that everything in the picture plane is fairly sharp. The effect is that the images are at once incredibly dense and spatially flat, as they lose the sense of foreground and background that a shallower depth of field might provide. It’s as if each image is a provisional answer to the question: “what happens when the infinite complexity of the world meets the two dimensionality of the photographic medium?” <%image(20050622-LF--Pittsburgh_factory_valleys_1980.jpg|370|249|Pittsburgh, PA, 1980; from his series Factory Valleys)%> At first glance, these images may seem chaotic, incoherent, with no clearly discernible subject. His captions are usually not much help, simply noting the city or town and year of the photograph. But if you pause and try to take in all the details, you begin to see the visual playfulness, the interplay among the myriad elements, the specificity of place and moment that the image records. There is wit and humor in the way he uses his shadow as self-portrait, for example, or plays with depth and surface using mirrors and windows (what the brochure calls “his talent for turning familiar photographic errors into beguiling puns and puzzles”), but he never abandons the documentary impulse to record his environment for mere visual effects. He finds a way—a brilliant way—to achieve a dynamic tension between the documentary and formal dimensions of what he sees through his camera. In fact, I’d venture to say that for him there’s not much difference between the two. One of my favorites is this one, titled “New York 1963.” What’s it a photo of, one might ask. It’s New York in 1963. It’s two people exiting and entering a city building. It’s light and shadow, and lines that segment the visual plane. It’s the fleeting moment at the threshold of contrasts. It’s strangers, including the long-coated man in the distance, caught together like specimens behind glass or in amber. It’s the differently reflective properties of glass and steel and that white shoe greeting the daylight as it steps out onto the street. It’s anonymity and isolation (minus the moralizing or sentimentality). It’s the oddness of, and perhaps the odd fear of being trapped in, revolving doors. It’s a visual delight. Go see the show. You won’t regret it.

I recently read two-time Booker Prize-winning novelist Peter Carey’s Wrong about Japan, a brief and fairly breezy “memoir-cum-travelogue,” as the dust jacket reports, about the author’s travels in Tokyo with his manga- and anime-loving son. For me –and for what it’s worth, my sentiments were echoed by many of the amazon.com reviewers—I found the narrator eminently unlikable, a real drip. The story’s conflict, such as it is, is between the father’s desire to find traces of Real Japan, and his son’s desire find cool manga, work on a Gundam model, and hang out with his friend Takashi (who, I learned on-line, was invented by the author to round out the story). The fictional status of Takashi, the capitalization of Real Japan, and a few other features of the book suggest a certain amount of irony. After all, if the son seems likable and sympathetic, the father a clueless and constant drag, I get this impression because of the narrator’s own presentation. Here’s a passage –which comes at the end of an interview with an anime artist-- that captures what was annoying to me about the book:

The narrator’s cranky admission that the Japanese are not the right people to ask about Japan is just one of those moments where the generous reader senses irony, the fed-up reader can only say: “well, there it is then.” I’m still not entirely sure.

In any case, what strikes me as ultimately interesting or important about the book’s troubles is not the particulars of the writer’s opinions about what is or isn’t really Japanese but the fact that this is a concern at all. However much irony may or may not be sprinkled throughout the book, its fundamental tone is one of constant disappointment with and irritation at Japan for not being sufficiently Japanese. It brings to mind a passage from Kipling’s Sea to Sea (1889):

A few weeks ago SL Kim posted a piece that opened with some critical remarks about Sheridan Prasso’s The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient, a book consciously devoted to debunking stereotypes about Asian women as dragonladies, sexed-up geisha, and so on. The focus was not on Ms. Prasso’s book itself, but rather on its marketing, an L.A. Times review of the book, and the ways in which the topic is generally treated in mainstream culture. Much to our collective astonishment, we received a polite and I think slightly hurt response from the author, who writes:

This is hard to disagree with, but for me it doesn’t settle the issue either. I imagine a book that disproves, through scientific research, the notion that African-Americans are genetically restricted to a low level of intelligence. Certainly my initial reaction would be disbelief that someone took the idea seriously enough to research it and write about it, and that a publisher is marketing it as an effort to debunk “our” misconceptions. At the same time, if the author swears she knows a lot of people who really do believe such things and she honestly believe that her book will clear things up . . .

(The analogy isn’t a very good one, because it doesn’t risk engaging in the fantasies it seeks to question in the same way as Mystique does –which was really SL Kim’s point. A better analogy might be Blood Brothers: What We Don’t Understand about Black-on-Black Violence. The cover would be a muscular black torso, maybe covered with Chinese tattoos).

What interests me about all this is the vast distance felt between the kinds of cultural work undertaken by different facets of the scribbleatti. There’s a sadness to the fact that these parallel universes so infrequently touch --and in part the initial impulse behind printculture was imagining a space where they might, to their mutual benefit. I don’t believe that academics live in ivory towers, but academic discourse seems pretty well zoned off and I have to believe –really, it seems a kind of necessity—that it is not entirely the fault of either those within the academy or those beyond it. Ms. Prasso’s defense for making what might seem to some an obvious argument is that it is far from obvious to “the uninitiated mass book-buying public.” It would be hard to find an academic writer who would so openly talk down to this “mass audience,” but I’m not sure if it’s because academics have genuinely left behind this attitude (fat chance) or because it is so deeply engrained that it needn’t, in fact cannot, be expressed.

The real problem, I think, is that current academic discourse is driven by a progressivist model: one shouldn’t write something that’s already been written, prove something that’s already been proven, refute something that’s already been refuted. This makes sense, but it doesn’t always sit very well with its broader social purpose. It is absurd to imagine, say, Judith Butler writing a book that argues that women can drive just as well as men, but no more absurd than are, for many Americans, the post-essentialist conceptions of gender that are standard fare on many campuses. The proliferating “posts” in the way scholars talk about what they talk about are united by a common post-essentialism that I suspect is the single greatest intellectual barrier between American academics and mainstream writers. That’s today’s post.

June 19, 2005
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran's spy chief used just two words to respond to White House ridicule of last week's presidential election: ''Thank you.'' His sarcasm was barely hidden. The backfire on Washington was more evident.

The sharp barbs from President Bush were widely seen in Iran as damaging to pro-reform groups because the comments appeared to have boosted turnout among hard-liners in Friday's election — with the result being that an ultraconservative now is in a two-way showdown for the presidency

June 20, 2005
WASHINGTON (AP) — “Nice work!”

That's the message the White House sent to Amnesty International today, only weeks after the human rights organization had compared the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay to the Soviet Gulag.

“I guess their whole report backfired,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. “Torture-supporting Americans will show the world that they wouldn't be intimidated by a stupid non-profit.”

Instead, the right-wing blog Powerline has started selling “I Heart Gitmo” t-shirts.

June 21, 2005
PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — “Smooth move, ex-lax!,” announced North Korean President Kim Jong Il today at a hastily convened press conference designed to send a message to Washington.

“I spent two years planning a whole gazpacho party,” Kim told reporters. “But then [American President] George Bush had to say he didn't want us to build nuclear weapons. We got so busy making them that we forgot about the soup and it went bad in the freezer.”

Kim said the party would be rescheduled for 2007. “We're going to have music to go along with the soup,” he said. “Probably Kool Moe Dee.”

June 22, 2005
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — 8-year-old Frank Smith today said that he was not going to eat his vegetables or work hard in school.

“I know my mom wants me to do those things,” Smith announced at a press conference. “But if I don't do them, she'll be unhappy, and that way she'll pay more attention to me.”

Reached for comment in the year 2035, 38-year-old Frank Smith, a diabetic employee of the Wal-Mart corporation, could barely contain his happiness. “Thanks a lot,” he said to his former self. “This life is really working out for me.”

June 23, 2005
TUCSON (AP) — In a letter written to George W. Bush today, an obscure teacher of modernist literature asked if the American president would mind telling university officials not to give him a giant raise, and forbidding Julia Stiles from dating him.

“Only the president's sharp barbs can keep me from getting the raise or the date with a superstar I don't deserve,” E Hayot told a reporter. “Unless the president steps in, I'll do anything--lie, disassemble, whatever--to get what I want, and I don't think anyone can stop me.”

June 24, 2005
WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House announced today that it has hired Brer Fox as its new Secretary of State.

The promotion for Brer Fox, who was recently accused of mishandling the case of Brer Rabbit (see “Brer Rabbit to Brer Fox: ”This Briar Patch is Actually Awesome,“ June 18, 2005), comes as something of a surprise to political observers. But Brer Fox was not surprised at all.

”This confirms my sense that a foreign policy designed around the things my enemies say they fear the most is the way to go," Fox said.

Fox went on to tell reporters that the U.S. war in Iraq had nothing to do with Tar-Babies.

In response to my post of June 8, a letter from the author of The Asian Mystique:

Thank you for reading, Ms. Prasso, and for your thoughtful response. If I mischaracterized the aims of your book or your motivations for writing it, I do apologize. At your invitation, I’m now more likely to pick up your book, and get beyond first impressions.

I would like to clarify that I did not mean to accuse you of trying to strip the subject naked. Rather, my skepticism concerns how the book’s marketing, and perhaps also its rhetorical structure, may actually promote or perpetuate the kinds of fantasizing that the book is critiquing. I remain skeptical that the critical mode of revealing or uncovering the truth behind the myths is enough to get readers (both Caucasian and Asian) to relinquish self-interested, and most often deeply irrational, cultural misreadings, especially because it seems that the gesture of unmasking can be easily appropriated to serve the very mythmaking machinery it is meant to undo. Of course, that is not your problem to solve, and I do understand your desire to start a conversation in a wider public arena.

Again, thanks for reading and for taking the time to write.

Sound financial advice from reader Catriona Menzies-Pike, who writes in response to a recent post:

Good policy. I'm going to start charging.

These two pictures crossed paths on the Yahoo! Most Popular photos section over the course of last week.

Their popularity, I imagine, derives from their efficient capture of a familiar aspect of each of these two Presidents’ public persona – Clinton is lascivious, Bush is a fascist. (It’s sort of a strange pairing, though, in that Bush’s Nazi salute is an artifact of the photographic instant, while Clinton’s picture captures an event that observers on hand for the signing would have also seen as having occured.)

On one hand, their simultaneous popularity seems to be some version of the red/blue, 50/50 election political climate we imagine ourselves to occupy. Whether chicken or egg of this political sensibility, the popularity of these two pictures is a reminder that our past 2 Presidents have done nothing more effectively than fulfill their critics’ worst nightmares. Almost to the point of caricature, Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and Bush’s . . . oh, you choose: maybe the Patriot Act, maybe the Enemy Combatant designation (Now available for American citizens!), the Purloined Letter obviousness of corporate oil’s influence on environmental policy? – have no doubt had something to do with a politics that focuses more on distrust of political opponents than positively stated positions.

I once heard someone explain their political preferences this way: If there was an obvious right answer to policy questions, we would have figured it out by now. In other words, whatever path you choose – in broad strokes, the liberal approach or the conservative approach – it’s not going to be 100% effective. So, this person reflected, one way of deciding is to think about the side on which you want to err (which you inevitably will, to some extent). At the margin, would you rather coddle freeloaders or restrict needed welfare support? Would you allow a potentially higher risk of terrorism by requiring a warrant to check library records, or buy safety at the cost of potential abuse?

The pejorative portraits of Clinton and Bush that Yahoo! readers passed around to each other last week might be testaments to the mistakes Americans don’t want to make – marking the boundaries of political choice that have voters weighing the invasion and occupation of Iraq against the prospect of two men calling their relationship a “marriage.” The psycho-sexual dynamics of our male presidents has a longer history than Bush-Clinton, of course, but this pair has certainly made the distinction interesting.

In a way that none of the last three presidential election match-ups have, the difference between Clinton and Bush seems to get a lot out on the table. The losers of those three elections – Dole, Gore, and Kerry – have, in some sense exemplified the non-virile version of their party’s stereotypical masculinity – Dole as the conservative Old Man, Gore and Kerry as the liberal Feminized Intellectual. Clinton and Bush, on the other hand looks like the real thing: the Ladies’ Man versus the Man’s Man.

In three years we’ll have the chance to look back at each man’s 8-year run as President and decide whose mistakes were worse.

Here’s to the Mollys and the Leopolds, even the Stephens.
 
To those settling in for a solid day’s reading.
 
To anyone out walking in their city.

 
Happy Bloomsday.

I can’t remember how I came across it, but I recently read an article on Campus Progress.org about a controversy at UVA over fun with the “Asian fetish” stereotype on the Facebook. The Facebook, as I only recently learned, is an online community for college students that’s all the rage at several hundred colleges, with many students spending hours of their time browsing the site. Students sign on to become members and can post their photos and interests, and form all sorts of virtual cliques and sub-communities, and keep a running tally of their friends. In any case, a popular Facebook activity is to establish particular sub-groups based on your interests and imagination, naming groups in ways that only adolescents can. As a Washington Post article explains,

Anyway, the trouble at UVA started when a white male student, teased by his (Asian American) friend for having an “Asian fetish,” created a new clique called “People for the Propagation of the Asian Fetish,” with a description that is sexually graphic and uses a lot of food metaphors. Another student (Asian American) found it disturbing and showed it to her (white) boyfriend, who responded with another group called “Americans for the Increased Importation of Asian Women,” and then they invited other students, both Asian and white, to join. (So, can you guess where this is all headed?) One of these invitees, Elizabeth Chu, who, BTW, is Chair of the University’s Diversity Initiatives Committee, did not see the humor, and published a letter in the student paper, and so on. The creator of the first group—“People for the Propagation of the Asian Fetish”—claimed that he was being satirical, and that he didn’t think anyone would see it as anything other than a joke: “I couldn’t see anyone reading that and being like, ‘Wow, someone really wants to do this to Asian girls.’” The creator of the second group--“Americans for the Increased Importation of Asian Women”—who says he was “frustrated to be relegated to that category of the ignorant honky who drools over foreign flesh” says his group was meant “as a humorous celebration of Asian women.” Ah, that tricky gap between intent and execution! My initial reaction to the details of this incident was, either these guys don’t know what satire is or they’re just really bad writers (or both). What a poor grasp of audience, I thought, what clumsy uses of language! And it struck me how incapable everyone in the ensuing debate seemed (white and Asian American students alike) of recasting the terms of the discussion about race, ethnicity, etc. to get beyond the discourse of Asian women as “assets” or “imports” or food products and beyond the determination of what is or isn’t offensive to whom. I suppose I shouldn’t be that surprised. What especially bugged me is not so much the students’ trafficking in tired clichés and sexist attitudes, but the unquestioned assumption that “Asian” means “foreign” and decidedly not American. As far as I can tell, all the Asian students involved are in fact Asian American students. Did no one pick up on this? Do Asians from New Jersey count as imports? What the incident highlights is how, no matter how assimilated, to be Asian is still in some fundamental sense to be foreign, non-native, and unassimilated, and how the uncomplicated, uninterrogated racial and ethnic identities that the Asian American students cling to contribute to that demarcation. All part of the persistent "East is East and West is West" mentality I mentioned last week. But maybe someone did remind the students that “we’re all Americans in a wonderful tapestry of cultures.” The result? The student responsible for “Americans for …Importation” renamed his group: Ugh. The earnestness is killing me. (And the horrible writing again--I hate the use of “female” and “male” as nouns.) If only there were a college student out there who could write a good satire about this whole thing.

The following is a list of books (titles from amazon.com) about China and Japan, with one slight variation. Perhaps these can be found on amazon.jp:

And of course:

When a dingo eats a baby, everyone is surprised.

The phrase uttered, apparently, by Linda Chamberlain at Ayers Rock in 1980 and immortalized by Meryl Streep in the 1988 film A Cry in the Dark, was "the dingo took my baby." Chamberlain, who was cleared of the murder (initial inquest: death by dingo), was later convicted of it, then eventually cleared (here's a full account of the incident and its aftermath).

But it was as "the dingo ate my baby" that the phrase acquired a pop cultural popularity in the 1990s, being used by Elaine on Seinfeld ("Maybe a dingo ate your baby," delivered in a fabulous Australian accent), finding itself in the Buffy-verse as the name of a band (Dingoes Ate My Baby) fronted by Oz, and getting mentioned by Bart Simpson.

"The dingo ate my baby" is delightful partly because to American ears, "dingo" sounds funny--like so many Australian words derived from aboriginal ones (boomerang, billabong, kangaroo) it combines n-g and o sounds you don't get much in American English, and the cultural distance from Australia means that those differences can feel charming indeed--witness the astonishing success of Paul Hogan (cf. "that's not a knife"; I can't imagine Australians were proud, but who knows). On top of that "baby" is pretty funny, and then of course eating a baby takes things over the top, so that you have an almost perfect comedic phrase for people who don't mind poking occasional fun at the so-called culture of life (making fun of babies = no; getting a whole army into situations where they might accidentally bomb or shoot babies... go for it!).

Snooping around online will reveal that, with all the sympathy for genuine tragedy and bereavement typical of internet culture (and of Oz and Elaine and the Simpsons, for that matter), lots of lemonade has been made of the Chamberlain family's lemons. I found t-shirts for babies reading "Dingo Snack," a spoof in which Kathie Lee Gifford's dog (aka her "baby") is eaten by a coyote, a fake news thing called "Babies ate my dingoes" ("It's so that common folks can't go out at night walking our pet dingoes, for fear of wild youngsters coming out from the bush and eating them," says one concerned resident), and so on.

Humor about someone else's tragedy is funny partly because it crosses a line involving respect for the pain of others (that is, it's funny because it's dangerous: I've found jokes online about September 11, but haven't seen anyone making such a joke in public yet). It's also, I think, a way of marking a tragedy as "not mine" (easier to do with the dingo than with 9/11--when the tragedy is yours you're generally limited to a wry, bitter humor of the good soldier Schweik type).

The most intense example of this line has been, lately, a series of photographs taken to mimic Lynndie England's poses in some of the Abu Ghraib photos. I find the photos shocking, but I cannot be sure if they're offensive or brave; to some extent they must be readable in relation to Botero's series on Abu Ghraib, which has nothing funny about it, but in which the excessive bodies of his subjects speak somehow to the side of the tragedy.

I'm struck once again how little of this would be knowable (or even doable--especially the Lynndie England photos) without internet culture, which makes this kind of humor so much more widely available, and which produces simultaneously a sense of distance that makes the humor easier. This is the global village, I guess. Having never lived in a village I don't have a clear sense of what such a thing is like but I feel like "village" is not the right metaphor. Something's changing. Stay away from dingoes.

Other than an occasional opportunity to note the arrival of the Iraq insurgency's last throes, the Vice President’s been keeping his usual low profile. Last month, though, during the college graduation season, Dick Cheney was out and about, heading out to the Air Force Academy and down to Auburn University to deliver a commencement address. It seems like light duty for a man who generally gives the impression that he’s too busy working to bother with appearing in public, but maybe the sense that the second term is winding down has left the VP with the sense that he’d better stop and smell the Vice Presidential roses.

The Air Force Academy Speech went about as you’d guess, but the Auburn speech was more personal. Cheney wove his remarks around a reflective, pseudo-self-deprecating (in the classic graduation speech style) version of his own life story. On one hand it was the typical life lessons address that’s meant to send graduates out ready to take on life’s challenges, but at the same time, it seemed to offer some glimpses of Cheney’s second-term mood and – most intriguingly – a hint of where he might go next.

For instance, thinking back to a job interview with Donald Rumsfeld way back when, Cheney recalls:
 

 
It’s a don’t quit kind of story, obviously, but it’s also the story of a relationship that’s been important to both men’s lives. Detached & impractical + cocky = Cheney in a fighting mood and a fighter who’s ready to do it. (Also, obviously, detached & impractical + cocky = sitcom comedy gold!)
 
Later, Cheney declared the United States the “country of the second chance,” reflecting
 
 
Again, pretty standard graduation speech stuff, but when you put that together with the apparent repudiation of his boss President Bush that came in the very next sentence:
 
 
I think we begin to see why Dick Cheney is going ahead with his next challenge. Having found a new cocky young warrior, a man who is indeed in need of a patented American second chance (or third or fifth, or more, but who’s counting), the real question is Why wouldn’t Dick Cheney be managing Mike Tyson?
 

About a week after grades were posted a student wrote to me with a question. He wondered whether I’d raise his final grade – and not by a little bit, from say a C- to a C, but from a C- to a C+ or a B-. The student explained that while he understood that the grade he received was the very grade he deserved, his program required a certain GPA before allowing their students to take upper level classes. And without some post-semester revision to his GPA, he’d be forced to take classes in the fall that wouldn’t help him directly advance in his major.

So while he knew he deserved his grade, he also knew that his world would be demonstrably better with a higher one. He didn’t feel it wrong to accept a grade higher than the one he worked to earn, and so he thought he’d see whether I didn't just feel the same way.

I wrote him back and told him that I wouldn’t change his grade. I explained what grades measure, at least ideally… why accurate grades are important to his department, mine, the University, society… why he’d maybe even profit from accepting responsibility for his performance over the semester… the whole thing.

Our exchange bothered me because while he hadn’t cheated, exactly, he was willing to accept that the rules might be remade for him. It also bothered me that he hadn’t seemed to care enough about his work until he saw that the consequences of not working very hard had negatively impacted him.

It’s deeply troubling that these kinds of unethical practices – cheating, plagiarizing, lying, dodging the rules and then somehow justifying these choices – are at work throughout academe, and aren’t reserved to young scholars who may not yet have learned better. A recent survey in the scientific journal Nature finds that up to one-third of respondents engaged in unethical practices sometime in the last three years.

Amid broadly publicized questions about the reliability of scientists and journalists like Jayson Blair, it’s heartening to remember the recent example of some business schools. In March the Harvard Business School refused admittance to the 119 applicants who made use of a security flaw in an online program that allowed them to view the status of their applications. The Dean recognized this as behavior “unethical at best” and “a serious breach of trust that cannot be countered by rationalization.” MIT and Carnegie Mellon made similar decisions. It’s hopeful to think of this move as a kind of pre-emptive weeding out of the Kenneth Lays, the Jeffery Skillings, the Andrew Fastows, even the Martha Stewarts of the future.

It may be a sign that attitudes are changing that the students of the Harvard Business School support the Dean’s decision, and that many of the Lays, Skillings, Fastows and Stewarts of today have been convicted and served time.

Examples like these that warn of the consequences of unethical acts may prove to be a good deterrent. In teaching, though, we have additional opportunities that needn’t focus on consequences (the “it’s not good to cheat because you might get caught” route): making it a goal, for example, to cultivate in students a sense of value in their own work, and better a value in the experience of working hard even when it means falling short of the mark.

There’s a new book out called The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient by business journalist Sheridan Prasso, who was based in different Asian cities for over fifteen years (this, of course, makes her an expert). Clearly aimed at a Western (read Caucasian) audience, the book claims to debunk the persistent stereotypes about the Orient, particularly about its women. According to an L.A. Times review, the book is divided into two sections:

Wait! Hold on, you mean to tell me that Asian women are human beings! Why didn’t anyone tell me this before? I haven’t read the book, so I’m not offering my own review. It may very well be a nuanced analysis of the ways fantasies of the exoticized East play out in a variety of social arenas. But I’m skeptical, and what makes me skeptical is the discourse surrounding the book—the way it’s being marketed, summarized, reviewed, blurbed and praised. When I first heard about the book, I thought, is it really, in this day and age, an argument to point out that Asian women aren’t really submissive sex kittens existing solely for the pleasure of Western men or manipulative and heartless dragon ladies who will eat their mates after sex?! Depressingly enough, people find the book “provocative” and “incisive” in the way it challenges these powerful fantasies of Asian women. Perhaps it’s the West’s lack of history and sense of the past (how’s that for stereotyping?) that makes it necessary to remind them periodically that Asian women really aren’t like that. But what’s so exciting about that news? How’s that gonna sell books? The real titillation, it seems to me, is in indulging in “our fantasies of the exotic orient” in the very act (the guise?) of giving up such ideas. Notice how the title itself (not to mention the cover image of a geisha) simply offers up the "Asian Mystique" with no sign of a critical stance. The book itself serves as a fetish for simultaneously confirming and denying one’s attachment to these fantasies, one’s belief in their reality. Need proof? The language of the reviews and promos mimics the rhetorical structure of the book itself—articulating in detail the contours of the fantasized Asian woman, only to reveal the illusory nature of those images. Here’s the book description provided on Amazon, almost identical to the L.A. Times summary cited above: It’s the language of revelation that’s key here, the penetrating scopic drive that aims to rip the blinders from Western eyes, to clear the foggy mists of illusion. The rhetoric effects a cultural striptease in which the Asian woman stands naked in her realness before the Western reader’s “unclouded deeroticized eyes” (Does that phrase even make sense? Is it the gazer or the gazed that needs deeroticizing?). But this very act of frenzied revealing—the fascination of the “reality tour” that offers a sense of intimacy with the women portrayed—repeats the structure of desire it claims to dispel. A blurb from Booklist, also on Amazon, makes clear how even stark reality can share in the eroticized fascination that is the book’s ostensible object of critique: Thankfully, (the writer implies) Prasso doesn’t let her scolding get in the way of providing the mise en scene for fantasies of rescue and “red hot” encounters. If the mystery, the “mystique,” weren’t so powerful, would the desire to know, to possess the truth of Asian women be as keen? The terms of discussion (reality vs illusion, truth vs fantasy) set up a false binary, false because the desire to know is in fact an extension, not a countering, of these persistent fantasies, which are based on yet another seemingly intractable binarism: the absolute difference of East and West. L.A. Times reviewer Seth Faison observes, “The cultural divide between East and West is so vast, even in these days of easy travel and instant access, that people on either side often want to believe remarkably inaccurate notions about those on the other,” and writes in conclusion: “In the end, looking at a deeply foreign culture is like looking at the future — it brings out our hopes and our fears and we imagine scenarios on either extreme. Yet the reality that eventually unfolds is inevitably more muddled, more human — and more interesting — than one ever imagines.” To be shown again and again that Asian women are in fact “fully dimensional human beings” is to be reminded of the distance that must be traveled to arrive at that revelation; that revelation can only be revelatory, surprising, compelling, provocative if one assumes from the get-go the impossibility of bridging such vast divides, such deep foreignness. Only in this way can the complex realities of a cultural other exceed one’s wildest imaginings and be as uncharted and unpredictable as one’s future. Not to pick on Mr. Faison too much, nor to oversimplify the complex issues involved in East-West cultural encounters and the cultural imaginaries that shape them. Certainly, as many Asians and Asian Americans believe in the incommensurable differences between East and West as do Westerners (all these terms, of course, are highly problematic in their essentializing tendencies). It’s a mutually constitutive process of mystification, as Faison himself points out. But what I want to emphasize is how inadequate (or more cynically, how disingenuous) this gesture of debunking is as a form of cultural critique; rather, it works to confirm and perpetuate the system of representation that produces “Asian women” as first and foremost a sexualized other. To illustrate this point with another example (and give this discussion one last creepy turn in the process): back on the Amazon site for Prasso’s book, there’s the convenient “customers who bought this book also bought” list, on which appears the title How to Attract Asian Women by Ming Tan (I kid you not). The subtitle: An Asian Woman Reveals It ALL. If Prasso’s book aims to be more high-minded, in the end it seems no less opportunistic than Tan’s. Positioning themselves as brokers of cross-cultural capital, these women promise high returns (truth! sex! possession!) on a very modest investment. Stay tuned for more fun with Asian stereotypes . . . I’m just getting started.

June 7, 2025

U.N. Secretary-General John Bolton announced that U.N. troops would “stay the course” in France, despite a recent escalation in resistance-themed performance art.

In an 8-1 ruling, the Capital One-U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Pizza Hut-Kansas State Supreme Court Ruling to ban “‘gravity’ and gravity-related ideas” from public school textbooks.

Producers of Abu!, the Tony Award-winning musical inspired by the Abu Ghraib prison in former Iraq, announced today that the show would be closing at the end of this season after an eight year run.

Louisiana Congresswoman Britney Spears brought the House down by kicking off her '26 re-election campaign with “Hit Me Baby One More Time.”

With his win at the U.S. Open, Tiger Woods broke Jack Nicklaus’ long-standing record of 18 career majors wins.

Acting Israeli Prime Minister Richard Perle was in Dallas today to accept the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the development of the Ebola bomb that helped resolve the 2020 Sudan crisis.

President Jenna Bush toasted Vice President Dick Cheney on the occasion of his 84th birthday.

A month ago Fernando Botero released a number of paintings and sketches showing torture in the Abu Ghraib prison.

Their style is immediately recognizable. Since the beginning of his career Botero has been known for the corpulent bodies his subjects.

...and his still lives evince the same commitment to something like obesity; the coffee pot in Still Life with Watermelon (1992) has had more than its share of half and half:

The quasi-cubist roofs of the city in the window are another Botero signature.

The Abu Ghraib bodies, torturers and victims alike, are decidedly more muscular than those of Botero's earlier work...

...and Botero has said (in a Reuters article) that this muscularity comes from his desire to "accentuate the masculine aspect of these prisoners. They are men humiliated."

Botero masculinzes the tortured in order to protect their masculinity against its humiliation; here we see the political case being made for a shift in aesthetic style.

But it seems important to respect the smallness of that shift, remembering how astonishing Botero's bodies are in this of all contexts. In an interview with Ana María Escallón, Botero once said:

The madness of Botero's style has always been its consistency: the obsessive insistence on making everything and everyone fat, bodied, fully fleshed leaves his paintings saturated with a carnality that has been most often read as sensuous and comic. To carry that over to Abu Ghraib, as in this painting of a man and a dog--

--which must presumably be read in relation to the 1989 Man with Dog above--indicates a willingness to take style all the way to content's limit.

How the bodies occupy their space, their push all the way to the edges of the canvas, reflects--has perhaps always reflected in Botero --humanity's desire for living room, a simple wish to grow to the limits of a container, and the painting's indulgence of that wish. In Botero's paintings before last year, the slowly expanding skin of his people and objects testified, or seemed to, to the simple and even admirable fullness of a certain form of life.

In the context of Abu Ghraib the joyfulness of that form must be tuned to a different frequency. "Art has this capacity to keep on accusing," Botero says in the Reuters story. What accuses today is, fair enough, the content. But what keeps accusing is, instead, the exultation of volume. Turn it up.

So perform this little thought experiment: how many top-tier academics in your field are substantially overweight?

In English and Comp Lit, I can think of only two. I'll come back next week with your responses--I'm looking for ideas, too, on why there is a dearth of fat people (in a country where 20 percent of the population is "obese").

Since 1976, Dragon magazine has come out each month, providing players with officially sanctioned supplements to the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. Some of the magazine’s offerings clarify existing rules, explaining, for instance, that the warlock’s eldritch blast is a spell-like ability rather than an attack, and thus requires a standard action to use. Others provide new material for dungeon masters or DMs (the player responsible for inventing the imaginary world that the other players explore and adventure in) such as magic items or locales that could be inserted into their invented worlds.

Currently at least, the magazine is focused extensively on giving players a variety of new ways to define the characters that they play in their DM’s world. If you have the misfortune of never having played Dungeons & Dragons, there are two basic elements to this process. First, a player defines his or her character within the game rules: defining abilities like strength and intelligence, choosing a class (Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, etc.) and race (Elf, Dwarf, Half-Orc, Human). All of these decisions have a numerically defined impact that will, in concert with the rolling of the game’s famous, oddly-shaped dice, determine much of the character’s success or failure in critical moments throughout the game.

At the same time, pen-and-paper role-playing games provide players the chance to play roles – to invent a character in the sense of fiction – and Dragon helps players with this part, too. In sections like “Class Acts,” the magazine offer prompts to help players imagine the non-statistical parts of their character. For instance, according to the game Wizards have to carry spellbooks, which one might typically imagine as tomes of the big and dusty variety. This month’s Dragon proposes that players might instead use spellbooks that take the form of tattoos covering the wizard’s body, carvings on a wooden staff, or scraps woven into long braids of hair. None of these really change the nuts and bolts operation of the game’s rules, but they’re prompts that give players new avenues for imagining the look and fictional background of their character. Instead of Gandalf or Saruman, the wizard as scholar, a player might develop a tattooed punk of a wizard who wears his magic rings not around his finger, but through his nose. (Or elsewhere.)

In the interplay between statistical and non-statistical elements, the D&D player shapes his or her character in preparation for play. And while much of the narrative that will be associated with the character will develop out of the collaborative activity of playing the game, one of the goals and pleasures of these games is to create a sense of a complete character prior to the events that will unfold during the course of play. The idea is, at some level, that the player will be able to invent a character and thereafter answer the question “What would this character do in this situation?” It’s a kind of story that emphasizes coherent imagination and performance as its mode rather than a slow revelation or exploration of characters’ nature.

As a regular and enthusiastic reader of Dragon magazine who does not currently play Dungeons and Dragons, I’ve come to recognize this as pleasure of the magazine for me. In some ways its like reading a fiction magazine that only ever presents sketches of setting or character that are never set into motion. Or like reading a pleasantly casual guide for writers, designed to provoke rather than satisfy imaginative activity.

As a result, there are a variety of characters that I know because Dragon has prompted me to imagine them beyond the very limited scope in which they are presented. The expectation is that Dungeons and Dragons provides the venue to retranslate this imagination into a kind of productive activity – creating new worlds for other players or creating new kinds of characters to play in those worlds. But my non-playing experience with Dragon has helped me recognize – by the way it distills out character and setting – the ways in which I most pleasurably engage in more traditional modes of cultural expression:

A kind of daydream, a way of thinking that might be described by what children are imagined to do when they “use their imagination,” to run off in all directions, taking just enough frame to give shape to a potentially endless improvisation that both reaffirms and reinvents the fictional universe of play.

It’s my affection for this mode of imagination, I suppose, that has led me to find such affinity with and affection for the writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who would have been, I do not doubt, an awesome D&D player. In The Marble Faun (also the source of this post's title), Hawthorne's narrator lauds the power of the painter’s sketch for its intimate expression and ability to provoke imagination:

It is, I think, the sketch I love best, and 6 films later it’s pretty obvious that the sketch is what George Lucas can best produce. It’s also probably an unavoidable conclusion that the “finished picture” of Episodes I -III were bad, and thus apt to confuse, stupefy, disenchant, and dishearten fellow admirers of the sketch that is the Star Wars universe. For the same reasons, I suppose, that I read Dragon magazine articles and imagine characters in a game I’ll never play, though I was disappointed by the innumerable failings of Revenge of the Sith my disappointment in the “finished picture” couldn’t outweigh my delight in the glimpses the film gave of the sketch of the Star Wars universe whose suggestive lines and gaps have given me a place to play for almost as long as Dragon has given its readers the same.

There have been a number of high-profile responses to Amnesty International’s annual report of human rights abuses, specifically to the allegations of human rights abuses conducted by Americans on prisoners at the U.S. Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and suggestions that the U.S. is in some ways responsible for an upsurge in human rights violations across the globe. Bush called it absurd, Cheney was offended, and Rumsfeld called it reprehensible.

What struck me about these reactions (after I got passed what is, I hope, the coincidence that these precise words describe my feelings on most days for the men who uttered them) was the way each response managed to dismiss and deflect the substance of the report. Also striking was the way each reaction could be reduced to a single word – absurd, offensive, reprehensible. These are words that typically dismiss claims on the basis of something other than reason - no one called the report inaccurate, for example. And unlike “inaccurate,” absurd, offensive, and reprehensible are words that are inflammatory - they are somehow spectacular and distracting in themselves.

Bush: “Absurd!”

In what seems to be Bush’s black-and-white understanding of all things, because the U.S. promotes freedom around the world, it can not also be guilty of human rights abuses. For him these are circles in a Venn diagram that just don’t overlap, and since he’s drawn the diagram, that logic seems to be OK with him.

 
(And did he really say disassemble instead of dissemble? And then define dissemble? I haven’t heard these remarks made earlier in the week at a Rose Garden press conference, so I don't know which word he pronounced, but it’s harder for me to imagine that “disassemble” is a typo than it is a malapropism. In either case, it adds a degree of absurdity to the president's remarks.)

Cheney: “Offended!”

Cheney seems to follow the same mode of reasoning as Bush - the U.S. can’t possibly be a violator of human rights, such a suggestion can’t be taken seriously. Like Bush, he finds the allegations absurd, but rather than say it’s absurd, Cheney says it’s offensive. He takes it personally.

 
Rumsfeld: “Reprehensible!”

For Rumsfeld, the argument is the same. Because the U.S. does good, the U.S. can not also do bad. But this is the man for whom the photographic evidence of human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib hit so deeply that he tendered his resignation (which, of course, wasn’t accepted by the president. A resignation from someone as competent as Rumsfeld was absurd!). But as Rumsfeld turns the focus to the comparison of Guantanamo to the Gulag, his remarks turn away from the report to its inflated rhetoric. What “cannot be excused,” that is what is worthy of reprehension, is the comparison, the analogy. And for Rumsfeld, “those who make such outlandish charges lose any claim to objectivity or seriousness.” Hence, we needn't pay any attention to Amnesty International and their specious arguments.

 
What all of these comments leave out, what most wire reporters have managed to remind their readers, is that when it comes to other countries’ violations of human rights abuses our government tends to take Amnesty International seriously. At the beginning of the war in Iraq, for example, Rumsfeld often cited Amnesty International’s account of human rights violations by Saddam Hussein. And the State Department’s annual report of human rights violations usually quotes Amnesty International on abuses in other countries.

But when it comes to allegations of human rights violations by the U.S., especially in connection with the “war on terror,” Amnesty International has no credibility. This leads me to wonder what kind of organization could be in a position to monitor the U.S.? Who would a Rumsfeld, a Cheney, or a Bush choose to report objectively on possible human rights violations by our country?

Assistant Secretary of State Michael Kozak offers this option: “The reason we don't do a report on ourselves is the same reason you wouldn't write investigative reports about your own finances or something; it wouldn't have any credibility. Somebody else needs to do that. It's not that we're against being scrutinized, and indeed we are scrutinized by many other organizations: Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International.”

Yesterday was graduation day at the university where I teach, and Sunday will be graduation day at my alma mater. I suppose most places call it Commencement; it is, in many ways, the flip side of Memorial Day. Still, amidst the celebration and forward-looking optimism that rules the day, there is the melancholy of endings. I kept my distance from the event and the other activities leading up to it, but the signs of it are hard to avoid. Clumps of parents and their offspring wandering the campus, the handful of fancy restaurants crowded deep into the night, school colors in store windows—the pomp and circumstance is heightened by the fact that, here, commencement comes at the end of reunion weekend. This is a school with very deep pockets, and the alumni who swarm the campus walk around as if inspecting family property that they’re returning to. After all, they do have a lifelong stake in the place; isn’t that what alumni are for? For those who are both alumni and parents, it must be quite a pridefest. On my walk home, I passed by all the cars lined up outside dorm rooms, ready to load up luggage and drive the new graduates home. Lots of minivans and SUVs, as you can imagine, and luxury brands (Mercedes, Audi) parked next to more humble makes and models. I wondered, as I was walking, if the parents or the students noted these and other differences of class and status, the various and more or less subtle markers that are visible despite the uniformity of caps and gowns and official diplomas that united the graduating class just a few hours before. The ritual must resonate differently for those for whom the event isn’t an inevitability or a family tradition. My thoughts lingered on the parents; what did this day mean to them? A couple of weeks ago, my mother gave me the following photograph: 1981, my sixth grade graduation, the first of four—the commencement of commencements. <%image(20050601-graduation.jpg|738|518|Graduation Day, 1981)%> We didn’t have caps and gowns; instead, we were instructed to wear white tops and dark blue bottoms (skirts for girls, pants for boys). I was told to deliver a speech; I believe I delivered the expected homilies. I have other photographs from the same day, and in one of them, I look even less happy than in this one. (Maybe it was those glasses!) It wasn’t sadness about saying goodbye to friends or anything like that. My closest friends had already moved away by my last year at P.S. 120, so leaving the place was no hardship. No, I think I was reacting to the symbolic weight of the occasion and feeling burdened by it. My parents’ uncontainable pride, their own expectations about what the day meant and how I should comport myself, such things tended to make me grumpy. I assume this was the case in 1981 because a similar unhappiness infected my college graduation years later. As I recall, my father wanted me to keep my gown zippered up and my cap on for a little longer so he could take more pictures; I wanted to be done with it and hang out with my friends, so I refused. So trivial, and yet, I know it hurt my father. I had a tendency to do things like that, to disappoint my parents’ desire to share in my accomplishments, to deflect their affection and attention because I didn’t feel up to the task of bearing such offerings, of deserving them. I kept rewriting my parents’ plans for me, all the while trying to make up the difference some other way. Perhaps for most, graduation day is an unalloyed happiness, good feelings all around. If so, more power to ‘em. And perhaps my ambivalence about commencement is just a product of my own idiosyncratic experience. On the other hand, it seems that any important ritual, especially the happy ones, has an emotional undertow that can catch us off guard, because (to mix my metaphors a bit) everyone arrives with a slightly different script in hand.