Fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR. I must say I am grateful to the MSM for giving me so much insight for the past couple of decades into my real psychological state. Instead of the easily stokable, twitching, bulging-eyed mass of fears that I now know myself to be, I would still labor under the self-delusion that I tend toward the phlegmatic and deliberative in my reactions. The thing I haven't quite figured out yet, though, is how people like me can be the most boring, unemotional, dull, grey, non-vibrant creatures in the universe, stunted by logic and reason, desperately in need of jazzing up by the presence of more exuberant types, and at the same time these seething volcanoes of primitive passions, barely able to make sense of the world in terms more complex and nuanced than kill or be killed. Help me out here, oh MSM sages.
April 23, 2013
Fear and Hate
Commenter Rohan Swee replies to the Washington Post editorial "Lawmakers stoking fear of immigrants:"
NYT: Tamerlan "conservative," anti-liberal, and (horrors) anti-MLK
Anecdotes suggest that Mr. Tsarnaev became more religious in the last several years and may have embraced more conservative Islamic ideas.
On Monday, a spokesman for the Islamic Society of Boston, a Cambridge mosque, said Mr. Tsarnaev disrupted a talk there in January, insulting the speaker and accusing him of deviating from Islam by comparing the Prophet Muhammad to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was the second time he had disrupted an event at the mosque because he felt that its religious message was too liberal, said the spokesman, Yusufi Vali, according to a report in The Boston Globe.
Jihad against stereotypes leaves Onion unfunny
From The Onion:
Study: Majority Of Americans Not Informed Enough To Stereotype Chechens
WASHINGTON—Following FBI reports this morning that the suspects implicated in Monday’s Boston Marathon bombing are of Chechen descent, efforts to thoughtlessly stereotype the alleged terrorists were impeded by the majority of Americans’ lack of basic knowledge about Chechnya or the Chechen people, a new study has confirmed. “Our research shows that, while many Americans would like nothing more than to make sweeping, insensitive generalizations about these two individuals based purely on their ethnic identity, this process is largely impeded by the fact that 9 out of 10 Americans truly know next to nothing about Chechnya, including even the very barest details of what or where Chechnya is,” said lead researcher Dr. Tim Kinane, adding that a majority of American citizens are almost totally unaware of Chechen history and culture, how to locate Chechnya on a map, whether Chechnya is a country or a city or a region, or that a person from Chechnya is called a Chechen. “Clinical trials show that most individuals will make brief, fumbling attempts to stereotype Chechens based on what little they know about Russians, but eventually drop the subject entirely after running out of anything to say within seconds.” Kinane’s team was able to confirm, however, that once research subjects were told Chechnya is a predominantly Muslim region, they were “usually pretty good to go from there.”
It's not as if Hollywood doesn't employ Chechen stereotypes: There are vicious Chechen gangsters in The Dark Knight, Eastern Promises, and The Other Guys, all pretty good movies.
It's just that The Onion is now cowardly.
April 22, 2013
Washington Post: "Lawmakers stoking fear of immigrants"
Lawmakers stoking fear of immigrants
By Editorial Board, Monday, April 22, 4:44 PM
CYNICS IN CONGRESS, eager to derail landmark legislation to overhaul the nation’s broken immigration system, have seized on last week’s events in Boston as a pretext to slow momentumon the issue. In the process, they may unwittingly provide a push for the very bill they hope to derail.
With scant regard for the actual immigration status of the bombing suspects, who came to this country legally as minors, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) nonetheless framed the attacks in Boston in the context of the debate over immigration. ...
Just what flaws in the immigration system are the senators talking about? The failure to divine the future and predict that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was a teenager when his family immigrated, and his surviving brother, Dzhokhar, who was 9, might become radicalized years after arriving? ...
From what is publicly known, if any governmental failure allowed the suspects to slip through the cracks — and that’s far from certain at this point — it was an intelligence failure, not an immigration failure.
To preserve immigration, we must build the Panopticon Surveillance State. To continue to invite the world, we must invade the world.
All of which will provide even more jobs for subscribers in the Washington Post's home delivery zone.
NYT: "Boston Marathon should prompt Americans to reflect on whether we do an adequate job"
A New York Times op-ed:
Immigrant Kids, Adrift
By MARCELO SUÁREZ-OROZCO and CAROLA SUÁREZ-OROZCO
LOS ANGELES
THE alleged involvement of two ethnic Chechen brothers in the deadly attack at the Boston Marathon should prompt Americans to reflect on whether we do an adequate job assimilating immigrants who arrive in the United States as children or teenagers.
In 1997, we started a large-scale, five-year study of newly arrived immigrants, ages 9 to 14, in 20 public middle and high schools in Boston, Cambridge, Mass., and the San Francisco Bay Area. Our participants came from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean; many fled not only poverty but also strife, in countries like Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Haiti. Over five years, we interviewed more than 400 students, as well as parents and teachers. We gathered academic records, test scores and measures of psychological well-being.
The two brothers accused in the Boston bombings — Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who was killed on Friday, and his brother, Dzhokhar, 19, who was captured later that day — were around 15 and 8, respectively, when they immigrated. Both attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin, that city’s only public high school. They were not part of our study, but they fit the demographic profile of the subjects of our research: birth to families displaced by war or strife, multiple-stage (including back-and-forth) migration, language difficulties and entry into tough urban environments where gangs and crime are temptations.
When asked “what do you like most about being here?” an 11-year-old Haitian boy in Cambridge told us, “There is less killing here.” His response was notably succinct, but not unique.
A Salvadoran 10-year-old whose family had narrowly escaped death squads recounted intense loneliness. When a firecracker was set off in his working-class Cambridge neighborhood, he plunged into the arms of a stunned researcher.
A 12-year-old girl whose family fled chaos in Guatemala for the Bay Area similarly turned inward. She lamented being “encerrada” (locked in) because of gang violence in her new community.
Not surprisingly, students from strife-torn areas were more likely than others to report psychological symptoms like anxiety, depression and trouble concentrating and sleeping.
Many newcomer students attend tough urban schools that lack solidarity and cohesion. In too many we found no sense of shared purpose, but rather a student body divided by race and ethnicity, between immigrants and the native born, between newcomers and more acculturated immigrants. Only 6 percent of the participants could name a teacher as someone they would go to with a problem; just 3 percent could identify a teacher who was proud of them.
When asked what Americans thought about immigrants of their national origin, 65 percent of the students provided negative adjectives. “Most Americans think we are lazy, gangsters, drug addicts, that only come to take their jobs away,” a 14-year-old boy in the Bay Area told us. We also found that many educators, already overwhelmed by the challenges of inner-city teaching, considered immigrant parents uninformed and uninvolved.
Having just one friend who spoke English fluently was a strong predictor of positive academic outcomes. Yet more than a third of the students in our study reported that they had little or no opportunity even to interact with native-born students, much less make close friends.
Our research also confirmed that kids who arrive during their high school years, as Tamerlan Tsarnaev did, face bad odds, especially if they experienced interrupted schooling, family instability and traumatic dislocations back home. ...
Taking in what Emma Lazarus called the “wretched refuse,” including asylum seekers like the Tsarnaev brothers, without providing a scaffold of support undermines the promise of America.
America as the trash dump of the world.
While no doubt we should send more money to Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Carola Suárez-Orozco to do more of whatever it is they do, it sure sounds like it would be better for everybody else involved -- both foreign children and the American people -- to admit fewer immigrants.
WaPo: "Marco Rubio, Salesman"
It's a commonplace that modern political journalism focuses too much on personalities and horse race analysis rather than on the real world impact of proposed policies. Less widely noticed is that political journalism is increasingly turning into "marketing campaign criticism," with reporters obsessing over how seamless are attempts to manipulate voters, with the more sheen the better.
For example, from the Washington Post:
Marco Rubio, salesman
Posted by Sean Sullivan on April 22, 2013 at 10:41 am
Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio has embarked on a high-risk, high-reward mission. His goal? Convince conservatives to support the bipartisan immigration reform measure he and his “Gang of Eight” colleagues have drafted. The success or failure of his effort will go a long way toward determining both whether reform passes, and where Rubio fits into the conservative movement going forward.
As last week showed, Rubio has his work cut out for him.
Since signing off two weeks ago on the bill that offers a path to citizenship to illegal immigrants, bolsters border security and creates a new guest-worker program, Rubio has been taking to the airwaves to defend the measure against detractors on the political right, who have complained the bill offers “amnesty” and is being jammed through by liberal Democrats.
On Thursday, Rubio launched a Web site designed to dispel myths about the bill and took his case to a crucial medium in the conservative sphere, talk radio.
“I don’t understand why we’re doing something that the Democrats are salivating over,” declared conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh on his Thursday show, adding: “I’m having trouble seeing how this benefits Republicans.”
Rubio responded that the imperative for action is twofold. The current immigration system is broken, he contended, and the nation’s laws are not enforced. “So, for those two reasons alone, we have to do something,” said the senator.
Limbaugh, who in a January interview with Rubio seemed warmer to reform, pressed him about securing the border and questioned whether it was politically wise to clear a path for new Hispanic voters, whom data show tend to align more closely with the Democratic Party. And in interviews with four other conservative talkers, Rubio failed to win over the hosts.
He’s also had to push back against claims in the conservative blogosphere that the bill would give immigrants with work visas free cell phones, and deal with protests from tea party activists.
Rubio’s most crucial task, Republican strategists say, is to win the arguments on border security and the path to citizenship.
“I think the biggest challenge, and what will ultimately decide this issue, is convincing conservatives that real border security is going to be a part of any package and that there are strong accountability measures and enforcement mechanisms,” said Florida Republican strategist Tim Baker.
Added Rick Wilson, another Florida-based GOP strategist: “If he successfully explains border security — the provisions of which are really quite remarkable — and the steepness of the path to citizenship, I think he can sway conservative audiences.”
Rubio appeared well aware of his biggest challenges, addressing conservatives directly during a “Gang of Eight” press conference last week.
“Let me close with one final point to my fellow Americans who share my commitment to limited government and free enterprise, who helped elect me in 2010,” Rubio said. “I would just remind them, America is a nation of immigrants.” To those worried about “amnesty,” Rubio offered a counterargument: “Leaving things the way they are, that’s the real amnesty.” ...
If Rubio fails to win sufficient GOP support and the bill dies, it will be a blow to the political standing of the politician viewed widely as one of the GOP’s best options for the 2016 presidential race. On the other hand, if he succeeds, then his stock in the party is likely to soar to even greater heights.
Politically, having Rubio on the “Gang of Eight” helps both Democrats and Republicans. For Democrats who have long clamored for reform, having a stamp of approval from one of the country’s most prominent conservatives — who is Hispanic, no less — is a huge plus. And for Rubio, taking part in the effort is an opportunity to be the most prominent Republican to take on an issue many see as a necessity in order to repair GOP’s relations with the Hispanic community.
“Marco is uniquely situated to do this and he and his team have obviously prepared,” said Florida Republican strategist Ana Navarro, an early supporter of Rubio in his 2010 Senate campaign. “They understand that if misperceptions about this bill are created early and stick, the bill dies and he is whacking at every attempt to mislead.”
After all, if Rubio can’t sell the conservative base on immigration reform, it would be hard to argue that any Republican can.
The 20,000 foot political question as this debate unfolds is whether having the ideal Republican on board as a chief advocate is enough to help the pro-reform crowd break through to skeptical conservatives, who hold sway in the Senate, and wield even more clout in the GOP-controlled House. So far, it isn’t clear that it will be.
The notion that Rubio is the ideal salesman to Republicans for adding lots of Hispanics to the voting rolls is very common, but doesn't anybody notice that a better salesman would be somebody more disinterested? Obviously, Rubio wants to add Hispanics because he is Hispanic and, relative at least to his non-Hispanic Republican rivals, this will help his career. Why in the world should I therefore listen to him?
In general, the concepts of "conflict of interest" versus "disinterestedness" seem to be disappearing from memory. The Democrats have an interest in electing a new people, as does Rubio, both both are unquestioningly presented as the heroes in this drama. Disinterestedness must be some old dead white European male thing we'll have left behind in the rush to our diverse future.
Pushkin on a Chechen not acting Checheny
Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) was the first world-famous Russian writer.
Yet, his work is notoriously hard to translate. Nabokov, arguing that translating the literary pleasures of Pushkin out of Russian was hopeless, labored for years on an absolutely literal (i.e., not literary) translation of Pushkin's long poem Eugene Onegin as an aid to students learning Russian: it was printed with the left hand page in Pushkin's Russian and Nabokov's translation into English on the right hand page. Edmund O. Wilson's attack on Nabokov's translation set off a famous literary feud.
Yet, his work is notoriously hard to translate. Nabokov, arguing that translating the literary pleasures of Pushkin out of Russian was hopeless, labored for years on an absolutely literal (i.e., not literary) translation of Pushkin's long poem Eugene Onegin as an aid to students learning Russian: it was printed with the left hand page in Pushkin's Russian and Nabokov's translation into English on the right hand page. Edmund O. Wilson's attack on Nabokov's translation set off a famous literary feud.
Chechen feuds, however, tend to be less literary and more literal. Chechens acting Checheny fascinated Russian writers, including Pushkin. From Margaret Ziolkowski's book Alien Visions: The Chechens and the Navajos in Russian and American Literature:
Another, later, narrative poem by Pushkin, "Tazit" (1829-30), is devoted to the conflict between conventional Chechen mores and an inexplicably more enlightened consciousness. "Tazit" tells of a young Chechen who returns to his aul and his father, Gasub, after thirteen years ... Tazit returns at a crucial moment, immediately after the slaying of his older brother, whose death he is expected to avenge in accordance with the strict requirements of customary law.
The young man proves a disappointment to his father, though, for he is incapable of fulfilling any of the traditional expectations of Chechen culture. In fairy tale-like manner, Tazit has three opportunities to demonstrate his commitment to Chechen ways, but on each occasion his failure to do so is more pronounced.
First, he refuses to take advantage of the opportunity to leap from a boulder and rob an Armenian merchant. ...
Nor can he explain why he does not capture an escaped slave with a lasso.
Finally, and most cravenly from Gasub's perspective, Tazit does not chop off the head of his brother's murderer when he has the chance. "The murderer was alone, covered with wounds, unarmed," he squeamishly objects, and his appalled father can only conclude: "You're not a Chechen -- you're an old woman / A coward, a slave, you're an Armenian!"
Gasub apparently has his own set of ethnic stereotypes.
The Atlantic: American stereotyping of Muslims and Chechens prolongs terrorism
A central theme here at iSteve is that the contemporary liberal worldview is pro-ignorance.
From The Atlantic:
The Boston Bombers Were Muslim: So?
Why we turn to labels in times of crisis -- and why we should stop
MEGAN GARBER APR 19 2013, 5:49 PM ET
Here is what we know -- or what we think we know -- about Tamerlan Tsarnaev: He was a boxer and a "gifted athlete." He did not smoke or drink -- "God said no alcohol" -- and didn't take his shirt off in public "so girls don't get bad ideas." He was "very religious." He had a girlfriend who was half-Portuguese and half-Italian. In 2009, he was arrested after allegedly assaulting his girlfriend. He was "a nice guy." He was also a "cocky guy." He was also a "a normal guy." He loved the movie Borat. He wanted to become an engineer, but his first love was music: He studied it in school, playing the piano and the violin. He didn't have American friends, he said -- "I don't understand them" -- but he also professed to appreciate the U.S. ("America has a lot of jobs .... You have a chance to make money here if you are willing to work"). He was training, as a boxer, to represent the U.S. in the Olympics.
We know, or we think we do, that Tamerlan's brother, Dzhokar, is "very quiet." Having graduated from the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School -- a public school known for its diverse student body -- he received a scholarship from the City of Cambridge. He went to his prom, with a date and in a tux. He had friends. He posed with them, smiling, at graduation. He tweeted pictures of cats. He skateboarded around his Cambridge neighborhood. His personal priorities, he has said, are "career and money." He is a second-year medical student at UMass Dartmouth. He is seemingly Chechan by birth and Muslim by religion, and has lived in the U.S. since 2002. He is "a true angel." He has uncles in Maryland. He called one of them yesterday and said, "Forgive me."
In times like this, we tend to emphasize adjectives rather than verbs.
These are provisional facts. They are the products of the chaos of breaking news, and may well also be the products of people who stretch the truth -- or break it -- in order to play a role in the mayhem. They are very much subject to change. But they are also reminders of something it's so easy to forget right now, especially for the many, many members of the media -- professional and otherwise -- who currently find themselves under pressure of live air or deadline: Tamerlan and Dzhokar Tsarnaev are not simply "the Marathon bombers," or "murderers," or "Chechens," or "immigrants," or "Muslims." They might turn out to be all of those things. They might not. The one thing we know for sure is that they are not only those things. They had friends and families and lives. They had YouTube accounts and Twitter feeds. They went to class. They went to work. They came home, and they left it again.
And then they did something unimaginable.
Not all that unimaginable if you are familiar with Chechens, who have, after all, been the subject of some of the greatest writers in the history of Russian literature.
That the brothers Tsarnaev are more than the labels we would hastily apply to them is obvious, I know. Then again, labels are especially tempting amidst the twin confusions of breaking news and municipal lockdown. Stories like the one that has now been shorthanded as the "Boston Bombing," or the "Marathon Bombing" -- among them "Aurora," "Newtown," "Columbine" -- have their cycles. And we have entered the time in the cycle when, alleged culprits identified, our need for answers tends to merge with our need for justice. We seek patterns, so that we may find in them explanations. We confuse categories -- "male," "Muslim" -- with cause. We focus on contradictions: He had a girlfriend, and killed people. She was a mother, and a murderer. And we finally take refuge in comforting binaries -- "dark-skinned" or "light-skinned," "popular" or "loner," "international" or "homegrown," "good" or "evil" -- because their neat lines and tidy boxes would seem to offer us a way to do the thing we most crave right now: to put things in their place.
The problem is that there is no real place for the Boston bombings and their aftermath, just as there was no real place for Aurora or Columbine or Newtown. Their events were, in a very literal sense, outliers: They are (in the U.S., at least) out of the ordinary.
But not in Chechnya, Dagestan, and other places within easy driving distance of Grozny.
They were the products of highly unusual sets of circumstances -- of complexity, rather than contradictions.
But we don't often treat them that way. ...
But it's that kind of conversion process -- people into People -- that led, this week, to the public fears that the bombers would turn out to be Muslim. It's the process that led, two days ago, to headlines like "In Boston Bombing, Muslims Hold Their Breath" and "For Muslim Americans, Boston Bombings Bring Added Anxiety" -- and that led, this morning, to stories about Muslim leaders now "fearing a backlash." The sad assumption carried in these reports is that Americans lack the intellectual equipment and moral imagination to tell the difference between an individual and a group. It's an assumption that has, in the past, occasionally proven valid.
Yet it's also symptomatic of a tendency, in the media and beyond it, to privilege caricatures over characters. Particularly when we have so much access to people's interior lives through social media -- this Twitter feed seems to be Dzhokar's, and it is revealing -- we have new license to think beyond categories (and metaphors, and stereotypes). We have new ways to bolster our categories -- "Muslim," "Chechen," "Causasian" -- with the many caveats they deserve. The Tsarnaev brothers may have been Muslim, and that circumstance may have, in part, motivated them in their actions on Monday. They may have been Chechen. They may have been male. But that was not all they were. Their lives were like all of ours: full of small incongruities that build and blend to drive us in different directions. ...
One day, the brothers left it for Boston. And to understand why they did that -- to have even a prayer of progressing towards a world where two more young men don't do that -- we have to embrace complexity.
Now this is the kind of intelligent-sounding boilerplate that gets churned out whenever anybody from a vibrant demographic does anything stereotypical. To extrude this kind of text, you don't have to actually know anything. In fact, the implicit message is fundamentally anti-knowledge: do not notice patterns, do not see what is in front of one's nose because one should be stabbing oneself in the eyeballs with Occam's Butterknife.
The liberal urge to know nothing appears to be increasing as learning becomes easier. Lately, I've been typing in search engines the names of world famous Russian writers along with words like "Chechen." I haven't yet found anything by Nabokov or Chekhov on Chechens, but, like Tolstoy and Lermontov, Solzhenitsyn wrote about them.
The Jamestown Foundation is in the misbegotten business of trying to bring Chechens to the United States as refugees, but here are some excerpts they've collected from Solzhenitsyn's works:
As the cycle of revenge and counter-revenge between Chechens and Russians continues to spiral downward, it is worthwhile to pause for a longer view. The greatest Russian nationalist of the 20th century, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, provided some occasional glimpses of the Chechens in his classic of three decades ago, "The Gulag Archipelago." In Part V he described a 1949 escape by two Slav prisoners from a labor camp in Kazakhstan. Desperate for food, they stole a cow from a village but were caught.
In Solzhenitsyn's words, "They were taken to the village and locked up. The people shouted that they should be shot out of hand and no mercy shown to them. But an investigating officer arrived from the district center with the picture sent around to assist the nationwide search, and addressed the villagers. 'Well done!' he said. 'These aren't thieves you've caught, but dangerous political criminals.' Suddenly there was a complete change of attitude. The owner of the cow, a Chechen as it turned out, brought the prisoners bread, mutton, and even some money, collected by the Chechens. 'What a pity,' he said. 'You should have come and told me who you were and I'd have given you everything you wanted!' (There is no reason to doubt it; that's how the Chechens are.) Kudla burst into tears. After so many years of savagery, he couldn't stand sympathy."
In his detailed account of the 1954 revolt at the Kengir labor camp in Kazakhstan, Solzhenitsyn observed that "there is more than one side to the Chechens. People among whom they live--I speak from my experience in Kazakhstan--find them hard to get along with; they are rough and arrogant, and they do not conceal their dislike of Russians. But the men of Kengir only had to display independence and courage--and they immediately won the good will of the Chechens! When we feel that we are not sufficiently respected, we should ask ourselves whether we are living as we should."
Comparing the various ethnic groups exiled to the most remote corners of the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn concluded that "there was one nation which would not give in, would not acquire the mental habits of submission--and not just individual rebels among them, but the whole nation to a man. These were the Chechens....They had been treacherously snatched from their home, and from that day they believed in nothing....The years went by--and they owned just as little as they had to begin with. The Chechens never sought to please, to ingratiate themselves with the bosses; their attitude was always haughty and indeed openly hostile. They treated the laws on universal education and the state curriculum with contempt, and to save them from corruption would not send their little girls to school, nor indeed all of their boys....They were capable of rustling cattle, robbing a house, or sometimes simply taking what they wanted by force. As far as they were concerned, the local inhabitants, and those exiles who submitted so readily, belonged more or less to the same breed as the bosses. They respected only rebels."
Solzhenitsyn ended his account of a Chechen vendetta:
"In our books and schools we Europeans read and pronounce only words of scorn for this savage law, this cruel and senseless slaughter. But it seems that this slaughter is not so senseless: it does not stop but strengthens the mountain nations."
On a Saturday, I posted a Youtube clip of Chechens' driving. It turns out Solzhenitsyn was struck by something similar:
"... in the constant motion of the automobile they found the satisfaction of their passion for trick riding, in the opportunities open to drivers the satisfaction of their passion for thieving."
In carjacking a Mercedes, then stopping at a gas station to pick up some snacks, which led to them getting into a car chase in which they threw pipe bombs out the windows injuring several cops, followed by a spectacular firefight, the Bomb Brothers were living the Chechen Dream.
Slate: Bomb Brothers show Americans not embracing enough of immigrants
In the comments to my last post about how the Bomb Bros. must have been provoked by all the uneducated right-wing intolerance of their vibrant diversity that they were exposed to daily in Cambridge, MA, reader Kaz challenges:
Steve, is the MSM on any consistent basis, claiming that the bombers perpetrated these attacks because they felt persecuted?
Slate to the rescue!
The Reluctant American
What the novel and the new movie The Reluctant Fundamentalist can teach us about the Boston bombers.
By Katie Roiphe|Posted Monday, April 22, 2013, at 11:41 AM
Those obsessively poring over emerging news about the Boston bombers should take a break from their iPhones and laptops and newspapers and read Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, (and see Mira Nair’s film version out later this week). The novel will go further in answering the general bewilderment about the Tsarnaev brothers than the little snippets of their lives we have so far, in answering the bigger mystery: “Why did young men who grew up and studied here, as part of our communities and our country, resort to such violence?” as Obama put it.
There was, as always, a scramble of people who knew them who are “shocked.” The slivers of their pasts seem to place them in the position of children of opportunity, the younger one, Dzhokhar, went to Cambridge Ringe and Latin with a scholarship. Photos show Dzhokhar in his prom clothes, in a red satin vest in a tumble of other boys in a goofy ordinary American high school moment. How does he go in a couple of years from this moment to the one in which he puts nails and ball bearings in a pressure cooker to injure and maim innocent strangers, including children?
The Reluctant Fundamentalist tells the story of a Pakistani kid, Changez, who comes to Princeton University on financial aid and then gets a job at an exclusive McKinsey-like firm where he rises quickly to the very top and then begins to question his new American life. The book points out that the experience of many people who come to America and think of staying is not straightforwardly one of success, or even aspiration or desire. The immigration story, which is in many ways a beautiful one, and is central to America’s idea of itself, is also one of violence. There is a rage involved in assimilation, a radical, dangerous rift in identity that we don’t usually like to think about or reckon with. This is what Hamid writes about, the minor shames, the small denouncements of the past, the sharp conflict between an old identity and a new one, the collision of comfort and discomfort in an adopted country that add up to something troubling and volatile (Though Changez does not turn to violence, he does turn into a vehemently anti-American professor back in Lahore, Pakistan.) ...
The novel (and the film version perhaps even more directly) challenges American culture to take a careful look at itself. One of the issues raised by the novel is that the acceptance we think we have for people of other cultures, the warm embrace that liberals, at least feel that they are giving, is not as absolute, as untroubled, as blanketly wonderful, as we think. After Changez grows a beard to connect, in some way, to Pakistan and goes back to his office, a black co-worker says to him, “you need to be careful. This whole corporate collegiality veneer only goes so deep. Believe me.”
The novel is important not for any single message it has to offer, but for a clarity that could be useful in an emotionally fraught conversation, a careful reckoning of the particular variety of welcome we offer to children from abroad. The issue of immigration, or of our relation to foreigners living here, is too subtle, too nuanced, too delicate for newspapers, which is why we need to look to novelists. To understand the Boston bombers, we need also to understand and be honest about ourselves, the ways in which we both take in and don’t take in people from other countries, the trickier side of the American dream.
If only the Tsarnaev Bros. had lived near more liberal intellectuals
We have to ask ourselves: What did we do wrong? How did American intolerance alienate the Tsarnaev Brothers? Perhaps the political climate was not welcoming enough, too conservative, ignorant, xenophobic, and right-wing. A quick search shows that Cambridge, MA was only the second most pro-Obama town in Massachusetts:
Obama's best towns
Of the 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts, Barack Obama did the best in these 10.
City or town | Obama votes | Total votes | Obama % |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provincetown | 2,121 | 2,380 | 89.1% |
| Cambridge | 41,991 | 48,787 | 86.1% |
| Aquinnah | 251 | 297 | 84.5% |
| Lawrence | 18,240 | 21,884 | 83.3% |
| Amherst | 12,316 | 14,883 | 82.8% |
| Northampton | 13,110 | 15,915 | 82.4% |
| Shutesbury | 1,028 | 1,250 | 82.2% |
| Somerville | 28,467 | 34,622 | 82.2% |
| Pelham | 728 | 887 | 82.1% |
| Great Barrington | 2,916 | 3,587 | 81.3% |
April 21, 2013
Diversity is their strength in Dagestan
From the NYT:
Search for Home Led Suspect to Land Marred by Strife
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and ANDREW ROTH
MAKHACHKALA, Russia — Tamerlan Tsarnaev had already found religion by the time he landed in Dagestan, a combustible region in the North Caucasus that has become the epicenter of a violent Islamic insurgency in Russia and a hub of jihadist recruitment. What he seemed to be yearning for was a home.
... “When he came, he talked about religion,” said his aunt, Patimat Suleimanova, who saw him a few days after he arrived in January 2012.
The reunion with his aunt and uncle in their third-floor apartment on Timiryazeva Street was a happy one, marked by contrasts with his life in America. “He said, ‘The people here are completely different. They pray different,’ ” Ms. Suleimanova recalled in an interview Sunday.
“Listen to the call to prayer — the azan — that they play from the mosque,” Mr. Tsarnaev said, according to his aunt. “It makes me so happy, to hear it from all sides, that you can always hear it — it makes me want to go to the mosque.”
“What, you can’t hear the mosques there in America?” she recalled asking, and he replied, “Something like that.”
Mr. Tsarnaev stayed for six months in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, where he had spent most of his teenage years and where his parents had returned to live after several years in the United States.
... This continuing strife between Islamic militants and the Russian authorities receives little attention outside Russia, but it has yielded a long string of terror attacks, many of them in Dagestan, that have caused many more deaths than the three in Boston. It is a cycle of bloodshed that Mr. Tsarnaev would have experienced close at hand when he was living here.
... According to his aunt, he was born in Kalmykia, a barren patch of Russian territory along the Caspian Sea. His family moved to Kyrgyzstan, an independent former Soviet republic in Central Asia, then to Chechnya, the turbulent republic in the Russian Federation that is his father’s ancestral home. Then to Dagestan. And then to America, where Tamerlan finished high school, married and had a daughter, now a toddler.
Wherever he went, though, he did not quite seem to fit in. He was a Chechen who had never really lived in Chechnya, a Russian citizen whose ancestors were viciously oppressed by the Russian government, a green-card holder in the United States whose path to citizenship there seemed at least temporarily blocked. ...
Two weeks after his arrival, another grenade was tossed in a residential area. It was apparently meant to draw the police into an ambush, because several minutes later, in a pattern eerily similar to the marathon bombing, a larger bomb hidden in a garbage pail went off, killing a small child and injuring another.
And so it went all the time he was in Dagestan: two or three deadly bombings a month on average, constant “special operations” in which the federal police killed dozens of people they said were Muslim insurgents, and numerous other attacks. ...
They twice traveled together to Chechnya to visit relatives, the father said, but he otherwise stayed near home.
Dagestan is a place where the graffiti outside one mosque says, “Victory or Paradise.”
Living in such circumstances may have had an impact on Mr. Tsarnaev even if he did not join any organized militant group, said Mairbek Vatchagaev, president of the Association of Caucasus Studies in Paris. He noted that the violence is worse in Dagestan than in Chechnya or Ingushetia, neighboring republics that are also predominantly Muslim and have a history of violence.
Mr. Vatchgaev and others noted the numerous crosscurrents in Mr. Tsarnaev’s profile: the sleeping-in that could conflict with morning prayers, for instance, or his desire to leave the United States but also to become an American citizen. Mr. Tsarnaev applied for citizenship last fall, three months after returning from Dagestan and around the time it was granted to his younger brother, Dzhokhar.
Something, it seems, may have driven Tamerlan Tsarnaev to violence, and Russian news outlets have reported that investigators are looking into connections he may have had with mosques known to promote extremist views.
From Wikipedia's article on Dagestan, some iSteveish sections:
The Republic of Dagestan (pron.: /dɑːɡɨˈstɑːn/ or /dæɡɨˈstæn/; Russian: Респу́блика Дагеста́н, Respublika Dagestan; also spelled Daghestan) is a federal subject (a republic) of Russia, located in the North Caucasus region. Its capital and the largest city is Makhachkala, located at the center of Dagestan on the Caspian Sea.
With a population of 2,910,249,[7] Dagestan is ethnically very diverse (it is Russia's most heterogeneous republic, where no ethnic group forms a majority) with several dozen ethnic groups and subgroups inhabiting the republic, most of which speak Caucasian and Turkic languages. Largest among these ethnic groups are the Avar, Dargin, Kumyk, Azeri, Lezgin, and Laks.[13] Ethnic Russians comprise about 4.5% of Dagestan's total population. ...
Dagestan has been a scene of low-level Islamic insurgency, occasional outbreaks of separatism, ethnic tensions and terrorism since the 1990s. According to International Crisis Group, the militant Islamist organization Shariat Jamaat is responsible for much of the violence.[16] Much of the tension is rooted in an internal Islamic conflict between traditional Sufi groups advocating secular government and more recently introduced Salafist teachers preaching the implementation of Sharia law in Dagestan....
The word Dagestan is of Turkic and Persian origin. Dağ means 'mountain' in Turkish, and -stan is a Sanskrit suffix meaning 'land'. The word Dagestan therefore means 'the land of mountains'.
Names for Dagestan [in the various languages spoken in Dagestan]
Aghul – Республика Дагъустан (Respublika Daɣustan)
Arabic – جمهورية داغستان (Jumhūrīyat Dāghistān)
Avar – Дагъистаналъул Республика (Daɣistanałul Respublika)
Azerbaijani – Дағыстан Республикасы / Dağıstan Respublikası
Chechen – Деxастан пачхьалкъ (Dexastan Pačxalqʼ)
Dargin – Дагъистанес Республика (Daɣistanes Respublika)
Kumyk – Дагъыстан Республикасы (Dağıstan Respublikası)
Lezgian – Дагъустандин Республика (Daɣustandin Respublika)
Lak – Дагъустаннал Республика (Daɣustannal Respublika)
Nogai – Дагъыстан Республикасы (Dağıstan Respublikası)
Persian – جمهوری داغستان (Jomhuriye Dâghestân)
Russian – Респу́блика Дагеста́н (Respublika Dagestan)
Rutul – Республика Дагъустан (Respublika Daɣustan)
Tabasaran – Дагъустан Республика (Daɣustan Respublika)
Tsakhur – Республика Дагъустан (Respublika Daɣustan)
Turkish – Dağıstan Cumhuriyeti ...
History
... The institution of heavy taxation, coupled with the expropriation of estates and the construction of fortresses (including Makhachkala), electrified highlanders into rising under the aegis of the Muslim Imamate of Dagestan, led by Ghazi Mohammed (1828–32), Gamzat-bek (1832–34) and Shamil (1834–59). This Caucasian War raged until 1864, when Shamil was captured and the Khanate of Avaristan was abolished. ...
As with its neighbors Georgia, Azerbaijan and Chechnya, Dagestan developed a renewed nationalist movement in the late 1980s. Dagestani nationalism, however, rested on very unstable foundations, as the republic was (and is) extremely multiethnic, with many of its regions being recent additions, and even the existence of a unified Dagestan was relatively new with little historical context (previously, Avaria had been a separate entity, and most areas were completely unrelated to any sort of centralizing government). Dagestan's new elite, composed overwhelmingly of Avars, Dargins and Russians founded and consolidated its power. To this day, Dagestan is a very troubled region. There are various underground Wahhabist/Islamist movements (some more moderate than others, there was also a constitutional Islamizationist party before it was banned), originating as early as the late 80s.
Dagestan's poor population, often displeased with the "official" clergy (who they deem as government puppets, either of the Dagestani government or of Russia), is occasionally drawn to these groups as a form or reaction against the government (not in the least because of the unifying power of the common Muslim religion in a highly multiethnic area paired with the promises of the Islamists to "end inequality, patriarchalism and corruptions of the true faith" paired with their occasional assistance to poor communities).
However, attraction to Islamism varies between sectors of the population. People from Southern Dagestan, poorer people, people with a lower education level and people from certain ethnic groups are more inclined to support Islamist tendencies.[citation needed] Whilst people from Northern Dagestan, Russians (who are not Muslim), Turkic peoples (who are often highly syncretic in their practice and often drawn instead to Turkic nationalism as a revolt against the authorities), more wealthy people, people from the hundred-or-so "governmental families", people with a higher education, and groups who are officially "not-native" to Dagestan (Russians, Azerbaijanis, Chechens, etc., regardless of actual nativeness they are not "titular groups") are less inclined.[citation needed] Separatism is also prominent: various groups resent the dominance of Dargins, Avars and Russians in government and revolt against this by calling Dagestan an artificial nation and demanding higher self-determination (i.e. secessionism). This is most noticeable among the Kumyks.[citation needed]
During the rectification of the Vuldronaii, the traveler came as a large and moving Torb. Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the Meketrex supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you! [citation needed]
Oh, wait, that last paragraph isn't from Wikipedia; it's Rick Moranis's prophecy about Gozer the Gozerian in Ghostbusters. Sorry. Back to Wikipedia:
In 1999, a group of Muslim fundamentalists from Chechnya, led by warlords Shamil Basayev and Ibn Al-Khattab, launched a military invasion of Dagestan, with the aim of creating an "independent Islamic State of Dagestan". Although Basayev and Khattab had expected that they would be welcomed as liberators, the Dagestanis instead saw them as occupiers and unwelcome religious fanatics, and the initial resistance against the invasion was provided by the Dagestani police, spontaneous militias and villagers.[citation needed] Once Russian military help arrived, the invaders were beaten and driven back to Chechnya. As a retaliation, Russian forces subsequently reinvaded Chechnya later that year.[citation needed]
Demographics
Because its mountainous terrain impedes travel and communication, Dagestan is unusually ethnically diverse, and still largely tribal. It is Russia's most heterogeneous republic. Unlike most other parts of Russia, Dagestan's population is rapidly growing.[18]
Population: 2,910,249 (2010 Census);[7] 2,576,531 (2002 Census);[19] 1,802,579 (1989 Census).[20]
So, Dagestan is demographically vibrant as well as diverse.
But how's that working out for Dagestan?
Seriously, Dagestan should stand as an object lesson to the DC-NY-Cambridge conventional wisdom about the benefits of multiculturalism. Everybody in Dagestan knows that diversity is their weakness. The lack of solidarity keeps the place futile and backward. So, the people of Dagestan look to rise above their diverse dysfunction, their lack of nationalism, through one of two larger concepts -- Russianism or Islamism.
Yet, Russianism and Islamism are the two things the neconservatives say they fear most.
Lindsey Graham weighs in
From Breitbart:
Two senators who have been pushing for comprehensive immigration reform defended their efforts on Sunday, after last week's Boston Marathon terror saga provoked new challenges for their new bill.
On Sunday, Crowley asked Sen. [Lindsey] Graham whether he would consider any amendments to the bill as a result of new security concerns. His response was that granting legal status to illegal immigrants would itself enable better monitoring of who they were, where they came from and why they had come.
"Now is the time to bring all of the eleven million out of the shadows and find out who they are," Graham said. ...
"What happened in Boston, and international terrorism, I think should urge us to act quicker, not slower, when it comes to getting the eleven million identified," he concluded.
Uh, Django had completed the Path to Citizenship, and Tamburlaine the Not Great had a green card.
No, the fundamental subject raised by the Bomb Brothers is: Who gets to choose who comes to America: immigrants or Americans? The entire marketing campaign has been framed around pushing the mindset that it's racist for Americans to try to choose who gets in. Instead of choosing, we should just take what we are given by the rest of the world and be grateful for their vibrant diversity. If you live in the Boston area and your windows have been rattling, well, that's just the vibrancy manifesting itself.
NYT: "Sweden's Closet Racists"
You can't make this stuff up. From the New York Times this weekend:
| Suspect No.2 in ten years? |
Sweden’s Closet Racists
By JONAS HASSEN KHEMIRI
Published: April 20, 2013
WELCOME to my body. Make yourself at home. From now on, we share skin, spine and nervous system. Here are our legs, which always want to run when we see a police car. Here are our hands, which always clench into fists when we hear politicians talk about the need for stronger borders, more internal ID checks, faster deportation of people without papers.
And these are our fingers, which recently wrote a very public letter to Sweden’s justice minister, Beatrice Ask, after she went on the radio to defend racial profiling of passengers on Stockholm’s subway.
On March 7, the minister told a nationwide audience: “One’s experience of ‘why someone has questioned me’ can of course be very subjective,” suggesting that racially profiled subway passengers were overreacting and that their anger was irrational. Without missing a beat, she continued, “There are some who have been previously convicted and feel that they are always questioned, even though you can’t tell by looking at a person that they have committed a crime.”
It was an interesting choice of words — “previously convicted.” Because that’s exactly what we are. All of us who are guilty until proved innocent. We Swedes who do not fit the outdated blond, blue-eyed stereotype of what a true Swede should look like. We whose personal experience makes us doubt our country’s international reputation of being a paradise, with equal opportunities for everyone.
We remember the shame and the slights.
Being 6 years old and walking toward passport control with Dad, who has sweaty hands, who clears his throat, who fixes his hair and shines up his shoes on the backs of his knees. All the pink-colored people are let by. But our dad is stopped. And we think, maybe it was by chance, until we see the same scene repeated year after year.
Being 7 and starting school and being told about society by a dad who was terrified even then that his outsiderness would be inherited by his children. He says, “When you look like we do, you must always be a thousand times better than everyone else if you don’t want to be refused.”
Being 8 and deciding to become the class’s most studious nerd, the world’s biggest brown-noser.
Being 9 and watching action films where dark men rape and kidnap, manipulate and lie, steal and abuse.
You mean like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?
From there, the essays goes so forth and so on.
Wikipedia details all the hideous brutality and shunning this half-Tunisian half-Swede has endured at the hands of the Blond Brutes of northern Europe:
Khemiri's debut novel, Ett öga rött (One Eye Red), was published in 2003. It was met with positive reviews from critics, sold over 200,000 copies in Sweden and became the best-selling novel of any category in 2004.[2]
Khemiri's second novel, Montecore: en unik tiger (Montecore - A Unique Tiger), received Sveriges Radio's Novel Prize (Sveriges Radios Romanpris) for the best Swedish novel of 2007.[3][4]
Khemiri's first play, Invasion!, was written for the Stockholm City Theatre. It was chosen for the 2007 Swedish Theatre Biennial and has been performed in France, Germany, the UK and Norway.[5] Khemiri has also written the plays God Times Five for Riksteatern and We Who Are Hundred, which opened at Gothenburg City Theatre in 2009[3] and won the Hedda Award, Norway's top theatrical award, for the best play of 2010.[6]
Oh, wait, huh ... Well, what do you know? It turns out that Nordics can't get enough of this guy's dark Otherness, that he's an expert at pushing White Guilt buttons, that being half-Tunisian in Sweden is almost as great a gig for him as being half-black in America has been for the President.
Chechens: Terrorists, gangsters, or freedom fighters?
Do Chechens tend to be terrorists, gangsters, or freedom fighters struggling for national liberation?
How about: All three?
The skill sets of terrorists, gangsters, and freedom fighters overlap to a fair degree, and in the real world, we see many examples of this, with Chechens being perhaps the most extraordinary examples on a per capita basis.
There has been much psychoanalyzing in the press of the alienation of the Bomb Brothers. Perhaps the best explanation of their anomie is that there just weren't enough fellow Chechens in America yet to form a proper Chechen Mafia, so they had to act out their Checheny impulses on their own.
Since the answer to all problems caused by immigration is to increase immigration, I look forward to essays explaining that the way to keep Chechens in America from blowing up marathons is to import more Chechens so they can have the weight of numbers to take over, say, pimping in the New England area or some other non-terroristic pastime appropriate to their cultural predilections.
The decline of women in computing
| Colossus Mark 2 computer at Bletchley Park, 1944-45 |
I can remember when Britain's giant WWII Ultra project that broke German Enigma machine codes was finally revealed in the early 1970s. Bletchley Park employed many thousands of people, yet it remained unmentioned for a quarter of a century after the war. I occasionally stumble upon a pre-1970 text that, in hindsight, is referring to Ultra (such as a reference by Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison to the allies success in U-Boat hunting in the second half of 1943 that is almost taunting the reader to guess), but not much.
TELEVISION REVIEW
Secret War Heroes, Hiding New Work From Husbands
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Churchill called the thousands of puzzle-solvers and clerks who spent World War II at Bletchley Park secretly breaking enemy codes “my geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled.”
And almost as extraordinary as their work was — some say the decryption of Germany’s Enigma machine hastened the end of the war by as many as two years — their loyalty to the Official Secrets Act is almost impossible to fathom.
Codebreakers kept silent about their war effort for decades; the British government didn’t officially recognize Bletchley Park veterans until 2009. Nowadays, it is still possible to read newspaper obituaries of 90-year-olds who never told their spouses, parents or siblings what they really did during the war.
“The Bletchley Circle,” a three-part series that begins Sunday on PBS, finds an imaginative way to give overdue credit to those unrecognized government servants, most of whom were women.
The series opens in 1943, but it’s actually a murder mystery set in 1952.
Anna Maxwell Martin (“Bleak House”) plays Susan, a bored housewife and mother of two who detects a pattern in a series of unsolved murders. When the police won’t follow up, Susan enlists three former colleagues from Bletchley Park to help her decipher the serial killer’s modus operandi.
One of the things we learned from the declassification of Bletchley Park was that a couple of years of the history of computers had been missing.
And that leads to an interesting demographic point: because computing was going in rudimentary form during WWII, a lot of women worked on computers.
A famous example is that the most widely used programming language in corporate America during the last 40 years of the 20th Century was COBOL, which was more or less devised by Admiral Grace Hopper. She had worked on the Harvard Mark I computer during WWII.
Her COBOL was notoriously verbose, the Chatty Cathy of programming languages, but it got an awful lot of work done. Not surprisingly, lots of women were COBOL programmers. (My wife was one for awhile.)
Today, the media recurrently gets worked up over the small (and quite possibly declining) number of women in the computer field.
One reason for why women aren't employed as much in computer programming these days is because languages have evolved away from COBOL's Englishness toward abstraction.
But another reason women have gotten squeezed out of programming is that government policy has responded to billionaires' demands that computer programming no longer be a middle class career appealing to American women. Instead, it should be a two-tier business with brilliant male programmers making death or glory bids to gain riches in Silicon Valley, while in the lower tier, American women are replaced by South Asian men via the H-1B visa.
The Gang of Eight wants to nearly double the number of H-1B visas, which will just continue to push American women out of computer programming.
NYT editorial: "Immigration and Fear"
The New York Times takes a break from editorializing nonstop about Newtown and how we must save the children from mass shooters to pooh-pooh any alarmists concerned by the recent display of vibrancy in Boston
Immigration and Fear
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
APRIL 20, 2013
Much of the country was still waking up to the mayhem and confusion outside Boston on Friday morning when Senator Charles Grassley decided to link the hunt for terrorist bombers to immigration reform.
“How can individuals evade authorities and plan such attacks on our soil?” asked Mr. Grassley, the Iowa Republican, at the beginning of a hearing on the Senate’s immigration bill. “How can we beef up security checks on people who wish to enter the U.S.?”
The country is beginning to discuss seriously the most sweeping overhaul of immigration since 1986, with hearings in the Senate last week and this week, and a possible vote by early summer. After years of stalemate, the mood has shifted sharply, with bipartisan Congressional coalitions, business and labor leaders, law-enforcement and religious groups, and a majority of the public united behind a long-delayed overhaul of the crippled system.
Until the bombing came along, the antis were running out of arguments. They cannot rail against “illegals,” since the bill is all about making things legal and upright, with registration, fines and fees. They cannot argue seriously that reform is bad for business: turning a shadow population of anonymous, underpaid laborers into on-the-books employees and taxpayers, with papers and workplace protections, will only help the economy grow.
About all they have left is scary aliens.
There is a long tradition of raw fear fouling the immigration debate. Lou Dobbs ranted about superhighways from Mexico injecting Spanish speakers deep into the heartland. Gov. Jan Brewer told lies about headless bodies in the Arizona desert.
... But the Boston events have nothing to do with immigration reform. Even if we stop accepting refugees and asylum seekers, stop giving out green cards and devise a terror-profiling system that can bore into the hearts of 9-year-olds, which seems to be Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s age when he entered the United States, we will still face risks. And we will not have fixed immigration.
There is a better way to be safer: pass an immigration bill. If terrorists, drug traffickers and gangbangers are sharp needles in the immigrant haystack, then shrink the haystack. Get 11 million people on the books. Find out who they are. ...
And if we are serious about making America safer, why not divert some of the billions now lavished on the border to agencies fighting gangs, drugs, illegal guns and workplace abuse? Or to community policing and English-language classes, so immigrants can more readily cooperate with law enforcement? Why not make immigrants feel safer and invested in their neighborhoods, so they don’t fear and shun the police? Why not stop outsourcing immigration policing to local sheriffs who chase traffic offenders and janitors?
As we have seen with the failure of gun control, a determined minority wielding false arguments can kill the best ideas. The immigration debate will test the resilience of the reform coalition in Congress. Changes so ambitious require calm, thoughtful deliberation, and a fair amount of courage. They cannot be allowed to come undone with irrelevant appeals to paranoia and fear.
Wow, that was weak.
Originally, I assumed I should go through this editorial line-by-line, but, instead, like a good defense attorney following a disastrous prosecution presentation, I'll just, "Ladies and gentlemen, we rest our case."
Originally, I assumed I should go through this editorial line-by-line, but, instead, like a good defense attorney following a disastrous prosecution presentation, I'll just, "Ladies and gentlemen, we rest our case."
I make unkind Downes Syndrome jokes about the NYT's designated immigration editorialist Lawrence Downes, but, really, he doesn't seem terribly smart.
Anyway, the Bomb Brothers have been an unpleasant intrusion of reality into the state-of-the-art marketing campaign for amnesty. As I've occasionally noted, marketing is the dominant type of work in 21st Century America, and journalism is slowly turning into marketing criticism. As we've seen with the amnesty push over the last six months, most of the "news" has been reporters telling us admiringly that the marketing campaign is proceeding smoothly, and that only bad people are noticing anything the least bit untoward about immigration. Everybody else is enthralled by the Gang of Eight's precision marketing.
And then this had to happen, making it hard for Americans to keep being quite as oblivious to the obvious.
Tom Cruise and Tom Macaulay
I linked last night to Thomas Babington Macaulay's 1855 description of his Scottish Highlander ancestors as mountain bandits, and that got me thinking about Macaulay's once-famous poem about a hero in Roman Republican history, "Horatius:"
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the gate:
‘To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods
Coincidentally, I saw the new Tom Cruise sci-fi film Oblivion tonight, and (spoiler alert) Macaulay's poem plays a central role in the movie.
From "Valerik" by Mikhail Lermontov
Following Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov was the second great writer in Russian literature. Born in 1807, Lermontov died in in a duel four years after Pushkin died in a duel. A Russian Army officer, he was mentioned in the dispatches for his bravery in the 1839 Battle of Valerik south of Grozny. From the "Chechen Republic of Ishkeria" website, here's somebody's translation of part of Lermontov's poem "Valerik,'
…I asked him:
What is this place called?
‘Valerik’, he said,
Which means ‘the river of the dead’
And those who named it rest in Heaven.
— How many of them fought today?
— 7,000
— How many did the Mountaineers lose?
— Who knows? Why would they be counted!
‘They’ll be counted’, I heard a voice reply
‘This day of blood will not be forgotten’.
I turned and saw the Chechen, nodding,
With a grin of contempt upon his lips.
Days of blood are not forgotten in Chechnya.
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