Being a Black Man

Summer in the City - Rachel Marx’s Paris Journal

Douglas Coupland: Time Capsules - I Luv Helvetica

I think the most common set-decorating error in films these days can be reduced to one word: Helvetica. I’ll be watching a World War I drama, and there at a train station in the background is a sign saying ”Ypres” in 200-point Helvetica Bold. Movie over — at least for me. Once I see Helvetica in any pre-1957 movie, all I can think is that the art director was so clueless he either used Helvetica in a historical drama, or hired someone stupid enough to do so, and never double-checked the work.

In art school I studied typography for several years. This was pre-Macintosh, and we had to draw fonts by hand using gouache, including numbers and diacritical marks. In 1982 there were maybe 50,000 people in North America who knew what kerning is. Today, my 10-year-old nephew knows what it is.

Typography has been massively democratized and has now done more wonderful things in 10 years than in the hundreds preceding it. I remember my type instructor, Greg, moaning, “Typography is over. Nothing new will ever happen with type ever again. Why do we even bother waking up in the morning?” I note that the moment you hear somebody say something’s over, it usually means that something massive is about to happen. Francis Fukuyama, meet Osama bin Laden and discuss the end of history.

In the world of type, Helvetica was the supposed endpoint of design. It was designed to be 100-percent emotionally neutral (yes, how Swiss, the same country that brought us sleeping pills — Helvetica is the Latin name for Switzerland), and when it was marketed in 1961, it caused a revolution, because everything the font touched it modernized. Helvetica essentially takes any word or phrase and pressure-washes it into sterility. I love it. So does Panasonic, BASF, Bayer, American Airlines, PanAm, Lufthansa, BellSouth, Hapag-Lloyd and any number of other firms that use it for their logos and as their house font.

When I began writing fiction, I was naturally curious about the relationship of words on a page and how the words look on a page. By 1995 I began experimenting freely with the “lookfeel” of words in my novel, “Microserfs.” In it I had pages of words that did and didn’t correlate to the main narrative. I did these in Helvetica. The book dealt with people who work at Microsoft (who developed their own Helvetica clone, the cheesy wannabe Arial) and I was wondering, well, if machines daydream, what would their daydreams look like? And so I did these pages, an extended example of which I present here.

PS: Helvetica is even getting its own movie!

The Pi Room

Eleven years later in “JPod,” a follow-up novel to “Microserfs,” I began messing with type again in newer ways, one of which involved presenting 24 pages of random numbers courtesy of a Yale computer. Somewhere in these pages was a capital letter O substituted for a zero, and the reader was invited to find it. The winner received a Simpson’s Groundskeeper Willie coffee mug.

Working with a curator in at The Rooms Museum in St. John’s, Newfoundland, I took large portions of the text from “JPod” and blew them up and put them onto the walls of three connecting rooms — a way of connecting words and visual art and exploring the links between the two. I also had one little side room we called “the pi room,” because on its walls were 53,000 digits of pi, done in pale green on black, a “Matrix” homage. But a very funny thing happened once it was up — people would go into the pi room, and their brains would become quiet, and they would emerge relaxed — to the point where if someone was getting stressed about the installation deadline, we’d say, “Go stand in the pi room.”

I got to thinking about it, and it made a lot of sense. When you’re looking at nothing but numbers — a numerical field painting of sorts — an interesting thing happens in your brain. Its numerical center (wherever it is located) hums into operation, while the verbal and linguistic center shuts down. But the thing is, because you’re looking at numbers but not doing anything with them, your brain is essentially in the idle mode, and hence the relaxation. A very strange thing. And it always worked. There’s that urban legend about painting prison cells pink to lower the rate of aggression in inmates. They should actually use pi wallpaper.

I Also Luv Photoshop

A selection of eye candy created mostly around 2000 when I dove into the software’s deep end.

It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a…

It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. ~Krishnamurti

Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity…

Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out… and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel…. And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for “the universal brotherhood of man” - with his mouth.

~Mark Twain

Straight Outta Boston

Why is the “Boston Miracle” — the only tactic proven to reduce gang violence — being dissed by the L.A.P.D., the FBI, and Congress?

Daniel Duane
January/February 2006 Issue

AMONG THE COMPETING STORIES about how to stop gangbangers from slaughtering each other, here’s the leading contender from the street: Sometime in ‘77 or ‘78, at a South Central L.A. junior high, a Grape Street Crip named Loaf, from the Jordan Downs housing project, sticks a knife into a Bounty Hunter Blood named Night Owl, from Nickerson Gardens, killing him on the spot. One bloody reprisal leads to a hundred bloody more, feuds spread through the two other big Watts projects—Imperial Courts, home of the PJ Crips, and Hacienda Village, home of the Circle City Pirus. With all of them warring against each other—Crip against Crip, Crip against Blood—and the crack wars raging, and L.A. gunslingers wasting 800 people in 1992 alone, Watts becomes the national epicenter of the shadow fantasy that lives in the heart of every American, that Boyz N the Hood dystopia in which lunatic teenagers troll the streets with AK-47s, gunning down suckers without remorse. To be hopeful is to be a fool—it’s all going to hell, steer clear—but, to hear Aqeela Sherrills tell it, the answer comes from the black community itself. First, Louis Farrakhan introduces a handful of rival gangbangers to Jim Brown, the retired NFL Hall of Fame running back. Brown directs a self-empowerment nonprofit called Amer-I-Can, and he starts inviting the four gangs up to his posh Hollywood home, feeding them pizza around the pool and pushing them to lay down arms. It’s not all love and kisses: One of the PJ Crip OGs, a guy named Tony Bogard, had just shot and killed a Grape, and the Grapes riddle Bogard in return, though not fatally. But Daude Sherrills, Aqeela’s older brother and a Grape OG, finally writes a cease-fire treaty based on the text of the Israel-Egypt truce of 1949. The only thing left is to make it real, to walk each other’s streets without fear, and it’s Aqeela who actually talks a handful of his fellow Grapes into the unthinkable: driving down to Imperial Courts and stepping into the broad daylight of the PJs’ turf.

As soon as they show up, Aqeela says, people start running into their houses, yelling, “All the cats from Jordan Downs over here!” But then Bogard emerges, demanding they step into the gym for a conference. “He was talking about how, ‘This can’t happen just like this! It’s going to take years! I just got shot up!’” Aqeela recalls. “But our Gs was over there, too. A lot of these cats is dead now, but they had a higher level of consciousness, and they was all just like, ‘Fuck that shit, you know, we ain’t never going to heal all that! That’s in the past. We got to make this shit right for the little homies.’ I was 25 at the time, so a lot of us young cats was like, ‘Man, let these old niggas stand in the gym and talk. Niggas ain’t going to shoot nobody, let’s go outside.’” So they do. They walk right into a crowd of PJs. “The young cats from the Imperial Courts,” Aqeela says, “they was like, ‘Man, you all wit it? You all wit the peace?’ And we was like, ‘Yeah, we wit it!’”

Right then, in Aqeela’s memory, “it was like, ‘Fuck it, it’s on!’ People yelling it, house to house, it was unbelievable, you could see people coming outside, ‘It’s on! The peace treaty on!’ Mobs of people driving up, girls seeing dudes they been wanting to see for years.” By the next morning, which was also the day the Rodney King riots erupted, the cease-fire party had rolled back to Jordan Downs, the Circle City Pirus had shown up to make amends, and yes, even the Bounty Hunters, all those years later, came just to let bygones be bygones. “There were so many peace-treaty babies, it was ridiculous!” says Sherrills.

Aqeela Sherrills, gang member and street worker, in front of the Watts Towers

And here’s why this story matters: Gang violence plummeted nationwide in the years that followed, along with an overall drop in violent crime, but while the overall number remains stable, youth homicide is rising again. Since the late 1990s, in fact, the only demographic to see an increase in murder victims is men between the ages of 25 and 34, and 67 percent of killings between young men are gang-related. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report for 2004, the latest with complete data, juvenile gang homicides have jumped 23 percent since 2000. And there’s no new drug epidemic to explain the change, nor is it confined to the ghetto. Much of the new gang activity is occurring in the affluent D.C. suburbs, sleepy Provo, Utah, even the Northern California wine country, which has provoked a new round of that old hand-wringing about how our kids got to be so psychopathic, and why we return again and again to this same awful place. If we brought down the violence before, one can’t help wondering, why can’t we bring it down again? And that’s why the story of the so-called Watts truce is so important: In the dysfunctional national conversation about how to move forward, it turns out that none of the leading players can agree on what worked last time, what exactly is happening this time, or, least of all, what to do next.

“People who really understand the street,” according to professor David Kennedy of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, “all understand a fundamental truth: that the stories we tell about gang violence are wrong. There are a couple of basic ones, and they’re all wrong.”

TALK TO LOS ANGELES POLICE Chief William Bratton, the former New York City police commissioner who currently has jurisdiction over the largest gang-violence problem in the world, and you get a picture of enormous, well-organized gangs proliferating nationwide and even internationally. A veteran of New York’s crackdown on the Sicilian Mafia, of Boston’s early successful experiment with community policing, and of New York’s now-famous “Broken Windows” approach to stopping urban decay, Bratton has successfully encouraged the FBI to develop a new “National Gang Strategy.” Targeting the biggest and most advanced gangs with a combination of RICO prose-cution, intelligence gathering, and special investigative techniques, the FBI’s new approach is modeled after those used on traditional organized crime—”something that I’ve been advocating since I came to Los Angeles and saw the scope of the problem,” Bratton says. “It was quite clear that it had grown to national proportion, so that gangs that began here in L.A. or Chicago had now begun to spring up in other areas.” Local police departments, in Bratton’s view, are simply too limited in their jurisdiction. “The tools that the feds can bring into the equation,” he says, “their investigative powers, their sentencing powers, it would be crazy not to take advantage of that. I had experienced that in New York, working with the FBI in their attack on the old-style mafias, and how they were able to break their backs, and the belief that you could use many of the same prescriptions against these gangs, whether they be Latino or African American, the two principal groups I have to deal with here.” To that end, in fact, an FBI task force has just been established specifically to dismantle Mara Salvatrucha, a.k.a. MS-13, an international gang that started among Salvadoran immigrants in Los Angeles.

In South Central L.A., a gang-intervention counselor talks with a youth named Kemo, who was later killed.

But to hear it from people on the street, like Aqeela Sherrills, who has become a national figure in grassroots peace activism, speaking at dozens of conferences as far away as Croatia, running a Watts-based nonprofit that brokers truces between gangs all over the country, and meeting with the likes of director Michelangelo Antonioni and Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, Bratton is missing the point. The mid-’90s drop in crime, in the view of Sherrills, happened not because of any top-down policing strategy but because thousands of men and women just like Sherrills, in a homegrown, street-level effort now called the urban peace movement, began devoting their lives to the tedious work of defusing conflict, day in and day out. Most gangs, they’ll tell you, are less about drug dealing or violence than about community, desperate young people looking for surrogate families.

“A lot of people think that there’s a level of sophistication within the gang culture like the Mafia,” Sherrills says. “Not at all. There’s no organization, there’s no nothing.” The Crips gang, Sherrills insists, admitting that he is still a member, “is not a sophisticated entity in any way. There’s probably 1,200 cats in my neighborhood, and it’s all broken up into cliques. So you got the Parolees, the Peta Roll Squad, the Boss Players, you got the Tiny Locs, and they all claim Grape. But they all in they own cliques. And you got the jackals in the neighborhood, people who rob folks, the drug dealers, the peacemakers, and then you got the killers. Individuals who are known, who shoot people.” Responsibility for the new upsurge in violence, in Sherrills’ view, has nothing to do with the gangs at all. It has to do with the system, with America’s ongoing refusal to address poverty and racism, its continuing manipulation by the prison-industrial complex, and the government’s betrayal of peacemakers, switching funding back over to the construction of jails and the arming of police forces.

L.A. Police Chief William Bratton

Kennedy, a leading academic criminologist and the architect of the only anti-gang-violence strategy that has ever worked against modern street gangs, shares much of Sherrills’ view. As chief designer of Operation Ceasefire, Kennedy presided over a public-private antiviolence initiative that got such dazzling results, so fast, that it is now known in law enforcement circles as the “Boston Miracle.” Using a mix of prosecutorial and psychological tactics, Ceasefire has since been replicated in so many small to medium-sized cities that it has emerged as academic criminology’s answer to the urban peace movement, the favored gang-crime control strategy of the intellectual best and brightest. And like Sherrills, Kennedy sees the emphasis on huge, hyperorganized crime syndicates as a red herring, a distraction from the real engine behind the routine murder of young men in American cities, and a product of the misconceptions that the public and the police have about gangs.

The first of these misconceptions, Kennedy says, echoing Sherrills, is that gang members are murderous superpredators. “That’s not true,” he says. “One of the interesting things about these guys is that if you can pull one aside and talk to him away from his boys, they start talking about how shit-scared they are, and how they don’t like this stuff, but if they don’t act in certain ways their friends and their enemies all turn on them. You get the occasional psychopath, but most of these guys do not have the same commitment to violence that they might to making money on the street.” In the words of T. Rodgers, founder of the Bloods crew in the notorious “Jungle” neighborhood, where Training Day was set, there are only two kinds of gang members, “cowards and kids, and both of them just want attention.”

“Another story is that it’s all about drugs,” Kennedy says, “and that’s not true either.” While most gang members do participate in the drug trade, the popular image of Crips and Bloods battling for crack-dealing turf is as outdated as the movie Colors. Nor, in Kennedy’s view, is gang violence a sickness somehow endemic to ghetto culture—”because almost everybody in these neighborhoods doesn’t participate. Hardly anybody goes this way.” In Boston, Kennedy found that even within the most gang-dominated neighborhoods, fewer than 5 percent of young men were gang members. A 2004 outburst of gang killings in San Francisco produced a similar finding: Only about 100 young men in the entire city were thought to be truly dangerous, and a couple dozen were thought to have done most of the killing. “But because almost everybody deals with one or another of those fictions,” Kennedy says, “it’s very hard to engage with what’s really going on.”

In East L.A., Porky and Pony of the Marianna Maravilla gang

What’s really going on, in Kennedy’s view, is small groups of young men encouraging each other to violence. “It’s about respect,” he says. “It’s about boy-girl stuff, it’s Hatfield and McCoy.” This, too, is nearly uni-versal among people on the front lines, from Sherrills to T. Rodgers to former police captain Rick Bruce in San Francisco’s notorious Hunters Point neighborhood: Gang killings are not about huge, hierarchical cri-minal organizations struggling for control of drug-dealing turf. They’re about beefs. They’re about patterned webs of vendettas and retaliations. Somebody looks at somebody wrong, or two guys want the same girl, and it’s on. In San Francisco, for example, nearly 20 tit-for-tat homicides over the past decade have been traced back to a single car auction, after which a gangster killed a man who outbid him for a vehicle. “You have to keep in mind,” says T. Rodgers, “that between the ages of 11 and 17 they’re warriors untried. From 17 to 21, it’s ‘What’s your claim to fame? I can impregnate every girl on the block. Or I can knock you out with a right or a left.’” It’s what University of California-Irvine criminologist George Tita calls “expressive violence rather than instrumental violence.” Tita says that even among gangs that are involved in the drug trade—and most are, in some way or other—the leaders will gladly negotiate trade agreements with one another even as their foot soldiers murder each other over petty slights, because strict street codes dictate a violent response to nearly any perceived insult and every individual is terrified of falling short of those codes. But because group psychology, among a relatively small number of young men, is the clear engine of an enormous percentage of urban violence, it’s a perfect point of intervention.

KENNEDY WAS A RESEARCHER at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in the early ’90s, when the Bounty Hunters and Grapes were gunning each other down and gangs in Boston’s poor neighborhoods started doing much the same. The city’s response, throughout the early 1990s, was like a blind grope through crime-control strategies. In addition to stop-and-search policies for all suspicious young black men and halfhearted attempts at community policing, there were street workers like the Sherrills brothers talking down gangbangers, even a powerful outreach effort by a coalition of churches, galvanized by a killing during a church memorial for a murdered gang member. Good stuff, and crucial to the success that came later, but it all amounted to gathering the pieces of a puzzle without putting them together—until 1994, when the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) funded Kennedy and his colleagues.

They started by forming a working group of all the law enforcement and community elements already involved—street workers, juvenile corrections, clergy, probation, parole, police—and even added a few, like the DEA. Then, in March 1996, when fighting between rival factions of the Vamp Hill Kings killed three gang members in the space of a month, they made a quick series of arrests, with help from the ATF and even local school police, and held a forum with virtually the entire membership of the Vamp Hill Kings. Supported by local clergy and community members, the working group then did what Kennedy calls “retailing the message.” The message went like this: Violence stops now, the adults are taking over, and the new penalty structure says that if anybody in your gang puts a body on the ground, the whole crew pays, and fast. Every unserved trespassing warrant will get served; every petty parole or probation violation will get enforced; smoke a joint in public housing and you’ll get evicted; open a single beer on the street or piss on the sidewalk and you’ll go to jail. With the help of street workers, Kennedy’s working group also made it clear to the Vamp Hill Kings, and soon after to other gangs, that this was not an indiscriminate war on gangs. It was a crackdown on violence alone. Gangs that didn’t indulge in violence would be spared. And everyone was getting the same story, so if you chose not to retaliate for a slight, you had an honorable excuse: Your whole crew would go down. Flyers at the forum described a gangster named Freddy Cardoza who’d just gotten 20 years without parole for being caught with a single bullet. The working group balanced the stick with the carrot of job-training services.

Criminologist and Operation Ceasefire architect David Kennedy

The point was to leverage group psychology in such a way that the group itself would have an interest in discouraging violence. It was wildly successful. Within 12 months of the Vamp Hill Kings forum, youth homicides in Boston dropped by 73 percent. In little over a year, Operation Ceasefire returned Boston’s youth homicide rate to a place it hadn’t been in decades. And in much the way the Watts truce triggered a nationwide paroxysm of truce-making, Attorney General Janet Reno started talking about a nationwide rollout of Operation Ceasefire. More than a dozen smallish cities have actually done it, with stunning results. Indianapolis, for example, saw a 40 percent drop in its annual murder rate, and Rochester, New York, in 2004, saw a one-year drop, from 31 to 9, in the number of young black males murdered. In February 2004, a long-planned Ceasefire intervention for the nation’s capital was triggered into action when a gunslinger from a gang that terrorized the Sursum Corda (Latin for “lift up your heart”) housing project shot a 14-year-old girl who was a witness to an earlier shooting. Within days, 36 gang members had been arrested on drug conspiracy charges, and dozens of other gangs had been contacted to make sure they understood exactly what had happened to the Sursum Corda gang—and how to avoid a similar fate.

BUT HERE’S THE RUB: Ceasefire, which is also known as the “pulling levers” approach because it involves a simultaneous pulling of all the relevant levers on violence, is very hard to hold together. Our government is built around the parsing out of human life, assigning our need for shelter to one agency, our need for law enforcement to another, our health and employment and education to still others. Getting all those agencies to work together—asking government to address the complex nature of a human life, in a holistic fashion—requires extraordinary commitment from all parties involved. And as soon as you get a new U.S. attorney with other priorities, or your housing authority gets caught up in a distracting scandal, or a lowered crime rate encourages a redistribution of funding, things fall apart. Boston itself saw a 67 percent rise in homicides in 2001, to a near doubling of the 1999 rate. Something similar is happening now in Rochester, with gang violence roaring back after a one-year hiatus. In both cases, Kennedy gives credit for the initial success to everything that’s right about Ceasefire—new Ceasefire interventions continue to have dazzling success—and he blames the subsequent failures that have occurred to the loss of momentum that comes with complacency. “As it existed in 1996 or 1997, Ceasefire is entirely gone,” Kennedy has said, speaking of Boston. With funding from the NIJ, George Tita and the RAND Corporation ran a pilot Ceasefire program in an L.A. neighborhood that followed the same pattern: After initial success, the working group drifted apart, and nobody in law enforcement or the community took responsibility for keeping it alive.

All this makes it easy for Bratton and L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca to dismiss Ceasefire as having little relevance to Los Angeles, which is significant to the overall national picture because, at some level, Los Angeles is the national picture. Accounting for 75 percent of all 10,000 youth gang homicides committed in California between 1981 and 2001, Los Angeles also accounted for fully 30 percent of the entire mid-1990s drop in the national youth-homicide rate; remove Los Angeles from the picture, and the story is very different, with equal numbers of cities reporting declines and surges in youth homicide. Individual Los Angeles gangs are also dramatically larger in membership than gangs elsewhere, they do spawn copycat gangs in other parts of the country, and they are so deeply entrenched as to be almost like community organizations. As Bratton points out, L.A. now exports Crips, Bloods, and L.A.-branded Latino gangs not only to every major city in the United States—and to most minor ones—but to Canada and Mexico. Aqeela and Daude Sherrills, in fact, were invited to New Jersey last year to work as peacemakers precisely because one of the warring Newark Crip factions was calling itself Grape Street, even though none of the Newark Grapes had ever been to the Sherrills’ neighborhood. (Aqeela tells a funny story about Newark Crips asking him about various secret handshakes and rituals they’d learned, wanting to be sure it was all authentic: He’d never seen any of it before.)

Trying to stop American gang violence without stopping it in L.A., in other words, is like trying to reduce global warming with no help from the United States. But if you so much as mention Operation Ceasefire in Los Angeles law enforcement circles, you find a thinly concealed contempt. Baca, who recently helped the Crips and the Bloods reaffirm the 1992 truce, calls the Boston strategy “good for a community that has 50 or less murders a year. I would wish that we had that small a problem in L.A. We have 500-plus gang-related murders a year…spread out over 800 square miles.” Baca’s own prescription leans toward the liberal—a personal commitment to various nonprofits that teach so-called “life skills” to troubled youth, offering counseling and job training, and mentoring from police officers. Bratton, who is arguably the most important law enforcement official in the United States on the issue of gangs, is equally dismissive of Ceasefire. “There’s no magic bullet,” he says. “There is no single solution. And while the patient may exhibit similar characteristics, what might work in Boston may or may not work in Los Angeles. Boston’s gang problem is very small. I’ve got 50,000 gang members versus Boston’s couple of hundred.”

As for his limited interest in street workers like Sherrills, Bratton wouldn’t be the only one with uncertainty about their effectiveness. It’s not that anyone thinks their work isn’t helpful, but there’s no consensus on how instrumental it is, largely because nobody can get any data. Criminologist Tita, for example, takes the work of urban peacemakers so seriously that he has a photocopy of the original Watts truce hanging on his office wall—the one drafted in part by Daude Sherrills—and he keeps a database of 40 years’ worth of Watts homicide statistics.

“And look, trust me,” Tita says. “I’ve done the literature search. I’m still looking for—and I have the opportunity to write—the very first real evaluation of a gangs truce. Tell the Sherrills brothers that I’m begging them to come down and meet with me and let’s design it together so that there’s no ambiguity.” But for whatever reason, Tita says, they haven’t heeded that call. And with the data Tita does have, he cannot find a single statistically significant effect of the Watts truce. “I even looked at the gangs that signed the treaty versus the other gangs in the community,” he says. “Did their rates of participation as homicide victims or offenders change? I couldn’t find that either.”

The problem with truces, according to T. Rodgers, who still does gang-outreach work in the Jungle, is that “there’s always a kid in the back of the group that says, ‘Fuck that shit.’ And that’s all it takes.” But Rodgers bridles at the suggestion that he needs evidence to prove the worth of what he does. “I’m just going to say it,” he growls. “White folks come in with a magnifying glass and always want to know how shit works with a MacGyver theory. And some things just don’t work like that. Some things are acts of God, some things are behavioral miracles.” He claims 60 to 70 percent effectiveness in getting gangbanging kids to go straight. “But I didn’t track them,” he admits. “I’m not the RAND Corporation. I’m just a street worker.”

Aqeela Sherrills feels the same way. “Even though the peace in the neighborhood is fragile as fuck,” he says, “we maintain it, through dialogue and conversation, and it don’t mean ain’t nobody getting shot. It means that’s all part of the process, that peace is not a destination. It’s a journey, like life. And there’s a movement in this country that wants everybody to see things through this lens, that if things aren’t like this, then it ain’t real. But as long as we can consistently come back to the table and have a conversation, the peace exists. As long as I can walk into the Nickerson Gardens and talk to those cats over there, it’s on. As long as we can go holler at Sister and PJ Steve, it’s on. As long as we can talk to Daude and Big Tank and Cal Boneski and the key brothers at Jordan Downs, the peace is fucking on. And that’s our reality. Because if people really knew what the fuck it was like around here, you know, man, they’d cry every fucking day.”

ACCORDING TO A 2002 REPORT from the National Institute of Justice, gathering 10 years of gang-related research, the view of street gangs as akin to the Mafia is indeed misguided. Data from a survey among almost 300 large police departments and members of four large Chicago and San Diego gangs found that while a few gangs—MS-13 would be one—are very large and organized, the vast majority show “little evidence of evolution into formal organizations resembling traditional organized crime. Instead, the gangs appeared to represent an adaptive or organic form of organization, featuring diffuse leadership and continuity despite the absence of hierarchy.” Most gangs, in other words, are just a bunch of guys hanging out on the corner.

The NIJ report, titled “Responding to Gangs: Evaluation and Research,” also found that traditional “get tough on crime” approaches—like the mass arrests of gang members and specialized gang task forces currently being directed at MS-13—have literally zero measurable impact on overall gang violence. (As if to prove the point, a press conference by Sheriff Baca, trumpeting the success of a recent anti-gang street sweep, was marred by simultaneous news of three Compton homicides.) Ditto for the Gang Deterrence and Community Protection Act, the draconian bill passed by Congress in 2005, which defines a gang as having as few as three members—just enough to make a federal conspiracy case—calls for stiff mandatory minimum sentences for gang-related crimes, and puts tens of millions toward prisons: The NIJ report shows conclusively that exaggerated jail terms have no deterrent effect at all.

The only responses that were found to be successful were the “life skills” programs that Sheriff Baca advocates, teaching conflict resolution and positive self-esteem, and, to a much greater degree, the Boston Ceasefire intervention. Ceasefire, in fact, is the only strategy singled out in the entire report as having caused a substantial reduction in youth homicide, and yet Bratton and the FBI appear utterly uninterested. Bratton is also ignoring a report commissioned by the California Attorney General’s Office—”Gang Homicide in L.A., 1981-2001″—written in part by George Tita and released in 2004, which concluded with a single, strong recommendation: that L.A. adopt a Boston Ceasefire approach.

This may have to do with the past experience of various players—Bratton headed the Boston Police Department when gang killings had the whole city in a panic, and he left shortly before Ceasefire took effect and made Boston famous for solving the problem. He was also part of New York’s “Broken Windows” successes and glamorous takedowns of the Mafia. One approach has worked very, very well for him, in other words, and the other has been mostly somebody else’s baby. But Kennedy places the blame on less personal habits of thought. Most of us, he says, jump to one of two very different responses to crime: the criminal justice response, which is all about the moral responsibility of individuals and the belief that tougher enforcement can influence those individuals; or the root-cause approach, which emphasizes the role of racism and economic inequality in crime.

The problem, Kennedy says, is that neither approach leads to an effective crime-control strategy. The criminal justice framework has no way of accounting for the fact that gang crime is overwhelmingly about “incidents in response to incidents in response to incidents that happened before, and which will affect incidents which will happen later,” and the root-cause framework ignores the fact that some people simply do need to be locked up. The criminal justice framework does make room for attacking certain groups—as in the anti-racketeering and conspiracy cases that brought down the Mafia and that are now at the center of the FBI’s anti-gang strategy. But these cases will never solve the problem if they are not combined with a larger response that targets group psychology. “I don’t have any sense,” Kennedy says, “that any of the people who put that together talked to anybody who knows about these issues.” As a result, Kennedy says, the FBI’s new war on gangs is “as tired as it can possibly be.”

The biggest problem, though, in Kennedy’s view, lies with the dysfunctional nature of American law enforcement. Comparing criminal justice to “a real profession, like medicine,” he points out that if there’d been a breakthrough in breast cancer treatment in Boston in the mid-1990s, and 70 percent of women who would have died of breast cancer were living, “then when people were talking about breast cancer in San Francisco they would not say, well, nobody’s made any headway on this, this is an intractable problem, we’re going to start from scratch. And if they did, then their patients would hold them accountable, but there is no mechanism like that in criminal justice. There is no real professionalism. How do you get to be a judge? Get a law degree. How do you get to be a DA? Get elected. There is no collective knowledge, no relationship between theory and practice. There was a time when surgeons were barbers, and what medicine did was bootstrap itself up. In criminal justice, we’re still barbers, and if people in these communities, paying the tax bills and burying their kids and visiting their raped daughters in intensive care, knew the way business was conducted, there would be bodies hanging from oak trees. The presumption that most people have, that this is serious, thoughtful work, and that if you don’t get good results it’s because absolutely nothing works, is so wrong. And if people really knew, I swear, there’d be blood running in the street.”

Daniel Duane is the author of the memoir Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast and the novel A Mouth Like Yours.

Triumph of Felons and Failure

by Bob Herbert

A Mother Adopts, and Discovers Her Own Racism

A white mother who adopts a baby from India confronts her shame that her child’s skin is dark, and realizes she needs more diverse friends.

War on Daddy’s Dime

August 18, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I’m not sure yet who’s the winner in the war between Hezbollah and Israel, but I know who’s the big loser: Iran’s taxpayers. What a bunch of suckers.

Isn’t it obvious? As soon as the reckless war he started was over, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, declared that Hezbollah would begin paying out cash to the thousands of Lebanese families whose homes were destroyed. “We will pay compensation, a certain amount of money for every family to rent for one year, plus buy furniture for those whose homes were totally destroyed,” said Nasrallah. “These number 15,000.”

Nasrallah also vowed that his organization would help rebuild damaged houses and businesses, promising those affected that they will “not need to ask anyone for money or wait in queues” to get relief funds. To paraphrase the All-State commercial, “You’re in good hands with Hezbollah.”

But wait — where will Hezbollah get some of the $3 billion-plus needed to rebuild Lebanon? Last time I checked, Hezbollah did not have any companies listed on the Nasdaq. The organization doesn’t manufacture anything. It doesn’t tax its followers. The answer, of course, is that Iran will dip into its oil income and ship cash to Nasrallah, so that he will not have to face the wrath of Lebanese for starting a war that reaped nothing but destruction.

Yes, thanks to $70-a-barrel oil you can have Katyusha rockets and butter at the same time. When oil money is so prevalent, why not? Hezbollah and Iran are like a couple of rich college students who rented Lebanon for the summer, as if it were a beach house. “C’mon, let’s smash up the place,” they said to themselves. “Who cares? Dad will pay!” The only thing Nasrallah didn’t say to Lebanese was, “Hey, keep the change.”

In the cold war, Russian taxpayers were the suckers who rebuilt Arab armies every time they got crushed by Israel. Now Iran’s citizens will foot the bill with their oil income — assuming the ayatollahs actually put their money where their mouth is. (Iran was always happy to spend money on Hezbollah rockets. Let’s see if it will pay for schools and clinics.)

This is why I am obsessed with bringing down the price of oil. Unless we take this issue seriously, we are never going to produce more transparent, accountable government in the Middle East. Just the opposite — we will witness even more reckless, unaccountable behavior like Nasrallah’s and Iran’s.

Been to Syria lately? Why do you think it can afford to shrug off U.S. sanctions? It also is not making microchips. It is, though, exporting about 200,000 barrels of oil a day, and that is what keeps a corrupt and antiquated regime in power. The Syrian regime subsidizes everything from diesel to bread. As in Iran, almost half of Syria’s people are teenagers, and without real economic reforms, widespread unemployment and unrest are just around the corner — but for now, oil money postpones the reckoning.

Ditto Iran. Iran is OPEC’s second-largest producer, selling the world about 2.4 million barrels of oil a day and earning the regime some $4 billion a month — the government’s main source of income. To buy public support, Iran’s regime subsidizes housing, gasoline, interest rates, flour and rice.

According to an Aug. 2 report on Bloomberg.com, “Iran spent $25 billion on subsidies last year, or more than half the $44.6 billion it collected through crude oil exports.” But Iran actually has to import more than one-third of its gasoline, because it can’t refine enough itself. This became so expensive the regime wanted to ration subsidized gas but feared a public backlash. No wonder. Bloomberg reported that subsidized gasoline in Iran is 34 cents a gallon.

Repressive governments like Iran’s and Syria’s use oil money to buy off their people and insulate themselves from the pressure of political and economic reform. When oil prices get high enough, they can even buy a monthlong war in Lebanon. Why not? It’s like a summer sale: “Now, this summer only: 34 cents-a-gallon gasoline and a war with the Jews and new living room furniture for Lebanese Shiites! Such a deal!”

If we could cut the price of crude in half, it would mean that all of Iran’s oil income would go to subsidies — which would be unsustainable and therefore a huge threat to the regime. It would also make Iran’s puppets, like Nasrallah, think three times about launching wars with Israel that might ravage Lebanon again.

Too bad we have a president who tells us we’re “addicted to oil” but won’t do anything about it. That sort of hypocrisy just makes Nasrallah’s day.

Line of Fire - Hard Crossings

Expressing its utmost concern at the continuing escalation of hostilities which has already caused hundreds of deaths and injuries on both sides, extensive damage to civilian infrastructure and hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons …

Calls on Israel and Lebanon to help ensure humanitarian access to civilian populations and the voluntary and safe return of displaced persons …

The above are two excerpts from the recently approved United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701. Due to the political and military situation, I feel rather confident that the displaced Lebanese (and certainly the Israelis) will be allowed to return to their homes (though the condition those homes will be in — if they are even still standing — is another matter).

Nevertheless, I thought of the issue of displacement as I was traveling across the Jordan River from Amman to Ramallah using an international crossing point that bears three names; Jordan calls it the King Hussein Bridge, Israel calls it Allenby Bridge and the Palestinians call it Al Karameh Crossing Point.

I am not going to talk about the 3.5 million Palestinians who, along with their children, are registered refugees since 1948, or the 770,000 Palestinians displaced in 1967. I am just talking about the Palestinians legally allowed to live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but have no access to the rest of the world except through two tightly controlled crossing points.

These border points are actually points of long and continuous suffering, especially during the hot summer days. Thousands of Palestinians spend long hours, often with their children, waiting to cross this temporary border between areas controlled by the Israeli army and Jordan. After the capture of an Israeli soldier in June, those living in Gaza can no longer use this location but are obliged to use the Rafah crossing point, which has been largely closed for over 50 days.

The Jordan River bridge is open for a few hours in the morning and afternoon, which adds to the overcrowdedness and sufferings of individuals and families. While a few cosmetic changes have occurred since 1967 to speed up the travel proceedings, the journey from Jerusalem/Ramallah to Amman or the return trip, which used to take a little over an hour, can now take up to 12 hours. No Palestinian is allowed to make the entire journey in his or her car or any other vehicle.

An improvement occurred during the first years after the Oslo Accords when Palestinian police along with Israeli officials were located at the Israeli-controlled point and the bridge was allowed to be open around the clock. But after the outbreak of the 2000 intifada, the Palestinian police were kicked out by the Israelis and the hours were reduced.

Now the crossing is run entirely by Israeli military and civilian officials and workers with little concern for or interest in the Palestinian people they have to process. The young male and female reserve soldiers at these posts, who are themselves not too pleased with being at this temporary job, often treat the ordinary Palestinians they encounter with arrogance, and even racism.

The expense of travel across this Israeli-controlled point is also unbelievable. The total amount, for permit fees and exit tax, can reach up to $80 per person. For a big family, this plus the cost of transportation easily tops $100 per person. Out of this amount at least $15 per person of the exit tax is earmarked for the Palestinian Authority, but these funds have not been turned over to the Palestinian Authority since last January’s parliamentary elections.

Those not wanting to wait for hours in the hot summer sun can use a special V.I.P. service that is nothing less than highway robbery. To be allowed to bypass the long lines of buses, a van service charges a hefty $82 per person to make the three-kilometer journey between the two banks of the Jordan. A family of five would have to pay up to $800 in travel costs, travel fees, exit tax, V.I.P. service and travel costs on the other side to make the entire 90-kilometer journey from Jordan to the West Bank. Of course, all this depends on having the acceptable travel documents and the Israeli border police permitting you and your family to enter or leave.

I certainly hope that our Lebanese friends will be allowed to return despite the presence of Israeli soldiers in areas south of the Litani. I would hate to think what would happen to them if the Israeli presence, God forbid, become permanent and they would have to go through what Palestinians, adter 39 years of occupation, have been going through.

———————–

Daoud Kuttab, a journalist and columnist, is director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al Quds University, in Ramallah and a founder of AmmanNet.net, the Arab world’s first Internet radio station.

Summer in the City - Negotiations

“Seventy-eight years!” someone said, and there was that distinctive popping sound. I’d come for a tuna salad sandwich but now plastic cups of champagne were being poured and, in a democratic spirit, one was placed on the Formica counter in front of me.

Before I could ask what was going on, the waitress came up and said they were out of tuna salad.

I had wandered into Buffa’s, on Prince and Lafayette Streets, on a whim. I had been feeling a bit frazzled. I go there now and then to settle down. “Time pools,” Barry Lopez wrote in his essay, “On the Wings of Commerce.” He was traveling the world in cargo planes, spanning the globe in a day, but it’s also possible to be jolted out of time in the course of certain city blocks. Buffa’s is a time-pooling place; it provides the consolations of a sandwich on a plate whose only other adornment is a pickle.

The two proprietors, brothers named Augie and Jon, were behind the counter wearing Buffa’s T-shirts. Someone came in and asked for a straw.

“Straws I don’t got!” Augie said. “I timed it perfectly, down to the wire. Nothing left.”

“You closing?” I asked.

“Renovating,” said Jon. “We’ll be back in a couple of months.”

Jon and Augie are the grandchildren of the man who opened the place 78 years ago. Over the years Buffa’s has grown, replacing adjoining businesses. Now it’s an anomaly in Soho, a place where an egg salad sandwich, a Diet Coke and a Tootsie Pop cost $4.70.

In a couple of months they will return but, as Jon explained in a hushed tone, as “a different kind of place.” He named a very sleek restaurant on 17th Street and 7th Avenue. “Something like that,” he said.

“So this is it for you?”

“Oh, no, we’ll still be around. We’ll be partners, you know.”

My egg salad sandwich arrived. Jon was called away for a toast.

It was approaching 3 o’clock, closing time.

On the way out I grabbed a Tootsie Pop from a big glass jar full of them — I suppose you can’t time Tootsie Pops — and as I paid, Augie launched into a monologue about how much the neighborhood had changed since he grew up down the block.

“When I was a kid, I didn’t know who to be more afraid of, the wiseguys or the nuns,” he said.

“And which of those two groups are still around?”

“Neither!” he said. “They’re both gone. The wiseguys I don’t miss. The nuns …,” he shrugged.

Hello Wal-Mart

A few days later I drove up to the Bronx to attend a rally by the anti-Wal-Mart organization Wake-Up Wal-Mart. The rally, at Our Lady of the Refuge church, was to be the launch of a cross-country bus tour to get the message out.

There was a heat wave in action — Fordham Road was sweltering and chaotic, but open for business. I was on my Vespa, and when I pulled over to consult a map, a blast of air conditioning from an open-fronted store barreled into me with such force, I was surprised the entire Bronx power grid didn’t collapse on the spot. It felt good.

The other means of dealing with the heat wave involved a more tangible medium — water. The side streets were a festival of open hydrants.

A huge tour bus was idling outside Our Lady of Refuge. A giant smiley face with a frown had been painted on the bus, along with the words, “Wake-Up Wal-Mart!”

Inside the church — in a large concrete room, a community center of sorts — 60 or 70 people milled around and sat in chairs. Most of them seemed to be the event’s organizers. Or people wearing union T-shirts. Or reporters. The room buzzed with energy.

The Reverend Billy, a political performance artist, took the microphone and led his choir into a gospel song whose refrain was, “Back away back, Wal-Mart, back away!”

Next up was a Franciscan priest, the Rev. Bryan Jordan. He wore a brown robe and jogging sneakers. In a thick New York accent he delivered a brief speech against Wal-Mart that began “It’s nice to be home in the Bronx!” and ended, “They steal from Indians, Chinese, and expect the workers of this country to work for peanuts. Wal-Mart can [and here he used a figure of speech that involved Wal-Mart kissing a part of his body]. Get out of here!”

A union man followed, then a pair of local political activists who shared an anecdote about a Bronx-born soldier in Iraq who said he would rather risk getting killed than take a low-paying retail job in the Bronx.

Then it was time for the main event, the show-and-tell by Chris Cofinas and Paul Blank, former campaign officials for Howard Dean and Wesley Clark respectively, who set up the Wake-Up Wal-Mart campaign and who were going to be getting on the bus.

There was a slide show, and Cofinas did a good job of depicting Wal-Mart as a kind of retail version of the omniverous fish in the movie “Darwin’s Nightmare,” a kind of toxic rash spreading over the country, devouring other life forms. But the screen was very small, the PowerPoint slides malfunctioned, and Cofinas’ speech was flat. “Come on guys!” I thought. “You know what you are up against, you have to do better than this!”

I left before Cofinas finished his talk and took pictures of the idling bus double-parked outside. It was a two-way street, and now only one lane was available; cars squeezed by in impatient shifts.

“Probably Be a Good Thing”

The sun was in remission, the sky blue and pink. I cruised south in the heat-stricken dusk.

Back near Forham Road, smoke billowed from a pothole, water spouted from a nearby hydrant, and while police cars arrived with lights flashing, Con Ed workers huddled over a manhole and set up shop with their truck. I thought, blackout.

I stopped a man striding down Fordham Road with a backpack, muscles and a do-rag and asked him what he thought about Wal-Mart coming to the neighborhood.

Photo by Tom Beller
Demone Colhoun

“Probably be a good thing,” said the man, whose name was Demone Colhoun. “You have all these small stores going out of business around here. Maybe Wal-Mart could handle the rent.”

He said he had been to a Wal-Mart in Florida and liked it, and when I suggested that a lot of local stores might go out of business he said, “Me, as a customer, I want the most for my money.”

I asked the same question of an older woman walking by in a fantastic green dress and matching turban, who was carrying several bulging plastic bags. She moved warily and would answer me only from a distance of 10 feet. She, too, said that Wal-Mart coming to the Bronx would be a good thing. I told her that some people thought that their wages were unfairly low. (I didn’t want to proselytize, but Cofinas and company are definitely my team here.) She considered this for a moment. “Then I would be against it,” she said. “If the wages were unfair.”

She told me only her first name — Tonkya — and wouldn’t let me take her picture, but we parted cordially, and she walked away past a large police truck and a sign posted on a streetlight that read, “Area under NYPD video surveillance.”

City of Hydrants

It was full-on dusk now, and I wound my way home through festive if slightly apocalyptic night scenes of children playing in the fierce spray of open fire hydrants.

Video: City of Hydrants

My thoughts lingered on Wal-Mart in the city. And then moved to Demone Calhoun. And finally to Buffa’s. And I decided that I didn’t even like Buffa’s that much. I always found it a bit annoying. I once saw a couple of guys who looked very much like Demone Colhoun standing at the counter deliberating over menus until Augie, characteristically to-the-point, said, “Come on, guys, move it. You’re blocking the entrance!”

The two men said, “Rude!” and walked out the door to the fate of a much more expensive lunch.

Was that it?

Or was it a more abstract dissonance around Buffa’s? I drove along thinking about the contradiction: it was a slightly annoying place I was sad to see go. One of the complicated things about the city is that some of our annoyances are actually a kind of pleasure: the annoyance provides a friction, and that friction provides a kind of parameter to the self, a definition. The suburban big box store is all about no friction, no borders, economies of enormous scale, and no heightened sense of self. Maybe this heightened sense of self is unhealthy, overrated, but it is one of New York’s indigenous virtues, I think, and perhaps the reason it is so difficult to get any writing done in this town that is nevertheless full of writers.

The Decider

The car ahead of me slowed and stopped. Up ahead a child was straddling an open hydrant. He had a can in his hand. As each car passed, he pressed the can against the open mouth of the hydrant and turned it into a water cannon. Each car slowed as it approached the gauntlet. The kid had this great poker face. He would stand there with the water lapping peacefully out of the hydrant. The car would edge forward and then he would absolutely cream it, his eyes right on the driver, his expression unchanged.

This happened to the three cars in front of me, and then it was my turn. I sat there on my Vespa, with no window to roll up. The kid kept his mournful poker face as he stood hunched over the hydrant, can in hand.
Come on, I thought, give me a break. I waited for some sign from him that I had a pass. A horn honked behind me. The kid’s face, lit by the last traces of sky, a bit of street lamp and the headlights behind me, showed no expression. I put my feet up and rolled forward, waiting for the crushing blast. To my surprise, it never came.

Douglas Coupland: Time Capsules - September 11

Slide Show

On Sept. 11, I was marooned in Madison, Wis., on the first day of a 52-day book tour. On the 12th, I was able to phone through to the Bloomsbury offices in New York’s Flatiron Building. Because a Verizon transmitter on the North Tower had been destroyed, Bloomsbury was able only to receive incoming calls, not to call out. There wasn’t much for the staff to do, really, and my publicist, Sara Mercurio, said that knowing I was out on the road gave them some sort of reason for coming in in the mornings, and this gave me a sense of mission. I’d been ready to pack the whole thing in.

By the fifth day in Madison, I was beginning to think, Hmmm … maybe if I’m stuck here for the rest of my life I could make a go of it. It’s a pretty little town — like TV’s “Happy Days” — nice houses and Mrs. Cunninghams all over the place making endless batches of cookies and cooling them on the ledges of Dutch doors.

On day six, I was able to board one of the first flights allowed back in the air and get to Los Angeles. I had a room at the Raffles L’Ermitage, in Beverly Hills, which had been fully booked for the Emmy Awards that then had been canceled, so the place was empty save for me, Claudia Schiffer and Salman Rushdie. Most of my TV and radio interviews — like much of the press schedule for that tour — was obliterated by the events of the month, and I spent four days on the hotel roof, poolside, looking at the skies over Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Pacific Palisades, marveling at how there wasn’t a single jet contrail to be seen (LAX had yet to open). Nor were there helicopters in the skies. Also, crime was down so there were fewer sirens, and I may as well have been sunning on the rooftop of a hotel in the middle of an Indiana cornfield.

The tour did press on, though, and over the next six weeks I kept a photo diary of the newly minted post-Sept. 11 world, focusing on airports, public situations involving media and electronics, and anything that smacked of surveillance. I look at them as a suite, and the whole tone of the tour comes back to me — the endless lineups to get through security, only to board a totally empty flight. Most of the flights those first three weeks were empty — and then suddenly every flight was chokingly full. There was never just a half-full plane.

Another thing I remember is empty hotels. I was always one of a handful of guests at any hotel, and I felt like a character in a J. G. Ballard novel — or in “Galapagos,” by Kurt Vonnegut. I was in the Marriott in San Francisco and they simply shut down one of its towers. The only thing that’s ever come close to this experience was in Toronto during the SARS outbreak, when I was at the Four Seasons and a North American oncology convention pulled out, and there I was alone in the lobby, with elevator banks shut down and the bar closed.

I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist…

I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it.

Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution yet.

Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.

Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.

When I’m good I’m very good, but when I’m bad I’m better.

Don’t let a man put anything over on ya ‘cept an umbrella.

~Mae West

Big Talk, Little Will

August 16, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The defeat of Senator Joe Lieberman by the upstart antiwar Democrat Ned Lamont has sparked a firestorm of debate about the direction of the Democratic Party. My own heart is with those Democrats who worry that just calling for a pullout from Iraq, while it may be necessary, is not a sufficient response to the biggest threat to open societies today — violent, radical Islam. Unless Democrats persuade voters — in the gut — that they understand this larger challenge, it’s going to be hard for them to win the presidency.

That said, though, the Democratic mainstream is nowhere near as dovish as critics depict. Truth be told, some of the most constructive, on-the-money criticism over the past three years about how to rescue Iraq or improve the broader “war on terrorism” has come from Democrats, like Joe Biden, Carl Levin, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Bill Clinton.

But whatever you think of the Democrats, the important point is this: They are not the party in power today.

What should really worry the country is not whether the Democrats are being dragged to the left by antiwar activists who haven’t thought a whit about the larger struggle we’re in. What should worry the country is that the Bush team and the Republican Party, which control all the levers of power and claim to have thought only about this larger struggle, are in total denial about where their strategy has led.

Besides a few mavericks like Chuck Hagel and John McCain on Iraq and Dick Lugar and George Shultz on energy, how many Republicans have stood up and questioned the decision-making that has turned the Iraq war into a fiasco? Had more of them done so, instead of just mindlessly applauding the administration, the White House might have changed course when it had a chance.

Not only is there no honest self-criticism among Republicans, but — and this is truly contemptible — you have Dick Cheney & Friends focusing their public remarks on why Mr. Lamont’s defeat of Mr. Lieberman only proves that Democrats do not understand that we are in a titanic struggle with “Islamic fascists” and are therefore unfit to lead.

Oh, really? Well, I just have one question for Mr. Cheney: If we’re in such a titanic struggle with radical Islam, and if getting Iraq right is at the center of that struggle, why did you “tough guys” fight the Iraq war with the Rumsfeld Doctrine — just enough troops to lose — and not the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force to create the necessary foundation of any democracy-building project, which is security? How could you send so few troops to fight such an important war when it was obvious that without security Iraqis would fall back on their tribal militias?

Mr. Cheney, if we’re in a titanic struggle with Islamic fascists, why have you and President Bush resisted any serious effort to get Americans to conserve energy? Why do you refuse to push higher mileage standards for U.S. automakers or a gasoline tax that would curb our imports of oil? Here we are in the biggest struggle of our lives and we are funding both sides — the U.S. military with our tax dollars and the radical Islamists and the governments and charities that support them with our gasoline purchases — and you won’t lift a finger to change that. Why? Because it might impose pain on the oil companies and auto lobbies that fund the G.O.P., or require some sacrifice by Americans.

Mr. Cheney, if we’re in a titanic struggle with Islamic fascists, why do you constantly use the “war on terrorism” as a wedge issue in domestic politics to frighten voters away from Democrats. How are we going to sustain such a large, long-term struggle if we are a divided country?

Please, Mr. Cheney, spare us your flag-waving rhetoric about the titanic struggle we are in and how Democrats just don’t understand it. It is just so phony — such a patent ploy to divert Americans from the fact that you have never risen to the challenge of this war. You will the ends, but you won’t will the means. What a fraud!

Friends, we are on a losing trajectory in Iraq, and, as the latest London plot underscores, the wider war with radical Islam is only getting wider. We need to reassess everything we are doing in this “war on terrorism” and figure out what is worth continuing, what needs changing and what sacrifice we need to demand from every American to match our means with our ends. Yes, the Democrats could help by presenting a serious alternative. But unless the party in power for the next two and half years shakes free of its denial, we are in really, really big trouble.

Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the p…

Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow. ~Dorothy Thompson

Line of Fire - Christian Zionists and False Prophets

As if we don’t have enough problems with Muslim and Jewish fundamentalists, we are now confronted with yet another -ist. Christian Zionists, mostly from the United States, are trying to throw their weight behind one of the parties, in effect calling for the continuation of the war and carnage in Lebanon.

A small minority of evangelical Christians have entered the Middle East political arena with some of the most un-Christian statements I have ever heard. The latest gems come from people like Pat Robertson, the founder and chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Network, and Rev. John Hagee of Christians United for Israel. Hagee, a popular televangelist who leads the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, ratcheted up his rhetoric this year with the publication of his book, “Jerusalem Countdown,” in which he argues that a confrontation with Iran is a necessary precondition for Armageddon (which will mean the death of most Jews, in his eyes) and the Second Coming of Christ.

In the best-selling book, Hagee insists that the United States must join Israel in a preemptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West. Shortly after the book’s publication, he launched Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which, as the Christian version of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he said would cause “a political earthquake.” With the outbreak of the war on Lebanon, he and others have called to their followers to pray for Israel, and for the continuation of the war on Lebanon. They have demanded that Israel not relent in what they call the need to destroy Hezbollah and Hamas. They seem to have completely forgotten the very core of the Christian faith.

I have been watching many American evangelicals trying to distance themselves from the calls in the name of the Almighty for the war to continue. As Christian leaders of all persuasions, including leaders of evangelical churches, are calling for Mideast peace and an immediate cease-fire, these Christian Zionists want their followers to pray only for Israel.

One e-mail message that was making the rounds came from a prominent U.S. evangelical Christian totally upset with an interview that Pat Robertson gave to the Jerusalem Post. In it, Robertson appears more pro-Israeli than the Israelis themselves and expresses anger at the notion that Israelis might not completely finish off Hezbollah — a task that he somehow sees as God’s will. The author of the above-mentioned e-mail message, Serge Duss of World Vision, a Christian relief organization, called the Robertson interview “a perversion of the Gospel of Jesus.” Duss writes that he is sure that many evangelicals strongly disagree and would gladly refute Robertson’s distorted theology.

Duss insists that American evangelicals are praying for 1) the people of Israel and Lebanon; 2) for a cease-fire, so that lives will be spared and 3) for peace with justice for all people in the Middle East.

The discussion has reminded me of so many calls I heard as a young Christian boy growing up in Bethlehem and Jerusalem: the false prophets that have predicted the end days and the presence of the anti-Christ are too numerous to list here. But I vividly remember the very same Pat Robertson in 1982 as he spoke on C.B.N.’s “700 Club.” He stood in front of a map of the Middle East, opened up a copy of the Old Testamant and claimed to know what a particular prophecy meant in geopolitical terms. As the Begin-Sharon army at the time was besieging Beirut, he pointed out exactly what he said would happen next. In particular he was keen to repeat that the P.L.O.’s leader at the time, Yasir Arafat, was none other than the anti-Christ himself.

Less than 13 years after that international broadcast, Robertson was filmed visiting Arafat in Gaza, delivering food and milk to Palestinians and applauding the peace agreement that Arafat had signed with Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin.

Christian Zionists who use religious rhetoric to justify political and military actions are no better than Jewish or Islamic fundamentalists who make similar outlandish claims. Peace in the Middle East should be about the liberty, independence and freedoms of all the people of the region, and not about whose promised land the Holy Land is.

For the time being, I, as a Christian Palestinian, prefer to follow the words of Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the sons of God.”

Line of Fire - An Existential Moment

I had to read the editorial in Haaretz twice to be sure I’d read correctly. “At this late and critical stage of the conflict,” wrote the voice of the Israeli left on August 8, “the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] must propose, recommend and indeed must demand political approval — public approval is clearly assured — for extensive operations that can snatch a victory from the jaws of looming defeat.”

Was Haaretz, which has always upheld the preeminence of Israel’s civil authority over its military authority and regards generals as potential Dr. Strangeloves, really urging the army to “demand” that the politicians back its battle plans? Had any other Israeli newspaper done so, it would have been accused — foremost by Haaretz itself — of advocating a soft putsch. Haaretz’s stunning militancy is indicative of the growing frustration and depression Israelis feel at the prospect of not winning the war against Hezbollah — which really means losing the war.

With the emerging cease-fire, it appears that is about to happen. And that’s why so many Israelis regard the prospect of a cease-fire as a disaster. Under the cease-fire terms, authority for securing the northern border will be transferred to an “augmented” U.N. force which has, in the past, proven not merely ineffectual but often appeared complicitous with Hezbollah. Almost certainly, Anan will link Hezbollah’s disarmament to an Israeli withdrawal from Shebaa Farms — thereby providing Hezbollah with a political victory, and enhancing the jihadist momentum within the Muslim world. One way or another, Hezbollah will be back on the border, and Israel will have to fight again.

Most Israelis perceive this war as existential. Even left-leaning journalists have compared it to the desperate battles of the 1948 War of Independence and to the weeks before the 1967 Six Day War, when Arab leaders threatened to drive the Jews into the sea.

The existential threat isn’t imminent, of course. But an Israeli defeat could trigger a process that would unravel our long-term prospects for surviving in the Middle East. As one friend put it to me: “If we lose, it’s the beginning of the end.” And in recent days I’ve heard variations of that comment from Israelis across the political spectrum.

Those anxieties begin with the nature of Israel’s jihadist enemy. What connects Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas is the theology of genocide — which sees the Jews as a satanic people and the destruction of the Jewish state as a divine imperative. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah once remarked that he doesn’t mind Jews immigrating to Israel, because gathering them in one place will make it that much easier to destroy them. And Hezbollah’s patron, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has called for Israel’s destruction so often that those genocidal pronouncements barely make news anymore — one more anti-Israel outrage that has been transformed from the inconceivable to the mundane. If Iran goes nuclear, Israel’s own nuclear force may not be much of a deterrence against apocalyptic leaders who apparently believe that the destruction of Israel will trigger the arrival of the Mahdi, the Shiite messiah. A nuclear Iran would be the ultimate suicide bomber.

For Israelis, this war is about restoring deterrence against the theologians of genocide. After Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, Nasrallah declared Israel a “spider web” — which seems from a distance durable but disintegrates with a single swipe. A Hezbollah victory, or even the perception of victory within the Arab world, will encourage terror attacks against our borders. And large parts of Israel’s periphery — especially the north and the southern area that borders Gaza — will become uninhabitable.

Finally, an inability to stop the most successful aggression against the Israeli home front since 1948 will result in widespread despair. Many Israelis, especially educated young people with options elsewhere, will understandably conclude that there is no hope for a normal life in a country that is an anomaly in the Middle East and that has lost the ability and perhaps the will to defend itself. The result will be widespread emigration. I know of one American-based high tech company with a branch in northern Israel that is arranging for its Israeli “brains,” as the president refers them, to be moved with their families to the northeastern United States. Will the “brains” want to return to the Galilee if Hezbollah hasn’t been uprooted from southern Lebanon?

Many Russian immigrants, who came here to escape a failed Soviet society, could conclude they made a mistake and that Israel is incapable of surviving in the long-term in the Middle East. One satirical TV skit showed an Israeli loudly proclaiming that there is no safer place for the Jews than “here” — which Israelis once said confidently about the Jewish state — but when the camera lens widens, we see he is seen speaking from London.

In a January 1996 speech in Stockholm before foreign ministers of the Arab League, Yasir Arafat laid out his vision of the long-term unraveling of the Jewish state: Extract territorial concessions from Israel, but without ending terror. When Israelis realize that not even a peace process will bring them security, then “a million rich Jews,” as Arafat put it, evidently meaning Israel’s middle class, will emigrate. Gradually, an impoverished Israel will lose its edge over the Arab world and collapse.

Hezbollah has taken us one step closer to realizing Arafat’s scenario.

Israelis see the war as a test case for our right to defend ourselves against terrorists. If the international community turns against Israel now, it will mean that we have no right to resist terrorists who hide behind their civilian population in order to attack ours.

This war is being fought on two fronts — Gaza as well as Lebanon. Those happen to be the two fronts from which Israel has unilaterally withdrawn to the international border. A recent “Dry Bones” cartoon by Yaakov Kirschen showed two Israelis discussing the war in Lebanon and in Gaza. “And the West Bank?” one asks. “Still quiet,” replies his friend. “We haven’t pulled back to the 1967 border there yet.”

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Yossi Klein Halevi, the author of “At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew’s Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land,” is a senior fellow at The Shalem Center, an academic research institute in Jerusalem, and a correspondent for The New Republic.

Line of Fire - Cease-Fire: Dispelling Two Imminent Clouds

The Lebanese are holding their breath. Will the cease-fire, which started this morning at 8 am, hold ? No one dares imagine what happens if it doesn’t, but an extraordinary phenomenon developed this morning as thousands of southern residents took to the road back to their villages, voting literally with their feet for a return to peace and normalcy. Another encouraging dimension was the announced withdrawal of Israeli troops, signaling that there is no Israeli desire to stay in Lebanon should the cease-fire hold under the terms of UNSCR 1701.

Two heavy clouds remain: one concerns the low threshold of a nervous Israel, which turns any incident into a risk for hell to break loose. Incidents are inevitable on an imbricate terrain where Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah militants form a fuzzy map. One or two Hezbollah militants were killed today, and the repetition of such incidents would quickly undermine the truce. Speaking to the Knesset this afternoon, the Israeli Prime Minister announced Israel’s intention to continue its pursuit of Hezbollah. War would be again inevitable if these threats were carried out against Hezbollah’s leadership.

This cloud is reinforced by the one cast by the ambiguity of Hezbollah, which professes support to the cease-fire, but considers it has the right to shoot at Israeli soldiers so long as they stay on Lebanese soil.

Both clouds should be forcefully dispelled, by lessening the zero-tolerance attitude of Israel and opposing a Hamas-like decapitation policy, and by working on removing Hezbollah’s ambiguity. I do not have the means to help on the first score, although I find the absence of open military preparations for foreign troops to move into the south a grave failure of the international community. The clause in Resolution 1701 requesting Israel to withdraw as early as possible should be taken seriously, and rapid withdrawal is contingent on foreign troops taking over. One does not yet see tangible signs of these troops, except for talk about the readiness of some countries to deploy them eventually. The Security Council had ample time to show such troops to be ready for immediate deployment in South Lebanon. Any delay brooks risk, and the dynamic of peace should be reinforced by far greater dynamism on this score.

On Hezbollah’s ambiguity, I expressed my opinion forcefully on Lebanese and Egyptian national television yesterday. There is no way armed Hezbollah militants can remain between the Litani River and the border. Should attacks be leveled against Israel, as the leadership of Hezbollah is trying to argue on the basis of a revival the so-called 1996 Israel-Lebanon Cease-Fire Understanding, peace will be immediately wrecked. That agreement was reached against a very different set of circumstances, as Israel was refusing to leave South Lebanon, and a stopgap modus vivendi developed to lessen civilian casualties on both sides. Today the peace plan introduced by UNSCR 1701 is based on the premise of a quick Israeli withdrawal and the parallel, exclusive deployment of international and Lebanese troops. There is no room for halfway measures that allow combat to resume in any form.

The ambiguous refusal by Hezbollah to vacate the South militarily already occasioned a serious crisis in the Council of Ministers, which failed to convene yesterday because the two Hezbollah ministers were reluctant to endorse that specific requirement of UNSCR 1701. This is not acceptable. Should Hezbollah boycott the Council of Ministers or refuse to conform to that clause, they should leave the government. Having been a year ago the first person in Lebanon to advocate the participation of Hezbollah ministers in government, against a decade and a half of a tacit understanding between Syria and the United States that they should be kept out, I feel morally compelled to speak out. When I suggested last year that Hezbollah should not be prevented from participating in government, I also insisted on the necessary quid pro quo: they could do not continue to operate as a separate armed force outside the law. Lebanon paid dearly for this weakness.

To protect the cease-fire, accelerate Israeli withdrawal and give a chance to a lasting peace on the border, the choice is clear: either Hezbollah ministers stay in government, and conform to UNSCR 1701, which was formally accepted by Lebanon; or they leave government and stay in opposition. Conforming to UNSCR 1701 means an end to Hezbollah’s military presence south of the Litani River and the recovery of all the land reoccupied by Israel since July 12 by the Lebanese army and an enhanced U.N. contingent. In a second stage, it includes the participation of Hezbollah in Lebanese political life exclusively as a Lebanese political, not a military, movement. As Lebanese, we cannot allow this oddity to remain, and cannot afford another war.

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Chibli Mallat is a professor of law at Saint-Joseph University in Beirut and a candidate for president of Lebanon.

Summer in the City - No Spitting!

I feel the need to write about bodily fluids. Perhaps it is all this perspiration, as TV ads and well-mannered people used to call sweat. I don’t really know why they called it perspiration. Sweat has such an honest, hard-working, 1930’s ring to it. That’s why George W. pretends to sweat on his ranch, but he’s a perspirer if I ever saw one. I, on the other hand, am shvitzing. That’s Yiddish, of course, and therefore the best word in any language for this slippery situation brought about by heat and humidity.

And now that we’re on the subject of bodily fluids, I really, really hate spitting. When my sons were younger, they would arrive home from camp and spit, every few feet, like H.B.O. cowboys, on the sidewalk. It was disgusting. We would have loud arguments on every street corner. Haven’t you ever seen a sign that says “No Expectorating”? I would ask. They would shake their heads sadly at my quaint notions. Then I would begin jumping up and down. It’s unsanitary and spreads disease! Tuberculosis is making a comeback! I don’t want to step in someone’s spit, not even yours! It’s, it’s, it’s … low class! (That was their favorite.) What if you forget and spit in front of a girl? (But girls spit, too, they explained. And they were right — I see lovely, delicate creatures in their pretty dresses cocking their heads to the side and letting one rip. Oh, dear. It is, as my grandmother said throughout her 98 years, the worst era in the history of the world.)

My grandmother and grandfather used to give a good spit once in a while, when I was really little, but my mother would go crazy with revulsion and try to embarrass them. The times changed (even in the endless worst era in the history of the world), and eventually they pretty much stopped. My great-grandfather spat tobacco, but that was before my time. And now, my sons have pretty much stopped, too. Even after watching a baseball game. In fact, I think the Mets spit less now than they did a few years ago. That’s what a really good manager can do. It’s obviously why they’re winning. I will go further and say that on the streets of New York City in August, when I expected to see a staccato of spitting provided by all those cigar-smoking men who consider it a summer style statement to reveal their hairy shoulders, I have seen no spitting whatsoever. Is it fashion? The zeitgeist? Their mothers’ voices ringing in their heads—“Are you crazy? That is disgusting!!!” — ?

Or is it? … Yes, it is, I’m sure of it — it’s all the shvitzing. There are no bodily fluids left to expectorate!

Again, I say, God bless August!

Douglas Coupland: Time Capsules - Why Write Modern Fiction?

Many people think of me as being Mr. High Technology Guy, which I find odd since I’m a fiction writer, possibly one of the lowest-tech jobs going. I’m asked why I don’t get into movies or TV — why should I? I enjoy writing fiction. Without fiction we run the risk of losing forever the possibility of certain kinds of stories being told a certain way. And fiction allows for a time to reflect and savor speech and the gift of language.

And yet there’s something weird with me. My existence annoys the hell out of traditional fiction writers. I get all sorts of corny damnations along the lines of, “All he’s doing is ruthlessly exploiting experimental fiction just to make truckloads of money.” Yes, that’s always been my plan all along. Yessiree, there’s no more surefire way of making a living than by exploiting society’s bottomless craving for experimental fiction. I’m sure if you go to any high school career counseling office, at the absolute bottom of a list of 9,472 possible career options, right below morris dancing and poultry sexing, you’ll find experimental fiction writing. My most recent novel features 24 pages of random numbers. Ka-ching! Ka-ching! I was certainly thinking of the jackpot when I put that in. And yet in it went, and it seems the more experimental my work gets, the more people respond to it.

So the fact is that I do write, and I am a writer, and I can’t be wished out of existence by those aging crustysomethings who’ve been trying to do just this for 15 years. I also note that these folks are usually the same folks who are always passionately arguing for society to offer new platforms for new and different voices to be heard. Rich nutritious irony, if ever there was: as long as those voices end up sounding like their own voices in the end.

I find a stifling homogeneity in most fiction. I walk into a bookstore and look at the shelves filled with thousands of doubtless worthy novels — beautifully crafted, nicely honed and all of that — novels of love, loss and redemption and … in my head I feel as if I’ve walked into a Broyhill furniture showroom. I feel like I’m looking at countless dark-stained colonial-style bedroom suites, and endless arrays of pickled-maple empire dining sets, with no spindle left unturned, every buffed surface dreaming of a shot of Pledge. What I’m seeing is undoubtedly fine furniture. It’s just not …new furniture. And I’m not saying that the bulk of novels out there aren’t art — they are — they’re just not modern art. They don’t point out anything new or the possibility of anything new. I mean, it’s also pretty hard to imagine a beautifully rendered canvas of mallard ducks in the Museum of Modern Art. Or a watercolor portrait of Anne Hathaway.

And the truth is that most people want to live in “old fashioned”-styled houses. It’s the way people are. But to be outraged and upset by the fact that someone might want to live in a modernist house seems medieval. No! My taste is absolute! Install Italianate decorative mantelpieces immediately! My ongoing joke is that most new subdivisions resemble microwave ovens with crown molding. If there’s anything new or modern to be seen, smother it with doohickeys.

I began writing because I fell in love with Pop Art at the age of 10. I’ve always thought that words are sexy. Words are art objects even by themselves, even without being inserted into a narrative. I discovered Jenny Holzer’s text work in art school in the early 1980’s. After that, it now seems, a lifetime spent working with words was unavoidable.

And given everything I’ve just said, yes, I continue to write fiction. I continue to write fiction set in a modern world that has never been weirder or richer or more charged with options, a world inhabited with modern people who hoard Tamiflu, compare the advantage of one credit card over another, and, shamefully or not, wonder which tastes better, Coke or Pepsi. Or Royal Crown.

These modern people have TVs and watch them. They shop on eBay. They question the regime in power. They have repetitive stress disorders. They downloaded porn last weekend. And yet in spite of this — maybe even because of this — they possess the qualities to become myths. That’s where art lies.

Douglas Coupland: Time Capsules - Photoshop = Pop Art

American Pop artist James Rosenquist has always been one of my favorite
painters. So when I really got into Photoshop in 1998, I used his
visual techniques as my training guide on how to use this new
software. Using Pop imagery from all over the place I was able to
learn about layering and gradation and cutting and pasting and … in the
end I came to the conclusion that the 1960’s Pop artists were merely
dry runs for year 2000 imaging software. For example, Andy Warhol’s work was about cutting, pasting and cloning, while that of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns was about opacity, layering and filtering.

Included here are some early examples of how I used Pop to learn Photoshop.

Line of Fire - Victory and the ‘Battle of Forms’

In the Hezbollah-Israel war, another pattern resulting from the asymmetric conflict — pitting an armed political party against a state — has been the “battle of the forms.” It is clear that neither party can win the war in the classical Clausewitzian manner: overpower the enemy and take over its territory. To overpower Israel, Hezbollah must occupy it. But it does not even envision advancing into the Galilee. On the other side, Israel rightly hesitates to move too deep into Lebanese territory, not only because of the high number of casualties expected against a universally acknowledged brave and effective resistance. By taking over Lebanese villages, Israel risks turning its anti-Hezbollah war into anti-Lebanon war of conquest — in other words i