Eyeteeth has a great interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Anarchist in the Library (which is now at the top of my “to-read” list). Vaidhyanathan discusses the ways that sharing networks–be they local communities like church groups or jam sessions or transnational structures like the Internet of global corporations–work as the medium for cultural growth and development. Legislation like the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) and the USA PATRIOT Act, by privileging corporate and government networks and network usage over local and non-commercial networks and usage, stifle creativity, innovation, and ultimately democratic participation.
The behaviors of sharing culture are what build culture. So this is a long-standing human habit. What is different is that these behaviors [copying and sharing cultural material] have been amplified and extended by the powers of digital technology and networking. We can’t deny that quantitatively we’re in a new situation, although qualitatively we are not. We’re actually behaving the way we always have.
Culture is worthless if you keep it in your house. So, yes, in that sense, this proliferation of shared culture–this proliferation of ostensibly free material–is simply the electronic simulation of what we’ve been doing in towns and villages and neighborhoods and garages and high schools all around the world for centuries.
The first battlefield in this conflict is and has been our public library system, beseiged on all sides by pay-per-use models in industry, academic journals available through electronic subscriptions plans that offer the library nothing concrete to archive or preserve, local and federal financial prerogatives that give short shrift to what is seen as a non-essential expense, dwindling acquisitions and inadequate staffing, and now the USA PATRIOT Act, the DMCA, and legislation demanding the use of web filtering software. This is where, at the moment, decisions about the kind of culture we’ll have in the future are being made.
Libraries are considered to be dangerous places and librarians are our heroes. This is something that we really have to emphasize. The library is also not just functionally important to communities all over the world, but a library itself is the embodiment of enlightenment values in all the best sense of that. A library is a temple to the notion that knowledge is not just for the elite and that access should be low cost if not free, that doors should be open. Investing in libraries monetarily, spritually, intellectually, legally is one of the best things we can do for our immediate state and for the life we hope we can build for the rest of the century.
Unfortunately, for many people, libraries are places for children and old people, not for everyone. When I check books out at my library, I often stand behind young mothers with armfuls of children’s books and not a thing for themselves. Of course, I love seeing parents taking an active role in their children’s educations and lives, but I can’t help but be saddened that, out of the thousands of books on the shelves, not one of them is seen as adding some value to their adult lives, some enjoyment or pleasure or knowledge or skill or understanding, outside of what they share with their children. That could contribute so much to their involvement with their children. And I have to wonder if they know that, behind the counter and in the offices out of sight, there are people fighting tooth and nail for their right to such enjoyment, pleasure, knowledge, skill, and understanding.
Ironically, my public library doesn’t carry The Anarchist in the Library…
[Update: Not so ironically, as it turns out–I failed to notice that the release date for the book is April 2004.]
Ella Shohat is a professor of Women’s Studies and Cultural Studies at CUNY, and is one of the co-founders of Ivri-NASAWI, an organization devoted to the cultural life of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewry. I know of her indirectly, as one of my partner’s professors and as the author of an incredible essay on Sephardic second-class status in Israel, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” in Dangerous Liaisons, which she co-edited.
Shohat is also an Israeli Jew of Iraqi parentage, living and working in the US, and in “Reflections of an Arab Jew” she writes of her awkward position as the three nations she is connected with embroil themselves in war. She writes of her relatives living in both Iraq and Israel, of her experiences during the first war against Iraq, of being at the same time Arab and Jew and American, with all the split loyalties and ambivalent (amtrivalent, maybe) desires that engenders. Shohat talks of her kind of Jewishness as an elision, an invisible yet uncomfortable presence in Jewish consciousness.
The same historical process that dispossessed Palestinians of their property, lands and national-political rights, was linked to the dispossession of Middle Eastern and North African Jews of their property, lands, and rootedness in Muslim countries. As refugees, or mass immigrants (depending on one’s political perspective), we were forced to leave everything behind and give up our Iraqi passports. The same process also affected our uprootedness or ambiguous positioning within Israel itself, where we have been systematically discriminated against by institutions that deployed their energies and material to the consistent advantage of European Jews and to the consistent disadvantage of Oriental Jews. Even our physiognomies betray us, leading to internalized colonialism or physical misperception. Sephardic Oriental women often dye their dark hair blond, while the men have more than once been arrested or beaten when mistaken for Palestinians. What for Ashkenazi immigrants from Russian and Poland was a social aliya (literally “ascent”) was for Oriental Sephardic Jews a yerida (“descent”).
Stripped of our history, we have been forced by our no-exit situation to repress our collective nostalgia, at least within the public sphere. The pervasive notion of “one people” reunited in their ancient homeland actively disauthorizes any affectionate memory of life before Israel. We have never been allowed to mourn a trauma that the images of Iraq’s destruction only intensified and crystallized for some of us. Our cultural creativity in Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic is hardly studied in Israeli schools, and it is becoming difficult to convince our children that we actually did exist there, and that some of us are still there in Iraq, Morocco, Yemen and Iran.
It’s a short but enlightening read and a good remedy for the binariness that threatens to engulf us in times of war, when all things seem to boil down into “us” and “them”, matters of pure survival. And it’s an especially good corrective for the all-too-facile use of terms like “Arab world” and “Muslim sphere” that have been thrown around far too much since 9/11, as we grapple with the simple-minded question of why “they” hate “us”.
Allright, I Lied…
Once I got started, the remodeling work went remarkably fast. So, without any further ado, I bring you OneMansOpinion.org, Mark III. It might still be a little rough around the edges, especially the search engine (Atomz free search engine only allows you to use one image in your search results pages, and I need 8 to make up the new menu…), but for the most part it’s done. I hope it’s liked.
In other news, Squawkbox’s comments service has been down all day. I assume that they’ll be back on-line soon–they’ve never had an outage of this magnitude before, and tend to be on top of things, so far as I can tell.
After only a few weeks of serious blogging here, I’ve decided to redo my site template, mostly in an effort to force myself to learn some coding skills. But also because there’s a lot of things I just don’t like about the current template. So if things get screwy around here, that’s me, “learning” (read: “making mistakes”).
What I like about the current template
- The “newspaper” style: I got the idea for this after seeing a Fark photoshop contest calling on users to redesign Slashdot. One of the entries was Slashdot, redone as an old newspaper, and it was, in my opinion, the best of the lot. So I stole the idea, although mine has more of an “Old West” feel than I remember the Fark entry having. I like the connection between old-style, “craft” printing and blogging. Since its inception, printing has been a tool of democracy and egalitarianism. The frontier printer (as I imagine him) was someone who culled the news from the Eastern newspapers and the telegraph and from travellers passing through and put it together for his local audience, mostly people he knew, with a healthy dollop of his own editorial commentary. He was a point of contact between his community and the wider world, as well as a shaper of his local world. In a social environment defined by the cattle trade, mining, railroad speculation, and farming, he devoted himself to intellectual pursuits, to feeding his neighbor’s need for information and connection. I’d like to think, as abstracted and idealized as this portrait is, that blogging partakes of some of these qualities.
- The domain name:When I decided to do this, in the last days before the 2000 election, I tried my hand at a number of domain names, all of which were taken, before arriving at onemansopinion.org”. That’s what the site is, the opinions of one man (me, of course). The domain name describes exactly what the site is.
- The logo: Once I settled on the domain name, I got to thinking. There’s an old joke, that opinions are like assholes–everybody’s got one. So I thought a good logo would be the asshole doodle from Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, which is really just a bunch of lines crossing at the center. But I also wanted to avoid all the implications of the “One Man”–I hoped that readers would comment, disagree, argue, and send me nasty e-mails (only 2 have, so far, and they weren’t really all that nasty). So I wanted the site to have a slogan to go along with the logo, and thought of the “Got Milk?” campaign, so along with the asshole logo I would put “Got One?”–as in both “got an asshole?” and “got an opinion?” Also, I didn’t want to throw it in your face but just subtly suggest that, by the very fact of running a site devoted to my own opinions, I was sort of an asshole, as well.
- The coding: There’s nothing fancy in the coding of the site. All of my own code is straight out of besic HTML. The only javascript on the isite is where outside services like bloggrolling.com or squawkbox.tv use it to integrate their content into my site–there’s no javascript in any of the critical areas, where a non-javascript browser would be unable to use the essential functions of the site. There’s no mouseovers or pop-ups or drop-downs. I did use server-side includes, notably for the archive menu and the copyright notice, but these are invisible to the end-user. I am a big fan of the simple in web design, of avoiding bells and whistles as much as possible, especially in layout and presentation. All of the places I’ve broken from this are content-related–links to sites I enjoy, the Iraqi Death Count counter, etc., all of which contribute to the meaning of the site without detracting from the structure of it.
What I dislike about the current template
- The “newspaper” style: As much as I liked the connection between blogging and printing, I have to admit that I didn’t pull it off well. As I added more content to the sidebars, they got too crowded. The Old West theme pretty much demanded I use a serif font, which are somewheat harder on the eyes when reading on screen. Most of all, though, I’m just not a good enough designer to pull it off. The site looks good, I think, but not distinctive. The biggest issue is the contrast of medias, the translation from 19th c. tech to 21st c. A good designer could do this, but I am not a good designer (I’m not a designer at all–my work in IT has been focused around content, not design). While I have some of the designer’s skills, I don’t have the “eye”, the “feel” for what would really work. And I am somewhat constrained by the nature of blogging, too–a newspaper has all kinds of visual cues–typefaces, page position, column width, and so on–to indicate how important a story is, where it fits in the grand scheme of things. A template–and especially one centred around Blogger or a similar content management system–takes all of these visual cues away; templates tend towards uniformity, while print can be designed anew for each application. I don’t have stories that are more important than others–I have random thoughts and opinions.
- The domain name: If I had really thought things through, I would have come up with something distinctive, like Turtle Wisdom or The Matter with Me or something. OneMansOpinion.org is what I came to when my first and second choices were all exhausted. It’s descriptive, it’s functional, but it’s not very fun. Maybe that’s why I came up with the whole “asshole” connection, to liven it up a bit.
- The logo: I scanned the image in from my copy of Breakfast of Champions, likely committing a grave copyright infringement in the process. But no matter what I did, on-screen it always had these jagged edges, and I never managed to make it look as fluid and off-the-cuff as Vonnegut’s original drawing. And I’m pretty sure that only a handful of Vonnegut fans could possibly get the joke.
- The coding: There’s nothing fancy in the coding of the site. In fact, most of the code comes out of the degraded HTML 3.2 standard, and doesn’t validate well against the current, HTML 4.0 standard. And I use my code sloppily. For instance, I use “font” tags, which are superseded by CSS text attributes. I use tables for layout, instead of for presenting content. I use structural elements like the “h2” tag for text formatting. Content and structure are not clearly distinguished. Basically, I just did not push myself–I relied on what I already knew and made it work, instead of trying new things.
The new template will hopefully address these dislikes while retaining the things I like. It’s very simple, much cleaner, much more restrained. I use CSS for all the layout and to define all the text formatting (although I’ve cheated a little, so I could use the basic HTML commands I know by heart in Blogger without having to refer to the style sheet). I am trying to make an effort to make sure it works in all browsers (at least all that support CSS–there’s a limit to how much backwards compatability I’m willing to extend). From my logs, I noticed that about 12% of my viewers use browsers that do not support PNG graphics, which means they never saw my background–although I prefer the PNG format, the graphics on the new site will all be GIFs or JPGs.
I hope to have the new template ready some time next week. I’m trying not to get sucked into it–one can easily waste hours just trying to add one more cool feature–and am devoting a lot of weekday time to job-hunting, so I don’t know for sure when it will be ready. And I have to go through my archives and add “/p” tags to all my posts in order for the CSS to work, which is a big project in itself. But I hope the new look will be a major improvement ove rthe current site. And if you’ve read this far–thanks for caring!
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Alas, Dick Cheney, We Hardly Knew Ye
Of course, that’s because you hardly let us…
The Smoking Gun managed to get a copy of an obituary mock-up for Dick Cheney accidentally made public on CNN’s website a couple days ago. Apparently most news organizations have nearly-ready-to-go obituaries in their files for famous personages, “just in case”–CNN is only unusual in having posted them to a public part of their website (a mistake which has since been remedied).
But I have a different theory: Cheney’s really dead. That’s the “undisclosed location”! Look at the obituary CNN posted: the date of Cheney’s death is given as 2001, which is precisely when we started hearing that Cheney had been taken to an undisclosed location. And the pull-quote is taken from a statement Cheney made the year before, right after a check-up. Remember, he had these “not-heart-attacks” that put him in the hospital a couple times? Clearly he suffered a massive not-coronary-infraction on hearing about the attacks on 9/11, and died. CNN prepared their obituary and was ready to roll when the cover-up came down. Anyone who has ever read Philip Roth’s amazingly vicious portrayal of Nixon’s presidency, Our Gang, has a pretty good sense of what went down. Afraid to admit to the American people that Cheney had become collateral damage in the latest fat-food ad campaign, and that the President was sailing without a rudder, the Veep’s handlers came down on CNN and other outlets, assuring them that despite what they may have heard or seen, the Veep was still very much alive and that running an obituary would be a breach of national security. When CNN’s Eason Jordan revealed that CNN had been covering up stories in Iraq in order to protect their sources and employees working there, someone at CNN let the new-found freedom to speak go to his/her head, and leaked the Cheney obit. S/he was quickly discovered and “neutralized” by DoJ forces, but by then the damage was done.
Which also explains why Powell has been so inneffective these last 20 months–since Cheney’s death, Powell has actually been the Vice President. And nobody listens to the Vice President.
According to USA Today, the Justice Department is pushing for legislation to extend their DNA database to include not only convicted criminals but also juvenile offenders and even non-convicted arrestees. This means that if you are accused of a crime–even if you are completely innocent–a record of your DNA will be kept by the Justice Department, along with your fingerprints and other personal information. The DoJ is comparing it to fingerprinting, but I think this is a false analogy–DNA extraction is both more invasive than fingerprinting and more telling. A fingerprint is only really useful in establishing your presence at the scene of the crime, and maybe your contact with a weapon or lock combination or other material evidence. DNA can be used to identify carriers of certain diseases and regressive traits, to build a rough physiological profile of a person, to establish ancestry to a degree, to establish paternity and maternity, and so on. Not only could such information be dangerous in the hands of less-than-scrupulous government agents, but it could be even more dangerous in the hands of persons who obtain illicit access to the DoJ’s databases–and somebody will, if a good enough use for that information is discovered.
If passed, this invasion of privacy will apply not only to people who have actually committed crimes, but to people who have not. The whole idea behind the juvenile justice system is that minors are not responsible for their own actions, can not evaluate the consequences of their actions, and may, under the right conditions, still be capable of becoming productive and law-abiding adults. Adding them to the DoJ’s DNA database is a tacit rejection of those ideas. It reflects the assumption that people who commit crimes as youngsters will continue to commit crimes as adults, regardless of time they spend in rehabilitiation facilities. The implications of including innocents are even more disturbing, reflecting the sort of “you may be innocent of this crime, but the fact that you were arrested means you must be guilty of something” mentality that is growing ever more pervasive in today’s America. The fact that you were arrested is taken by the DoJ as proof enough that you are likely to be involved in future crimes.
Given the free reign which the War on Terrorism, especially, has given to law enforcement, it would not be surprising if within a very short time, all Americans have been indexed in the DoJ’s DNA database. If DNA recording is made the status quo for arrestees, why not make require it for everyone who appears in court, or everyone who applies for American citizenship, or everyone who uses federal social services? I’m not trying to make a “slippery slope” argument–it might be possible to manage to get everyone arrested, at least once, just under existing laws. Even law-abiding citizens like Mike Hawash can be arrested under our current anti-terrorism laws–why not you? Or me? The DoJ’s terrorist watch list includes 13 million people–many of which are non-citizens and foreign nationals, but the sheer number of potential suspects for just terrorism-related crimes is an indication of the kind of scale the DoJ is willing to consider for keeping an eye on potential criminals. The DoJ is clearly willing to think big, and that scares me. It should scare everyone.
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Common Dreams is a great website, bringing together dozens, maybe hundreds of liberal-to-radical voices to address the critical issues of the day. Recently, they ran a great piece by Howard Zinn calling for a new take on patriotism, a patriotism that recognizes the common humanity–and the common suffering–of people everywhere, instead of the ephemera of nation, tribe, and government.
We need to expand [our notion of patriotism] beyond that narrow nationalism which has caused so much death and suffering. If national boundaries should not be obstacles to trade – we call it globalization – should they also not be obstacles to compassion and generosity?
Should we not begin to consider all children, everywhere, as our own? In that case, war, which in our time is always an assault on children, would be unacceptable as a solution to the problems of the world. Human ingenuity would have to search for other ways.
They are also carrying a transcript of a speech Tim Robbins gave on “baseball and show business”–and, not coincidentally, democracy.
For all of the ugliness and tragedy of 9-11, there was a brief period afterward where I held a great hope, in the midst of the tears and shocked faces of New Yorkers, in the midst of the lethal air we breathed as we worked at Ground Zero, in the midst of my children’s terror at being so close to this crime against humanity, in the midst of all this, I held on to a glimmer of hope in the naive assumption that something good could come out of it.
I imagined our leaders seizing upon this moment of unity in America, this moment when no one wanted to talk about Democrat versus Republican, white versus black, or any of the other ridiculous divisions that dominate our public discourse. I imagined our leaders going on television telling the citizens that although we all want to be at Ground Zero, we can’t, but there is work that is needed to be done all over America. Our help is needed at community centers to tutor children, to teach them to read. Our work is needed at old-age homes to visit the lonely and infirmed; in gutted neighborhoods to rebuild housing and clean up parks, and convert abandoned lots to baseball fields. I imagined leadership that would take this incredible energy, this generosity of spirit and create a new unity in America born out of the chaos and tragedy of 9/11, a new unity that would send a message to terrorists everywhere: If you attack us, we will become stronger, cleaner, better educated, and more unified. You will strengthen our commitment to justice and democracy by your inhumane attacks on us. Like a Phoenix out of the fire, we will be reborn.
Of course, America has no leaders worthy of the name, at least not in office, and within days of 9/11–within hours–the military machine was already in motion, and what we got instead of hope and a renewal of purpose was this Eternal Retribution, this hirsute bow-legged cock-swinging that seems likely to become the status quo for the foreseeable future.
Zinn and Robbins speak to the best human nature has to offer. There have been times in the last 20 months when I’ve been literally on the edge, seething with frustration and rage and impotence and fear and uncertainty and loathing and contempt, and it their example and the examples of so many people like them that has kept me not only sane but hopeful.
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After appearing to have finally come into lockstep with the rest of the administration in the build-up to the war in Iraq, Powell seems to be breaking away again. In an interesting development–especially in the context of on-going investigations of Kissinger as America’s representative in the coup–he told a student recently that America’s role in the Chilean coup that brought Pinochet to power in 1973 “is not a part of American history that we’re proud of.” His own State Department flew into CYA mode, issuing a statement that America had no involvement in the coup. Seems like Powell can barely open his mouth in this administration without being contradicted. I only hope that once Powell is out of the administration, whether because he resigns or because Bush falls out (or is thrown out) of office or because he is not asked to repeat his role in the second Bush administration, that Powell will spill his guts, loudly and thoroughly. I also hope that by the time he does, the deregulated media that his clan has played a big role in creating will give him a strong platform to speak from.
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Wired has an article on well curves, curves whose distributions are weighted towards the left and right ends instead of towards the center like a “normal distribution” or bell curve.
[A] surprising number of economic and social phenomena now seem to follow… the well curve.
[…]
Large companies… are becoming gargantuan enterprises…. Meantime, small enterprises are also proliferating…. Yet while the big grow bigger and the small multiply, midsize enterprises are waning. The pattern is similar in geopolitics. The past decade saw the rise of both huge multinational federations (Nafta, the European Union) and tiny secessionist movements and small independent states. But the political entities in the middle – countries such as Italy and Spain, for example – are on the unprecedented brink of losing population.
[…]
High-end luxury hotels and low-end budget chains are doing well – but at the expense of midprice accommodations. In retail, Wal-Mart is soaring, boutiques are thriving, but middlebrow Sears is struggling. As The Wall Street Journal noted last year, “consumers are flocking to the most expensive products and the cheapest products, fleeing the middle ground in between.”
Then there’s the drooping middle class. The Federal Reserve Board’s latest analysis of family finances showed that from 1998 to 2001, American incomes were up across the board. But when economists divided the population into five equal segments, a well curve emerged. “Incomes grew at different rates in different parts of the income distribution,” the Fed reported, “with faster growth at the top and bottom ranges than in the middle.”
Other examples range from the size of screen in consumer electronics (an increasing number of small screens on PDAs and well-phones and of large screens like the 45″ plasma screens and HDTVs) to standardized test scores (a large number of students score very well or very poorly, with fewer scoring just “average”). The implications of this might turn out to be quite significant. Bell curves are what we think of as “normal” (in the real-world, not just the statistical sense), with most people being more or less average and a small number of people at the ends of the distribution being “deviant” in some way. These well-shaped distibutions suggest that we are in a period of divergence, that there are developing normativities that are at odds with each other, perhaps even struggling against one another. It is too easy to read this as a single polarization of society–the widening gap and clearer differentiation between rich and poor may or may not be related to the widening gap between high and low scores on standardized tests, for instance–but it does show a need to begin to reassess our concept of “normal”, as well as our society as a whole.
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A couple of years ago, the owner of Denver’s Tattered Cover bookstore said “No”. The recipients of this refusal were the North Metro Drug Task Force, who had ever-so-nicely asked if they might see the records related to a book purchase a suspected methamphetamine producer had ordered from the bookstore. Seems they had found two books on the fine art of meth-making in the suspect’s home, and an empty mailing envelope from the Tattered Cover in the trash. They were able to make their case without the Tattered Cover’s cooperation, and the baddie is now doing time
But for refusing to hand over the records, the Tattered Cover has spent two years in court. As their lawyer says:
The Tattered Cover believes that all information about customer purchases is private…. The bookstore is not in the business of determining what is helpful to law enforcement and what is not.”
Right on! Remember, two years ago, the War on Drugs was what the War on Terrorism is today–drug dealers were the scum of the earth, and only a real sicko would actually care about their rights. But the Tattered Cover made a stand on principal, and their stand was ultimately sanctioned by the Colorado Supreme Court. Hopefully this ruling will stand as a precedent when some other brave soul stands up to the USA PATRIOT Act’s nefarious bookstore and library records provisions.
Oh, the name of the book that the suspect bought from the Tattered Cover? Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters. The Tattered Cover and their lawyers knew that the information the police were after wouldn’t do them any good. But, as the lawyer said, they couldn’t tell the police that. “Because it’s private.”
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