Edge

Heavy metal: Has the style of music lost all its power?
Mexploitation: Filmmaker Richard Rodriguez aims to start a new genre.
Scandal: Prime ministers’ memoirs are no fun compared to those of lesser politicians with better affairs.

War on Terror

Imagination: What has been the cultural impact of the war?
New York: Why are New Yorkers opposed to the Park51 center near Ground Zero?
Afghanistan: Jonathan Steele reflects on his visit to the country and what will happen there next.

*Photo courtesy manlio.

Jennifer Ouellette was an English major who long “avoided all math,” as she put it. Today, the science writer and author of The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse recalled asking her math teacher what every student wants to know: why does math matter in every day life? “He gave the usual stock answers,” she said. “But when you start to see where calculus is in the real world, that’s when you start to see where it’s useful.” Ouellette dropped by Zocalo’s offices to chat with Swati Pandey about how calculus can help you win in Vegas, anticipate the next dip or turn of a roller coaster, and why we should all aim for mathematical literacy to give us a richer view of the world around us.

*Photo courtesy Joe Penniston.

Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 years
by Philip Jenkins

—Reviewed by Ralph Walter

The difficult but critical doctrine that Jesus Christ is two different reflections of the same phenomenon — fully God and fully man in one being — was developed during late antiquity. It is one of that period’s great intellectual achievements, one that determined who Jesus Christ was, who he is today, and who he will be. Jesus Wars tells, in an approachable and exciting way, how that achievement came to be. Jenkins, himself of a liberal protestant bent, shows the story of the advancement, adoption and defense of the dogma to be one of politics, power, and corruption as much as it is one of theology.

Jesus left no known writings or explanations. After he was hauled off by the Romans to be nailed to a tree, his immediate followers believed that he returned from the grave and appeared to them. They decided that scripture had been fulfilled and started to spread their gospel, literally, the “good news.” By the beginning of the fourth century, Constantine — convinced that the story of Christian hope was what he needed to revitalize his empire — adopted Christianity, as it had come to be called.

To Constantine’s surprise, the Christians in his empire professed many different sets of beliefs. He gathered their leaders at Nicaea in 325, where they agreed that their one God has three inseparable personae: the Father who creates, the Son who redeems, and the Holy Ghost who sustains. But for over a century the question remained, was Jesus Christ a man, a God, or a bit of both? In 451, at Chalcedon, it was “agreed” that he has two full natures in one undivided person. Unfortunately, the answer didn’t satisfy about half of the Christian world at the time. The Nestorians — numerous then, limited to a few enclaves today, mainly in northern Iraq — believed that two natures existed in Jesus Christ, but that they weren’t in complete union. The Monophysites argued for one nature with divine and human aspects, a view that continues to hold sway in Armenian, Coptic, and Syrian churches today, leading Jenkins to claim that the Monophysites in the region preferred benign Islamic rule to repression by fellow Christians.

The story of how the church got to Chalcedon and struggled afterwards is Jenkin’s theme. He has a great cast of characters: wild bishops, plotting Popes, harpy empresses, Machiavellian patriarchs, and militant rioting monks. Jenkins spins them into a good yarn, a tale of theological sausage-making, demonstrating that one of the most fundamental Christian principles was the creation of flawed men acting for less than noble reasons.

Further Reading: The Early Church (The Penguin History of the Church) (v. 1) by Henry Chadwick and Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology by Lewis Ayres.

Ralph Walter is a member of the Zócalo board of directors and lay episcopal minister.

*Photo courtesy Fergel OP.

Tragedy

Pakistan: Why we should come quickly to the aid of those displaced by the flood.
Death: We seem incapable of taking good care of the dying. Surgeon Pauline Chen explains why.
Girls: How Indian parents who don’t want daughters get around the law.
Hate: Islam isn’t the first faith that Americans have reacted to with suspicion.

Closet

Republican: The former chair of the Republican National Committee comes out, and voices some regret about not doing more for gay rights.
Archies: The comic book series is primed to introduce its first gay character.

*Photo courtesy littlestar19.

Democratic Vistas: Reflections on the Life of American Democracy

—Reviewed by Adam Fleisher

The political scientist Adam Przeworski’s minimalist defense of democracy is that it is the best system for changing government without bloodshed — power changes hands by election, and the losers can take solace in knowing they will survive to fight another contest. But for Democratic Vistas, a collection of essays based on the DeVane lectures at Yale University, such narrowness will not do.

Here, as Jedediah Purdy explains in his brilliant introduction, the goal is to “sort out” democracy in America. Purdy starts with the inherent contradiction of the democratic ideal, which Anthony Kronman addresses in detail in his essay on Plato, and which is explored throughout the collection: a deep commitment to both the idea of individuality and to “tearing down distinctions.” Purdy continues with a succinct overview of how this contradiction appears across the diverse themes addressed in the remaining twelve essays, which range from the baseline question of what democratic values are to the roles of family and religion in our democracy to examinations of education, capitalism, inequality, foreign policy, science and technology.

Walt Whitman, from whose work of social criticism comes the title of this collection, identified individuality and “adhesiveness” as essentials of democracy. According to David Bromwich’s essay, Whitman, along with Abraham Lincoln, “enlarged our idea of the discipline and the imagination of democracy.” Making their contributions during the national argument over slavery, they each articulated the moral basis of democracy as grounded in the notion of the supremacy of the individual — over himself, but not over others. Or, as Whitman put it, with kings beneath us, “every man a knight.”

But from there arises the paradox of democracy that Purdy identifies — that individual freedom to achieve can lead to the inequality that democracy promises to eradicate. It’s particularly noticeable in this country’s education system, and particularly in regard to institutions like Yale. As Richard Brodhead, Dean of Yale at the time of his lecture, points out, higher education has expanded access beyond the privileged few to the striving many. Of course, as Brodhead notes, selectivity means there will be discrimination; the real question is what kind. As for Yale, Brodhead says, the school seeks students with “quick, inquiring minds,” which “rewards differences of gift and accomplishment” but provides opportunity “without regard to family background or ability to pay.” Money, however, is the real issue. Merit-based aid distributes more advantages to those who already have much, and yet schools with smaller endowments might feel competitive pressure to offer relatively less need-based aid in order to attract top students. Brodhead does not claim to have a solution, though he thinks figuring out how to resolve them is the key question for the future of democratic education.

While Brodhead embraces the difficulties of the many and the few, Richard Levin and Ian Shapiro, in their essays on markets and democracy, are less sanguine. Levin, president of Yale, starts with a premise implicitly similar to Brodhead’s: competition inevitably leaves some people behind. Markets are liberating and therefore tend to reinforce democratic freedom and create opportunity. But they also engender inequality. Levin invites democratic government to “remedy the deficiencies of market outcomes” and he is optimistic that we can indeed create the right policies to do so.

Shapiro more explicitly looks at distribution of wealth and the struggle to get Americans on board with broadly redistributive policies. He admits that for many Americans, redistribution means from “us to the government” rather than from rich to poor. Shapiro blames this sentiment on “anectodal distractions.” Granted, it isn’t surprising that there was no room in this visionary volume for public choice theory, but there is certainly some substantive basis for the notion that government redistribution is effectively of, by and for the connected.  Shapiro’s wish to “push redistributive politics in the desired direction” seems about as viable as admitting everybody into Yale.

Though the lectures on which these essays are based are not necessarily very new, they address timeless questions about how we govern ourselves. Or, as Purdy eloquently puts it, they are “contributions to a national project — the project of the nation itself.” And yet in a country founded on and still dedicated to forward movement, the national project “cannot be completed unless by an unhappy ending.”  In other words, American democracy is committed to the perpetual promise that tomorrow is another day.

Excerpt: For Whitman, and for us, the belief that diversity has value and that the highest purpose of the state is to promote its exuberant expression and joyful appreciation — beliefs so commonplace in our contemporary culture that we scarcely even recognize them as such — are the secular by-products of that radical revaluation of individuality entailed by the religious doctrine of creation from nothing, a teaching whose implications could never be absorbed within the limits of Greek thought.  For once it is granted that the absolute distinctness of every individual is something real in its own right — a proposition foreign to the whole spirit of Platonic philosophy but required by the doctrine of creation ex nihilo — the way is open to the celebration of diversity as something divine, as the revelation of the Creator in His creatures, and to a view of the state as a union of individuals gathered for the purpose of enjoying their own diversity.

Further Reading: Democracy’s Values by Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordón and Democracy: A History by John Dunn

Adam Fleisher is a law student at the University of Virginia.

*Photo courtesy Adam Solomon.

Ladies

Diana: On the anniversary of her death, looking back at her visit to the Arab world.
Hillary: It’s long been a national pastime to watch her style. Now, she’s wearing her hair long, and defiantly, says Robin Givhan.
Spy: A former MI6 operative reveals the insular life of a spy.
Housewives: How reality TV ruined (at least) one marriage.
Audrey: Did she really invent the modern ideal of woman?
Virtual: Fabricated girlfriends join Japanese men on vacation.

*Photo courtesy david_mills_canada.

Skullphone, Clear Channel Digital Billboard, Los Angeles, California, 2008, copyright Curtis Kulig.

JR, 28 Millimeters, Women Are Heroes, Morro da Providencia, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2008, courtesy JR.

Paolo Buggiani, Minotaur, Brooklyn Bridge, NYC, 1980

Filippo Minelli, FACEBOOK, Bamako, Mali, 2008, courtesy Filippo Minelli

Nick Walker, Mona Lisa, London, England, 2007, courtesy Nick Walker

Joey Krebs the Phantom Street Artist, Los Angeles, California, 1993, copyright Anthony Friedkin

Thundercut, Chinatown Walker, New York City, 2007, courtesy Thundercut

ZEVS, Liquidated McDonald’s, Paris, France, 2005, courtesy ZEVS

Harald Naegeli, Death Series, Cologne, Germany, 1981, copyright Hubert Maessen.

All images courtesy TASCHEN.

Words

Poetry: Why do Arabs hold the form in such high esteem?
Rules: Forget these ten laws of language before going back to school.
Compliments: They’re key to smoothing social relationships, and Katie Trotter explains how best to flatter.
Translation: A soldier’s tribute for a teenaged translator.
Klingon: Shakespeare as he’s never been done before.
Love: Finding love by finding a common love of writers, or at least trying.

*Photo courtesy Cayusa.

Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland
by Stephan Salisbury

—Reviewed by Angilee Shah

The introduction to Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Stephan Salisbury’s investigative memoir Mohamed’s Ghosts is titled “How to Take Down A Mosque.” It’s an eye-grabber for anyone who is watching closely the controversy around the Park51 Islamic community center and mosque slated to be built in Lower Manhattan.

But Salisbury’s book takes us to another mosque in a rundown neighborhood in Philadelphia. Ansaarullah was created in January 2002 and closed in 2008 after years of FBI surveillance and deportation, forced or self-imposed, of the mosque’s top leaders. Salisbury forces us to question our values as Americans, our national security and cherished freedoms. His is a book about the nature of fear — what it gives us license to do and say, how it colors our understanding of entire groups of people. In Mohamed’s Ghosts, we also find an answer to the question on many minds today: why are so many people so uncomfortable with the idea of Muslims worshipping two blocks from Ground Zero?

As Salisbury argues through the case of Ansaarullah, America’s fear of terrorism has morphed into a general distrust of Islam. Probable cause has been replaced with a policy of domestic preemptive strikes. Ansaarullah’s imam Mohamed Ghorab was arrested in high drama while his daughter looked on from the front of her school. His mosque was raided with dogs and weapons in tow. The media coverage and the FBI’s informant strategy destroyed trust within the community that once benefited greatly from the mosque. Even as investigations into alleged tax fraud and terrorism training turned up no leads, at least six members of the mosque were arrested for immigration violations, six were detained and released, and more were questioned and blackmailed to provide information about terrorist activity that never actually happened. “My sense is that once a suspect is identified, authorities are reluctant to let go, no matter what,” Salisbury explains.

Salisbury narrates the broader picture of domestic counterterrorism around the country after 9/11. He explains how the FBI monitored Middle Easterners, South Asians and Muslim groups, and drew information from within their ranks. In one devastating chapter, he lists hate crimes — murders, beatings, arson — committed in the name of 9/11 against immigrants and Americans, many of whom saw little to no justice. He draws parallels with the FBI’s infiltration of the Communist Party during the Red Scare, when informants were used not against a specific criminal activity but against a set of beliefs. Salisbury also gives voice to prosecutors and law enforcement, who say they have to pursue leads and suspects with whatever tools they have, while keeping information about them confidential for national security.

It becomes difficult to justify the human cost of our domestic war on terror, however, when, thanks to Salisbury, we get to know the people affected. What does it mean to be interrogated or held in solitary confinement, or put on a confidential watchlist that cannot be altered? The costs are much greater, it turns out, than just time. The individuals profiled in Mohamed’s Ghosts are ruined; they lose their homes, their families, their health. They suffer severe psychological effects, untenable damage to livelihoods and relationships, sometimes by a mistaken keystroke or minor error in a visa application. One mosque member who lost his family after he was imprisoned and deported says at one point, on the phone from Jordan, that torture or death would have been better than the personal destruction he endured.

This is not a typical arms-length work of journalism. Salisbury chronicles his own journey as an American watching his country make choices he does not agree with. “It was a shock of familiarity that finally awakened me to the cultural continuity represented by the war on terror,” he writes. “Freedom threatened leads defenders to threaten freedom.” In truth, Salisbury is haunted by the stories of the Muslims he reported on in Philadelphia. The import of this book is clear: before we rush to judge, we should allow ourselves to be haunted as well.

Excerpt: “I was drawn to this spot, the corner of Wakeling Street and Aramingo Avenue in Philadelphia’s old working-class community of Frankford Valley, by an easily overlooked whitewashed cinderblock building across from the Baptist Center — a one-time auto body and repair shop, in recent years converted to a mosque. There were no worshippers on this day, however. The central bay door was pulled shut. A chain-link fence, tangles of weeds growing up through its interlacing loops, surrounded by buildings and parking lot. A dirty yellow Abco Auto Body Sign teetered over the barbed wire atop the fence, and a metal gate stood chained and padlocked shut. The windows were boarded up… Emptiness soread now like a durable stain down Wakeling, but for a moment, an instant in the life of Frankfurt Valley, this spot had been one the dramatic focal points of the Global War on Terror.”

Further Reading: A Mosque in Munich by Ian Johnson and Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves by John R. Bowen.

Angilee Shah is a freelance journalist who writes about globalization and politics. You can read more of her work at www.angileeshah.com.

*Photo courtesy Angela Rutherford.

Sights to See

Drag: What drag is doing for women.
Roadside: Mom-and-pop tourist stops are suffering a slump.
Architecture: Three young stars respond to modernism.

Scare

Looters: They provoke excessive law enforcement responses after disasters, at the cost of human life.
Robots: Why do human-like robots scare us?
Drugs: A librarian compiles lists of Ciudad Juárez’s dead.

*Photo courtesy Ron.