Corridors instead of states

Here is a proposal by someone who thinks the US needs to focus less on states and more on mega-regions, and especially the urban corridors of these regions like the Boston-DC megalopolis.  While the idea is fascinating and shiny and new, and of course in general terms I'm on board with favoring high-speed-rail links and economic corridors that transcend individual cities or states, there are a few dangerous ideas operating here too.  Essentially the author seems to believe that political concerns should mainly serve goals of economic growth, and conversely that non-economic political considerations are somehow antiquated or not worthwhile.  Here's a quote:

These city-states [ie Los Angeles, the Northeast megalopolis] matter far more than most American states.

LA may have more economic output than Wyoming, but this doesn't mean the city "matters" more.  Indeed, I would assume that residents of Wyoming or Rhode Island or Mississippi, in fact believe that they and their homes do matter, that their local political issues and the solutions they attempt do indeed matter.  And precisely one of the major tenets underlying the US system of government is to avoid concentrating political power in economic centers, lest the republic only serve its better-off, better-connected citizens.  To my understanding, this is what motivates many aspects of our Constitution: the cumbersome division of our government into federal and state spheres, the division of our Congress into state and district representations, the electoral college, the designation of smaller cities as state capitals, to name a few.  The author seems not to understand these principles, and even to disdain them:

While the economic reality goes one way, the 50-state model means that federal and state resources are concentrated in a state capital — often a small, isolated city itself — and allocated with little sense of the larger whole. ...[This keeps] back our largest cities.

That's kind of the idea--to avoid a country of hyper-developed, hyper-powerful cities surrounded by disenfranchised hinterlands.  We are already doing a pretty poor job of avoiding this outcome--why would we actively try to encourage it?

Brown Girls web series

Here is a link to a new web series set in Chicago.  It's called Brown Girls, and focuses on young artists living in the Pilsen neighborhood of my hometown.  I think it's pretty clever and well-done.  It's like Sex in the City, except the characters aren't rich, are a bit less self-centered, and to the extent they are self-centered and their personal life is a chaos, it's more forgivable since they're in their mid-twenties and not their mid-40s.

UN on human rights for gays

This is a nice little wordless video showing how quiet homophobic animosity can easily give rise to homophobic violence, and how those of us who may not like the idea of homosexuality, but are appalled by the idea of oppression and murder, need to fix our attitudes and speak out, because the one thing can easily lead to the other.  There is no such thing as benign discrimination.

Muslims as the new Irish?

This is an article about the anti-[Irish] Catholic frenzy in the 19th-century US.  Yes, cities that today are as staunchly and archetypically Catholic as Boston and New York, used to be bastions of Protestant whites trying their darnedest to suppress and oppress Catholics in any way, including through physical violence.  Anyway, the article discusses a sensationalist book about the bizarre sex and cannibalism rites supposedly going on in convents across the Americas in the early 1800s.  It turned out to be a total fabrication, but even after this became clear, people apparently continued to cite the book as a justification for their prejudices.

It all sounds surprisingly close to the anti-Muslim frenzy that prevails in many parts of the US and Europe these days, right down to the specious written reports that people continue to cite even after they've been thoroughly disproven (cf. the alleged Muslim celebrations of September 11th in New Jersey).  I am lucky that in my upbringing in modern-day Chicago no one would have thought to question my loyalty to the US, or wondered if I partook in blood sacrifice or incestuous orgies, simply because of my Catholic faith or my European immigrant background.  But I can imagine how that would have been for me, and this is a situation that many people of other faiths and backgrounds do deal with in the US today.  So this article, along with recent books I've been reading, have given me a bit more direct and visceral empathy for the sufferings of those tarred by their society as undesireables, simply because of how they look or talk or worship.

The Slate article has a great quote to summarize the trends it describes:
"It’s at this juncture that the true purpose of conspiratorial thinking reveals itself: It’s a way to smuggle a xenophobic agenda into mainstream politics under the appearance of legitimate fears and grievances".

Global leaders from Chicago

Here is a plug for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Emerging Leaders program.  From what I gather, the idea is to expose young leaders from the Chicago area to global issues and global thinking, in order to maintain and advance Chicago as a center for global thought and decision-making.  This is precisely the type of thing I want to promote in Chicago. 

So go out and nominate someone!  The deadline is April 26.

The Kindness of Enemies

In my recent bid to read more fiction, more female authors, and more writers from the developing world, I just finished The Kindness of Enemies, by Leila Aboulela.  It is an engrossing novel framed by the present-day story of a Sudano-Russian-British university professor, the focus of whose research is a mid-19th-century Dagestani guerrilla leader named Imam Shamil, who led one of the most successful colonial resistance campaigns in history as he tried to keep Dagestan and Chechnya from falling under Russian imperial expansion.  This professor learns that one of her students (her most brilliant) is in fact descended from Shamil, and spends increasing time with this student and his Baghdadi-Persian-Russian-Scottish actress mother.  The student is grappling with the pacifistic Sufism of his mother, which is in fact the same Sufism that underlaid Shamil's successful jihad against Russian imperialism, and which is at the same time despised by (and diametrically opposed to the values of) the 21st-century international jihad movement led by al-Qaeda-type people.  Like young people of all generations, this young man bristles at the injustices rife in the world (while also internalizing some of the materialism and other values that drive these injustices), and is both intrigued and repelled by the brutal absolutist response offered by al Qaeda and friends.  He is picked up by police and questioned for 11 days before being released without charges, which totally turns the young man's world upside-down.

But this is just the frame story.  Most of the book follows Imam Shamil as he makes a last-ditch effort to regain his son, who was kidnapped by the Russians 15 years prior and subsequently raised as a Russian gentleman.  This effort consists in kidnapping a Georgian princess and her family in order to negotiate a prisoner exchange.

So the book follows the story of a few modern-day Britons who are regarded with suspicion by their compatriots because of their Muslim background (not even their faith, as one of the main characters is a totally lapsed Muslim), and this story parallels that of Jamaleldin, the Dagestani youth growing up in the czar's court, and that of Princess Anna, the Georgian captive of Imam Shamil.  Jamaleldin yearns to see his father and brother, and is haunted by snippets of spiritual teachings, everyday sayings, and prayers from his childhood, but at the same time speaks only Russian and French, is an avid consumer of ballet, Chopin, parlor games, and alcohol, as well as an officer in the Russian army.  Anna is Georgian to the core, which means she resents her grandfather's cession of Georgia to Russian domination, and is not altogether sure whether she identifies more with her Russian rescuers or her fiercely independent captors.  Natasha is a secular Briton history professor, but is never entirely accepted by her colleagues or students because she is too black, too linked to Islam, too fat.

My reading of this book comes within a year of my reading a number of titles with different links to it.  LeCarre's Our Game is about a Briton who falls in love with the culture and present-day struggle of the Ingush (a Muslim ethnic group from the Chechnya/Dagestan neck of the woods), while the same author's Single and Single is centered on Georgia and its Mingrelian ethnic group.  I am about to finish Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, a 1980s-era survey of Great Power dynamics from the 1500s through the Cold War, which of course toward its last chapters is now focused on a bipolar world split between the US and the USSR.  The 19th-century Russian territorial expansion is in this book, as well as US and Soviet ambitions in Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, and that whole neck of the woods, not to mention Sudan, which also figures prominently in The Kindness of Enemies.  And Kennedy's book has been made even more interesting by my recent reading of A Concise History of the Middle East, which has a fair amount about the imperial ambitions of various parties in the region, and the indigenous resistance of varying success that this inspired.

In The Kindness of Enemies, Aboulela does a number of things well, but for me perhaps the most useful and fascinating aspect of the book was that it finally let me get my head around the 21st-century jihad movement (or Islamic terrorism, or Islamo-fascism, or whatever other lurid name we want to use).  Obviously I don't ascribe to any of the principles of a group like al-Qaeda or ISIS, but beyond this, because I don't come from a cultural milieu imbued by Islam, I never really understood how it could appeal to anyone.  These groups obviously do a lot of social media and marketing that draws a lot of sympathy from certain people, but their media strategy that is apparently so successful elsewhere falls totally flat on my ears.  I could always understand on an intellectual level that there are lots of injustices in the world, many of them deriving in large part from the past and present misdeeds of the West (to use a loaded geographical designation), and that modern Islamic jihad is being offerred as a potential response to these injustices, a response that could appeal to lots of disaffected people.  But I wasn't one of those disaffected people (I'm a different type of disaffected person!).  I could see the parallels of this discourse with the international Marxism of the 60s and 70s, and even with the (mainly but not always peaceful) Catholic Liberation Theology-inspired movements in Latin America of this same period.  But there was something missing, something that didn't entirely click in order for me to understand how this new incarnation of ideologically-inspired guerrilla terrorism could appeal to so many.

Aboulela's book helps me to close this gap in understanding, simply by painting a situation that is similar to many situations faced by Leftists throughout Latin America during the Cold War.  If you were a Leftist intellectual (or union member, or peasant leader, or student) in Colombia, you might or might not have advocated the use of violence to right the clear injustices in your country or the world in general, and independently of your own personal advocacy of violence, you might or might not have sympathized with or even supported in some tangible way the cause of guerrilla groups like the FARC, El Salvador's FMLN, or admired Communist governments like that of Cuba or China.  But to repressive governments in Cold-War-era Colombia, and even more so to openly murderous governments like that of Argentina or Somoza's Nicaragua, simply holding certain Leftist beliefs was enough to earn a lot of people some pretty bad treatment--imprisonment, questioning, torture, even disappearance.  The gradations that are evident to me, the difference between a professor who studies Communist rebellions in 1840s Germany and an urban terrorist who plants car bombs in populated areas, were moot to a lot of those who sought out and persecuted Leftists.  And because of this, that peaceful professor who was formerly just studying Industrial-Revolution-era social movements may in fact become a hardened militant or even a guerrilla in the mountains if he has been tortured by forces that were painting him as a militant and a criminal anyway.

This situation of Cold War Leftists living under Western-aligned governments seems similar to that of many Muslims today.  Just being Muslim (or "looking" Muslim to outsiders, as might many Arab Christians, South Asian Hindus, atheists from Muslim families, etc.) is enough to earn you a lot of nebulous suspicion from your neighbors and government authorities in many Western countries.  If you have any sympathy for or even an antagonistic interest in political Islam (not even necessarily of the jihadi variety), that might get you an arrest or worse.  This latter point seems to be even more the case in a lot of majority-Muslim countries with repressive governments that try to stamp out political Islam (Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey) or terrorism (Saudi Arabia), many of whom also winkingly tolerate or even actively collude with terrorist groups.  Just as in Cold-War-era Latin America, it is often not a question of anti-democratic Islamic jihad fighting against respectable democratic regimes that uphold the rule of law and human rights.  No, both sides are almost explicitly committed to violating human rights, which means that even a lot of legitimate critics of the status quo can get labeled as terrorist sympathizers.

Anyway, reading a human story of Muslims caught between legitimate grievances and a mix of legitimate and illegitimate responses helped me to better understand what I think must be a pretty common situation for lots of people in the world, and to tie it to a Latin American context that I do understand.  In any case, I hightly recommend The Kindness of Enemies.

Slavery in the North

This is a fascinating website that gives information on the history of slavery in the northern US.  I had long heard that Illinois was a state that strictly limited entry of blacks, slave or free.  This site gives even more detail, including a brief episode where Illinois almost voted to become a slave state!

Russian influence in the US

This is a long-format article with lots of disturbing detail about the extent of Russian hacking, election meddling, social engineering, and just general nasty stuff they're doing in the US.


I think that most of us in the States are rightly concerned about all this, though my Colombian family members offered me a bit of insightful advice.  It seems that we in the US often focus on foreign affairs to the neglect of important domestic dynamics.  We are wont to get all riled up about genuinely bad stuff going on abroad, and the bad guys behind it, but in doing so we ignore our own very real shortcomings and problems.  In this case, my family members remind me that, regardless of Russia's hand in it, we in the US have a long, ugly history of oppressing, harassing, and antagonizing people of color, of voting sociopathic ideologues into power, of systematically excluding the poor from full participation in our economy and our democracy, etc.  Many of these trends have come to a head with the election of Mr. Trump, and to the extent that Russia has had a hand in fanning the flames of fascism in the US, then of course we should look to protect ourselves from such pernicious outside influences.  But most of the trend is homegrown.  With or without encouragement from Russia, just under half of the Americans that turned out on November 8th voted in favor of an outspoken bigot, corrupt oligarch, and cynical reality TV hack, largely because he promised explicitly to persecute and hurt lots of people.



In light of this, I would proffer that our attention should be fixated equally on both the hatred that has always roiled beneath the surface of the US, and the very real possibility that our elected officials and their advisors are taking their cues from leaders of a foreign autocracy.  The foreign autocracy can't much be blamed for doing bad shit--that's what autocracies do, and since it's a foreign one, there's a limited amount that we in the US can do to correct Russia's behavior.  Of course we need to attempt to defend ourselves from this foreign threat as we would with any other, but let's not fall into the mistaken belief that all our woes are coming from abroad.  Let's focus right here in our own country on a drift toward autocracy, and any actions by our leaders that would compromise our sovereignty.

Chimamanda Adichie on "dual selves" in the developing world

Here is a video from Chimamanda Adichie that purports to be about US misconceptions of Africa.  It does touch on that, but more interesting to me was the author's reflection on reading literature from Europe and the US as a child, while growing up in Nigeria in a reality very different from what she was reading.  She posits that many well-read young people in her situation, living in tropical and/or postcolonial and/or developing countries, which often don't have much indigenous children's literature, adopt a sort of dual self.  The referents they read about speak of winter, and temperate-zone fruits and foods, while their reality is one of permanently hot weather with dry and wet seasons, tropical fruit, in short a reality totally different from that of Hans Brinker or Pip or Huck Finn.  So they learn how to inhabit both worlds.  Jamaica Kincaid, in a similar essay, spoke of reading Jane Eyre and fixating on the idea of the gloaming, a weather/astronomic phenomenon of evening light that doesn't exist in the tropics.

Anyway, I have noticed this as I raise two North American boys in tropical Latin America.  At school they celebrate winter and summer, even though neither really exists where we live.  They learn P for Pear, which don't grow here, instead of Passionfruit, which does.  People here even seem more concerned at times about domestic politics in the US than about what's going on in their own country.  It's a similar situation to what Adichie describes, wherein people relate to a physically alien but mediatically familiar reality, in addition to the very different reality that surrounds them.

My wife lived perhaps a more healthy duality, in that she grew up in small-town Colombia in the late 20th century.  So she was exposed to very alien things like Michael Jackson and Wonder Woman that became part of her cultural panorama, but was fully aware that these were alien.  So much so that even US shows and movies that purported to be realistic seemed like fantasies to her, totally irrelevant to her reality.  Would that I had realized as a child, like my wife did, that my life wasn't supposed to match the blueprint of The Breakfast Club or ET or any other US media that really didn't correspond at all to my reality.  Perhaps her balanced outlook was in part because Colombia has such a healthy indigenous literature, both for adults and children, and it combines nicely with clearly foreign elements, so children can grow up appreciating the similarities between their surroundings and those representations that reach them from abroad, while not expecting them to match precisely.

Concise History of the Middle East

I just read this primer on the history of the Middle East, spanning from shortly before the rise of Islam up to the present day (ISIS and everything).  It's pretty comprehensive.  There's some editorializing (see some reviews of the previous edition here), especially at the end of each chapter, where I assume that the authors are trying to encourage their readers (it's a college textbook) to think critically, and apply some of the ideas and lessons beyond the Middle East or the specific time period covered in that chapter.  But it's a pretty good book if you want a general overview of Middle Eastern history, or a solid refresher.

Cook County Jail as the nation's largest mental health provider

This is a fascinating article about Cook County Jail, the nation's largest single-site jail, located in Chicago at 26th and California streets.  According to the article, a large proportion (estimated at one third) of the inmates have mental health needs, and in light of this the jail is run in many ways as a mental health facility.  It's a sorry state of affairs when a county sheriff is one of the nation's lead progressive thinkers on mental health care, though I'm glad he is such an advocate.  Also striking was this quote, "In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled in Estelle v. Gamble that prisons are constitutionally required to provide adequate medical care to inmates in their custody. As a result, prisoners are the only group of Americans with a constitutional right to health care".

Coffee, climate change, and migration in Guatemala

Here is a good article discussing how drought, coffee rust, and other climate-related issues that affect farming are now becoming more frequent and severe, further driving the flow of migration from Central America to the US.

Europe a step farther away

For the first time in my conscious life, people from the US like me will not be able to enter Europe freely and without a visa.  This comes after a European Parliament vote, in which it was decided that, since the US denies visa-free entry to five EU member nations (Croatia, Poland, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Romania), the EU will revoke the visa-free reciprocal agreement with the US.  This will be a minor inconvenience for me if I decide to travel to Europe sometime soon, but I'm sure it will have a pretty major impact, both economic and personal, on many US nationals, their European family members, non-US nationals who had visa-free access to the EU thanks to a US visa on their passport, and perhaps most of all for the many people in Europe who make their living from tourism.

So at this point my Colombian family members, who for most of their lives regarded their Colombian passport as a liability that brought them restricted access and enhanced scrutiny when they tried to travel to most countries, will now have easier access to Europe than I do.

Separating families on the border

This is an article about a proposal to change the way we treat migrant families that arrive at the US border.  It would retain mothers in Department of Homeland Security detention, while releasing children to become wards of the state while their parents are being processed.  A comment from a Texas Democrat about sums up my sentiments:  "That type of thing is where we depart from border security and get into violating human rights"

Up close and personal with Sebastian Gorka

Here is an article about and direct audio from a call by one of the White House's senior advisors, Sebastian Gorka, to someone who had criticized his ideas, credentials, and actions through a Twitter feed.  It is painful to listen to, since the situation is so absurdly inappropriate.  The recipient of the call, one Michael S. Smith, seems totally taken aback, as anyone would be, at receiving a call from a high-level official complaining that he'd said mean things.  I assume it is because of this that Smith never says the only thing that he'd have to say to end the conversation:  "You, Mr. Gorka, are a public servant, and I am a private citizen, and as such it is my right and my duty to learn what I can of your actions, credentials, and proposals, analyze them to the best of my ability (in this case as an expert on terrorism), and discuss them with my neighbors and the community at large.  This is a fundamental tenet of our democratic system."  Mr. Smith touches on many of these themes, but never manages to put them into a succinct phrase, so shocked is he at the conversation.  It's like when you have a run-in with someone on the street or at work, and only later you come up with the perfect retort.  Except in this case, there's some Hungaro-British fascist yelling at you for 20 minutes, so you can never get your thoughts together.

Particularly shocking are multiple moments in which Mr. Gorka evinces a fundamental misunderstanding of representative democracy.  On the one hand, he all but says that he takes any questioning of his work as a public servant to comprise a personal attack on him.  This twisted vision of his public role is confirmed by his using work time (when he should be serving the Nation) to make a private call to harangue someone for 20 minutes, and inviting Mr. Smith to work out their differences at a personal, private lunch in the White House, instead of in the public forum, where policy discussion belong.

But more troubling than this is Mr. Gorka's authoritarian insistence that no one question him or his master.  He seems to believe that, since Trump won the election, and since Gorka has been allowed a bully pulpit by the powers that be, then no one has a right to question him--not on his academic and professional merits, not on his fitness to carry out his duties, not on the soundness of his policy proposals.  The Boss says get in line, so you're supposed to get in line and not quesion.  It's like the classmate in grammar school that finds or makes up some arbitrary rule that supposedly lets them do what they want and "legitimately" prevents others from having a say.  I'm sorry, but that's not how a society of free subjects works, Mr. Gorka.