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[ by Charles Cameron — for Madhu ]
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Our friend Madhu has requested that I post poems here on occasion, and this particular poem made me think of her and her request, so here it is:

A copper and gold koan
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The world happened, the world is drifting away,
the farther away the world floats the deeper into the mists.

In Mes Aynak, Afghanistan, the remains
of a buddhist monastery already eroded by time are adrift,
a sitting buddha is floating into the mist,
headless, gold paint still on his knees and robe,
the devotion has drifted, lifted its focus
to the one without a second, the buddha left
whatever he left in memory, lingering, to gather aromas
of other ideas, realms, dust, archaeology, oblivion,
there is change, ceaseless change,

and adults must decide: is the wealth implied by the copper
beneath the buddha worth more than a trace of halo,
as the moon moves once again across a brilliant night sky.

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Koans are those brilliant paradoxes zen buddhism uses to pry the mind open, I think they’re important aids to handling complexity, and I have a post about them coming up shortly. Here, it’s enough to say that the issue of copper mining vs archaeology in Mes Aynak seems to me to be a living, breathing koan.

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It’s awkward, when you write an “ekphrastic” poem, a poem about a painting or photo, to have the image right there when the poem is read, because it trammels the reader’s mind in much the same way that a film can trammel the mind of a reader into “seeing” only the film-maker’s Gandalf, no longer her or his own.

And I’m going on at some length about this, because next up is the image from which that particular poem was built, but I’d like the image to be, as they’d say in the newsprint world, “below the fold” as you read the poem.

So here it is, #4 in a fine series of photos in a Foreign Policy photo essay which I recommend, although I’ve taken this particular (smaller) version from a CNN page, since the subtitle in the lower right corner explains the basic situation handily:

You can hear the archaeologist Brent Huffman, who took the photo, talk about the situation here — local reactions pro and con, who the Taliban are shooting at, the likelihood that the Chinese operation will in fact benefit the locals and more:

The koan of balancing material with immaterial values remains, but in this circumstance the likelihood of local Afghans receiving litter or nothing from the mining project likely tips the scales.

You can petition Afghan President Hamid Karzai for preservation…

But then he’s another wild-card in the continuing Great Game, isn’t it?

Iconoclastic strategist Edward Luttwak has characteristically caustic words on an Australian -American strategic entente to contain an “autistic” rising China:

Australia counters Chinese threat 

AUSTRALIA has been quietly building a regional defence coalition to restrain China’s increasingly ”aggressive” and ”autistic” international behaviour, an influential adviser to the Pentagon says.

Edward Luttwak bluntly contradicts Australian and US denials that they see China as a threat or want to contain its rise. ”Australians view themselves as facing a strategic threat,” he writes in his coming book, The Rise of China v The Logic of Strategy.

The emerging latticework of regional defence arrangements augments ”the overall capacity of the US-Australian alliance to contain China”.

The book praises Australia’s strategic initiative in forging ties with countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and India that lie beyond America’s natural security orbit, as well as broadening the defence networks of close US allies such as Japan.

”Each of these Australian initiatives derives from a prior and broader decision to take the initiative in building a structure of collective security piece by piece, and not just leave it all to the Americans,” it says.

….The Australian National University’s Hugh White has argued that the US needs to ”share power” with what is going to be ”the most formidable power the US has ever faced”. But for Mr Luttwak, the ”logic of strategy” dictates that neighbours will naturally coalesce against the new rising threat, thus preventing China from realising anything like the relative military power that has been projected.

”The rapid accession to prosperity has been a very common way for countries to lose their sanity,” Mr Luttwak told the Herald. He said China suffered from ancient and new foreign policy weaknesses.

”The Chinese are autistic in dealing with foreigners, they have no sense of the ‘other’,” he said. ”They think they are incredibly brilliant strategists as if they had been conquering other nations, when in fact it’s been the other way around for 1500 years.”

Ouch.

China’s political system is in the midst of a particularly edgy and uncertain generational transition of power, following the succession machinery designed by China’s last “paramount leader”, Deng Xiaoping, to retain harmony among the ruling Communist Party elite.  Deng’s successors are following his script, but their hearts no longer appear to be in it – 15 years after Deng’s death, cracks have appeared in the facade of unity. Not a fatal flaw, but lacking a leader of Deng’s stature who, even in retirement, remained the supreme arbiter of China’s political system, factions of China’s elite have more room to push conflicting agendas.

In foreign policy we see the effects in China’s erratically belligerent, then conciliatory behavior towards it’s East Asian neighbors and the United States. Strategically, it makes little sense for China to repeatedly generate friction over territorial claims to the entire South China Sea with Vietnam, Philippines, Taiwan, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia and the United States and push a separate dispute with Japan simultaneously, yet because of intra-elite, domestic politics, Beijing is unable or unwilling to restrain enthusiast Chinese officials from doing so.

[ by Charles Cameron — comparative riotology, with sidelong glances at goats and a single mole ]
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It’s not always disrespect for the Prophet that causes people to burn flags and attempt to break into embassies…

This week, the disputed sovereignty of some uninhabited islands has done the trick quite nicely in Beijing, where rioters have attempted to breach the Japanese embassy and burned the Japanese flag (upper image, above) in a manner that’s somehow reminiscent of the breaching of the US embassy and corresponding burning of the US flag (lower image) in Cairo .

I imagine that if one was Japanese or Chinese, one might consider the Beijing protests over the ownership of the Senkaku / Diaoyu / Tiaoyutai Islands to be the primary troubling news-story about embassies, rioting and gross breaches of diplomatic protocol this week.

There’s a strange kind of parallax involved here, I think. Or perhaps: what’s in the foreground depends on where you stand.

But that’s not to say there’s an exact equivalence between the situations, just that bearing one in mind may shed some light on the other.

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I hope to get into the layers and layers of motivation that feed a riot in a subsequent post, but for now I’d just like to point to one similarity between the two situations. In each case, there’s an undertow of strong feeling that surfaces at a certain point — and astonishes us by its force.

In the case of the disputed islands, it may be Chinese feelings about Japanese behavior towards them in World War II that are triggered by Japanese claims on the islands. As China Daily USA says:

Japan has to recognize China’s sovereignty over the Diaoyu Islands and atone for its past aggressions and atrocities, and take measures to punish those Japanese who deny the country’s violent past, in the way that Germany has been doing for decades. Only if Japan does that will China and other Asian countries see it as a normal country. Otherwise, China should prepare for a long-term struggle.

Or as the Israeli Arutz7 puts it:

As

The dispute with Japan is now part of the legacy of World War II and China claims that under the Potsdam Declaration of 1945, Japan was obligated to return all the territories seized illegally.

The above means that the dispute over the islands is now connected to one of the most highly charged issues in Sino-Japanese history, making it a matter of national honor for the Chinese that is not subject to negotiation.

Note here that the question is expressly one of honor.

It is significant, too, that the Chinese can be described as lenient towards their protesters attaching the sovereign embassy of a sovereign nation, just as the Egyptian government has been described as lenient towards their protesters attacking the sovereign embassy of the United States:

In the interim, China has allowed anti-Japanese demonstrators a relative freehand (“Their feelings are perfectly understandable” explained the Chinese Foreign Ministry) and the Japanese Embassy in Beijing has issued warnings to Japanese citizens and businessmen to take precautionary measures.

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I strongly believe that undertows, as I am calling them here, are among the most important topics for monitoring and analysis — and that the fact that they so often take us by surprtise is a good reason to pay them closer analytic attention.

They surface in dreams, in graffiti, in conspiracy theories, in all the liminal spaces. And they can have game-changing impact: Great Game Changing impact.

That, btw, is why Cass Sunstein‘s paper on conspiracy theories is one we should consider in detail here on ZP one of these days.

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Of course, as this recent map from the Economist shows —

— there are also oil and gas fields nearby.

What drives a crowd to riot and what interests the powers that be may be two very different sides to the same affair.

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Curious Goat Fact accompaning the above map:

In the 1970s Japanese ultra-rightists took two goats on a 2,000km (1,250-mile) trip southwest from Tokyo to a group of uninhabited rocks near Taiwan called the Senkaku Islands. In the absence of humans willing to live in such a remote outpost, the hardy creatures would be the vanguard of a new push to solidify Japan’s hold over the islets, which are also claimed by China and Taiwan.

Supplementary Mole Fact:

The Senkaku mole is an endangered species.

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Does comparing Beijing 2012 with Cairo 2012 change the emphasis with which you view recent events in Cairo and elsewhere?

Do you find the analogy between Cairo 2012 (upper panel above) and Tehran 1979 (lower panel) more convincing?

Look, I think the making of analogies is one of the chief ways — if not the chief way — in which we make “instinctive” judgments, which we then back up with appropriately selected data and reasoning. If you like, it’s subject to our own mental version of undertow in terms of what analogies we chose and how strongly we then weigh them — unless we take responsibility for the process, and begin to explore how it actually works in our own minds, and in the public mind…

Analogy is an extremely powerful instrument of thought — and it’s about time we understood it as well as we understand linear logic.

[ by Charles Cameron — science and / or apocalypse, quirky, not analytic ]
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The upper image of this par shows the Yangtze River recently, as reported by the Daily Telegraph under the delightful header, Red China:

I got it from Scence, Space & Robots, which commented:

NDTV reports that Chongqing’s Environmental Protect Bureau is blaming sand for the color change in the river. They claim flooding upstream washed sand downstream which turned the river red.

Okay, so as anyone who has stirred watercolors with their fingers knows, water can be all kinds of colors…

But what it it’s the apocalypse?

That was one possible conclusion Live Science found whehn they asked people about the red color of a lake in Texas (lower image):

The color has some apocalypse believers suggesting that OC Fisher is an early sign of the end of the world, but Texas Parks and Wildlife Inland Fisheries officials say the bloody look is the result of Chromatiaceae bacteria, which thrive in oxygen-deprived water.

So — when you see red water, do you think “aha! daub time” or “ooh, chromatiaceae” — or “OMG, it’s the end, it must be”?

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Do you prefer to get your explanations for curious events from science, or from religion?

As Caitlin Fitz Gerald — who has an impressive acquaintance with watercolors as the artist behind the Clausewitz for Kids project — kindly tweeted:

John the Revelator puts it this way, in Revelation 16.4:

And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters; and they became blood.

Even the Onion mentions the streets running red, though out of concern for good taste, I won’t quote…

[ by Charles Cameron — Jewish Democrats suggest humorous barbs for Jewish Republicans to digest ]
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As those who follow my strand of posts her on Zenpundit know by now, I’m not a great one for taking sides: I imagine very few bridge builders are, and my real interest is in building bridges.

I am also, in general, interested in the ephemeral signals that go on between and within opposing camps — because they’ll often portray a different side of things from what’s in the official pronouncements.

What I’m offering here, then, is a fleeting glimpse into some Jewish humor from the Democratic side of things:

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— two “curses” from the from the Yiddish Curses for Republican Jews website.

As wry humor, I’m okay with these. As embittered humor, not so much.

And I don’t know the people who posted these “curses” — though I’m reasonably sure they didn’t intend them as actual, may G*d do this to you and I mean it, curses.

Frankly, I’m interested in the religious content.

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I’m interested in the jokes.

I’m interested in the leaflets, the comments in the comment sections of websites — and in the winks, the nudges and the nods.

I’m interested in the differences between “in-house” and “external” explanations of things, what the differences may actually mean, and what they may get interpreted to mean. I’m interested in the asides, the sneers and smears, the jokes, the ambiguous threats, the real hatreds, the moments of reflection, the metanoias, changes of heart, repentances.

At times, the materials I run across are threatening, at times witty or droll, at times insightful, and at times completely unhinged from reality, but they usually have something to teach us about undercurrents — about the variousness of human thoughts and feelings.

We humans are a strange lot, each one of us so singular that we have a hard time getting our heads around the differences between us — differences that can make all the difference between peace and war, life and death.

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I’m not going to explain the jokes, but I am going to take just a quick look at their religious content.

One of the qualities that is, IMO, most likeable about Jewish culture is that it delights in self-mockery. The New York Times journalist Michelle Goldberg tweeted a Jewish joke yesterday, to which I responded with a quote from Martin Luther:

Now I don’t know about Michelle, but I didn’t intend my quote from Luther — “sin boldly” — as representing either my personal advice to the world at large, or Luther’s, except perhaps in a very limited sense such as the one Dietrich Bonhoeffer offered as his explanation of Luther’s meaning.

Bonhoeffer’s question is the obvious one:

Is this the proclamation of cheap grace, naked and unashamed, the carte blanche for sin, the end of all discipleship? Is this a blasphemous encouragement to sin boldly and rely on grace? Is there a more diabolical abuse of grace than to sin and rely on the grace which God has given?

And his response?

Take courage and confess your sin, says Luther, do no try to run away from it, but believe more boldly still. You are a sinner, so be a sinner, and don’t try to become what you are not. Yes, and become a sinner again and again every day, and be bold about it. But to whom can such words be addressed, except to those who from the bottom of their hearts make a daily renunciation of sin and of every barrier which hinders them from following Christ, but who nevertheless are troubled by their daily faithlessness of sin? Who can hear these words without endangering his faith but he who hears their consolation as a renewed summons to follow Christ? Interpreted in this way, these words of Luther become a testimony to the costliness of grace, the only genuine kind of grace there is.

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So no, I don’t think all religiously-themed tweeting and web-based cursing is to be taken literally.

But I do find it interesting that Michelle jokes about kosher, and I joke about sinning boldly — and that the Yiddish humor displayed on the “curses” website includes references to the LDS practice of proxy baptism for the dead and an indication that it might be uncomfortable for those with strong anti-Muslim feelings to meet the generous hospitality that so often characterizes Muslim cultures.

So let’s dig into those two themes in a little more depth.

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Official Latter-day Saints doctrine teaches:

Jesus Christ taught that baptism is essential to the salvation of all who have lived on earth (see John 3:5). Many people, however, have died without being baptized. Others were baptized without proper authority. Because God is merciful, He has prepared a way for all people to receive the blessings of baptism. By performing proxy baptisms in behalf of those who have died, Church members offer these blessings to deceased ancestors. Individuals can then choose to accept or reject what has been done in their behalf.

And while the practice of baptizing the dead by proxy may seem strange to most Christians, the Latter-day Saints can point to I Corinthians 15.29:

Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for the dead?

and I Peter 4.6 for precedent:

For for this cause was the gospel preached also to them that are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit.

Maybe so — but Saints Peter and Paul, though Jewish by birth, are now generally reckoned Christians, having accepted the belief that Jesus was the awaited Jewish Messiah, the Christ — so their epistles are not canonical texts for mainstream Judaism.

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Feelings in the Jewish community can run pretty strongly on the issue of Mormon believers’ baptisms of Jewish believing dead:

The wrongful baptism of Jewish dead, which disparages the memory of a deceased person is a brazen act which will obscure the historical record for future generations. It has been bitterly opposed by many Jews for a number of years. Others say they will never stop being Jews, simply because there is a paper saying they had been baptized, that the act of posthumous baptism is unimportant and should be ignored. We think this to be a narrow, parochial, and shallow view. We will continue opposing this wrongful act which assimilates our dead to the point where it will not be possible to know who was Jewish in their lifetimes.

[ … ]

A protest drive initiated by Jewish genealogists escalated it to a nationally publicized issue that was followed by public outcry. American Jewish leaders considered it an insult and a major setback for interfaith relations. They initiated discussions with the Mormon Church that culminated in a voluntary 1995 agreement by the Church to remove the inappropriate names. Activists continue to monitor Mormon baptismal lists, seeking removal of inappropriate entries.

Indeed, in February of this year it was discovered that the Holocaust victim Anne Frank had been baptized by proxy — for what one researcher said was the ninth time.

The Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel responded with passionate anger, and the Mormon Church with an apolpogy and a firm statement that the practice was prohibited.

LDS spokesman Michael Purdy made it clear that the Church “is absolutely firm in its commitment to not accept the names of Holocaust victims for proxy baptism.”

There are serious issues here: as humans, we can listen to one another with respect, and work them out.

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Palestinian Muslim hospitality towards Jews?

Miftah is an Ethiopian who visited some Palestinian shepherds in company with people sympathetic to the Palestinian cause:T

he group I went with was a mostly Israeli – international activists’ group that accompanies shepherds in the village as they graze their herds. Since these shepherds face attacks from settlers and soldiers frequently, the purpose of the trip was to document and confront the settlers or soldiers if they try to harass the shepherds.

These were people the Palestinians had reason to respect, Israelis and foreign activists sympathetic to their cause — but the degree of hospitality they were shown nicely illustrates the innate courtesy of so many pastoral peoples…

As we were heading back from the hills to where our mini-van was, these shepherds we had met offered to take us home for some tea and coffee. Mind you, it’s the Ramadan fasting season and all of them were fasting. They would offer us water, coffee and bread even though the last meal they had was at dawn that morning and would not have any food or water until dusk that evening. In Ramadan, even people who don’t fast don’t eat in public or in front of people who fast. But out of true hospitality, they extended their “‘Mitzvah’ – their act of kindness” to us, as one of the Israeli activists put it

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The story is an old one: the person of few possessions who will kill one of their handful of sheep to feed the passing stranger…

In this second “curse” we glimpse the long tradition of hospitality to strangers without which the great trade routes of the ancient would would not have permitted China to supply Europe with silks, nor Roman jewelry to have found its way into Japanese tombs…