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Pakistani Islamist militants, with the political support of the ISI and some of Pakistan’s higher military leadership, are trodding down a path we have seen before. Assassinations of democratic or tolerant political figures at odds with Islamist extremists and the military elite has become de facto “normalized” in Pakistan.

And popular among many Pakistanis.

Bhatti Killing Should Alarm Pakistan’s Minorities

The murder last week of Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s minority affairs minister and the only Christian in the cabinet, is a reminder of how dangerous it can be to voice one’s opinion in violence-riddled Pakistan. Bhatti was a liberal who spoke often against Pakistan’s blasphemy laws and their narrow-minded application.

His murder comes just weeks after the assassination of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer, another prominent moderate. Both men were targeted by Islamic extremists because of their calls to reform the blasphemy laws. The purpose of their murders — besides depriving moderates of some of their most courageous leaders — is to frighten moderates and minorities into silence and submission.

What Salman Taseer’s assassination could mean for Pakistan …

Experts believe the outpouring of praise for the killer of Salman Taseer, the former governor of Punjab who was slain by his own security detail in Islamabad on Tuesday, reflects deep support for religious intolerance and will have a chilling effect on reform-minded public figures.

“It’s highly dangerous for these religious scholars to say things that do not fit into the legal context of [an] issue. Are they saying Taseer was guilty of blasphemy simply by criticizing a law? In that case, hundreds of thousands are guilty. This is a clear incitement to violence,” says Badar Alam, editor of Pakistan’s Herald magazine and an expert on Islamist groups.

Pakistan’s Bhutto assassinated – World news – South and Central …

NAUDERO, Pakistan – The body of Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto arrived in her family village for burial on Friday, hours after her assassination plunged the nuclear-armed country into one of the worst crises in its 60-year history.

Enraged crowds rioted across Pakistan and hopes for democracy hung by a thread after the former prime minister was gunned down as she waved to supporters from the sunroof of her armored vehicle.

The death of President Pervez Musharraf’s most powerful opponent threw the nation into chaos just 12 days before elections and threatened its already unsteady role as a key fighter against Islamic terror.

A cadre of military leaders manipulate and orchestrate civilian fanatics to methodically murder and intimidate civilian officials and radicalize the larger society, where have we seen this before? Oh, yes:

Pakistan is a Muslim version of 1930’s Japan.

US policy has hitched itself to a dangerously evolving and increasingly Fascist leadership class in Pakistan that is steadily veering away from any pretense of civilized conduct or partnership with the US, reifying a witch’s brew of Islamist extremism, militarism and anti-Indian and anti-American nationalism.  We need to disengage from and de-fund this monstrosity that bends most of it’s efforts against our interests and values. 

Pakistan is a strategic black hole of an “ally” that is going to blow up in our face someday.

 Some Advice to Evil Dictators by Steven Elden

Amusing.

Great multidisciplinary talk by Dr. Denis Dutton on the possible evolutionary origins on culturally universal concepts of aesthetic beauty.

a light-hearted canon in two voices

[ by Charles Cameron ]

*

I’d been doing some research for a follow-up post on story-telling in Afghanistan to go with Scott‘s account of his day at DARPA’s recent STORyNET conference, and one of the interlocutors on the list we’re both on posted a question about the impact of drug use as a consideration in narrative.

Baudelaire and Cocteau both have writings on drug use — hashish and opium respectively — but it was Afghan or more generally Islamic story-telling that I was after, and it occurred to me that the four stories in Paul Bowles‘ collection, A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard, were easily accessible examples of the kind of story-telling that Moroccans are prone to under the influence of hashish.  Bowles describes their mental processes thus:

Moroccan kif-smokers like to speak of the “two worlds,” the one ruled by inexorable natural laws, and the other, the kif world, in which each person perceives “reality” according to the projections of his own essence, the state of consciousness in which the elements of the physical universe are automatically rearranged by cannabis to suit the requirements of the individual. These distorted variations in themselves generally are of scant interest to anyone but the subject at the time he is experiencing them. An intelligent smoker, nevertheless, can aid in directing the process of deformation in such a way that the results will have value to him in his daily life. If he has faith in the accuracy of his interpretations, he will accept them as decisive, and use them to determine a subsequent plan of action. Thus, for a dedicated smoker, the passage to the “other world” is often a pilgrimage undertaken for the express purpose of oracular consultation.

The title of Bowles’ little collection, by the way, comes from the Moroccan proverb which is gives me the first of my two quotes, two courtyards, two intoxicants and two hundred camels below…

I wasn’t entirely satisfied, though, which a Moroccan account of hash-flavored narrative when DARPA was looking for an understanding of narrative that would apply in Afghanistan, so I thought I’d look up some of Idries Shah‘s writings, and Kara Kush in particular, to see if perhaps I could find an Afghan equivalent of Bowles’ stories there…

I already had Bowles’ one courtyard and one hundred camels in mind, so you’ll understand how pleased I was to stumble upon another slightly obscure but interesting writer — Peter Lamborn Wilson, aka Hakim Bey, who gave use the concept of the TAZ or Temporary Autonomous Zone — writing about Afghanistan rather than Morocco, opium rather than hashish, and a second courtyard, with a second hundred camels:

Two terrific writers: Paul Bowles and Peter Lamborn Wilson.

Sources: Bowles – Wilson

Courtyards with a hundred camels in them are popping up all over.

The New York Times, which I read on my iPad, particularly the non-political news sections of the paper where the obnoxious spin is reduced and the content quotient is higher, had an article that I think will ring a bell with ZP readers:

Sam Anderson –What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text’

One day in college I was trawling the library for a good book to read when I found a book called “How to Read a Book.” I tried to read it, but must have been doing something wrong, because it struck me as old-fashioned and dull, and I could get through only a tiny chunk of it. That chunk, however, contained a statement that changed my reading life forever. The author argued that you didn’t truly own a book (spiritually, intellectually) until you had marked it up.

….All of which means I’ve been feeling antsy over the last five years, as I’ve watched the inexorable rise of e-readers. I sympathize with the recent wave of public teeth-gnashing about the future of marginal notes. The digital book – scentless, pulp-free, antiseptic – seems like a poor home for the humid lushness of old-fashioned marginalia. You can’t even write by hand in an e-book – at least not comfortably, not yet. As John Dickerson recently put it on Slate, describing his attempt to annotate books on an iPad: “It’s like eating candy through a wrapper.” Although I’ve played with Kindles and iPads and Nooks, and I like them all in theory, I haven’t been able to commit to any of them. As readers, they disable the thing that, to me, defines reading itself. And yet I’ve continued to hope that, in some not-too-distant future, e-reading will learn to take marginalia seriously. And it looks as if that might be happening right now.

According to the marginalia scholar H. J. Jackson, the golden age of marginalia lasted from roughly 1700 to 1820. The practice, back then, was surprisingly social – people would mark up books for one another as gifts, or give pointedly annotated novels to potential lovers. Old-school marginalia was – to put it into contemporary cultural terms – a kind of slow-motion, long-form Twitter, or a statusless, meaning-soaked Facebook, or an analog, object-based G-chat. (Nevermind: it was social, is my point.) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the undisputed all-time champion of marginalia, flourished at the tail end of this period, and his friends were always begging him to mark up their books. He eventually published some of his own marginalia, and in the process even popularized the word “marginalia” – a self-consciously pompous Latinism intended to mock the triviality of the form.

Incidentally, How to Read A Book is by Mortimer J. Adler. A classic 

Marginalia is of critical importance to biographers and historians studying controversial figures. We know far more about such disparate figures as John Adams and Joseph Stalin because they enthusiastically marked up their books and documents with sharp and brutally frank opinions, revealing the true feelings often masked to contemporaries. Stalin, who sometimes used a crayon, would mark certain passages with “ha ha!” which, far from being a sign of the dictator’s amusement indicated rage toward the author – sometimes with lethal consequences. Stalin’s rival and equally deadly disciple, Mao ZeDong scrawled erudite literary, scholarly, sometimes poetical, comments about philosophy and Chinese history that belied his taste for the maniacal ruin of a classical Confucian culture in which he was deeply versed.

Richard Nixon, who clinked toasts of maotais with Mao and Zhou ( mostly Zhou as Mao was seriously ill) during Nixon’s historic visit ran his semi-isolated presidency via marginalia he methodcally wrote on news clippings, memos and yellow legal pads all day long, which he sent to his “Lord High Executioner” H.R. Haldeman, who like Henry Kissinger, discreetly ignored Nixon’s angrier, stranger and more ill-considered notations while carrying out Nixon’s incisive or at least harmless instructions. Harry Truman, known for employing blistering profainity in private, was also capable of the searing marginal commentary favored by John Adams.

It isn’t just e-readers, iPads and PCs that have reduced marginalia. The culture of literacy is in a general decline in America and the “gotcha” nature of modern politics and the criminalization of policy differences have caused political figures to adopt a strategy of eschewing diaries, journals, letters and email on the advice of attorneys. Statesmen are following the old rule of Chicago alderman, “Don’t write it down when you can say it, don’t say it when you can nod, don’t nod when you can wink”. It’s a loss to history. We will know far more about Teddy Roosevelt’s true interior life or Richard Nixon’s than we will of Barack Obama’s. Very little that is recorded will not be, in part, artifice and marginalia is a poor strategy for artifice designed to craft an image or advance an argument.

As part of the diminishing cadre of marginalians, I like to mark up books with colored, ultra fine point, sharpies. Generally lighter hues so it won’t bleed heavily through the page. Occasionally, for especially important passages, maybe one or two a book, a highlighter is used so that in the future, I can lazily pull the book from the shelf and quickly flip to the paragraph in question. I tend to do a lot of underlining and bracketing; when I was younger, I “argued” more with the authors in the margins. Older now, I expand on their points whether I agree with them or not. The Kindle has the capacity to type in notes, but I have not used the function much because most of the books I have read on it are fiction.

What do you do with the margins of your books?