The Lazy Logic & Fantasies of Sanjeev Nayyar

If you would believe Sanjeev Nayyar of DNA India, the right way to understand American opposition to a mosque in New York (conveniently titled the Ground Zero mosque) is to:

· Quote a battle dating from 1683 AD & claim a precedent of revenge dating from that battle and claim that "American" memory extends all the way back to 100 years before their country was formed.

· Claim a semantic objection by the collective unconscious to the name proposed: "Cordoba House". The stunning logic is that "Cordoba" symbolized Islamic inroads into Christian Europe; never mind that since then, the south of Spain has almost developed a collective amnesia to their Muslim heritage, as a visit to the region would inform anyone.

· In the fantastic imagination of the columnist, 9/11 is "perceived as an Islamic attempt to take revenge for the loss in the Battle of Vienna in 1683"... perceived by whom? And how? In which opinion poll? Or in which interview? Oh bother, never mind with the trivial details.

· Then Sanjeev jumps on a magic carpet and travels from New York to North India to draw parallels between a mosque in present day New York and temples destroyed in the 17^th century by Aurangzeb... never mind the Taj Mahal built by the Mughals, screw the Red Fort, forget the ghazals and the famous miniature paintings... let us focus solely on the sordid details of two destroyed Hindu temples just because they serve this argument better (that " the mosque is a symbol of Muslim victory over the Christian west … (or over tolerant Hindustan?")

· Lo and behold, it is at this juncture that "a few questions arise" in the mind of Sanjeev Nayyar and what are they?

o Why do liberals in democracies not use the same yardsticks to apply in countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Malaysia and J&K?

o Consider, my thudding heart, these paragons against which we are advised to compare ourselves:

o Saudi Arabia: never was a democracy; is a monarchy (defined as King Rules. King with very deep oil wells. Hence everyone's friend. Regardless of liberals, yardsticks and oil-sipping hybrids)

o Pakistan: tin-pot generals, Mr.10% presidents, cataclysmic floods and the Taliban... they have enough slightly more pressing problems than liberals with yardsticks, no?

o Malaysia: I haven’t heard much about religious persecution in Malaysia but I do know there are very big Hindu temples in Malaysia which entertain quite a few pilgrims.

o J&K: J&K is a mess, more or less the same as Pakistan where people have enough problems from the mujaheddin, the Indian Army, the Pakistani ISI, the VHP, you name it... and we wonder why they don’t proclaim deep and profound thoughts about religious freedom.

Hence, as this utterly logical flow of argument flows, this mosque becomes “an attempt to rewrite history which will result in Americans forgetting the Twin towers 200 years from now”. Ah, the utterly sinister workings of the Islamic mind... who else could have smoked out this devilry but Mr. Nayyar from DNA!

Towards the end of the article, the mysterious & secretive liberals (They Who Shall Not Be Named) who made an appearance earlier in the column, arrive again to raise a parting question “Why the past is so important when there are more pressing concerns in the present?” and vanish again, into the mists of time, confusion, secrecy, whatever. But intrepid Mr.Nayyar, who never bothers to mention them by name or quote sources, doesn't spare them... no way! He trots out poor Vivekananda to track down and answer these confounding liberals with a good patriotic dose of Hindu nationalism.

So lets quickly recap the highlights of shoddy journalism in play here:

• Connecting facts that sound significant but bear no relation or impact on each other (eg: American memory and Islamic inroads in Spain)
• The creation of strawmen (liberals) without any records to back up who they are or what they said; the creation of another level of strawmen (the so-called intolerant states against which Level 1 Strawmen raise arguments)

And thats just the top two...

I know of at least a dozen bloggers who write phenomenally better copy than this; so I wonder why DNA relies on such inferior talent to turn out fundamentally flawed opinions like this?

British Butterfly History

But there is some good news: as the climate gets warmer, Britain is attracting butterfly immigrants such as the Queen of Spain fritillary from Southern Europe. In the last chapter of the book, Barkham finds a pair of Queen of Spains mating (his 60th species). His companion, the butterfly expert Neil Hulme tells him not to get too excited...

"We mustn't get too close. This is British butterfly history unfolding before our very eyes"

- From The Sunday Times review of Patrick Barkham's "The Butterfly Isles"

Like the Rape of Christ

Last May, I was at the Guardian Hay Festival listening to Colm O’Gorman on the behaviour of the Catholic Church and its response to the child abuse scandal... and this was what he called it “Like the Rape of Christ Himself”.

Colm O’ Gorman is a man of unassuming looks, who wouldn’t stand out if you crossed him on the Tube. But listen to him and you get a hint of the trauma that he’s been through... Colm grew up in an Irish village where the parish priest regularly abused him. It was very difficult to explain to his mother why he wouldn’t visit the priest and help him, when it was almost a moral obligation for young Catholics do so. Sometimes when the priest came to collect him for “volunteer” duties, he would refuse to come down and his mother would try her best to convince him to go and help out – she found this weird because he was normally a well behaved child.

Unable to put up with this, he broke off contact with family for over 4 years, “kept running” as he said and ended up in London. It was only in 1995 that he went back to Ireland and told his sister what had happened. What spurred him to action was a chat on the phone when his sister remarked that she’d seen the priest at a marriage and that he had a lot of young boys around him... that’s when he knew he had to something and within 6 weeks he was back in Ireland.

The Need Not To Hear, Not To Listen | He spoke about how receiving such brutal news could be traumatic for people who had grown up with the Church as a pillar of their life: “the need not to hear, not to listen to this terribly destructive experience”... Indeed, when a friend tried to tell his mother about how a priest had abused her son, she was so disturbed that she got up and throttled him, as if to hold him by the throat would prevent such a thing from happening.

And in one sense, this was what the Church was also struggling with… and coping by denying the existence of a serious issue: out of 4 bishops who resigned in Ireland, only 2 were allowed to go. He shared an example of what happened to a priest who abused boys in a group in a Boy Scout training session; while the Scouts banned him for life, the church made him a priest. An escalation of the issue to the Papal Nuncio (ambassador) of Ireland in 1987 earned a callous response: "The Holy See is aware of your concerns". And so the priest continued to abuse until Colm complained to the police and the priest was finally arrested in 1995.

It is difficult to imagine the very personal trauma of being abused… Colm wondered about how it would feel to confess your sins to a man who has raped you? He gave the horrific example of a priest who abused a nun, arranged for abortion when she got pregnant and when she died of medical complications, officiated over her funeral.

A Secular Conspiracy| He went on to show how the sub-text of every communication from the Vatican detracted from the primary issue…

• ...somehow the corruption of the society was part of the problem…
  
• ...somehow it was a secular conspiracy against the Church…
  
• ...it was the result of celibacy…

Since when does celibacy (or the lack of it or anything else, for God’s sake) allow a man to go out and rape a child?

At the end of his interactions with the Church, he had to conclude that the Catholic Church had been morally corrupt in dealing with the situation… an institution that was supposed to stand up for truth, love, pursuit of justice was shielding rapists against the justice, against the rights of victims. And by ignoring the cries of victims and abetting this behavior, the Church was almost abetting the rape of Christ (Mathew 25:45, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least among you, you did not do for me”)

I found it a very disturbing, stark and almost gimmicky comparison… but think about it, maybe not too far from the truth. All the AIDs clinics that the church builds, all the priests and nuns who slog thanklessly in jungles and deserts, all the schools and colleges that have fed a hungry mind… the goodness of all such outstanding acts of courage and faith go waste in the face of the Church leadership’s utter cowardice in obfuscating these crimes.

Creating an opportunity to prey| In the Q& A session after the speech, a social worker explained how her organization realized that if there weren't enough checks in place, enough empathy in listening to victims and enough measures to apply against criminals, you would become an organization that attracts paedophiles, because this is how they find opportunity and prey... And she felt that the Church was in danger of going down that route.

Colm agreed with this and added that that there had been several petitions submitted to the Vatican but it still refused to put in place mandatory child protection policies. If this was possible in England, which enjoys good standards of freedom of speech and law enforcement, he wondered what would be the case in Philippines or Brazil or other developing countries where people are more vulnerable and the Church has more authority. An example he quoted: In Brazil, a priest regularly abused a kid from a favela; when the grandmother complained, the Bishop ex-communicated her and tried to suppress the issue. But it was only when they realized that everyone teased the victim as the priest’s “little wife” and when they discovered a diary with details of whom to target and how to abuse, that the priest was finally arrested.

In his closing remarks, Colm insisted that the State cannot abdicate responsibility...it needs to ask questions and not let the Church dodge responsibility.

I wonder…| What men are these, that lurk in the corners of churches... and what men are those that allowed them to prey on children? My High St. Kensington parish priest took great pride in booming across the pews at mass: that abusers constituted only 0.4% of the total priest population and most parishioners clapped their hands as if this somehow constituted a remarkable achievement. Since when does rape get sanction, go unpunished or become justified because such an ugliness occurs only rarely? (A questionable statistic considering the Church’s lack of transparency in the issue).

No one takes issue with the 0.4% statistic or with the truly noble work done by the Mother Teresas and Father Damiens of the Church… but when Bishops, Cardinals and the Pope himself turn a blind eye to acts of evil under their roofs, I wonder if Colm had it right there: like the rape of Christ Himself.

Notes

• Colm O'Gorman's "Beyond Belief" is available (with a needlessly sensational subtitle - "The Story of the Boy Who sued the Pope") from Amazon for GBP4.89 here.
• Image sourced from a Telegraph article about Colm O'Gorman here

The 4 women

" Used to say there was four women in every man's heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman"

Billy Pretty in The Shipping News, Annie Proulx.

A reflector reflects...

Jarod Lanier in the Chronicle of Higher Education talks about the end of human specialness and the alarming ascendance of a computerized collective unconscious:

"If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you'll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?"

His speech at the LSE last year, in which he lays out the premise behind his book "You are not a gadget" is interesting, provocative and is available as a podcast here.

That Which Is Beauty Is Also Beast

Fiona Banner has hung up a couple of fighter jets at the Tate Modern - this extract from either The Sunday Times or The Observer or the New Yorker is her comment about them...

PS: If anyone knows the exact source, do let me know- would be happy to cite and link up.

An Acceptable Substitute for Light

The Crepuscular Theory of Light
- Richard W. Halperin

That light in it's purest form is found
In jazz heard on a summer night;

That light is drinkable in any
Colour one chooses, as the mad know;

That we think light bends because we bend -
Racine knew better: it's a hatchet;

That where she lives now is a bossa
Nova of light, as when she lived here;

That just to to think of her name is an
Acceptable substitute for light.

From the latest Poetry Review

The Consequences of Earshot

I've always been a merciless eavesdropper but much as Alaphia points out here about its merits, it has its own consequences... on one's sanity!

We have a Flexidesk system at work - Flexidesk is companyspeak for "Let's see if you can reach early enough to catch a chair, the number of which outnumber by 2:1, the building's occupants". A.K.A. "Gotcha".

What this hustle means is that one's neighbour varies everyday, an absurdist human lottery of sorts... the glorious gongura-pickle eating South Indian, the Frenchman going brrrppoooofff all the time, the Arab who seems to hiss at/curse everyone's grandfathers, the stinky nerd with the shiny Mac, the woman with hula-hoops on her ears impeccably complemented by a Chanel No.5 forcefield and the occassional tobbaco chewing Texan. All stereotypes duly make their appearance at regular intervals.

Today, however, is an outlier of a day. There is a plain looking 55+ year old man next to me. Harmless almost, until he gets on the phone. Wears a tie, really looks white but speaks Sinhalese to his relatives. He varies his accent depending on whom he speaks to and presents his complicated surname to Brit callers in two simple syllables. He calls his niece on the office phone to tell her friend about not mentioning his Tamil origin on his UK visa application.

Needlessly funny at most times, he tells a caller to hold on for a second while he weeps in the corner and comes back. To another, he shares the discovery of his professional incompetence by the company (in a hushed tone) and shares his new responsibilities which may include shredding blank paper and fetching vanilla tea. He has been apparently reassigned as part of a management shakeup (he shakes himself, his chair and MY desk, somehow communicating the agony of it all, down the thin copper line) and is awaiting his new role.

He explains to his cousin how senior managers in the firm are practititioners of the exotic language of Jar-Gon-Ese and also how his new boss was supposed to turn up to tell him what to do but has been AWOL for the last 5 days and so he enjoys the sun in the office atrium but has regretfully left his suntan lotion at home.

Then he calls to check on his aunt in a care-home. On being told that she is asleep, he signs off thus "Tell her that her little nephew, 'S' called and that he is praying for her daily".

The wonder, the horror. Yet another day winds down.

Image sourced from here.

And I too suffer...

"...but always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer..." Bertrand Russell in The Prologue to his autobiography.


I just finished Susan Sontag’s “Regarding The Pain of Others” and it was a such a strong reminder of all the reasons why I love reading and how a powerful compendium of words can ram home unpalatable truths. In this book, Sontag makes an unflinching study of the many images of human distress and dissects our thinking as we consider such images. In doing so, she not only spells out the tenuous limits of morality (during wartime, especially) but also marks the larger manipulation of memory that human society chooses to live with.

Some excerpts from the book:

"...and the pity and the disgust that pictures like Hick's inspire should not distract you from asking what pictures, whose cruelties, whose deaths are not being shown"

“When Woolf notes that one of the photographs she has been sent shows a corpse of a man or woman so mangled that it could as well be that of a dead pig, her point is that the scale of war's murderousness destroys what identifies people as individuals, even as human beings”

“It is the same intelligence whose weapons of annihilation can locate the enemy to the exact second and meter, wrote Junger, that labors to preserve the great historical event in fine detail.”

“The exhibition in photographs of cruelties inflicted on those with darker complexions in exotic countries continues, oblivious to the considerations that deter such displays of our own victims of violence; for the other, even when not an enemy, is regarded only as someone to be seen, not someone (like us) who also sees; but surely the Taliban soldier begging for his life whose fate was pictured prominently in the NY Times also had a wife, children, parents, sisters and brothers, some of whom may one day come across the three colour photographs of their husband, father, son, brother being slaughtered-if they have not already seen them.”

“Photographs that everyone recognizes, are now a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about or declares that it has chosen to think about...what is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating; that this is important and this is the story about what happened with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.”

“The problem is not that people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs… to remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture.”

“Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.”

“Whom do we wish to blame? More precisely, whom do we believe that we have the right to blame? The children of Hiroshima or Nagasaki were no less innocent than the young African American men (and women) who were butchered and hanged from trees in small-town America… A stepped-up recognition of the monstrousness of the slave system that once existed, unquestioned by most in the United States is a national project that many Euro-Americans feel some tug of obligation to join. This ongoing project is a great achievement, a benchmark of civic value. The acknowledgement of the American use of disproportionate firepower in war (in a violation of one of the cardinal principles of war) is very much not a national project… would be regarded-now more than ever-as a most unpatriotic endeavor.”

“We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.”

The book is available at Amazon for $9.36. Capa's falling soldier picture from the BBC site here.

Characters on The Underground

The man with the glass-ball – 16th January 2010 (Piccadilly)
A wild haired man with blonde hair curly and pointing in all directions. Large eyes, small jowls on his cheek, tiny chin. Stands next to door leaning on glass partition. Takes off coat. Rolls up sweater sleeves. Takes out a glass ball about the size of a small football. Holds it on palm then turns palm upside down and holds ball on top. Then glides it to crook of elbow. Up and down. Left to right. When Holborn hits, takes it on left side and makes a block gesture with his right. I pretend to look the other way and get off at Notting Hill Gate.


The girl without makeup – 19th January 2010 (Central)
Indian origin; camel haired coat, stockinged feet, Padukone lookalike, more rounded. No rings. Unusually large calves, firm and stockinged. No makeup. Plain well tended nails. No lipstick, no mascara, no rouge, no nail polish, no eyeliner. Maybe coming in from the gym? Rolls eyes to side and I see them... black. Black flat shoes with small silver bows. The crowd pushes us nearer but I edge away from the brush of her hair. It is, after all, a disturbing feeling. Gets off at Chancery Lane.


The kid with the touch-screen phone – 10th April 2010 (Central)
Little blonde kid, lavender crocs, tights with metal studs around the ankle, plastic hair-band. Black short-sleeved tee that reveals gangly, long arms. About 8 years old. Fiddling with a Palm Pre encased in florescent green rubber. Looks up at Mom who's busy reading a magazine. Turns away and licks touch-screen with tongue to see if it works. Tiny delighted smile when it does. Briefly struggles with thought of sharing discovery with Mom. Decides to. Mom nods, smiles and turns away. I nod to the little discoverer in acknowledgement. 1845 hours on the Central line.


Image from this Evening Standard article with Tube Trivia