Hussein

A long piece here (requires registration) about the monster Hussein.

There were widespread reports that Mr. Hussein himself periodically carried out the torture or even execution of those he felt had crossed him. In the summer of 1982, for example, Riyadh Ibrahim Hussein, the health minister, suggested during a cabinet meeting that Mr. Hussein step down to ease the negotiation of a cease-fire with Iran. Mr. Hussein recommended that the two retire to another room to discuss the proposal. When they did, a shot rang out. Mr. Hussein returned to the cabinet meeting alone, although in later interviews he denied killing anyone. The minister’s widow was sent his dismembered corpse.

The NYT has an excellent slide show/commentary on Hussein here.

In the article linked above, a reporter writes,

Mr. Hussein often tried to draw parallels between himself and the famous leaders of Mesopotamia, the earliest civilization in the region, as well as Saladin, the 12th-century Kurdish Muslim military commander who expelled the crusaders from Jerusalem.

What preoccupied him, he said, was what people would be thinking about him in 500 years. To the horror of historic preservationists, he had the ancient walls of the former capital, Babylon, completely reconstructed using tens of thousands of newly fired bricks. An archaeologist had shown him bricks stamped with the name of Nebuchadnezzar II in 605 B.C.

The great NYT reporter John Burns remarks, “He will be remembered for what he was: a remorseless, brutal, murdering tyrant”.

Questions

Calypso offers Odysseus eternal youth and pleasure in exchange for his identity; but Odysseus refuses all, for an uncertain journey home,

“Much have I suffered, labored long and hard by now
in the waves and wars. Add this to the total—
bring the trial on!

How much home and identity matter — worth risking everything for.

::::

Confused, finding himself in mists on a strange shore, Odysseus asks himself,

“…whose land have I lit on now?
What are they here—violent, savage, lawless?—
or friendly to strangers, god-fearing men?”

The eternal questions of the traveler. (Without realizing it, Odysseus had been transported home. As it turned out the questions were still apt.)

The Aeneid

I've been listening to Ian McKellen reading (via CD) Fagles' translation of The Odyssey. Today, the NYT has a wonderful piece by Brad Leithauser about Fagles' translation of Virgil's Aeneid.

The “Aeneid” is suffused with a fascinating, upending sense that most of what goes gravely wrong on earth isn’t imputable to human agency. There’s something comforting to Virgil’s conception of humanity, in which relatively little malice and unreasonableness and rapacity seem innate to our kind. And there’s something unsettling as well — a vision of a world that would be safer and more secure if only the heavens were emptied.

Jimmy Carter Sells

Passive-aggressive ex-president Jimmy Carter has been going the rounds, hawking his wares — a tendentious book this time — to raise money for his monument to himself, the Carter Center. Carter has been trying to repair his reputation after a failed presidency in fitful public lobbying to improve his tarnished image — that of a depressive technocrat and incompetent leader. Sabotaging his best efforts to appear impressive, Carter's morally demented comparison of Israel to apartheid South Africa — unsupported in his book and cynically deflected by Carter when confronted in interviews — is an ethically compromised attempt to make money by slandering the democratic state.

[via Glenn Reynolds]
Here is a WaPo article by Michael Kinsley about Carter's book.

[ In Carter's book]…”Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” It's not clear what he means by using the loaded word “apartheid,” since the book makes no attempt to explain it, but the only reasonable interpretation is that Carter is comparing Israel to the former white racist government of South Africa. …

I mean, what's the parallel? Apartheid had a philosophical component and a practical one, both quite bizarre. Philosophically, it was committed to the notion of racial superiority. No doubt many Israelis have racist attitudes toward Arabs, but the official philosophy of the government is quite the opposite, and sincere efforts are made to, for example, instill humanitarian and egalitarian attitudes in children. That is not true, of course, in Arab countries, where hatred of Jews is a standard part of the curriculum.

An obvious — if necessary to state, given these times — conclusion by Kinsley:

There used to be Jews living in Arab nations, but they also fled, in 1948 and subsequent years — in numbers roughly equivalent to the Arabs who fled Israel. Now there are virtually no Jews in Arab countries — even in a moderate Arab country such as Jordan. How many Jews do you think there will be in the new state of Palestine when its flag flies over a sovereign nation?

And the most tragic difference: Apartheid ended peacefully. This is largely thanks to Nelson Mandela, who turned out to be miraculously forgiving. If Israel is white South Africa and the Palestinians are supposed to be the blacks, where is their Mandela?

And what of Jimmy's money ?:

But it’s the financing behind Georgia’s Carter Center and the Jimmy Carter Library that raises serious doubts that the former president is, in actuality, a wholly neutral intermediary in the troubled region.

[review of…] annual reports … indicate millions of charitable dollars have flowed into the center from His Majesty Sultan Qaboss bin Said Al Said of Oman, Jordan, from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and from the Government of the United Arab Emirates.

Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of dollars have been donated to the center by the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development. H.R.H. Prince Moulay Hicham Ben Abdallah of Morocco has also contributed tens of thousands of dollars.

The Devil Wears Prada

The Devil Wears Prada is a movie about the fashion industry, told in a mind-numbingly conventional way: Innocent Meets the Beast. The Beast is played by Meryl Streep as Anna Wintour of Vogue, who, according to the movie is the fashion industry's very own Soup Nazi. The movie is slick, the editing of particular note; the cinematography and the direction all first-rate. The actors all come across well — usually a byproduct of the director being competent; the movie adds up to an okay appetizer. (It all looks so dated though. The fashions, the feel of the movie. The director was a Sex and the City regular; Patricia Field was responsible for the clothing choices — pretty much a co-director in a movie like this.)

Streep is an example of a reputation without a referent. Her conception of her character, which probably is parrot-based on Wintour (wikipedia says not), is of a powerful figure who hardly needs to enunciate, so hanging on her every word are her trembling underlings. Streep drains her performance of interest: she pulls the energy and edge while attempting to portray a deeply ambitious in-fighter, a product of wealth and privilege, an individual without empathy or depth. In the commentary the predictable observations are made about this: no one would say anything about her behavior if it were done by a male counterpart. That is so true. Who has heard of men in leadership positions eviscerated in the media for being cranks, fools or simple-minded sadists. The media is far too decorous. Another supporting example that large swaths of reality are unavailable to politically correct ideologues.

Sopranos Keep Singing

After peaking early in its long run, The Sopranos Season 7 set of DVDs (as rented from Netflix), is part of a long joyless glide of the show to a possibly enervated conclusion next year. The show became more conventional, more fractured, as the sometimes perfunctory story-lines played themselves out over the past several seasons. But still, in its doddering old age it is capable of evoking a shudder of psychological insight and of grappling with a moral landscape in a humorous, often satirical (the show can be very funny), yet serious manner; The Sopranos is still better than the current crop of slickly produced and cleverly done TV — boring and empty manifestations of pop culture at its core.

No longer worth watching for what it is, The Sopranos is worth watching for what it aspires to be.

The Universe Speaks

Just as the gently irreverent Alex Filippenko, in his science podcast, was saying “Isn't it amazing that as the energy is released the liquid grows and crystallizes” — explaining how those camper's hotpacks work — the video stream froze. Perfect.

These lectures by Filippenko are probably the best science podcasts (video stream the best choice) I've come across. It is a golden age for astronomy and Filippenko is a hands on kinda guy, working on material as an “observational astronomer” that later is published in scientific journals. Direct from the horse's mouth, you will hear wonderful discussions of the awesome in these podcasts. Filippenko just won a national teaching award — clearly deserved. His classes are sold by The Teaching Company for a fee. But here it is online for free.

One thing I've noticed over the years is that the deeper the understanding a scientist has, the closer to the actual material in a meaningful rather than purely regurgitative mode, the clearer the discussion, the simpler the language, to explain that very complex thing we call reality.

Here's the spoiler, the punch line, the cause of the Big Bang: the stupefying universe ejaculated from a quantum fluctuation in an inconceivably dense, energetic, hot (20 trillion degrees) singularity, as predicted by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The originating energy (fluctuation) could have been minute and still have created the infinite cosmological beast. In fact this inflationary energy might be the source of the “dark energy” recently discovered (based on work done by Filippenko's team @ Berkeley).

The Iliad

Years ago I read an enthusiastic review of Robert Fagles' translation of The Iliad. I finally got around to taking a look, in the form of an audio reading of the epic by Derek Jacobi.

Like it all classics, The Iliad resonates in the ever-present. A brilliant piece by Bernard Knox, included as a booklet with the cassettes, is worth the price of admission. In the beginning of the poem the nobility of the warrior ethic is emphasized. It is made plain that Troy had grown fat and happy and ripe for the picking by a warrior culture of Achilles and his Achaean hordes; a society has to have toughness to survive.

Hector, the Trojans' great warrior, is a model of the communal ideal — father, member of his society, concerned and decent. But he is defeated by the greater still Achilles, who has an edge, because his rage knows no bounds — only warrior honor matters.

In the end Achilles' self-absorbed rage transforms into self-awareness, into humanity — but only shortly before his own death.

Even Achilles had his doubts about the worth of a life dedicated to martial glory:

“Cattle and fat sheep can all be had for the raiding,
tripods all for the trading, and tawny-headed stallions.
But a man's life breath cannot come back again —
no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,
once it slips through a man's clenched teeth.”
(9.493-97)

Also available on CD: The Iliad

David Milch @ MIT

The Scientific American podcast praised this podcast. It's an interview with David Milch of Deadwood fame talking for over an hour. Milch tells something of his family and personal history — an aggregate of dysfunction and achievement. Milch turned out okay though, as apparently did his brother, a hospice doctor. Tough times can hone the spirit bright.

It's worth watching this as a video because Milch is a real character; he schlumps in his chair like a collapsed marionette as, with gravelly voice, he barks out his viewpoints. He described his concept of the culture of the Old West that Deadwood circles as having just that mentality: curse a lot to show you are a dangerous character — the equivalent of your dog growling so as not have to fight. One questioner, a former student, said he was a little afraid of Milch when he taught at Yale.

There is a lot of shuck and jive in Milch — he wants to please and impress, but doesn't want to show it: he overcompensates. The rhetoric is a mix of academic burble and TV smart-huckster talk. By the end the act was becoming tiresome, but near the end he opened up; he allowed something of his more fractured self out and you saw him as he really was. He trusted the audience at that point. The mix of academic reference and colloquial toughness is entertaining, although sometimes this former drug addict sounded as though he might have fried a few too many neurons — there were disconnects in his logic, a fuzziness (a weakness often accompanying the tough guy persona).

Anyway, underneath, Milch is a giving and generous spirit I thought. Certainly worth listening to the beginning of this stream. The interviewer, David Thorburn, is what Woody Allen would look and act like if he had made his career in academia.