spending beyond our means

I’ve been reading about consumer debt in the United States. Our insatiable appetite for cheap borrowing has resulted in many Americans mortgaging their houses to pay for expensive toys. A country without much of a past, we now seem incapable of thinking about the future; our minds focused on endless desiring, the infinite now.
So sign us up for big screen TVs, for cruises and a new car every two years; what’s the matter with a new set of golf clubs, with another pair of shoes, a breakfast nook and a new bay window? Don’t we need a new grill, a riding lawn mower, a faster computer, a digital video recorder? It seems to me that our lives have become so suffused with work that we now believe that the good life has be purchased, instead of lived.

Reading these stories, about people with such a hunger for a different life that they borrow without any possibility of repaying, made me think about our foreign policy.

It seems to me that Americans have a tendency to buy things pitched to us by charlatans. In 2002, the vast majority of us approved of a war to remove Saddam Hussein. Gulf War II sounded good to us! The first one was fun and besides we already knew who the bad guy was.

The emotion that led us there was not unjustified – the 9/11 attacks on American soil were deeply unsettling, and the country longed for a return to safety. But we transferred that legitimate desire to an unrelated thing. It’s something like a mother that misses spending time with her husband and children, who channels that unvoiced desire onto a Viking stove. The stove represents cooking, meals together, shared time gathered at the hearth. But buying objects that represent unfulfilled needs traps us in the very life that was depriving us. We have to keep working to pay the growing bills, and while we are busy the stove gathers dust.

Unfortunately the American people failed to take account of the APR on our National Credibility Card. It looks like the rate’s variable. Iraq is ours now, and the cost of this impulse purchase will just keep going up.

But as Americans usually are, I am optimistic. Frugality and delaying gratification used to be a source of pride in this country. This is my prayer: when we get out of this hole we’ve dug for ourselves, may we as a nation have finally learned to read the fine print.


(I got the stove = family time image from a book I read or an article somewhere, but I can’t remember what it was. If anyone comes across it please let me know so I can give proper credit.)

opium dreams

This is an e-mail I sent to a friend. I hope he doesn't mind that I've put it here!




I have been thinking about religion and pain. There was an article in the New York Times magazine recently about a woman who had a problem with chronic pain. She was part of a pain management study, where the therapists sought to teach people how to decrease their pain sensations. For the woman who wrote the article, she could alter how much pain she felt by imagining herself as a religious martyr, a victim of the Inquisition. This image helped her to activate her brain’s natural pain-blocking ability.

So strong religious conviction, or even the imagination of it, has the ability to stop suffering. You know Karl Marx’s famous comment, that “religion is the opiate of the masses”? He meant that religion is the thing that takes them away from reality and sets them dreaming. In his mind, it was not a good thing. But the opium poppy has two uses. Heroin destroys the minds and bodies of its users, drives them to commit crimes, ruins their families. But morphine has the miraculous ability to take away unbearable pain. It’s impossible to say whether the opium poppy is good or evil, it simply is. How you use it determines which face it will show to you.

I think that religion is exactly the same way. I think that religion is often used as a palliative, to ameliorate pain. A few weeks ago, I was walking in the subway and I came across a group of young black men, dressed in robes with the Star of David on them. One was speaking, and calling out Bible verse numbers, and another would read the named verse in a loud voice. I have heard about these groups, who believe that blacks, and not Jews, are the “Chosen People” mentioned in the Christian Bible. They are sometimes on TV but I have never seen them in the flesh, so I stopped to listen.

Mostly when religious people are yelling in a public place, New Yorkers ignore them. So naturally, the one who was speaking and calling verses began addressing his speech to me. Mostly he seemed focused on proving that the “Israelites” in the Bible are black. He would ask for a verse, and when it was read, explain how to interpret it, or simply emphasize something in the text.

Religion in all its forms interests me, but when one claims to apply exclusively to one racial group, of course I smell a rat. I began asking questions. I didn’t want to fight with the speaker, but I wanted to clarify what he was saying. So I asked whether the Bible, in his opinion, had anything to say to white people. He answered me that according to the Book whites would be made to pay for the sins of our ancestors, who enslaved the “black Israelites,” by being enslaved and killed ourselves. This, to him, was the justice of God.

He was careful to point out that merely being born after the crimes were committed against the Africans who were brought here in slavery was not enough to excuse me, and that the sins of my fathers were passed to me in the blood. I asked him if there was nothing whites could do to expunge their guilt, and he was triumphant when he told me “nothing.”

I told him that he seemed very pleased, for someone who was delivering a death sentence to someone who had not harmed him personally. And he just smiled and answered that yes, he was pleased, because he was one of the “Chosen.”

I found this encounter highly disturbing, because it was my first personal taste of how my Book can be twisted. Of course I knew that the Bible has “justified” all sorts of prejudice and horror, but it’s different to have that prejudice look at you in the face. It’s the first time I had a visceral understanding of how a Muslim might see the beheading videos from Iraq, people reading from the Qur’an and then pulling out their knives. What makes it so horrifying is not just that their acts are evil, but that they use something precious to justify them.

Suicide bombing is a less obvious case, because the bomber is so deluded as to be willing to die in commission of his crime. The poor fools who use their bodies as weapons are like heroin addicts, drunk on beautiful visions, running from suffering to the only thing that they think will make it go away. They are not blameless, and what they do is evil, but it is most important to find out what causes their suffering, and repair the problem at its source.

Real life is more than beautiful enough to compete with an opium dream, if you can pay true attention to it, if outside pressure doesn’t make you bitter and filled with anger. And the peddlers of sick, hate-filled religion should be ashamed of themselves, just like any other drug pusher. They prey on the desperate and the weak-minded, and sell only illusions.

exhaustion

One of my friends was telling me a story about filling jars with objects of different sizes. If you fill it with large stones, then with pebbles, then with sand, and finally with water, it is “full” at each stage, and yet continues to accept more. Try this operation in reverse order, however, and as you can imagine you won’t get very far.

As a metaphor for life, this means that if you don’t put the “big” things in first, you will never have room for them. I guess those large things are different for each person, but in my case I have long known that one of them is time to be alone and unhurried. Somehow, that knowledge slips away from me, though, and I find myself frantically running from meeting to work to appointment to date to telephone conversation with no space in between, no rest, no peace. I couldn’t even find time to write a short post on this blog.

And then this Friday I hit the wall. I didn’t want to talk to people, read anything, work, or eat. By the end of the day I was so exhausted that I couldn’t even imagine going to my belly dance class, no matter that I had stayed up late washing things to wear there. On the way home I stopped in the cigar shop to thank my Yemeni friends for helping one of my coworkers out (she needed pictures of tobacco products for an article). They had a huge bag of bread that someone’s sister in Brooklyn had baked, hard and round, with whole cumin seeds scattered through it and corn flour mixed in. They used to give them to me last Ramadan when I was fasting. I took two, went home, and sat in the back garden slowly drinking a cup of sweet tea and breaking the crusts off with my fingers. The night was still warm, no wind because of the high walls around me, no other people outside. Bliss.

In the end just giving myself permission this weekend to do nothing, meant that I didn’t have to. I did go to belly dance on Saturday, filling my body with a wave of “ gold endorphin light,” and drank a beautiful cappuccino standing up in an Italian-style espresso bar in midtown. I stayed in Union Square park next to a fountain with four drooling lion heads (they really do need to turn the water pressure up) and watched the brilliant light come through a swath of red tulips planted at head height.

That night I started a photography project I’ve been turning over in my head for months (more about that later, when I have something to show) and went out to celebrate the time I’ve spent with a friend who is leaving soon for three months of travel and then medical school.

Sunday was full of sleep, a very late lunch, and hours in a community garden, sitting in silence with a beautiful woman and her pet rabbit Toby. I had met her before, and liked her before, and sat quietly with her before -- I guess it is not the company of people that tires me but only the requirement of talking to them.

The large stone of silence and motionlessness, added first to the jar of my days, makes me feel curiously light and open, and suddenly adding in smaller things felt less like a burden and more like a balance. Why is it so hard to remember this? How many times must I have an epiphany before the shiny newness and wide-eyed surprise wears off, and the concept becomes part of my everyday knowledge?

civility

I’ve been thinking, and arguing, about the Muhammad cartoons for the last month. Fortunately I have friends on either side of the debate, and since I don’t agree with any of them, it’s been useful -- nothing like taking fire from both sides to really figure out what you think. When my overseas Muslim friends first started talking about the cartoons I was dismissive. Looking at the images online I knew I had seen similar jokes at Christianity’s expense. If it didn’t bother me when I was the butt of the joke, why were they so angry?
Two things changed my first opinion. One was finding out that the Jyllands-Posten was less a champion of free speech than a hypocritical right-wing rag, which rejected caricatures of Jesus three years ago because they would offend readers.

The second was an IM conversation with a Moroccan friend of mine. He was hurt and offended by the cartoons, and I was trying to explain that freedom of expression must explicitly protect offensive speech. In talking to him about the decision to publish the cartoons, I realized that there’s been a conflation of two kind of rules, the rule of law and the requirements of good manners.

I do not want legislation protecting religious figures from satire. But the right to offend carries responsibility. I have a right to criticize the dress or lifestyle choices of my next-door neighbor, but I had better have a damned good reason to do so beyond the desire to demonstrate my freedom of expression. If we’re going to violate the most deeply held sensitivities of a group of people, shouldn’t we be getting something of value out of it? Because after I've had my say, the next morning my neighbor is still going to be right next door.

I see nothing coming from this provocation but (absolutely inexcusable) property damage and loss of life, and a justified, and very damaging, boycott of Danish products. So what was the purpose? To show that you can corral uneducated bigots on both sides into extreme positions?

You can’t legislate politeness. But you can criticize people who violate its rules.

The Jyllands-Posten had an absolute right to publish those cartoons. But they should not have. All the bloviating about Muslim hypocrisy (it’s true, anti-Semitic cartoons are common in the Middle East) does not change the fact that this editorial decision was rude, intentionally provocative, and most inexcusable of all, ineffective.

The Case For Contamination

This article, by Kwame Anthony Appiah, inspired me to start thinking about tolerance and pluralism. In thinking about it, I noticed that I seem to have a very similar argument over and over. The strange thing is that similarity of background is not a good predictor of agreement. I find more commonality on this subject with an Iraqi I talk to over the internet than I do with American acquaintances of mine.

Here’s an example of the repeating argument. I was fighting with one of the people who used to live in my house about immigration. My fundamental position is: I like it. Even illegals don’t bother me. This is not an economic position, but an emotional one, and I know that unless perfect justice exists in the world unrestricted immigration isn’t feasible. But the thought of waves of immigrants coming to this country is simply exciting to me.

My former roommate’s opinion was that illegal immigrants should be thrown out, that immigration control and enforcement should be tightened, that government-supported bilingual information lines and forms should be discontinued. So it goes without saying that we were unable to come to an agreement.

Finally, he said in disgust, “If you lived 500 years, and gradually the American language turned to Spanish, and all your customs were swept away, you wouldn’t care.” The tone of his voice made it clear that he was describing an abhorrent situation. But my immediate reaction was, “That’s exactly right.” But my own culture is precious to me, as is my country. I want to live according to my ideas of what is right, and I love the image of America I was taught in elementary school: a land of freedom, the fair rule of law, equal opportunity, and justice.

But if the majority of citizens of that country choose, in the future, to enshrine the cuckoo as the national bird, speak Esperanto, and worship Hostess Ding Dongs, more power to them. The centrality of my identity as an “American” has nothing to do with the ethnic trappings of culture at all. I cannot deny other Americans the right to the same freedoms I claim for myself, because to me being “American” is an ideology and not an ethnicity.

The thought that is so beautifully argued in the article, (which I link to again because it is well worth reading) is this: cultures are not pure. They are not sacred. And they do not have a right to exist. They will mix, shift, cast off old traditions, create or borrow new ones. And lived culture (distinct from cultural arts and languages) is only valuable to the extent that it appeals to the people who are a part of it. My culture is good for me, but I have no authority to tell others to ascribe to any part of it. My right is to live as I wish, as long as I don’t impinge others’ ability to do the same.

This means that I should be very tolerant. But in practice, sometimes when I have had these arguments, I sense myself stiffening up with an absolute inflexibility. Something in the discussion makes me hard and unmoving, and it’s very uncomfortable. There is an apparent inconsistency there. That is where Appiah’s article interests me so. It clarified for me that it is when I encounter an unwillingness to allow others this freedom that I claim for myself, that I discover my uncompromising core. Be it a discussion of family law, or national dress, gay rights, the establishment of an official language: anything that seems to impose a set of values that apply to all people gets my back up.

The most important point in the article, to me, is a simple one. There is no ideology, no culture, no language, on which we can legitimately ask all the people of the world to agree. Therefore, the only way we will learn to get on together is to get used to each other. Get used to living next to, among, people whose ideas and practices we could never accept for ourselves.

That’s why, as a tolerant pluralist, there is no contradiction in arguing for universal female suffrage, equal access to education regardless of race or sex, laws that give equal power in marriage and equal requirements for dress, regardless of the fact that some cultures consider any or all of these things abhorrent. Individual liberty is more important than cultural integrity.

But I must accept, for example, that some women have no desire to show their face to any man but their husband. I may vehemently disagree with a culture that requires this of them, but I must allow them the freedom to choose what I would not. That is all that matters. The absolute freedom of the choice.