California dreamin’

The New Neo Posted on by

Dreaming of what? Of real estate.

I picked up one of those “Homes and Land of the San Fernando Valley” freebies from the supermarket. Glossy pictures of page after page of home listings. Most of the actual buildings look surprisingly modest from the outside, although their insides might boast six bedrooms and a private theater.

I’ve also noticed that, at least in their photos, the realtors themselves are all dolled up, very slick and glitzy. As a group, they look as though they keep the plastic surgeons of the region mighty busy. The realtors of New England are more the banker types, trying to convey the idea that they’re sober and trustworthy. But the realtors of southern California resemble movie stars–or maybe TV stars, or telemarketing stars. “Stick with me and you’ll be a star, too.”

But the prices are a giggle, an absurdity. Over the years, I’ve watched them move up and up and up, but this is beyond belief. No home appears to be priced lower than about $550,000. Most of them are well above one million, and many are above two. Here’s one of my absolute favorites:

GREAT STARTER HOME IN HIDDEN HILLS
Wonderful starter home on prime street in Hidden Hills. Beautiful wooded lot…Potential to build your dream estate here, great upside for developers. $1,175,000.

I know that Hidden Hills is one of those exclusive gated communities, so I suppose this represents the low end of the Hidden Hills market. But surely the phrase “starter home” is a bit of a misnomer?

Where have you gone, Steven Den Beste? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you

The New Neo Posted on by

I miss Steven Den Beste.

No, I never met him; and yes, I know he’s not returning to political blogging (he still blogs on anime here).

He’s very ill; and, what’s more, even if he weren’t, I don’t get the sense that he’s the type who would respond to pleadings from his audience. He’s no Andrew Sullivan, playing the “Hello I must be going” game. He’s the type who makes up his mind and that’s it. No looking back. At least that’s what I imagine.

But I still miss him, and hope he’s doing well. I think, when I reflect on it, that he was my favorite blogger. There was nothing easy about him; no cheap shots, no funny stuff. He didn’t pander, and he was the hardest worker imaginable, churning out reams of lucid prose on a daily basis. I never understood how there were enough hours in a day for him to write as much as he did, even if he was working round the clock. And of course I didn’t know at the time that it was done at enormous physical cost to him because he was suffering from a progressive degenerative illness. When he quit blogging about a year ago in July, 2004, he cited both the illness and a massive psychological burnout that seems to have come from the fact that almost all the mail he got—and he got a lot of it—was negative.

I felt guilty, having never written him an e-mail myself that let him know how much I admired and appreciated his work. I wrote one afterwards, but he never replied, nor did I expect him to. I like to think it was because he was inundated with similar missives.

Den Beste had never impressed me as being the type to care whether people appreciated him or not, though. In fact, Bill Whittle famously called him the “Krell Mind Machine”–and those of you who read the book The Forbidden Planet in your youth and loved it (as I did), or saw the movie, will understand what Whittle was getting at. But I suppose even the most cerebral of us—and Steven Den Beste was nothing if not cerebral—have feelings, too (something that should be glaringly obvious, but is sometimes clear only in retrospect).

To those of you who got into reading blogs after Den Beste had retired and who don’t know what I’m talking about, I urge you to visit his archived writings. Here’s a guide. Of course, it’s not the same as reading his analyses at the time he wrote them. For example, during the buildup to the Iraq war, when the US was presenting its case (interminably, it seemed) to the balky UN, I recall that it was Den Beste who had the best (yes, puns are irresistible) writings on the situation. He was the one I relied on.

You had to be patient to stick with Den Beste—he wasn’t what you’d call a quick read. Step by laborious step, he’d take the reader through a beautifully and logically reasoned argument or explanation, and he didn’t really care how long it took. He respected his readers and figured they were up to the task—and for him, they were. He sometimes dealt with minutiae and technical things (after all, he’d been an engineer), and some of his posts were arcane. If on a certain day he wanted to write about something obscure and tech-y, or anime—well then, that’s what he wrote about that day (and that’s the day I might take a break from his blog). But most of the time he worked large, weaving together examples from disparate sources in new and unexpected—and, above all, deep—ways, bringing the sharp order of his mind to the chaos of politics and world events.

As Den Beste himself put it (and he put it best) in this essay about the process by which he wrote his articles, he used an “internal mechanism” which was especially “good at…finding non-obvious relationships.” That was indeed his specialty. In the same essay, he says: I write about something because I’m compelled to, because it’s often the case that if I don’t, then I can’t get it out of my head. Putting my thoughts into print relieves an internal pressure which also isn’t easily described.

That came across in his essays. He seemed to be a pressure cooker of some sort: throw in a bunch of data, seal the top, add heat, and the pressure would build until—voila!—out came a tasty feast, in his case an intellectual one, cooked in far less time than conventional pots and normal pressure could ever accomplish. It’s not surprising he burnt out. Even if he hadn’t had an illness, I can’t imagine anyone keeping up that sort of pace.

Den Beste was a master of the long essay form and a blog pioneer, beginning in early 2001, when most of us had never even heard the word “blog.” I’m a practitioner of the medium-to-longish essay myself, and I tip my proverbial hat to Den Beste for setting the bar very very high.

Should I? No, don’t think so

The New Neo Posted on by

I had no idea when I planned my trip, but it turns out that today is Disneyland’s 50th birthday.

Well, it seems serendipitous–after all, I’m here, it’s here; a rare confluence of events.

But no, I won’t go. I must confess, I’m no Disney fan. As a child I actually had a sort of horror of cartoons–all those animals being squished pancake-flat and then popping up again, phoenix- and accordian-like, only a tiny bit the worse for wear.

Even back when I first visited Disneyland in 1960 (perhaps on its fifth birthday? I liked it at the time, by the way) it was mild stuff like the teacup ride that was my cup of tea. My mother and I did the teacups and the like, while my brother and father went on to heartier fare. And, although I did manage to ride the Matterhorn, I kept my eyes closed most of the time.

Then, as a parent, I put in many a long hour in lines at both Disney parks. But now that the child is grown, no need any more to pretend. I just don’t like the place.

I hope this post doesn’t end up being the most controversial thing I’ve ever written.

Action and reaction: prayer

The New Neo Posted on by

At American Digest, Gerard van der Leun has written an interesting piece on prayer and why it isn’t often answered in the way people might want (and sometimes even expect) it to be.

Reading it brought to mind an article I read quite a few years ago on the subject of prayer. It appeared where I would have least expected it–in some magazine like Esquire, or perhaps Vanity Fair, which I think I was probably reading in a dentist’s office.

Unfortunately, I no longer recall the author’s name or the magazine in which it actually appeared. But the premise of the article was that the writer, a complete nonbeliever who was experiencing some sort of huge crisis (midlife or otherwise), decided in his desperation to pray daily, even though he was without belief. He kept this up for a year or more, not knowing quite where he was going with it, and he found to his great surprise that the very act of prayer had an effect–but the effect was on him.

Prayer didn’t necessarily get him what he wanted, not by a longshot. But he ended up changing as a person. He changed what he wanted, and changed what he was praying for, or praying about. He was calmer, more accepting, more “spiritual.” And this was true even though he initially felt awkward and stupid praying, and was without any belief for quite a long time.

If you go back to one of my early pieces on change, I wrote:

So here is a somewhat dry (and, mercifully, relatively brief!) introduction to the topic of how therapists view the process of change in therapy.

Of course, like any other discipline, therapy has no lack of theories from which to choose. But the one that made most sense to me when I was studying marriage and family therapy was the idea that change can occur on any–or all–of the following dimensions: cognition, feeling, and behavior (another way to describe the three would be thought, emotion, and action). I would also add a fourth, the spiritual, but for the purposes of therapeutic change or political change we can safely ignore that one…

Intervening to change one dimension could end up changing another, and ultimately changing them all. The idea was that lasting change could start anywhere, but would then (at least, ideally) cause a ripple effect that would end up changing the family or individual on all three dimensions.

To use a very simple example with an individual: changing a thought (“I’m ugly”) could lead to a change in behavior (going out more) that could lead to a change in feeling (from depression to joy). It usually seems much easier to start with either a thought or a behavior, because they are fairly easy to define and describe (to operationalize). Usually the change in feelings would follow the other changes.

So, my interpretation of what happened to the author of the article was that he changed on the behavioral dimension, and it sparked a change on the fourth dimension, the spiritual one, and probably on the others as well.

This certainly is not an attempt to take the mystery out of the process of prayer. I think there’s still plenty of that left. But it is a framework for understanding part of the more mundane human dimension of what might be happening when a person undertakes a practice of prayer.

With age, wisdom?

The New Neo Posted on by

In the comments section of my recent post about the direction of political change, neuroconservative asked:

I wonder what you (and the other neos here) think your younger self would have made of your older self? More broadly, how do you imagine that thinking liberals encode the fact that neo-cons exist but neo-libs don’t? This is hard for me to answer, since I have always been conservative.

Interesting question, I think. My guess is that my younger self would have ascribed it to a phenomenon I’d always heard about””that of people in general growing more conservative as they grow older. As a young person, I probably would not have thought much about why such a thing might occur. I probably would have thought it to be some sort of natural phenomenon, like getting wrinkles or gray hair or sagginess or all those other signs of fusty old age that of course were never, never, ever going to happen to me.

The fact that one might actually grow wiser with age, or might increase one’s store of information about history and human nature and what it all means, would probably have been a somewhat alien concept to me at the time. Sad, but true.

Speaking of terrorists and families: the Moussaouis

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In a previous post, I referred to an article that appeared in the February 2003 Sunday NY Times Magazine, about the family of Zacarias Moussaoui. It’s unavailable now except through the archives, but I saved a copy of it when it first appeared. Here, for those of you who might be interested, are a few short excerpts to give you a flavor of the family.

One caveat: by presenting these facts, my aim is not to exonarate Moussaoui in any way. He is completely responsible for his own actions.

The title of the article is “Everybody has a mother,” and it focuses particularly on Moussaoui’s rather strange and emotionally labile mother, Aicha el-Wafi. Moussaoui is one of two brothers and two sisters. His brother has written a book purporting to tell the story of Zacarias’ life; both sisters are considered mentally ill and perhaps schizophrenic.

First, the mother and brother:

A divorced 56-year-old born in Morocco, el-Wafi has lived in France for close to 40 years. Having spent two and a half decades working for France Telecom, she now lives in a comfortable home, complete with deck, grill, sea view and a dog named Tango. One of her sons has admitted in court to being a member of Al Qaeda and will be tried for conspiracy in the Sept. 11 attacks. The other has written a tell-all condemning her for what he recalls as her unloving, harsh ways. It’s unclear who has disappointed her more…

It’s a book that tries to account for the genesis of a terrorist, relying not just on familiar, sweeping geopolitical terms but on the language of pop psychology, referring to the specifics of a dysfunctional family — a vocabulary irresistible to some but inherently untrustworthy to others. Politics versus psychotherapy: one seems to explain, while the other can seem to excuse, or even victimize, the wayward. ”We’re scared about this book, and we don’t scare easily,” Simon says. ”If it had a hard time finding a publisher here, it’s because people like Moussaoui are untouchable. It’s leprosy.” Publishers assume, in other words, that Americans don’t want to see an accused hijacker humanized. ”But we thought it was important to point out that this is not ‘Lord of the Rings, Part II,’ with evil characters coming out of the mud,” Simon says. ”Everybody has a mother.”

Aicha El-Wafi married in Morocco at 14 and moved, with her husband and two babies, to France five years later. By the time she was 22, she had four children, the youngest being Zacarias. After 10 years of making excuses about her children’s bruises, as well as her own, she finally managed to leave her husband, putting the kids in an orphanage for a year while she stayed in a shelter. She worked a series of menial jobs — in a factory, as a seamstress — before starting work as a cleaning woman for France Telecom. She may have been sweeping floors, but she had secured that particularly prized French status of fonctionnaire, a government employee, with superior benefits, virtually guaranteed employment and reliable housing…

Here is the brother’s account of the radicalization of Zacarias (note particularly the London connection):

In 1991, unable to find a job, [Zacarias] picked up and moved to London, where at age 23, he became, as his brother observes, a perfect target for well-financed, dangerous Muslim extremists who prey on disillusioned young men. Abd-Samad’s book devotes a chapter to the ways that fringe extremists — especially the more violent factions of the Wahhabi strain — recruit young foundering Muslim men, giving them inflammatory religious texts, offering them free meals, relying on a language of exclusivity that would apply to the vanity of ambitious, but thwarted, searchers. ”I am convinced of one thing,” Abd-Samad writes. ”If it worked with my brother, it can work with plenty of other young people.” Moussaoui started attending lectures by radical clerics like Abu Qatada and Sheik Abu Hamza al-Masri and became a regular at the Finsbury Park mosque.

And here are the two sisters. Notice especially Nadia, the elder of the two:

Nadia is wearing jeans, a green fleece under her windbreaker and no makeup; by Parisian standards she looks like someone who has stayed home for a sick day, which is basically the case. Nadia’s life has been a series of sick days since around 1985, when, as she says, ”the craziness came,” triggered by a bad breakup. She has since suffered through depression and four suicide attempts. Like her younger sister, Jamila, she has been told she is schizophrenic. Her life has frozen since her first illness. Although she is clearly bright and strikingly articulate, there’s something disconcertingly adolescent about the eagerness of her smile, the high pitch of her voice, even the look of her face, which belongs to a woman much younger than 39. She has had odd jobs here and there, but in the months since the 11th, she has barely been able to leave her small, state-subsidized apartment. ”I like solitude, and I tend to hide myself in sleep,” she tells me. ”I love to sleep. Sleeping, that’s my sport.” If her life is lonely, she has partly engineered it that way. ”I was afraid to repeat my mother’s history, having all those kids, marrying a man who was abusive,” she says. ”Jamila herself says she did just that.” (Jamila eventually divorced her husband; now when el-Wafi is not laboring on behalf of Zacarias, she’s going to court to fight for her daughter’s visitation rights.)…

Like her brothers, Nadia has a complicated relation to her religious background. Unlike her brothers, she speaks Arabic fluently and spent many summers as a child with her mother’s family in Morocco. But if her brothers left mostly secular homes to devote themselves to Islam, Nadia looked altogether elsewhere, developing, when she was in her 20’s, an abiding devotion to Judaism. ”In my heart,” she tells me, ”in my heart, I am Jewish.” What’s more, she loves Israel, would go tomorrow if she could, without blinking; her dream is to see the Brooklyn Bridge, to go to Brooklyn, ”because that’s where all the Jews are in America.” If you mention Palestine, she’ll point out sternly that no such nation has been recognized; she returns frequently to the subject of Israel with a passion that cannot be circumnavigated. She regularly listens to Radio Shalom or Radio Communaute Juive, reads books like ”Jewish Thought” and ”Bibliotherapy.” She has written her brother to say that she loves him but says that even if she could fly to the United States to visit him, he would refuse to see her.

Tolstoi famously wrote, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But some families are unhappy in especially unique ways, and this seems to be one of them.

Valley girl

The New Neo Posted on by

Two days in California. Two days away from my usual amount of frenetic news-checking and computer connection, and I’m experiencing a bit of withdrawal and culture shock, as expected.

I certainly know Los Angeles–in fact, I lived here for a year, back in the 70s–but it changes all the time. It gets more and more crowded, with more freeway traffic. Back then, the only really congested times on the freeways were rush hours, but those days are gone. In recent years rush hour seems to have expanded to fill almost all the hours.

There are other differences. One hears English only somewhat sporadically in certain locations (the airport and the car rental place, for example). Then there’s the unique and almost endless consumer variety of Ventura Boulevard, which has grown exponentially. To me, the excess is somewhat off-putting and seductive at the same time, its greatest attraction by far being the restaurants and groceries with their amazing variety and almost dizzying choice of ethnicities. In a single block or two, one can find Argentinian, Thai, Persian, Cuban, Indian, barbecue, and Japanese food, in an enticing parade of my very favorite sort of diversity.

One thing that doesn’t ever change is the strangeness and the beauty of the vegetation, which hits me anew every time I arrive here from New England–the tropical flowers, the oleanders and the bougainvillea, and all the other cacti and trees and plants which to me are nameless and exotic, and tell me immediately and wordlessly that I’ve arrived in a very different place.

And then there’s the heat, at least in the San Fernando Valley, where I’m based. (That’s “the Valley” to most people, as in “Valley Girl,” the song). When we landed at LAX the night was cool and almost brisk, with a fine breeze, so much so that I wished I had on a sweater. But by the time I got to the Valley, only a forty-minute drive later, the temperature had risen by about twenty-five degrees. It’s been too hot during the day to enjoy doing much outside except scurrying from one air-conditioned venue to another. But still, enjoyable for my purposes, since my goal here is not to sightsee, but to visit old friends and new, and of course to do a lot of fine eating. The weather doesn’t interfere with that.

The neo-neocon has landed

The New Neo Posted on by

Thanks for all the good wishes on my trip. I’m here in very sunny (and mega-hot) southern California–the San Fernando Valley, to be exact, where many of the people I’m visiting happen to live. I am just touching base for the moment on a friend’s computer, to say a quick hello to you all. But I’ll be having a lot more to say later, perhaps this evening or tomorrow.

Travel day

The New Neo Posted on by

Today I’m setting off for California, to Los Angeles and then San Francisco to visit relatives and friends and even to see a few sights. I should be gone until July 25.

I do plan to post fairly regularly, since I’ll have access to a computer there, although I don’t know whether posting will be a daily event or not. I even have a couple of pieces that are already written, which I plan to plug in here and there. So we’ll see.

Families in the aftermath of terrorist attacks

The New Neo Posted on by

Much fast-breaking news on the London bombings–so fast that, by the time I finish writing this post, new events may have taken over. Things will probably continue to change moment by moment, but the questions right now are: did all the bombers die in the blasts? And, if not, will they be caught? And, of course, who are they?

These details are not known yet. But there is virtually no doubt that the bombers were (or are?) Islamicists, most likely living in Britain for some time. I am also amazed, as I was after 9/11, at the ubiquity of surveillance cameras, and their ability to help the police in cracking the case. In the last decade or so, the use of security cameras has mushroomed, and my guess is that they will continue to be a vital forensic tool.

Unfortunately, though, the cameras only come into play ex-post-facto. They record events in real time, but they cannot tell us what is happening or what will happen; they can only give us information after the fact. Photos that at first look utterly ordinary become chilling and telling only in retrospect, containing information that, but for the cameras, we might never have learned.

Another interesting detail that has just emerged in the London case is that the family of one of the bombers (yes, I know: “alleged bombers”) reported him missing after the blast. This is a strong indication that they had no idea of his role in the attack. This is not surprising, of course. I would imagine they are undergoing a very difficult time right now, as they learn what their loved one was actually up to that day.

Of course, sometimes the families of bombers are sympathetic to their cause. Or, sometimes they pretend to be, the better to fit their community’s twisted type of political correctness (for example, among the Palestinians). But sometimes family members’ sympathies lie elsewhere. The large Bin Laden family is a case in point–quite a few members have spoken out against their most famous relative. And back in February of 2003, a lengthy profile of the family of Moussaoui, the so-called “twentieth hijacker,” appeared in the NY Times Sunday Magazine. It was extraordinary for a number of reasons, but one of the most interesting was that it revealed that one of Moussaoui’s two sisters is a converted Jew and fervent Zionist. So, one cannot assume much of anything about the families of terrorists.

Speaking of families, I was wondering why we’ve seen virtually nothing about the victims of the London bombings. It seems that, at least according to this story, which features a brief description and photos of three of the victims, the reason for the delay is that progress has been slow on identifying the bodies and notifying the families.

Those families, and the families of the many other people who are missing and presumed dead, are undergoing a very special and horrific type of torment right now. What they are experiencing is the stuff of nightmare. It is a strange thing to think that, even as I write this, there are families in such widely scattered places as Netanya in Israel, London, and of course Iraq who are all mourning the victims of terrorists. What do these families have in common? Simply this: their loved ones were going about the ordinary business of life, and were blown apart by followers of a branch of Islam that is indeed “in love with death,” and which has been allowed to flourish in the fertile soil of Western tolerance.

A changed mind who wants to change minds: Duong Thu Huong

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In today’s NY Times (registration only, of course) there is a book review featuring a Vietnamese novelist who is new to me, Duong Thu Huong .

Huong, 58, is an excellent example of a changed mind, not to mention a courage and outspokenness that reminds me quite a bit of Oriana Fallaci:

In 1994, through the intervention of Danielle Mitterrand, France’s first lady at that time, Ms. Huong was allowed to come to France to receive an award. She was offered political asylum. “I said, ‘Thank you, but in my country fear crushes everything, brave soldiers have become cowardly civilians,’ ” she recalled. ” ‘That’s why I have to return. I return to do one thing: to spit in the face of the regime.’ “

Here’s a summary of Ms. Huong’s activities:

Her sins, it seems, are many. Her novels dissecting life under one of the last Communist regimes are published and well received in the West. She is a former Communist Party member who was expelled as a traitor. And above all, she is a dissident – a “dissident whore,” one party leader said – who refused to be silenced even after spending eight months in prison in 1991…her priority is to denounce the Hanoi government as irremediably corrupt and abusive…

“It is my mission to do so on behalf of those who have died under this shameful regime,” she said, speaking fluent but heavily accented French. “Because I have a small reputation abroad, I have to say these things. I have to empty what is inside me to feel my conscience is clear. The people have lost the power to react, to reflect, to think. Perhaps I will give people courage.”

It’s the changed-mind aspect of her story that especially interests me. Huong was born in North Vietnam and indoctrinated as a child in the party line. She became an actress during the late 60s, and went to entertain the troops:

“I joined a group of young artists performing for the troops and victims of the war. The slogan was: ‘Our songs are louder than the bombing.’ We would silence the screams with songs.”

But even then, she recalled, she noticed that party members enjoyed special privileges. A bigger shock followed when South Vietnamese prisoners arrived in her zone. “I discovered the truth that we were also fighting Vietnamese,” she said. “Yes, we were being bombed all the time by the Americans, but they were high in the sky and I never saw them. I only saw Vietnamese.”

She kept her thoughts to herself, as she did after the war when she met up with relatives in Ho Chi Minh City (as Saigon was renamed) and realized that the defeated were better off than the victors.

Ms. Huong later was privy to some revisionist history on the part of the North Vietnamese, which fed her disillusionment:

One freelance job proved to be another eye-opener. Working for a group of army generals, she ghost wrote a history of the Vietnam War. “The generals would discuss among themselves how to correct my text to suit their interests,” she said. “They wanted to increase the number of Vietnamese who died to show that no sacrifice was too great for the people.”

After one of her novels was published in the 80s and became a source of some controversy for the Party:

“The party’s general secretary, Nguyen Van Linh, offered me a house of the kind reserved for ministers if I would remain silent,” she said. “I told him, ‘I fight for democracy, I place myself on the side of the people and would never agree to be like a minister.’ My principle is that you can lose everything, even your life, but never your honor.”

That last sentence is the key to the attitude that propels people such as Huong (and Fallaci, by the way) to take the risks they do. When faced with experiences and personal observations that contradicted her early indoctrination, she chose to jettison the belief system in which she had been raised, and to fight it with all her considerable powers of expression. Her sense of personal honor required such a course of action.