A debacle, indeed: revisiting the Iran embassy hostage rescue attempt

The New Neo Posted on by

This piece from the Atlantic Monthly Online, “The Desert One Debacle,” about the Carter administration’s attempt to rescue the embassy hostages in Iran in 1980, is a sobering read.

I vaguely remember the incident–just one in a long line of frustrations connected with that sorry spectacle. But the details–which I’d never read before–are a case of “whatever could go wrong, did go wrong;” from vicious sandstorms, to the utterly improbable coincidence of the planes’ initially encountering a truck and a civilian passenger bus as they landed in the desert, to a fatal airplane crash. Debacle, indeed; the planes never even came near Tehran.

Perhaps it’s a good thing they didn’t. From the evidence in the piece, the loss of life would likely have been even greater had they done so. It’s very difficult to believe that this mission ever had any chance of succeeding. Not only was the weather problem in the desert underestimated, and the assault force relatively small (one hundred thirty two men maximum, with some planes expected to encounter technical difficulties and drop out), but here was the game plan for controlling crowds around the embassy:

Another presidential directive concerned the use of nonlethal riot-control agents. Given that the shah’s occasionally violent riot control during the revolution was now Exhibit A in Iran’s human-rights case against the former regime and America, Carter wanted to avoid killing Iranians, so he had insisted that if a hostile crowd formed during the raid, Delta should attempt to control it without shooting people. Burruss considered this ridiculous. He and his men were going to assault a guarded compound in the middle of a city of more than 5 million people, most of them presumed to be aggressively hostile. It was unbelievably risky; everyone on the mission knew there was a very good chance they would not get home alive. Wade Ishmoto, a Delta captain who worked with the unit’s intelligence division, had joked, “The only difference between this and the Alamo is that Davy Crockett didn’t have to fight his way in.”

At any rate, it didn’t come to that. After flying through vicious sandstorms, landing in the desert, and encountering a Mercedes passenger bus filled with ordinary Iranians (who were promptly searched by the Americans and prepared to be flown out of Iran for the duration of the mission), the rescue attempt was aborted because too many aircraft had been rendered inoperative.

Then, as the evacuation of the planes was underway, one of the helicopters crashed into a transport plane on the ground, causing a conflagration and the death of eight members of the assault force. From the description of the scene, it’s a wonder the death toll wasn’t higher.

Reading about the hostage crisis brings back gut-wrenchingly bad memories: the endless negotiating, the arrogant posturing of the hostage-takers, the seeming impotence of our government. It’s easy to recall that it was long; at the time, it seemed nearly endless, but the actual length was astounding: 444 days. The incident was one of the reasons Carter lost the Presidency (and rightly so), suffering the final ignominy of the hostages’ release on Ronald Reagan’s Inauguration Day.

In retrospect–and perhaps even at the time–the entire hostage crisis was a debacle, not just the rescue attempt. The consensus is that Carter’s mishandling of the situation caused the US to be perceived as weak and vulnerable.

This recent Salon article contains a telling vignette on the subject, from the Iran of 2004:

So it was that I stood impatiently before the window to check out while the [hotel] receptionist took his sweet time to retrieve my American passport from the cubby behind him. He held it for a long, strange moment before he slid it my way. Wistfully, he said: “How I wish I had a passport like that.” Off we were, talking about the election. The receptionist hoped President George W. Bush would defeat Sen. John Kerry. He hated the Democrats, he professed. It wasn’t my first encounter with this Iranian enthusiasm for the Republican Party, as unfathomable as it was widespread. Under the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, after all, the United States toppled Iran’s popular nationalist prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953, consolidating power in the hands of the brutal and despised shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Under the Democratic President Bill Clinton, the United States finally apologized for engineering those events. I asked the receptionist to explain. “Jimmy Carter,” he replied with disgust. “He could have stopped this Islamic Revolution, and he didn’t.” When it comes to Iran, where revolutionaries identified Carter with every bad turn the United States had ever visited on their or any other third-world country, and where Americans would come to associate him with haplessness and defeat, somehow everything the president from Plains, Ga., did would always be wrong. His presidency, already a fragile vessel, shattered on the shoals of the Iranian hostage crisis — those 444 days at the end of his single term when the staff of the American embassy in Tehran was held captive by militant students. From then on, he would forever be linked in the American mind with the humiliation of seeing one’s countrymen blindfolded, helpless, surrounded by angry mobs of Shiites — believers in a religion most Americans only dimly apprehended, revolutionaries who hated the United States for having supported a regime most Americans were barely conscious existed. And now, 26 years later, this Iranian hotel worker in a single gesture renounced his country’s revolution and laid it at the feet of the very president whose likeness Iranian revolutionaries burned in effigy as they massed outside the seized embassy compound.

“Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?” Jury still out on that one

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s an ugly rumor, I know, and I shouldn’t repeat ugly rumors.

But just this once, I will: Paul McCartney and his wife Heather might be splitsville (the photo accompanying that link, by the way, is proof that after a certain age–or perhaps at any age–you should avoid having a photo taken from a low perspective. Trust me on that one).

So ladies, if you were a “Paul girl” such as yours truly, there is still hope. Not a whole lot of hope, but then again, there never was a whole lot, was there? The odds were always against us. And although even Sir Paul himself is looking a trifle raggedy lately, only those among us without sin should cast the first stone.

But it’s the timing of the story–if true–that impresses me. Because it turns out that today Paul is exactly one month short of his sixty-fourth birthday!

So perhaps that song was prescient, after all, in its uncertainty (although the line, “you’ll be older too” doesn’t seem to apply in Heather’s case):

When I get older losing my hair
Many years from now
Will you still be sending me a valentine
Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
If I’d been out till quarter to three
Would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I’m sixty-four?

You’ll be older too
And if you say the word
I could stay with you

I could be handy, mending a fuse
When your lights have gone
You can knit a sweater by the fireside
Sunday mornings go for a ride
Doing the garden, digging the weeds
Who could ask for more?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I’m sixty-four?

Every summer we can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight
If it’s not too dear
We shall scrimp and save
Grandchildren on your knee
Vera, Chuck & Dave

Send me a postcard, drop me a line
Stating point of view
Indicate precisely what you mean to say
Yours sincerely, wasting away
Give me your answer, fill in a form
Mine for evermore
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I’m sixty-four?
Ho!

Apres le deluge

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, we’ve had a week–or is it two?–of almost unending rain. But today, sun!

Here’s that same view outside the window of my study. You can see the changes; two weeks ago:

vs. today:

The birch tree is almost fully leafed out, hiding the evergreens that used to dominate.

Floods in New England: weather, climate, and change

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s a commonplace quip in New England that if you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes. In other words, our weather is very changeable. Very.

Another quip is that there are two seasons in New England, winter and the Fourth of July. In other words, winter’s long and cold, and summer fleeting. Very.

Right now most of New England is in the midst of torrential rains and swollen rivers, record-setting within the last seventy years or so but not unprecedented. First we had a spring drought, and the initial rain was welcomed, but now it’s “Rain, Rain, Go Away” in earnest.

Schools are closed, basements are flooded, roads are damaged, and it’s still raining. My house is on a hill, and everything’s still dry inside, but I hear bitter complaints all around.

A friend sent these photos from an apartment complex in New Hampshire, one of those old converted mills that are ordinarily so picturesque.


Those windows you’re looking at with the water close to rushing into them are on the first floor, and the apartments they’re attached to have been evacuated.

When this sort of weather happens, people–being people–search for explanations. Global warming is often blamed for all the perturbations we’ve experienced lately, and for all I (or anyone) knows it may indeed be so.

But I think we often forget how constant change in weather has been. That New England saying refers only to short term day-by-day and hour-to-hour fluctuations. We cling to the illusion–and it’s just that, an illusion–that weather in general is stable over time, when in fact the opposite is actually true.

Our lifetimes are short enough that we don’t perceive these fluctuations in climate (“weather” becomes “climate” when we speak of the long term), but scientists know they exist and theorize as to their cause. There have been many; the glaciation of the ice ages are among the most well-known and dramatic. But we don’t have to go back that far in time to get an idea of the scope of climactic change; more recently there was the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.

Here’s a small glimpse of some of the features of these climactic events, to give an idea of the relative speed with which the climate changed in those days, even before the massive burning of fossil fuel:

[The Medieval Warm Period lasted] from about 1000 to 1300 AD. As with the Little Ice Age, its timing and effects varied from region to region, and many experts doubt that the Medieval Warm Period was a truly global phenomenon. In East Asia, for example, temperatures were cooler.

Europe, though, enjoyed an undeniably balmy climate during the early medieval period. Agriculture flourished farther north and at higher elevations on mountains than is possible even in today’s warmish climate, and harvests generally were good.

Farmers raised wine grapes in England 300 miles north of present limits, and in what now are icebound parts of Greenland, Norse settlers grazed sheep and dairy cattle. In his book Climate History and Modern Man, H.H. Lamb noted that the great burst of cathedral-building and population expansion in medieval Europe coincided with the peak of the Medieval Warm Period.

By about 1400, the climate had cooled to temperatures comparable to today. Over the next century or two, the world would cool still further, bringing on the Little Ice Age.

…Some mark its inception as early as the 1200s, others view the Little Ice Age “proper” as beginning around 1450 or even later.

Disagreements arise because the phenomenon was not simply a giant cold snap. The cooling trend began at different times in different parts of the world and often was interrupted by periods of relative warmth.

All agree, however, that it lasted for centuries, and that the world began emerging from its grip between 1850 and 1900….

That’s recent; very recent indeed. Long before that, descendents of those who’d settled in Greenland in a warmer era had all died, and Iceland’s population was decimated. And, as an ex-New Yorker, I find this word picture of the Little Ice Age in that city something to marvel at:

In the fledgling United States, New York harbor froze over in winter, allowing people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island.

As a child, such things fascinated me, in particular the ebb and flow of the ice ages themselves. I spent hours poring over a series of maps in the World Book Encyclopedia purporting to show the extent of different glaciations, as well as the changing shapes of the continents.

The idea that the coastline that seemed so immutable to me was only this way for a long moment in time, that all was flux, that over unimaginable aeons the very shape of the ground beneath us had altered immeasurably, that seas had appeared where mountains had been, and vice versa–all of this filled me with a sense I can only describe as wonder. That the world was far stranger than I could ever imagine, and in ways I could never understand, seemed just about right.

[NOTE: Speaking of change, here, for your viewing pleasure, are some animated drawings of the movements of the continents over time.]

Blogger burnout: it’s the end of the beginning

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s an interesting wave of fatigue running through the blogosphere. A lot of people are writing about it: The Anchoress is taking time off from politics, although not from blogging; Shrinkwrapped offers keen insight; Austin Bay opines, and Belmont Club weighs in with his trademark deep reflection.

The consensus is that a frustrating frustration is abroad in the land, related to the fact that the “easier” parts of this struggle have ended or are ending. Not that any of it has been easy, but Afghanistan and al Qaeda, and even to some extent Iraq, were clearer targets and tasks than the ones that lie ahead.

Still, they’ve been difficult, and are not clearly over yet, and people are tired. Tired of the struggle, tired of the bloodshed, and in some way tired most of all of the endless haranguing and vicious infighting here in the US.

But now we’re facing even tougher problems. As Austin Bay says:

Al Qaeda is being defeated”“ it’s not dead but it’s on its way to defeat. Even Al Qaeda’s latest rants reflect an awareness that their great gambit has failed…There is also a growing awareness that Iraq’s long slog may well result in the emergence of a new, more open political system in the Muslim Middle East. It’s still going to take a couple of years for this to be evident ”“and the worst defeatists and naysayers will either go to their graves denying it”“ but all of the indicators are there…Iran’s mullahs are demonstrating once again the limitations of UN multi-lateralism”“ sharp minds on the left and right recognize this. A lot of people staked their hopes for peace and a better future on UN multilateralism. The Iranian situation also illustrates the limits of US unilateralism ”” how many times can the world’s superpower go it alone?…

I think Iran is indeed one of the biggest causes of blogger fatigue, combined with our lack of agreement on the seriousness of the problem–if we can’t agree on the vicious intent and dangerousness of the Iranian leadership, what can we agree on?

Iran is a topic I’ve tried to wrap my mind around many times, and still it looms, unresolved and seemingly–perhaps–unresolvable. All approaches seem potentially either catastrophic or ineffectual, or both. So fatigue is an understandable reaction; the mind tends to shut down.

For me, personally, I think I faced something of this way back on 9/11, strangely enough. Not the details, of course; I couldn’t possibly have foreseen them. But it came to me that day that we were in something that would be very long and extraordinarily difficult. Here were my thoughts, from my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series:

[On September 11, 2001], I went to the ocean and sat on the rocks. It was the loveliest day imaginable. I had been alive for over fifty years at the time, and I cannot recall weather and a sky quite like that before. It added to the utter unreality of the day and my feelings. The sky was so blue as to be almost piercing, with a clarity and sharpness that seemed other-worldly. It made it feel as though the heavens themselves were speaking to us; but what were they saying?

All this clarity and purity was enhanced by the fact that there wasn’t an airplane in the sky. There were boats of all types on the bluest of oceans, the sun beamed down and made the waves sparkle, and it all seemed to have a preciousness and a beauty that came with something that might soon be irretrievably lost…

Even on that very first day, as I sat on the rocks overlooking the beautiful ocean that I loved so much, I thought we had entered a new era, one which would probably go on for most of my lifetime however much longer I might live. The fight would be long and hard, and there would be many many deaths before it was over. Perhaps it would result in the end of civilization as we knew it–yes, my thoughts went that far on that day. This war would encompass most of the globe. I had no idea how it would work out, but I knew that we were in for the fight of our lives.

The legal actions of the past–the puny trial after the first World Trade Center attack, for example–no longer seemed like an effective response. It seemed, in retrospect, to have been almost laughably naive. The situation didn’t even seem amenable to a conventional war. Something new would have to be invented, and fast. And it would have to be global. It would have to have great depth and breadth, and it would probably last for decades or even longer.

It’s long, and it’s hard. But fatigue is really not an option, although of course we all feel it. In the deceptively simple yet majestically eloquent words of that wily old leader, Winston Churchill, who knew what long hard struggles were all about, and who knew how to describe them:

This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

[NOTE: I just wanted to add that the fatigue I’m writing about here is certainly not limited to the blogosphere, nor even to the so-called right. In an earlier (and longer) version of this post, I made that clear, but when I shortened the post it became much less clear.]

A daughter reminisces: the making of a writer

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a beautiful piece by the Anchoress, an honest and complex tribute to the mother who gave her her love of words.

It would be interesting to uncover the heredity/genetics of what makes up a writer and reader. And by “writer” I don’t just mean professionals, but amateurs as well, all those who love words (remember, the root of the word “amateur” is “lover”) .

The Anchoress’s mother was brought up by deaf parents, which may have made her love of words even more powerful. As the Anchoress writes:

She gave me that – the love of words – of the very sound of words – the ability to take delight in a well-turned phrase or a crafty sentence, the ability to sense something beyond vowels and consonants, something that sounds like real music and gives almost as much delight. Drunk or sober, angry or gleeful, the stuff that poured from her mouth would routinely stop me in my tracks for the sheer glory of her word usage. I revelled in her immense vocabulary, her flawless diction. If some surprising, or obscene, words occasionally found their way into her soliliquies, even those were rendered inoffensive thanks to the plucky, affectionate way she inserted them.

Some people are just drawn to words from the start; I was one of them. And, as with the Anchoress, it did seem to run in our family. I grew up with a mother to whom I automatically gave all my school papers to edit, just as my father was in charge of checking my math homework (at least for a while). My mother loved taking the old blue pencil (metaphoric, in her case) to my childish efforts, indicating grammar corrections and the like, and then explaining them to me in a teaching moment. Didn’t everybody’s mother?

And didn’t everybody’s brother read poetry aloud to them in-between bouts of teasing and various other forms of torment? Some might call the poetry readings themselves a form of torment–but not me.

The answer, of course, is no. But I wasn’t aware of that at the time; I thought such skills went with parenthood, and maybe even big-brotherhood.

My mother used to have a newspaper column, and she was a child prodigy as a poet. My mother’s father was a writer also, although he worked in advertising, and her entire family used to compose funny jingles for all occasions–birthdays, weddings, any small excuse–set to popular tunes of the day. (Perhaps that’s why I appreciate Dr. Sanity’s lofty skills in that particular arena so much). I carried on the blue pencil tradition for my son when he was growing up. And now he’s a better editor and writer than I.

Which is as it should be, right?

For Mother’s Day: mothers and babies

The New Neo Posted on by

Okay, who are these three dark beauties?

A hint: one of them is the very first picture you’ve ever seen on this blog of neo-neocon, sans apple. Not that you’d recognize me, of course. Even my own mother might not recognize me from this photo.

My own mother, you say? Of course she would. Ah, but she’s here too, looking a bit different than she does today–Mother’s Day–at ninety-two years of age. Just a bit; maybe her own mother wouldn’t recognize her, either.

Her own mother? She’s the one who’s all dressed up, with longer hair than the rest of us.

The photo of my grandmother was taken in the 1880’s; the one of my mother in the teens of the twentieth century; and the one of me, of course, in the 1950s.

Heredity, ain’t it great? My mother and grandmother are both sitting for formal portraits at a professional photographer’s studio, but by the time I came around amateur snapshots were easy to take with a smallish Brownie camera. My mother is sitting on the knee of her own grandfather, my grandmother’s father, a dapper gentleman who was always very well-turned out. I’m next to my older brother, who’s reading a book to me but is cropped out of this photo. My grandmother sits alone in all her finery.

We all not only resemble each other greatly in our features and coloring, but in our solemnity. My mother’s and grandmother’s seriousness is probably explained by the strange and formal setting; mine is due to my concentration on the book, which was Peter Pan (my brother was only pretending to read it, since he couldn’t read yet, but I didn’t know that at the time). My mother’s resemblance to me is enhanced by our similar hairdos (or lack thereof), although hers was short because it hadn’t really grown in yet, and mine was short because she purposely kept it that way (easier to deal with).

My grandmother not only has the pretty ruffled dress and the long flowing locks, but if you look really closely you can see a tiny earring dangling from her earlobe. When I was young, she showed me her baby earrings; several miniature, delicate pairs. It astounded me that they’d actually pierced a baby’s ears (and that my grandmother had let the holes close up later on, and couldn’t wear pierced earrings any more), whereas I had to fight for the right to have mine done in my early teens.

I’m not sure what my mother’s wearing; some sort of baby smock. But I know what I have on: my brother’s hand-me-down pajamas, and I was none too happy about it, of that you can be sure.

So, a very happy Mother’s Day to you all! What would mothers be without babies…and mothers…and babies….and mothers….?

Answering a true liberal’s question about Iraq

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently an elderly aunt (oh, I don’t think she’d like that “elderly” bit at all!) who lives in San Francisco asked me the following question during a phone conversation we were having, “So, do you still think it was good for us to go into Iraq?”

She’s a lifelong liberal Democrat, but one of those people in my life who, since my “change,” has always been patient and respectful towards me in all of our discussions. We actually don’t talk too much any more about politics–it’s mostly become one of those “agree to disagree” things–but at first we certainly did, and (unlike many) she made efforts to listen and never flew off the handle.

So, when she asked that question, her tone was only ever-so-slightly dubious, with the subtext, “How could you possibly believe such a thing?” only vaguely hinted at.

My answer amounted to the following:

Yes, in a way, although I never phrased it that way to begin with and wouldn’t describe it that way today. It’s not a question of “good for us,” although the results could end up being good for us in the long run. But the way I saw it at the time, and still see it, is that it was a difficult and risky decision that represented something we needed to do, faced with a bad situation that had been building for decades in that area.

The risks were always huge, but we had to take a stand on Saddam’s defiance of the terms of the ceasefire and of the UN’s authority, and we had to try to see whether we could get something decent going in the region. That country seemed, for a whole host of reasons (including, most prominently, humanitarian ones), a good place to try to start.

I take the long view, and the jury is still out on what will happen in Iraq. You may not realize it, because of the news sources you read, but the government there is still moving ahead, and the country is not actually in a civil war, despite the bitter and bloody conflict. And it may also seem strange to you when I say this, but I was actually expecting worse. I expected far more bloodshed to occur, and more unrest and street fighting, not less. In this perhaps I’m different than most, but I seem to recall those were the prewar predictions even from the Left–which they seem to have forgotten, since moving the goalposts is always good sport.

I never thought a good outcome was a foregone conclusion. And the idea that the Bush administration uniformly thought so is a distortion (and here I referenced my posts on that theme, and on the famous “cakewalk” remark).

Her response was to thank me for a thoughtful and complex answer–which gives you a good idea of what sort of a person she is, and why we can talk together. I doubt she agreed with me, but not only is she willing to talk and to listen, but I know I represent one of the few opposing views she ever encounters, and she values hearing a different perspective. That makes her a true liberal indeed, in the first sense of the word as it’s defined here:

broad: showing or characterized by broad-mindedness; “a broad political stance”; “generous and broad sympathies”; “a liberal newspaper”; “tolerant of his opponent’s opinions”

Blogger collage

The New Neo Posted on by

I just noticed (via this link to the site by Gerard Van der Leun) that I’ve got a place in the blogger collage Blogs With a Face.” I’m especially honored, since I hardly qualify–I’m more like “blogs with a partly-hidden face.”

Van der Leun is especially pleased with his positioning next to the stunning Michelle Malkin. As well he might be. And I, likewise, have no reason whatsoever to complain about my personal surroundings. I am more or less encircled by some of the finest male pulchritude in the blogosphere, both on the sides and above.

And they can write, too.

Negotiating with Iran: who’s the real enemy?

The New Neo Posted on by

Even back when I was a liberal, I don’t think I ever was out of touch with reality about the nature of our enemies.

For example, when the ayatollahs came to power in Iran and launched their PR campaign by taking over the American Embassy and making the Carter administration look like impotent fools, it was clear what we were dealing with. The repressiveness of the new Iranian regime (particularly vis a vis women) was clear from the start, as was its aggressive intent and its uncompromising tyranny.

This was how the crisis began:

On November 1, 1979 Iran’s new leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini urged his people to demonstrate against United States and Israeli interests. Ruhollah Khomeini was anti-American in his rhetoric, denouncing the American government as the “Great Satan” and “Enemies of Islam”.

Well, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. There are few regimes around that represent such models of consistency over time.

Yes indeed, as I’ve said before, one can rightfully disagree on what to do about Iran. But at the risk of sounding like a broken record I will repeat: the intent of the Iranian leadership is clear, because they have made it clear. These are not people with whom one can expect to negotiate and reach any sort of favorable outcome, or indeed any outcome at all that isn’t a sham.

So the solutions lie elsewhere. They might be strategic: working with other nations to apply the screws in various ways, such as economically. They might be clandestine: working to help Iranians themselves change the regime. And of course they might be military, the solution hated most by liberals, leftists, and pacifists.

And in fact that latter solution–the military one–is also most hated by me. I would imagine it’s most hated by almost everyone on the right as well as on the left, because most people on earth are actually not eager for war if other solutions have a good chance of success. Those who advocate a military solution do so because they tend to consider it the least bad of a host of possible bad solutions, and risky ones at that.

I personally still advocate a combination of the strategic and clandestine solutions, holding off a military one till if/when it may be absolutely necessary. But in any event, I don’t think it’s best to take any possibility off the table.

I believe that I would feel the same way if I were still a liberal Democrat. Some would take that as evidence that I never was a liberal Democrat in the first place, but they would be wrong. The truth is that there have been tremendous changes in the last few decades in the stance of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party (and perhaps “wing” isn’t a good word, since the entire party has shifted enough that I’m not sure there’s much of a moderate wing remaining).

When I take a look at blogs of the liberal persuasion writing on the topic of Iran, I can’t help but feel that a sea change has occurred of such major proportions that I simply don’t recognize my own former party.

Here’s a case in point–not so much the post itself, but the comments that follow. The most common attitude I see there is that the enemy is bloodthirsty and is on the brink of starting a war, and the enemy must be stopped.

So, what’s wrong with that, you say? Only this: the enemy in question is the Bush administration. The other enemy–Iran–is given all the benefit of the doubt, and Bush is given none.

Iran’s motives are seen as, if not noble, then as understandable reactions to the threats of others. Its history and its own stated aims are ignored. Its ability to actually make a weapon is doubted; the longest possible time frame for such a possibility is accepted as the earliest possible time frame. And on and on…

Historical context? Fagettabout it.

Bad news vs. even worse news

The New Neo Posted on by

This morning when I went to Yahoo to check my email, I saw a headline about a blast in Nigeria that had killed two hundred people.

The original headline (it’s been slightly changed now) didn’t make the accidental nature of the explosion at all clear. So my first thought, of course, was terrorism.

But when I read the first few paragraphs it became apparent that that first thought of mine was wrong. Although the cause of the blast is still not exactly certain, this was the actual situation:

The villagers had been collecting the gushing fuel outside the coastal village of Ilado, about 30 miles east of the main Nigerian city of Lagos, when the fuel ignited, police and rescue workers said.

The dead are just as dead. But it appears to be a tragedy rather than a crime or an act of war.

My point? Ever since 9/11, when I hear about something like this, my first assumption is terrorism. It’s now the default position–whereas, prior to 9/11, the reverse was true.

It’s certainly not that terrorist attacks weren’t commonplace before, but it was easier to relegate them to the background. That shouldn’t have been the case–we know that now–but for so many of us, that’s the way it was.

Perhaps it’s just the way the human mind and heart tends to work. We don’t like to face the reality of the threat until it’s made unequivocal. We don’t want to have to peer too closely into the heart of darkness. And too often we don’t want to have to do something about it until it’s close to being too late.

In this case and many others, I’m relieved to be incorrect. My sorrow remains at the loss of life. But there are degrees of terribleness in human events, and causes do matter.

Pubescent rites of passage: coming of age in Astoria (and elsewhere)

The New Neo Posted on by

Today, reading Fausta’s reminiscences about the coming-of-age party for girls in the Hispanic community known as the quinceaé±ero, I was reminded of–well, of lots of things, which I’ll get to in due course.

But first, Fausta quoting the NY Times on the subject:

In Miami, home to moneyed Latin Americans and wealthy Cuban-Americans, quinces are fancier than ever, with some parties now veering into Broadwayesque stagecraft. It is not uncommon for a young girl in belly-dancing attire to be carried aloft on a bejeweled “Arabian Nights” bed by four young men or to step out of a custom-built Cinderella castle. Birthday girls saunter across sandy floors as mermaids, é  la “Under the Sea,” or dance in Victorian regalia, or put on hip-hop routines. Masquerade parties are popular, and costume changes, as in stage productions, are au courant. Even when the party involves just the traditional waltz, a choreographer is a must.

“Some wear short dresses underneath their big dresses and during the disco, they rip off the big dress…”

Even though the quinces were more a bit more modest when Fausta was a girl, she was not looking forward to the event at the time for herself:

As a shy (it was a long time ago) fourteen-year old I dreaded the prospect of a solo evening-long performance on a Mass followed by a ball followed by a dinner. The dread increased as I watched my next door neighbor go through the preparations: endless discussions of what the gowns were to look like (white gown for her, gowns in coordinating colors for her mother and sisters), coordinating accessories, flowers, tuxedo rentals and a thousand other petty details…

When I was a fourteen-year old (and no doubt it was even longer ago for me than for Fausta), I didn’t know of any quinces. But there were other coming of age parties: for girls, the Sweet Sixteen. Bar Mitzvahs for Jewish boys. And weddings for all. I knew of no one who came out as a debutante, but I suppose that factored in for some.

Like Fausta, I wasn’t all that eager for the two that might apply to me, the Sweet Sixteen and the wedding. In fact, at the age of eleven, on attending my very first big wedding–held in a catering hall, with two hundred guests and eight attendants in pink satin, and a loud band making it hard to speak or to hear–I turned to my mother and shouted over the din, “I’m telling you right now: you’ll never get me to do this.”

Oh, my poor, poor long-suffering mother. She panicked; did I mean I was never getting married?

“Oh no, it’s the wedding,” I answered. “Don’t ever expect me to have this kind of wedding.”

Nor did I want to have the next kind of wedding I attended. It was different, that’s for sure: a late morning ceremony in a beautiful old church in Brooklyn Heights. The bride had designed and made her own gown, but this is misleading: she was an artist, and it was exquisite and unusual, a heavy satin with a vaguely Asian obi-like flair and tiny pearls sewn in a striking design. No, no problem there–although I certainly didn’t have the skill to follow suit, I admired her style.

The problem came later, when we went to her family’s elegant brownstone for the reception. No, not the brownstone itself; that seemed ideal. It was the refreshments. The day was insufferably hot in those pre-airconditioned times, close to 100 degrees. The crowd filled the brownstone and it became even warmer.

So, what was the menu? Elegant simplicity itself, like the bride’s dress:

(1) champagne
(2) salted peanuts

Nice beginning, you say? What about the rest?

There was no rest. That was it. And, if you use your imagination, you can guess what happened next. Everyone was sweating and also very hungry: dehydration led to thirst which led to greater imbibement of the champagne, hunger led to massive downing of the salted peanuts which led to greater thirst which led to…well, you get the idea. The entire crowd got totally and completely looped–almost dangerously so.

My own wedding, when it came in the fullness of time, was exactly as I wanted it to be: in my house, rather small, great food, good company.

But I digress (what, moi? Digress??) Back to the quince; we were speaking of the quince. And, thinking about the more general phenomenon of wretched excess in such matters, I’ve come to the conclusion that its a complex matter, perhaps just a natural part of human nature.

Note in the Times article that the idea of the huge coming out party is catching on:

The quince-style coming-of-age parties have even managed to influence the coming-of-age celebrations of other groups, including West Indians, African-Americans and Asians, who have grown infatuated with the party’s choreographed nature and family tributes. This trend is particularly evident in multicultural New York, where the tradition of trading slippers for heels, lighting 16 candles and surrounding the birthday girl with a weddinglike “court” of friends is winning over non-Hispanic girls.

“I am amazed at how many nationalities come in and want these Sweet 16’s ””Indians, Filipinas, Chinese,” said Angela Baker-Brown, who runs Tatiana’s Bridal in Queens, which sells quinceaé±era dresses and props, like the scepter the birthday girl carries. “It is a Hispanic tradition, but these other groups are going to these parties and wanting one as well.”

Greed, you say? Materialism? Yes, of course. But reading between the lines I see something else as well, something more heartwarming: love. Call me naive–and perhaps I am–but I think that’s part of what’s operating here:

The Hispanic community treats it this way: I have one or two daughters. She may get married several times but a ’15’ happens only once. It’s once in a lifetime…Many families who can’t really afford the party have them anyway. Traditionally, quinceaé±era parties have cut across class lines. “They save for this for years,” Ms. Albuerne said. Mexican-Americans often share the cost with the extended family, naming several godparents specifically to participate in the process. Cuban families open special savings accounts. “I know some Hispanics who have placed second mortgages on their home for this,” she said. “It’s important.”

The passage from childhood to adulthood traditionally has had these sorts of markers and celebrations, cutting across cultures. The impulse is nearly universal. The ages differ, and the details certainly do: menstrual huts and scarification, for example, are not part of a quince (at least not yet), although tattoos seem to be making a generalized comeback.

But the urge is there, and it is twofold: to mark an important passage for a beloved child, and to do it in style. In our affluent society, we have the money to try to outdo each other in ostentation, it’s true. But perhaps that’s just another human impulse that goes along with any society with greater resources; note the potlatch.

So, I’d consider accepting any quince invites that might happen to come my way. And I bet there’s more than champagne and salted peanuts on the menu.