A brief note on literary criticism

Firstly, apologies for the lack of posts. Have been very busy recently and it seems I will be for a while here, but will post as soon as I can. In the meantime, keep reading 90ways.com and theouterloop.com for more pieces. This week: On the nature of cloned meat from animals (90ways) and on Jewish terrorists (theouterloop). Both are articles with which I wish I had more space, but other editors aren't as ready to indulge my narcissism, because they want people to "read" their sites and not get turned off by my long-windedness. The nerve.

Anyway, I was moved to write today because of something I read in the Tribune- a brief little article asking some college English professors (and a few other people) why it was that no one seemed to teach the late, great Saul Bellow anymore. A few interesting answers- Bellow is complex, perhaps too quirky, etc. But there was one, from Erin G. Carlston, English professor at University of North Carolina (which is already annoying for having beaten Illinois), which stood out for its sheer craven, knee-jerk idiotic response that goes a long way toward explaining why intelligent people like Robert Conquest are disgusted by the educational system. I am going to quote it in full, so you can appreciate the growing horror and anger I had while reading it.

"The truth is I dislike Bellow so don't teach him myself. I'd guess from informal conversations with friends that my dislike for Bellow is fairly widely shared among women scholars, at least. But it's also highly idiosyncratic and all about gender and ethnicity, for me. I’d say in a general way that most post-World War II literature by American white men strikes me as incredibly whiny. It's trivial and narrowly focused, and they go on and on about how it's the end of Western Civilization because they can't get women to pick up their socks anymore. Bellow, being Jewish, is less offensive to me on these grounds than [John] Updike and his ilk, for whom I have no patience at all -- I mean, American Jewish men have actual cause to be insecure . . . and their relationship to power is much more complicated than it is for WASPs. But he still fits, in my mind, with a kind of writing I think of as self-absorbed and trivial. There's no real tragedy, no joy, no relish in humanity. It's all kind of flat."

And this woman, if you read her CV, teaches on Ulysses and writes about Proust! If the above paragraph is any indication of her temperament or true sensitivity (as opposed to the New Age-y sensitivity she espouses) her students, when being taught about some of the finest novel and novelists in the post-Flaubert age, are being force-fed the most merciless pap and sub-academic trite the eastern seaboard has to offer. I for one despise when people like Tom DeLay or Bill O'Reilly denounce in off-handed manners the "liberal elite" and stand proudly as sneering bastions of "political incorrectness"- but it is people like Carlton that give them ammo for their ad hoc attacks.

For her whole analysis of Bellow is one long attack itself, and has little or nothing to do with his actual writing. Rather, she attacks him because he is a white male, and says his literature is worse for it. His "relationship to power" (admittedly tempered by his partially redeemable Jewishness) takes everything he writes and skewers it.

This reminds me of a story by (who else?) the great Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." The conceit of the story, if I may do it the injustice of summation, is that Menard, an author, wanted to write Don Quixote. But he wasn't just going to copy Cervantes' masterpiece, or even take the route of becoming Cervantes (learning Spanish, forgetting history, fighting the Moors) because it was too easy. Rather, he wanted to have the Quixote come to him as Pierre Menard. He only manages to "create" a couple of passages, which the author of the story (also a character, though I presume Carlton would assume it was Borges' own opinion) summarizes thusly.

"It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard with that of Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes, for example, wrote the following (Part 1, Chapter IX):

...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.

The catalog of attributes, writer in the seventeenth century, and written by the 'ingenious layman' Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.

History, the mother of truth!- the idea is staggering. Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history as not delving into reality, but as the very fount of reality...the final phrases- exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor- are brazenly pragmatic. The contrast in styles is equally striking."

It goes on like this. Borges uses his narrator to brilliantly expose the worst kind of modernist tripe- that a work of literature has to be judged by who its author is, what they looked like and where they lived, if it was experimental, what the ultimate intention was, their politics and their contemporaries, rather than if it is, you know, any good.

This is exactly what Carlton does with Saul Bellow. I can't claim to be any real expert on Bellow. I've read, and greatly enjoyed, several of his novels and some short stories, but his canon has long been on the "to get to someday" list, lamentably. But I do know garbage when I see it, and having read only a little Bellow (admittedly his classics) is enough to classify her opinion as garbage.

What is Bellow's relation to power? Perhaps pretty high- he is, after all, a white male (as, one presumes, is Carlston's father- for shame!). Therefore, the lamenting of his characters, their personal sorrow and tragedy, their inner strife, from Augie March's journey to the giant, bellowing anger and sadness and titanic lust and fear of Henderson, is moot. Boring. Piffle, really. What does anyone who is white know about sadness?

This is absurd. Bellow's characters are not powerful men (not all whites, it must be noted in passing, have a silver spoon and hands firmly gripped on the wheels of power). The are frequently low and desperate, many terminally dull and violent. Bellow himself may have amassed some money and prestige- but should that take away meaning from his exquisitely drawn characters? Of course not.

Carlston's foolishness in this article has failed to meet a bound a decency or rationality that it didn't leap. One asks where she has read a writer lamenting having to pick up his own socks- a literary trope she seems to find pervasive without actually giving an example. But perhaps she has read it, perhaps often. Then one has to ask if it was a character lamenting his own relative decline in the power-structure of his own family, which may or may not reflect the author's own bias. There is also the chance that the author is- perhaps, and I know this defies common sense- creating a character.

But that is too easy. It has to be the author "whining" through their character, which really is just their avatar, even if there are many characters. This is awful garbage, and it shows an elementary mistake, and one that is being beaten into the heads of her students. I know it seems awfully much to pick on her, but she did decide to make these comments in a major newspaper and does in fact teach at a prestigious university. And this is not an attempt at a Daniel Pipes academic blacklist- she has every right to teach like an idiot, just as we have every right to call her out.

Her last section is the most infuriating (other than when she says she "has no time" for Updike and his cronies. I am not an Updike fan myself, but she dismisses them for being in the majority in every way, which is the height of bigoted wrong-headedness). Of Bellow (and his ilk): "There's no real tragedy, no joy, no relish in humanity. It's all kind of flat."

One might be generous enough to say that she is making these comments without actually having read Bellow, judging him on cover-jacket picture alone. That is the generous interpretation. But what seems is the case is that she read Bellow, and based on who Bellow was, judged him flat. This is impossible unless you start reading with an agenda, as did those who read "Menard's" Quixote. For someone who teaches literature, who makes her living off of it, Carlston seems to lack any real appreciation or insight. Literature has to be appreciated for what it is, not as a tool around which one twists their politics. Bad politics frequently makes for bad literature, though not always (as Orwell reminds us). There are exception, like with T.S. Eliot. If one like Ms. Carlston were to read Eliot, though, she would impugn him for his beliefs rather than celebrate his magnificent poetry. If she can say such a thing about Bellow she could make hash out of Eliot, reminding us that while dirty politics can still sometimes make bad literature, bad politics always makes dirty literary criticism.

Strange bedfellows at the Papal Funeral

Look at this picture from the BBC. In the front is Israeli president Moshe Katsav. A few seats to his left stands Iranian President Mohammed Khatami, and behind him is Syrian President Bashar al-Asad. Before and during the funeral, Katsav shook hands with al-Asad and exchanged pleasantries with Khatami. As the article reminds us, Syria and Israel are both at a state of war, and Iran does not recognize the state of Israel.

Of course, the President of Israel is a largely ceremonial position- Katsav has very little power or influence. Khatami should have power, but the hard-liners, with their control over the army, police and judiciary have rendered him politically impotent. And al-Asad is a fool and a frontman for the power class in Syria (though he still wields more control than the other two put together). But there is still something special about that moment, something almost beautiful.

It is a testament to the greatness of this Pope. Great does not always mean good- and readers of this page know I remain strongly critical of John Paul the II, but there is little doubt that he almost always meant well, even when his programs bring harm and misery (like the stubborn and dogmatic opposition to birth control). And he was most sincere about bringing people together, about dialouge between faiths, about the brotherhood of man, as he saw it. War to him was always deeply troubling. It was clear that the virulent hatred and violence of the Middle East was something that pained his heart.

Probably little to nothing will come of these warm handshakes, of the smiles. They were what was called for. But, still! That these men could come together, could put aside their differences, refusing to let politics and war and hatred and enmity and anger get in the way of honoring this man is perhaps his greatest tribute. The millions in Rome and the millions of Catholics who wept at home and the millions of other confessions that were saddened by his passing shows his touch and his genuine ecumenical spirit. That shows plenty about this man, and would probably be the most touching to him were he around to see it. It shows his honest humility and his deep love for the world, not just for those in the sway of the Vatican. His greatness, what he will be most missed for, though, is his unique ability to bring people together, even if it left them bewildered. The force of his personality, even when he left the world behind, was enough to do so. The picture of enemies standing in solemn respect, joint in their mourning, is as much a tribute and remembrance of the man as the millions of candles justly lit around this troubled planet.

Shameless self-promotion

So there are now two different websites that have allowed me to write for them. I am going to use this space to promote myself, and the sites, at least as much as I can.

90ways.com is a magazine type format with fiction, essay, criticism, science and weather sections. I write for the science one, which you can find by clicking on the science icon (this detailed instruction is written mostly for the benefit of Gregory, who has trouble with these sorts of things). It is just a short article, but with some broad implications, which I hope to start attacking more.

theouterloop.com is a pretty comprehensive site, dealing with politics and lifestyle and arts and a bunch of things. I am a political columnist- surprise!- and should have stuff out every Thursday.

Both sites seem really good: comprehensive, esoteric, witty, smart, (save for the tragic mistake of letting me scribble for them). Check them out. Actually, check them out 100 times a day so they can sell ad space and I can get paid. If this happens, I'll take you all out for ice cream.

The Tripe of Tom Friedman: The World Isn't the Only Thing That's Flat

New York Times Foreign Affairs Columnist Tom Friedman is a maddening writer: easy to dismiss until he comes up with something good, which makes his past 10 columns all the more frustrating. He is nowhere as awful as many of his detractors insist (and I am often in that group), but much further away from the guru his legions of fans imagine he is (and in this group I include the Pulitzer committee- Friedman's multiple wins don't sully Joseph Pulitzer's reputation on the same level as Arafat-Winning-The-Nobel did, but it does make one wonder just how many papers the judges actually read).

Friedman was a good reporter and has always been a skilled writer. His From Beirut to Jerusalem is still an excellent read, though not without its faults (Edward Said titled a review of it "The Orientalist Express"). But even in that, the burgeoning Tom Friedman, Ace Columnist, was peeking out. You could see it lurking- but it wasn't until he actually became a columnist that all his irritating tendencies came to fruition.

There is a passage in the Bible that reads something like "When I was a child, I talked like a child, spoke like a child, did other things like a child, but now that I am an adult it is all different. I mean, really different." I'm paraphrasing here (slightly), but the same pattern is true with Tom Friedman, Journalist, and Tom Friedman, Columnist, only the juvenile nature is reversed.

Now, I am not saying that he is a dumb guy, or a puerile name-slinger or anything like that. He isn't juvenile personally, but he tries to explain everything in the most simple terms, to dumb it down into a series of bite-sized info-nuggets, all with helpful titles that serve as a guide to Understanding The World.

This reached it's seeming apex with his The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. The title refers to a symbol of wealth, prestige and globalization (the Lexus) and of ancient longing, superstition and hatred (the olive tree). The second part of the title detailed what the book would not help you do, though it weirdly failed to make that clear (you may have got the opposite impression). This was a whirlwind tour between diametrically opposite poles, rushing back and forth so fast you didn't really have time to stop anywhere in between.

And the people we heard from! Rich, powerful, eloquent, excellent at three-pointers (Steve Kerr, which makes this the second time he has been referenced on this site): the whole gamut between powerful and really powerful presented their panoply of opinions, all of which pretty much dovetailed with Friedman's own thesis.

Which doesn't make them wrong- it just makes them incomplete. Friedman even admitted as much as a speech at the American University of Cairo, where he mentioned that he was a slave to his own paradigm (I was there at the time). Perhaps the best example of this came in a little anecdote in his speech, which later became the forward to the paperback. He mentioned riding a train from Alexandria in the north to Cairo, and all throughout the car there was the constant ring of cell phones. This is probably true- a lot of people in the Arab world have cells.

However, I've been lucky (?)enough to ride in Egyptian trains, and in the cars I could afford there were no cell phones. Chickens were more common. This isn't to say what Friedman said was untrue- just wildly incomplete.

It seemed he got out of that a little bit after September 11th. Friedman realized that the war was taking place in the Muslim world, and it wasn't just an attack on America because America loves freedom or because America is an evil country or any of the trite views espoused by left or right wing commentators. His stuff wasn't excellent- it is still stunning he won another Pulitzer for it- but it was more grown-up than "The Lexus...", by far.

I found his writing on the war in Iraq to be the height of his career. He managed to both support the war and make clear that he was very wary of George Bush and company. He didn't support the President, but he was willing to get on board with something he believed was right. I think he made this distinction, a brave one in the zero-sum world of political commentary, as well as anyone beside Michael Ignatieff, who isn't widely read anyway. He wasn't as eloquent in the defense of his opinions as was, say, Christopher Hitchens, but Hitchens somewhat sullied himself and disappointed his supporters by cutting off all criticism of the Bush Administration, a silence he maintained until recently. Friedman has actually been even more eloquent in the run-up to the election in Iraq, writing what I thought were some of his finest columns. I'm going to quote three paragraphs from a Jan. 6th column that I think are possibly the finest and sharpest he has ever written.

"In short, we need these elections in Iraq to see if there really is a self-governing community there ready, and willing, to liberate itself- both from Iraq's old regime and from us. The answer to this question is not self-evident. This was always a shot in the dark - but one that I would argue was morally and strategically worth trying.

Because if it is impossible for the peoples of even one Arab state to voluntarily organize themselves around a social contract for democratic life, then we are looking at dictators and kings ruling this region as far as the eye can see. And that will guarantee that this region will be a cauldron of oil-financed pathologies and terrorism for the rest of our lives.

What is inexcusable is thinking that such an experiment would be easy, that it could be done on the cheap, that it could be done with any old army and any old coalition and any old fiscal policy and any old energy policy. That is the foolishness of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. My foolishness was thinking they could never be so foolish."

Granted, even in his good days, there was still too many "Friedmanisms," a cute little word that he himself might write to describe what his columns were littered with. He frequently talked about making a decision from his gut- "my gut says"- in an attempt to sound tough. I think this longing to sound like a tough clear-headed thinker affects more than just his prose- his need for clear and simple prose affects his thinking, which is why he reduces everything to little infonuggets and "mini-theses" (a phrase lent by BMK). And there is also a large amount of narcissism- his documentary on Israel's security wall could have easily been called "Tom Friedman's Deep and Meaningful Adventure in The Holy Land"- there were as many shots of him walking around and looking contemplative as there were of the wall, and several shots of him cracking wise as he walked up the stairs (and an unfortunate number of shots from down low of him walking away- Mr. Friedman's posterior will never be described as his "moneymaker").

These traits come to the forefront and the skill he showed recently drops away as we enter his new role- explainer of the new wave of globalization, with a new theory that he coined: flatism. His new book "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century" was the basis of a long article in Sunday's New York Times magazine, which, if his history is any guide, is an easy way to understand fully the depth of his argument without missing anything but padding from the long form.

The thesis is simple- Columbus thought he discovered the world is round, and announced it to the queen. Friedman discovers it is actually flat, a revolutionary bit of knowledge he tells us, tenderly, that he announced only in a whisper to his wife (how modest! I'm sure he never intended to write a book!).

Of course, he doesn't mean the world is geographically flat- he is referring to "a tale of technology and geoeconomics that is fundamentally reshaping our lives...", and something that Americans need to be aware of or we will be lapsed by the Indians, the Chinese and, weirdly, even the Russians. The nut of it is this: undersea fiber-optic cables have flattened the world so much that, combined with giant advances these countries (India especially) have made in their own technology sectors, any job can basically be done anywhere, and these countries are more hungry.

The drecht starts early. A Banglore CEO told him that the playing field was being leveled. Here is Tom at his most Friedman-esque: "'What Nadan is saying,' I thought, 'is that the playing field is being flattened. Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!'"

Well, no- he was saying the playing field is level. It is essentially the same thing, but Friedman has to twist it to come up with a cute phrase that may sell some books and give himself a hook on which to hang his thesis. That bit alone tells you everything you need to know about the man- the self-indulgence, the need to simplify, the desire to show you how deep a thinker he is. This is supposed to be personable, I suppose, to level the towering giant that is the Times foreign affairs columnist in the same way that deep-sea cables leveled (flattened? flattened!) the world, but it comes across as narcissistic pap.

He goes on to explain different eras of globalization, which he cannot but resist in calling "Globalization 1.0", "Globalization 2.0" and so on. Not a terrible thing, but just obnoxious and unneeded and little more than a trick to sound catchy. This version of globalization (3.0) is about individuals, not countries or companies, becoming globalized. He quotes Marc Andreesen, co-founder of Netscape. "'Today, (Andreesen says) the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want."

The parochial and self-serving nature of this statement almost makes one want to wretch (ignoring the fact that he made a present-tense reference to the Soviet Union). It reminds me of a few years ago at a conference of computer moguls, at a session on philanthropy. They wanted to give computers to Africans, to plug them in, until Bill Gates, who has really done excellent work, stood up and said (appx), "You can't download a loaf of bread. You can't Google clean-water." Meaning: first things first.

That is the problem here. Yes, there may be a few 14-years-old Romanians who have all the information, software and tools they need, but they won't radically change their economies or pull their countries out of penury. But Friedman gets sucked in when someone important talks to him, even though he should be used to it by now. These important people usually fail to see beyond their narrow scope, and for some reason Friedman narrows his own. Nowhere in the article is anything mentioned about politics, ethnic and religious tensions in India, the medieval poverty that exists elsewhere in the country, the Middle East, anything. It is if there are many Tom Friedmans, and the one responsible for writing about politics wasn't around when the book and the article was being written.

A good example of this is AIDS- according to a 2002 Nicholas Eberstadt article in Foreign Affairs, India China and Russia are all on the verge of a major AIDS epidemic, which Eberstadt says "will alter the economic potential of the region's major states and the global balance of power." Now, that those countries are AIDS' next stalking ground is pretty widely accepted. Eberstadt may be wrong about the scope of its impact (though I tend to think he is at least mostly right, certainly in Russia, with its horrid health infrastructure), but it illustrates that Friedman has once again willfully blinded himself to anything that doesn't fit his thesis.

And that is his problem- his hooks and lines preclude nuance and depth. He is a slave to his own ideas, a Friedman Fundamentalist. Things have to fit his catchy ideas. The article keeps repeating three cities in succession: Boston, Bangalore and Beijing. Why Boston? It begins with a B. Alliteration trumps relevance; Friedman's success is the triumph of the soundbite.
The problem is, Friedman is earnest and really wants to explain things and help people understand, but in the end he does them a disservice on multiple levels. One, he presents a fraction, a sliver of the world as the key to understanding it. "Flatism," as he nauseatingly calls it, may be true, but it is not the whole picture: it is a single piece, and not as big a deal as many other things, which go unmentioned. And, even were he to say he was just writing a book on one piece, not going for the brass ring, he does a disservice to "flatism" by bending it into a form he can spell out in catchy bullet-point highlights.

This seems to be a lot of words spent on one man, but Tom Friedman is very popular and his style helps a lot of people think they understand things, when in reality he is giving them a very simplified, dangerously reduced version of his worldview. In some ways this is the limits of a columnist, but his longer work tends to be his worst, because he has all the space he needs to make up torturous phrases and painful analogies and have reality conform to them. In his books, he is boxed in only by his self-limitations. He may want to understand the world, he may in some ways have deep and true concern, but his ultimate concern is for the world to understand him. I suppose that is Pulitzer-worthy, but in the end that doesn't make it respectable.

A note

To all the many avid readers of this site (basically BMK and young KP) I would like to apologize for the long delay between articles. I have been very busy with a few other things, none of which should be as important as entertaining and informing you, but there we are. Regular programming will return tomorrow. I have been trying to write a piece on Tom Friedman and his newest article (soon to be a book!) but have been distracted by it being Opening Day of baseball and the NCAA Championship. Big day. This isn't what has precluded me from writing the past two weeks, but it is today. Tomorrow everything will be better, and I promise an article. So you can all go back to doing whatever it is you do, and not have to wait, with baited, nervous breath, for the next article. When it comes up, I'll be sure to send up a plume of colored smoke and announce, pope style, "We have a blog." Bells will chime, rest assured.

Again, apologies, and I look forward to resuming the usual level of comments.

brian o'neill

The path of human evolution is a bizarre one- far from the fish- caveman- slightly taller caveman-guy in suit depiction on grade school posters (at least when I was in grade school. Back when evolution was ok to talk about in public schools- but that is another matter. Suffice to say, if you don't believe in evolution you probably won't enjoy this site). The path of human evolution is far from a straight line: it is a jumbled, twisted tree, with stunted branches and broken twigs meandering off any which way but loose. There isn't really a pattern, and one can easily see that there isn't really a plan either.

A recent, if still controversial discovery out of Indonesia helped confirm this. A joint team of Australian and Indonesian paleontologists found were the remains of a tiny, human-like creature, no taller than a modern three-year-old child. But it wasn't a child. Examinations of the pelvic structure revealed it to be a fully-grown adult, still no more than three feet tall. This was a stunning discovery.

What they believe they discovered was a new branch of our family tree, and named it homo Floresiensis, after the Indonesian island of Flores, from whence it came. Any new addition is an awe-inspiring discovery, helping us to trace the true roots of who we are, but this one is more chilling and has deeper implications than the rest. For the bizarre Lilliputians lived as recently as 13,000 years ago, if not sooner. Previous wisdom held that the last non-modern humanoid species died out about 25,000 years ago, after which modern man was supposed to have the planet to himself.

Before we get into the spine-tingling, beautiful implications of this, a few caveats need to be addressed. The first is the most obvious one- how do they know they didn't just find the bones of a freak, a midget, and decided to base a whole new branch off a quirk? That is an important question, and one that other scholars jumped on (the world of science is open, but very competitive- and that's what makes it valuable: the bad ideas tend to get squashed, not written as Gospel). If, in some weird Planet of the Apes scenario the only bones from the 20th century found were those of Shaquille O'Neal, those super-smart apes could be fooled into thinking we were all 7'2" giants with fragile toes and weird heads. And they would be wrong (ha-ha! Jokes on you, Imaginary Ape of the Future!).

But it is not a pygmy or a midget or anything like that. I'll quote at some length an article from Scientific American, which had the story on its cover in February (well before the haughtier journal Science, which is when the story really started making headlines. Science is a more academic, peer-reviewed journal).


"...when (Australian paleontologist Peter) Brown and his colleagues considered the morphological characteristics of small-bodied modern humans- including normal ones, such as pygmies, and abnormal ones, such as pituitary dwarfs- LB1 did not seem to fit any of these descriptions. Pygmies have small bodies and large brains- the result of delayed growth during puberty, when the brain has already attained its full size. And individuals with genetic disorders that produce short stature and small brains have a range of distinctive features not seen in LB1 and rarely reach adulthood."


In addition, there are other traits that seem distinctly archaic and don't belong to modern humans, no matter their size. So this seems to take away the idea that this skeleton was just a freak, and later excavations found more and more bones that belonged to the same family.
There is still some controversy, but most of the community has accepted the finding.

An important question is: how did this happen? Floresiensis (also known as "Hobbit" but I think we'll stay away from that) is smaller than the other homo species that preceded it, and obviously far smaller than its contemporary, homo sapien (us). Smaller is generally thought to mean weaker, and we are taught that evolution doesn't design things to be less fit.

(While we're here, let's have an important side-note. When talking about evolution, one has to use phrases like "design" and "plan" and other humanistic metaphors. This is a necessity driven by the occasional poverty of language and ingrained needy superstitions. Evolution doesn't have a design, nor is it planned, nor does it "want" anything. Keep in mind these are just metaphors, lest one fall into the faux-scientific trap of "intelligent design.")

But Floresiensis came to Indonesia during the ancient waves of eastern migration, and ended up on Flores. Weird things happen on islands. Small animals tend to get bigger and big animals tend to get smaller. It is all about finding a niche. "Fittest" should never be confused with "strongest" when talking about survival. Why is this? There tend to be smaller and more confined food sources, and animals that need to eat more to survive do worse. There is evidence that the mini-humans hunted (relatively) tiny elephants, a scene that to us rings faintly comic but to them was a gripping life and death struggle in the ancient Indonesian wetlands.

The largest problem to come out of this evidence, albeit so far inconclusive, that the h. Floresiensis had relatively modern tools, despite having a tiny brain. It is troubling and fascinating in its implications: we always assumed that brain size was the most important thing. If true, this gives weight to the idea that brain size is not what counts- it is how the brain organizes itself. Needless to say, we can't make any giant leaps in our understanding of neuroscience based on a few stone tools, but this idea is gripping in the way that it could completely overturn conventional wisdom.

But there is a piece of conventional wisdom that it has already thrown on its head, and to a great good. The idea that modern man was for a long time alone cannot be valued anymore. 13,000 years ago is not such a long time. Mesopotamia was feeling the birth-pangs of its agricultural societies that led to the first great empires, and people who would become Native American were streaming across the Bering Straits. The world as we know it was beginning to form.

But there was still a glitch. In the Indonesian islands (perhaps on more than one) a distant and tiny relative remained, perhaps even thrived, possibly made tools just as advanced as "ours." Floresiensis shows just how chance-driven human evolution actually was. It was a series of quirks that made modern man what it is today, and a similar series of quirks that enabled a species to shrink itself in order to survive.

Eventually, Floresiensis disappeared. The hell of it is, though, nobody really knows when. Villagers in Flores tell tales, as the Scientific American article tells it, "of a diminutive, upright-walking creature with a lopsided gait, a voracious appetite, and soft, murmuring speech." Scientists best guess before was that they were talking about a monkey, but perhaps the answer needn't be as patronizing as all that.

Perhaps in the sweating isolation of Flores, removed from any Europeans, two species of homo co-existed until relatively recently- recently enough that it is still in oral memory- one less advanced, hiding in the jungle, but still hauntingly close enough to modern humans that they named it ebu gogo- "the grandmother who eats anything." What were these encounters like? Did they fight? Did they try to interbreed? Or did they just pass each other, a spark of dull recognition, two species closer to each other than they could imagine, and that anything science or religion has taught us since? Perhaps, and this is just pure imagination and wistful speculation, the Indonesians recognized that the world was a weird place, and they weren't as special and divinely ordained as their shamans taught them to believe. And perhaps, even more fanciful, it is a lesson we can draw as well.

Two steps back

It has been a wild few weeks for supporters of the Bush plan to spread democracy in the Middle East. Developments in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt have been well-documented, sometimes to exhausting length; sometimes with dizzying rhetoric. There are a lot of questions and hesitations that should trample Republican/liberal hawk gloating, but overall one has to say that even these tentative, fragile steps would have been impossible without regime change in Iraq and the heroic election that followed (an election, it is important to note, that the Admin didn't want to happen, which should be enough to shut up messianic preening).

However, just when you think things are going well, the Administration shoots itself in the foot with two high-ranking appointments to international bodies. Last week, it was announced that John Bolton would become the Ambassador to the United Nations, a body he detests. We'll talk about Bolton a little more later, as he is not very well-known. The well-known appointee is to the Presidency of the World Bank; the nominee is the globally despised Paul Wolfowitz.

Start with Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz is one of the leading proponents of regime change in Iraq, and one of the most forceful voices that convinced President Bush to go to war. He is the most well-known "neo-con," gaining fame over even Richard Perle. Throughout the world, his name is met with fear and disdain.

Not here, though, and by here I mean on this site. I like Wolfowitz. I think sometimes he is irritating, and even offensive (pretending not to know how many troops had been killed in Iraq when testifying before Congress was one of the most repugnant displays of truth-hiding during the course of this war- a callous display driven by arrogant ideology). But I think Wolfowitz is the most consistently interesting man in the Admin.

A Washington Times article from a few years ago (I can't find a link to it anymore; I apologize) detailed a complex, fascinating man. The reporter clearly went into the story expecting to find a drooling monster and came out of it deeply impressed. Wolfowitz is a man driven by a hatred of tyranny and oppression. His family escaped Eastern Europe before WWII, but his extended family was wiped out by the Holocaust, and he was forged in this weird prism of fear and relief, and a deep love for the freedom America provides.

Once, at a pro-Israeli rally, Wolfowitz, through an expected chorus of boos, talked about the suffering of the Palestinians, and how it was important to remember their needs. Wolfowitz is usually described as a staunch supporter of Israel, and he is, but recognizes the humiliating brutality of the Occupation and the rights of the Palestinians, and does not slavishly approve of everything done by Sharon. He is not a Likudnik.

His rationale for the war in Iraq followed a similar logic. Yes, a stable and democratic Middle East is good for both America and Israel, but Wolfowitz recognizes that these things are a great good outside of their strategic needs. He loathed Saddam and what he did to the Iraqis trapped under his cruel thumb. He hates the oppressive and autocratic regimes all throughout the Muslim world (and outside of it as well). Though his zeal may at times be frightening and one fears he thinks military action in Iran would be a good thing (it wouldn't), his heart is in the right place.

John Bolton, on the other hand, is an explosion-obsessed nutcase, a far-right chicken hawk who, were he not so smart, would be driving around with a car full of yellowed, crazily underlined newspaper clippings and a bumper sticker reading "US out of UN/UN out of US." He is a hawk for the sole reason that he thinks the US has to use all of its power in a dangerous world, and despises multilateralism. He hates the United Nations- it is the same vein as appointing Spencer Abrams as Secretary of Energy, a cabinet pose that as Senator he tried to abolish- only here, it is writ large on the international level.

The implication is obvious- the Bush Administration feels that their tactics are a universal, unquestionable success, with no caveats or missteps, and certainly giving no sway to the notion that they may have stumbled backwards into achieving their goal. Appointing Bolton is a slap in the face to multilateralism; it is a way to say to the UN that they will be doing things our way, or else. This is a dangerous and arrogant move at time when Poland, Ukraine and Italy are all discussing withdrawing their troops. Even if it doesn't make too big of a tactical difference (though we will miss the Poles), it will make a giant difference in perception.

And the perception is the important thing here. It sounds weird for me to bury Wolfowitz' nomination than praise him in the next breath. But we are in many ways fighting a war of perception. That is as important in this death-struggle against radical Islam as is fighting and killing the bad guys. Wolfowitz is hated in the Middle East, where people know little about him other than the Zionist conspiracy gibberish.

What is this gibberish? It is the notion that a cabal of Israel-fellating Likudnik American Jews are driving US policy in a direction that only serves the greater good of the Jewish state. Wolfowitz, with his clearly Jewish name, is an easy target for this vile caricature. Yes, there are people in the US who are just as concerned with Israel as America, but to assume that A) it is just because they are Jewish and B) all Jews feel this way is a horrid notion. The claim of anti-Semitism may in fact be leveled too often, but that doesn't mean it isn't even more often appropriate.

And it is growing in places, especially Europe, where it has been adopted, albeit with more gentle rhetoric, by the left- allowing them to make an obscene dovetail with the traditional hard-right. This is a terrible development, and one we'll look at more closely tomorrow.
So what am I saying: that appointments need to be decided by global consensus? Of course not- it is the right of any nation to determine who will represent them. The World Bank is slightly different, as Wolfowitz is not there only to further American interests, but tradition dictates the US appoints the post. It is the prerogative of the President to make these appointments.

However, there need to be other concerns addressed. Wolfowitz is an easy target, and unless Bolton reins himself in he will turn off even those countries who support the US. This is dangerous. The war we are in can only be won when Muslim countries come to the consensus that jihad is ruinous and those who have hijacked Islam provide a bad alternative. But for that to happen America has to show a good alternative- the power and freedom of a secular, democratic society.

The election in Iraq helped this, as does the Cedar Revolution and Egypt's slow steps. But the President is threatening to erase these steps by appointing two loathed men. It is hard to say which is worse- I think it is Bolton, because he is a dangerous nutcase. But the Wolfowitz one is very bad, even though I think in the long run his humanist side will allow him to do an excellent job in the fight against poverty (which is a big part in the war against terror).

But the World Bank is already seen by many as an arm of bullying American policy. And Wolfowitz is (wrongly) perceived as one of the chief proponents of a testosterone-driven Islam-hating US war machine. The confluence of the two will help to convince even moderates that the US only has bad intentions. There are surely others who can do a good job. I know Bush wants to reward Wolfowitz, but the price of his loyalty will be paid by the rest of us.