March 28, 2006
Soldiers and sexual geography
Why, after more than four years in Afghanistan, don't our soldiers speak more Pushtu?
Robert Kaplan hits the nail on the head in his latest, 
Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground, regarding the intersection between language and culture, a preoccupation of 
An Amateur's Guide to the Planet.
On page 235, Green Berets raid a compound near Gardez, and then interrogate one of the men living there. Kaplan reports:
As I left the compound, I noticed a counterintelligence officer interrogating one of the male inhabitants. They were both squatting against a section of mud wall illuminated by flashlights attached to the M-4s held by other Green Berets, who had formed a semicircle around the Afghan. He had a long white beard and brown hood over his pakol. He looked stoic, unafraid. The counterintelligence officer was asking him simple, stock questions in English: Had he seen anything suspicious? Who were his friends?Each question elicited a long conversation between the man and the terp. It was clear that the intelligence officer was missing a lot. He didn't speak Pushtu beyond a few phrases. Finally, all he could say to the man was "If you ever have a problem, come and see me at the firebase," as if the man would feel comfortable forsaking his kinsmen and trusting this most recent band of invaders passing through his land, invaders who couldn't even communicate with him.
Here was where the American Empire, such as it was, was weakest. With all of its technology and willingness to send the most enterprising of its soldiers to the most distant parts of the world, it was woefully incompetent in linguistic skills, especially in places and in situations where it counted the most. This was another neglected part of defense "transformation that had nothing to do with the latest weapons systems.
By contrast, U.S. soldiers training their counterparts in Colombia rattle away in Spanish, which many speak either as a native or second language. It's no surprise, of course, that many more Americans speak Spanish than Pushtu, but given the obvious benefit and necessity of getting good intelligence, we need to get up to speed on some languages that few of us know.
Kaplan's most intriguing theme is that the U.S. military has apparently decided that it is a lot cheaper and more effective to drive a wedge between groups like Al Queda and Latin guerrilla movements, and regular villagers around the world, by sponsoring dental and medical clinics and building wells and doing Peace Corps and non-governmental organization-type work. The theory is that if you have fixed a boy's broken leg, and trained a local army to provide real security, his father will never forget your help and will be loyal to you and not Al Queda.
Kaplan gives copious examples of such activities in the Phillipines, where clinics overlap with quiet gathering of intel via informal chitchat and observation, as well as in Lamu in Kenya and Mongolia. It will be fascinating to see the domain clash between the Peace Corps and NGOs over who gets to help the Third World.
"Imperial Grunts" also visits the Phillipines and identifies a number of issues relative to sexual geography. First, the obvious contrast between the burkha'd women of the Middle East and sassy Filipinas. Second, the way that sex tourism offers a viable economic alternative for poor people, a theme I explore in 
Romance on the Road. From pages 174-75 of "Imperial Grunts""
There were nearby strip joints with names like Muff Divers. Walking into them was like entering an octopus. Several sets of hands would suddenly be all over you, offering massages and more. The women were not down-and-out as one might expect. I interviewed Filipinas in their forties who looked considerably younger and had turned to sex to put children through good colleges and boarding schools. They had specific strategies for investments, future jobs, and cushy retirements. They were not strippers or prostitutes per se. The Philippines offered something subtler: "the girlfriend experience,'' it was called in Manila. There was an entire class of attractive Filipinus who made an excellent living, relative to the standards of the local economy, by becoming companions of Western men. Relationships lasted days, weeks, or months even. Couples were often loyal to each other. Such overtly sex-for-money relationships sometimes evolved into marriages. It was crude by the standards of the middle-class West, and yet quite sophisticated and discriminating by the standards of conventional prostitution.
This observation would also apply to the type of romance tourism practiced by the men in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean, and the world, for that matter.
Here's some more dandy observations on sexual geography, the dating war in the West and how Western men and women react quite differently to the undercurrents of Asia:
While the Philippines was an Eden without rival for Western males, for the same reason the wives of American servicemen harbored "a visceral hatred of the place," as one soldier observed. When Subic Bay and Clark Field were in operation as American bases, female spouses who came out here were often in an uproar when they saw what was going on. it led to real "morale problems," as the U.S. military would euphemistically put it: spousal screaming matches, divorces, and the like.
Now here is an observation that, while fascinating, is incomplete:
With the bases gone, soldiers interacted more with the locals. it wasn't ike the days of the old Pacific Army prior to World War II. But the situation had moved back a bit in that direction. The result, actually, was a better relationship with the immediate environment, a phenomenon which, in fact, has a basis in imperial history.In
Armies of the Raj, British military historian Byron Farwell writes that the opening of the Suez Canal, by allowing the wives of British officers in India to conveniently join their husbands, cut the officers off from native society, and became one of the contributing factors leading to the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58 against British rule. "In all societies women have been the conservators of culture," Farwell explains. "When British women began to arrive in india in numbers, they brought with them British attitudes, British fashions, and British morality; they were soon imposing their ideas, standards, and customs upon their new environment." Consequently, British soldiers, many of whom had preferred to be orientalized themselves rather than to Christianize the Indians, now no longer went native, and a new divide opened between them and the locals.
This is excellent research on Farwell's part regarding an aspect of sexual geography. It reminds me of how Sir Richard Francis Burton extolled the virtues of learning a language via an area's prostitutes. Again, we see the importance of language to learning a culture, and the importance of sex (!) to learning a language! Given the devolution of the Indus Valley (modern-day Pakistan) and its regional neighbors from areas of wild sensuality during Burton's time to the burkha today, it doesn't seem our soldiers will be learning Pushtu from prostitutes, or even everyday women.
Yet OK, one quibble here. It was not the arrival of British "women" that inconvenienced the British officers in India -- it was the arrival of their wives. Plenty of British women arrived in areas of the Commonwealth -- India, Burma, South Africa -- and began carousing with locals, especially royalty. In fact, these women traveled during the Raj era to escape the domination of men at home, and would only feel constrained when British colonial men meddled in their freedom.
So Mr. Farwell -- what you describe was a two-way street!
- posted by jbelliveau at 7:31 AM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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March 27, 2006
Does humor stand up over time?
This little back-and-forth on National Review's The Corner got me to thinking:
DEAD HUMOR [John Derbyshire] I used to think Peter Sellers was the funniest man alive. The other day, however, I watchedA Shot in the Dark, the 1964 movie that established the Inspector Clouseau character. It really wasn't very funny at all.
We all know, of course, that humor is perishable, and that what made our parents -- or even our younger selves -- laugh can leave us stone faced. There are degrees of perishability, though, and the very best humor can stay funny for decades. I thought Sellers was in that league. Nope. His repertoire was narrower than I'd remembered -- really just two or three funny voices and a couple of facial expressions. It's sad... Though now I don't feel quite so bad at never having found Charlie Chaplin the least bit funny.
RE: DEAD HUMOR [Warren Bell]
I often wonder about that, Derb. I think I've written here before about the disaster that is viewingBlazing Saddles at age 42, after having wallowed in its glory at age 13. I think our memories tend to put a rosy glow around things we laugh at, and then in revisiting, the reality destroys the glow. ... So how much is the fault of memory, and how much is our own evolution in life? Is Sellers less funny, Derb, or are you?
RE: DEAD HUMOR [John Derbyshire]
Warren: Something of both, I'm sure. We get more critical as we mature, and harder to please.
Gentlemen, agreed. I recently noted with excitement a reunion show of Carol Burnett and her crew. Watching, I was shocked at how mean and sad the Family sketches seemed and how the sketches with Tim Conway as a bumbling handyman went on forever without point.
Coincidentally, we have just finished watching 
the Monty Python "Personal Best" series on PBS. Lamont and I had looked forward to seeing these, and found that they in some, or many, places, did not live up to memory.
At their worst, Python was wordy (to say the least). I remember laughing away at Python as a teen-ager, but somehow today you end up more often thinking, "Clever concept," but not actually laughing. The group had no idea when to end a sketch, and relied excessively on skits that had Graham Chapman as a military commander and/or John Cleese as a TV presenter.
Comedy moves on, and Dave Chappelle now seems to be the gold standard. His skits cover a wider range than the Python's, are far better produced (but of course, it's nearly 40 years later), and make more effort to be daring and surprising.
It was also interesting to see whose material, of the individual Pythons, held up better. It was not explained on the series the criteria for inclusion of various skits. I.e., are the pieces on John Cleese's Personal Best his favorites? Or skits that he wrote? Because many of the bits were clearly not selected because the individual Python actually starred in a major way on them.
That said, I would rank the hour-long specials as follows. They varied wildly in both humor quotient and how the individual Python approached writing the new material that bridged the sketches:
- Terry Jones. What a surprise! The overlooked Welshman had the most original segues between material. And cheers and applause for his Spanish Inquisition ("Fetch ... the COMFY CHAIR!"), one of my favorites. Jones included a hilarious military courtroom scene, the Court Martial of Sapper Walters, that I absolutely don't remember from the TV series shown in the States. Either my memory is bad or a lot of the British material never made it here, especially this one, which is deliciously, subtly raunchy (Presiding General: "How did he oblige them?" Fawcett: (more and more irritated) "He ... um ... used to make them happy in little ways, sir.") Also features the working-class playwright sketch and the world-famous "RAF Banter" -- "What ho, Squiffy?" -- one of the best send-ups of jargon ever.
- John Cleese. Morbidly fascinating to see him a bit age-spotted at home in Santa Barbara, Calif., with wicked intros to his sketches, which included the Exploding Blue Danube, which Lamont laughed at, and I found dated. Features the FABULOUS "Upper Class Twit of the Year." And I enjoyed the old ladies re-enacting Pearl Harbor.
- Eric Idle and Michael Palin. A tie here. I love Palin, the "nice Python" and well known as a sweetheart of a man, and was disappointed a little with the slow pacing of his intros at Teddington Lock, where the fish-slap dance was born. Though we both roared at his "Blackmail Show," which Lamont remembered -- wonderful to see Palin get very wicked! And the Cheese Shop holds up well, an accurate commentary on the Britain I knew in the early 1980s. * Idle seemed just a bit crazy today. But he's found good picks with the Bruces (side splitting to anyone who has been to Australia) and The Lumberjack Song.
* I once visited a pub with my cycling club at lunch and was told the menu was "shepherd's pie and bread and cheese, but we're out of shepherd's pie."
- Graham Chapman. The bits include what may be my favorite skit, ever, Oscar Wilde:
Whistler: "Your Majesty is like a stream of bat's piss."
The Prince of Wales: "What? Who said that?"
Whistler: "It was Shaw."
The Prince of Wales: "Well, Shaw, what did you mean by that?"
Shaw (in exaggerated Irish brogue): "It means Your Majesty is like a shaft of gold, when all around is darkness."
All: "Very good, Shaw, very good!"
Here were the Pythons being intellectual, wordy yet still hilarious, and not being arch and Oxbridge and trying too hard, "too clever by half."
The interviews with other Pythons lent the show real zip. Chapman is of course an ex-Python, in the same sense as a parrot can be an ex-parrot, nudge nudge wink wink, so a lot of his buddies reminisced to put this shown together. The other shows would have benefited I think from just a little bit of commentary by others.
- Terry Gilliam. His animated sketches -- well, we couldn't finish this one, 20 minutes of absurd Yellow Submarine type art and moving hands and feet were plenty.
Indeed, humor is perishable. Sometimes it's best to hold it in memory. Though I do think the Python Personal Best series would have held up superbly had they been better edited, with more commentary and judicious trimming of the sketches to leave only the stuff that still holds up as brilliant today.
That sort of polish helped Richard Pryor's 
I Ain't Dead Yet DVD, for one example, to be quite good.
Though if Python wants to make the point that they are zany and amateurish in a veddy old tradition of the British amateur, that's fine, too.
UPDATE (April 4, 2006): Thanks for all the calls and remarks from people who enjoyed this blog entry! I have heard from my friend Harry Davey, who recently watched some old Mary Tyler Moore shows. What did he think? "They weren't funny." That's it in a nutshell.
My sister Carol noted that she has been buying DVDs of old TV shows, including Dick Van Dyke, and watching them with disappointment.
My husband Lamont, asked to explain what he thinks is going on, gave two explanations. "Humor is perishable, in some cases. And some shows never were funny -- that's why I don't much care for comedy."
I suppose the moral is, try to rent, borrow or Netflix old TV shows that you once loved, rather than buy.
- posted by jbelliveau at 8:59 AM in Parodies
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March 25, 2006
A Maryland fan watches the NCAAs
One aspect of loyalty to a team is, once your team has gone home, picking other teams to root for through the prism of how they relate to your own favorite.
(In this case, Maryland didn't even MAKE the NCAAs, and stunk so bad in the NIT game a week ago they lost at home.)
So I picked four other teams to root for during March Madness:
- Anyone playing against Duke.
- Boston College (now plays in same league as Maryland, and my father graduated from there). Plus, very impressive to watch. Their dismantling of Maryland in the ACC tournament showed a team of great strength and a professional, businesslike approach to the task.
- Georgetown (like Maryland, in greater D.C. area, and I was born at their hospital).
- George Mason (ditto, another greater D.C. area team, and I saw Duran Duran there a year ago). Like Boston College, they seem to be men playing against boys, with their big power-forward duo of Jai Lewis and Will Thomas.
Georgetown and Boston College lost last night. Duke, wondrously, lost Thursday to LSU. But George Mason keeps rollin' along, brushing away Wichita State like a pesky gnat.
From Liz Clarke's article in the Washington Post:
The Patriots' starting lineup consists of five players from Maryland -- three of them seniors -- and none taller than 6 feet 7. At first blush, that gave the edge to Wichita State.
More on the Maryland connection for George Mason, by Mike Wise:
Lamar [Butler]'s father owns Varsity Sports in Marlow Heights. Coached his son's high school team at Oxon Hill in Fort Washington. Been to all but three Mason games -- home and away -- in five years. The man actually had the Patriots in the Washington Region final of his office pool.The rest of the starters are from Maryland, too -- Skinn from Takoma Park, big Jai Lewis from Aberdeen, Thomas from Baltimore and Silver Spring's own Folarin Campbell.
The real point that no one seems to be addressing here is, why is all this Maryland talent NOT PLAYING at Maryland?
This thought first crossed my mind two years ago, watching U-Conn play in the NCAAs (and win the final). The commentators mentioned that forward Josh Boone was from Mount Airy, Md. What? I thought. Why is he at U-Conn. Paging Gary Williams, how did you miss this smart, athletic player?
The core of the Maryland team that won the national championship in 2002 was two homegrown players, Juan Dixon and Lonnie Baxter, with excellent support from Steve Blake (Florida), Drew Nicholas (New York), Chris Wilcox (North Carolina) and Byron Mouton (Louisiana).
Something went wrong after the 2002 team, with recruits both from Maryland and elsewhere.
When Gary recruited in state (Travis Garrison, Chris McCray, Will Bowers, James Gist, Sterling Ledbetter), he got five kids, none of whom seem the brightest bulbs, especially compared to their counterparts at George Mason.
For the out-of-staters, same story. When you look deep into the eyes of a Mike Jones (Dorchester, Mass.) or a Jamar Smith (Sicklerville, N.J.), it looks like nobody's home. Look at a John Gilchrist (Virginia Beach), and you see a nutcase. You don't see the almost palpable intelligence and edge of the players for Boston College, Carolina or George Mason.
Maryland needs to recruit some thinking players. I hate to cite Duke and its student-athlete model, or the dorky Shane Battier, but at least you see a kind of overall awareness that translates into court smarts when you look at a Battier.
Whereas with Maryland's Chris McCray, he couldn't maintain his academic eligibility even with $12 million of taxpayer-funded help designed expressly to keep him and other Maryland athletes on track for graduation, or at least minimally present for classes.
Juan Dixon has a gritty version of the Battier kind of smarts. Lonnie Baxter seemed to have a different kind of excellence, based on toughness and persistence.
After Maryland won the championship, everyone was giddy about the kind of recruits that the school would now attract. It didn't happen.
Gary needs to take a look at how George Mason flies under the radar with local player recruiting, be less in love with the McDonald's All-Americans, more aware of how much talent is in his home state, and take a good look at the basketball IQs, rather than credentials, of the kids he wants to play at College Park.
Let's get us some smarter players.
PS Isn't it charming how some of the player photos broadcast during the games show them in suits and ties, instead of uniforms? Sends a good message.
March 27 update: Well, well, well, it's the day after George Mason's astounding upset of U-Conn (though maybe not so astounding, the Huskies have always struck me as soft, especially after Maryland's playoff defeat of them in 2002).
And it looks like Maryland's Gary Williams indeed tried to recruit George Mason's Lamar Butler (from Mike Wise today):
Gary Williams contacted him, but Butler felt it was too late in the game."Maryland was my dream school growing up," he said. "Gary Williams talked to my high school coach."
But he ultimately decided, like many of Mason's overlooked kids, "Let me go where I'm wanted and not just be another player on a roster."
Ouch! Maryland really did screw this up.
Oh, and note to the TV announcers on CBS: It's "George Mason," not "Mason." No one knows what you are talking about when you talk about Mason!
- posted by jbelliveau at 10:00 AM in Sports
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March 24, 2006
'Platform' to be made into play
From the Edinburgh Evening News:
'Anti-Islam' sex tourism book takes to the stage at Festival A CONTROVERSIAL novel about sex tourism in Thailand which landed its author in court accused of stirring hatred against Muslims is to be turned into a new play for the Edinburgh International Festival.Catalan director Calixto Bieito, who is renowned for his X-rated productions, will work with novelist Michel Houellebecq to adapt his explosive book Platform for the stage.
Anyone interested in sex tourism, male or female, should take a look at
Platform (see our capsule review here). It will be fascinating to see how it can be adapted for the stage, given its high quotient of frank eroticism.
- posted by jbelliveau at 12:18 PM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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March 1, 2006
A get-well wish for Carl Schoettler
Long-time Baltimore Sun feature writer Carl Schoettler was cruelly beaten in downtown Baltimore after a fender-bender on Saturday night.
Carl Schoettler, image broadcast by WJZ-TV
You can read the details, Police seeking suspect in attack on reporter and "3 hunted in attack on reporter" (Baltimore Sun, March 1, 2006), or see a video clip from WJZ-TV of the coverage here, and see a forum discussion here.
Excerpt from the latest story:
Witnesses saw a man punch and knock Schoettler to the ground, kick him as he lay unconscious and then attempt to rob him by going through his pockets, according to a police report and police officials.The three people then jumped into the van and fled, police said. The van's driver - Gregory G. Kulla of Westminster - has said only that he gave a ride to a man believed to be Schoettler's attacker, Bealefeld said.
Police said that Kulla has not fully cooperated with them or confirmed that he also gave a ride to the other man and a child. Police have charged Kulla with making a false statement.
Schoettler, who has worked as a journalist for The Evening Sun and The Sun since 1959, remained in serious but stable condition yesterday at Maryland Shock Trauma Center, his son Daniel Schoettler said.
Condolences and wishes for a speedy recovery go to Carl and his family.
My own connection to Carl began in 1973, as a sophomore at the University of Maryland College of Journalism. Right after I enrolled as a journalism major, Watergate happened, and UM was invaded by hordes of Woodward-Bernstein wannabees.
J-majors had a mandatory News Writing class to take, and although I registered promptly for the semester, the class was filled. News Writing was a prerequisite for later classes, and I went to the administration in a state, worried that I couldn't graduate on time.
UM hired Carl to teach the overflow students, all three of us: myself, Bob Ford and Greg Couteau.
Our quartet met evenings in an otherwise empty classroom. As I recall, Bob, Greg and I were all thrilled to have, not a j-school professor, but a living, breathing Evening Sun reporter as a teacher!
Carl was incredibly patient with our very first rookie news stories, brought to him on typed and erased paper. We received mentoring one on one from a guy who knew what he was talking about.
Carl was one of a trio of teachers, the others being Bob Horowitz and Bill Alsberg of the Montgomery Journal, who taught me the basics of journalism. It's an incredible gift, because so often bigger papers are strictly a sink-or-swim proposition.
I recall Carl gently suggesting changes to a story, usually prefaced with a humble, "Do you think this would be better if ... ?" He was a coffee fiend, not surprising after a full day as a reporter, and the drive from Baltimore to College Park. We loved his informality, taking little breaks to go to the vending machine, teaching along the way.
All Carl's students turned out fine. I ended up later at the Baltimore Sun, in fact for one stint copy-editing Carl's feature writing. He never wanted a word changed, but I didn't take offense -- it was his work, and he turned in beautiful stories.
Greg now appears to be at Defense News, and Bob MAY be at the Philadelphia Inquirer -- I'll e-mail and check.
So Carl batted 1.000 in turning out ink-stained wretches who remain either in journalism or writing (books, in my case). Thanks again, Carl.
- posted by jbelliveau at 12:23 PM in The Neighborhood
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