As Laura Kipnis put it, the Lisa Nowak scandal — your classic love triangle, plus astronauts and diapers — was “almost better than fiction.” It’s the first story Kipnis explores in her How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior, which deconstructs the self-destructive, publicly staged, often hugely irrational actions of more or less ordinary people. “I was really trying to figure out my own fascination with the subject – why my eye was always drawn to those stories first when I read the paper,” explained Kipnis, also the author of Against Love: A Polemic. She chatted with Zócalo about what makes a good scandal, why adultery scandals never get old, and whether scandals are ever redemptive for the person involved or for all the people watching.

Q. What makes for the ideal scandal?

A. Scandals involving love and betrayal I find particularly compelling, I admit – they’re the closest to home, right? The first two stories in the book are about people who’ve been injured in love in different ways. Adultery scandals do interest me especially (I wrote a previous book on this subject, I should mention), though it’s the most quotidian form of scandal obviously. The main point to consider is that every scandal at some level has to do with people simply failing to negotiate some major social contradiction, but doing it in a particularly public, sometimes almost theatrical way. But the basic contradictions are ones we all face: the conflict between trying to uphold monogamy and wanting sexual freedom is probably fairly common, though if you have enough social prestige and act your conflicts out in public, you can become a national scandal.

But I was also interested in the kinds of scandals where someone previously unknown propelled themselves to national attention. In some of these cases, there’s a fuzzy line between crime and scandal, like with Amy Fisher, the teenager from Long Island who shot her married boyfriend’s wife. Or Lorena Bobbitt, of course. But here are two women acting in violent ways that defy gender stereotypes and in very attention-getting ways – it didn’t matter that they were unknown.

Q. Why don’t we tire of the adultery scandal?

A. For one thing, the temptation and pleasure of moralizing about other peoples transgressions lets us off the hook for transgressions we’ve committed or may be contemplated committing. The great moment in this regard was the Clinton impeachment committee, half of whom turned out to be adulterers themselves, even though they were going on about family values and trying to toss Clinton out of the presidency for moral breeches. Something you do see over and over in scandal is the unmasking of hypocrites. But as far as social transgressions, people get involved in these stories in different ways – you can identify, you can dis-identify, you can moralize, you can feel elevated in the social hierarchy when a powerful or prestigious person falls. At the same time, I think there can also be an element of pleasure in people breaking the rules. We’ve always been fascinated as a culture by criminals and people who transgress social codes. There’s a tinge of  pleasure when the norms get violated and business as usual gets disrupted.

There’s also is a lot of pleasure in exposing people’s secrets. I talk about Freud’s theory of the primal scene in the book: hearing or glimpsing your parents having sex, or the childhood mystery of where babies come from – there’s this urge to unlock sexual secrets that our lives inside the hothouse of the nuclear family prepare us for. It goes back to very early in our psychological functioning. You see the echoes of that in adult life in the scandal-exposing process.

Q. Do scandals reinforce social norms, or can they sometimes change them?

A. Yes I think scandals can shift society, though social norms are also shifting all the time. Certain things are more scandalous now than they once were, and vice versa. Take illegitimate birth, which was once quite scandalous. Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini – that was a huge scandal at the time, and wouldn’t be today. But then adultery is actually far more scandalous than it once was because the expectations of marriage are higher now: people are hyper-sensitive about spousal affairs, which wasn’t always the case. So the rules can get pushed and shifted by scandal, but in either direction.

Q. What drives someone to become a scandal?

A. It varies so much. In writing these cases up, I often felt like a detective. The scandalizers were scattering clues around in public, leaving trails, and I was tracking them like a bloodhound and putting the story together, trying to construct the psychological profile of the person who had done this particular thing. That was a lot of the pleasure of writing, feeling like I got to some essence of kernel of a motive with each of them. But in every scandal, there are conflicts and desires at work that are essentially rebellious and antisocial, though they’re desires we all share. Take monogamy, which is one of our key social norms. Let’s face it, people often want more sex or love or attention or some combination of those things than they’re getting in a marriage. That’s a simple way to think about why somebody gets themselves into a scandal. They just wanted more, and they didn’t negotiate their way around relevant prohibitions with enough finesse. At the same time, there’s often a certain self-destructive element you see in these scandal situations, as if  there was a need to get exposed and punished and humiliated. The point to consider is that there are people doing the same things as these terrible scandalizers, but somehow don’t become scandals. So what determines who gets exposed and who doesn’t? I think it’s more than luck. What you see in a lot of these cases is someone setting him or herself up for exposure, as if they’re seeking punishment.

Q. Can scandals and the punishment for them ever be redemptive?

A. The scandals that seem most interesting to me are the ones where people wreck their lives and don’t recover, there isn’t an easy path to redemption. Though that’s become more rare, I think there is less shame generally about many transgressions than there once was. But there are also people who are humiliated in ways that simply never going to recover from. And for society, that’s probably important. It shows where the boundaries are. But also, scandals are social purity rituals, in which we throw the transgressors out and then feel better about ourselves as a result – cleansed, purified.

Q. What determines who recovers from scandal?

A. I think it depends on the nature of the scandal. Take somebody like Eliot Spitzer: scandal is always going to follow him around, but he’s gone on to have a second act. Monica Lewinsky is always going to be known for these salacious details – the cigar, and so on. But has semi-recovered?  The Lisa Nowak scandal – the astronaut – was particularly shameful because of the element of the diaper. I don’t know if she can recover from that. It seems to depend on how much humiliation was involved and maybe how much irrationality.

I’ve been asked a lot about the other side of this: celebrity culture – people releasing sex tapes and foisting their private life onto the public then going on a talk show to apologize, and I don’t think this really counts as scandal. They’re not significantly violating social norms, at least not ones we really care about. But someone violating significant norms in ways that heap scorn on them – that’s harder to recover from and more what I mean by scandal.

Q. How do larger scandals, say the Catholic Church controversy, operate?

A. In the book I focused more on individual scandals. With the Catholic Church you’re talking about an institutional scandal, which operates along different lines, though of course there are individuals involved. But in these cases, we’re talking about an institution engaged in some kind of conspiracy or complicity in keeping secrets to protect itself. It’s a somewhat different dynamic. I’m sure you could write a case study of each individual priest, and unravel the story of their psychological and sexual formation, and of course there would also be larger point to make about the role of sex in the Catholic Church.

Q. Are Americans uniquely obsessed with scandal?

A. I didn’t try to get cross cultural in the book, because you’d have to know each different culture you were writing about incredibly well to understand its particular social codes. As an American I can write about American scandal because I’m part of this culture: I know its taboos very intimately. What you can say is that every culture has its own taboos and norms, and they differ. Of course, there are also universal taboos: incest and murder. But sexual mores are often pretty different from society to society. Even the way people conduct themselves bodily and what’s considered a bodily transgression is different from culture to culture. In some cultures it’s a scandal for a woman to show her face! So obviously what counts as scandalous can’t be generalized. As to whether Americans are more fascinated, I think every culture is fascinated by its transgresssors.

*Photo of Laura Kipnis by Julie Kaplan, courtesy Henry Holt and Company. Photo of shame-faced man courtesy Rob.

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Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland
by Stephan Salisbury

–Reviewed by Angilee Shah

The introduction to Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Stephan Salisbury’s investigative memoir Mohamed’s Ghosts is titled “How to Take Down A Mosque.” It’s an eye-grabber for anyone who is watching closely the controversy around the Park51 Islamic community center and mosque slated to be built in Lower Manhattan.

But Salisbury’s book takes us to another mosque in a rundown neighborhood in Philadelphia. Ansaarullah was created in January 2002 and closed in 2008 after years of FBI surveillance and deportation, forced or self-imposed, of the mosque’s top leaders. Salisbury forces us to question our values as Americans, our national security and cherished freedoms. His is a book about the nature of fear – what it gives us license to do and say, how it colors our understanding of entire groups of people. In Mohamed’s Ghosts, we also find an answer to the question on many minds today: why are so many people so uncomfortable with the idea of Muslims worshipping two blocks from Ground Zero?

As Salisbury argues through the case of Ansaarullah, America’s fear of terrorism has morphed into a general distrust of Islam. Probable cause has been replaced with a policy of domestic preemptive strikes. Ansaarullah’s imam Mohamed Ghorab was arrested in high drama while his daughter looked on from the front of her school. His mosque was raided with dogs and weapons in tow. The media coverage and the FBI’s informant strategy destroyed trust within the community that once benefited greatly from the mosque. Even as investigations into alleged tax fraud and terrorism training turned up no leads, at least six members of the mosque were arrested for immigration violations, six were detained and released, and more were questioned and blackmailed to provide information about terrorist activity that never actually happened. “My sense is that once a suspect is identified, authorities are reluctant to let go, no matter what,” Salisbury explains.

Salisbury narrates the broader picture of domestic counterterrorism around the country after 9/11. He explains how the FBI monitored Middle Easterners, South Asians and Muslim groups, and drew information from within their ranks. In one devastating chapter, he lists hate crimes – murders, beatings, arson – committed in the name of 9/11 against immigrants and Americans, many of whom saw little to no justice. He draws parallels with the FBI’s infiltration of the Communist Party during the Red Scare, when informants were used not against a specific criminal activity but against a set of beliefs. Salisbury also gives voice to prosecutors and law enforcement, who say they have to pursue leads and suspects with whatever tools they have, while keeping information about them confidential for national security.

It becomes difficult to justify the human cost of our domestic war on terror, however, when, thanks to Salisbury, we get to know the people affected. What does it mean to be interrogated or held in solitary confinement, or put on a confidential watchlist that cannot be altered? The costs are much greater, it turns out, than just time. The individuals profiled in Mohamed’s Ghosts are ruined; they lose their homes, their families, their health. They suffer severe psychological effects, untenable damage to livelihoods and relationships, sometimes by a mistaken keystroke or minor error in a visa application. One mosque member who lost his family after he was imprisoned and deported says at one point, on the phone from Jordan, that torture or death would have been better than the personal destruction he endured.

This is not a typical arms-length work of journalism. Salisbury chronicles his own journey as an American watching his country make choices he does not agree with. “It was a shock of familiarity that finally awakened me to the cultural continuity represented by the war on terror,” he writes. “Freedom threatened leads defenders to threaten freedom.” In truth, Salisbury is haunted by the stories of the Muslims he reported on in Philadelphia. The import of this book is clear: before we rush to judge, we should allow ourselves to be haunted as well.

Excerpt: “I was drawn to this spot, the corner of Wakeling Street and Aramingo Avenue in Philadelphia’s old working-class community of Frankford Valley, by an easily overlooked whitewashed cinderblock building across from the Baptist Center — a one-time auto body and repair shop, in recent years converted to a mosque. There were no worshippers on this day, however. The central bay door was pulled shut. A chain-link fence, tangles of weeds growing up through its interlacing loops, surrounded by buildings and parking lot. A dirty yellow Abco Auto Body Sign teetered over the barbed wire atop the fence, and a metal gate stood chained and padlocked shut. The windows were boarded up… Emptiness soread now like a durable stain down Wakeling, but for a moment, an instant in the life of Frankfurt Valley, this spot had been one the dramatic focal points of the Global War on Terror.”

Further Reading: A Mosque in Munich by Ian Johnson and Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves by John R. Bowen.

Angilee Shah is a freelance journalist who writes about globalization and politics. You can read more of her work at www.angileeshah.com.

*Photo courtesy Angela Rutherford.

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Hostage Nation: Colombia’s Guerrilla Army and the Failed War on Drugs
by Victoria Bruce and Karin Hayes, with Jorge Enrique Botero

—Reviewed by Angilee Shah

When three American contractors were taken hostage after their plane crashed in the jungles of Colombia in 2003, Victoria Bruce and Karin Hayes were positioned well to tell their stories. The duo had just finished a film about the kidnapped presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt. But the authors write in the prologue that there was little interest and not much of a market for a book about hostages taken by the Colombian rebel army, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC).

The proposal sat on the shelf for years, but the three hostages became an “unshakable part” of the authors’ lives, even though they’d never met. Bruce, Hayes and Colombian journalist Jorge Enrique Botero talked about them on a first-name basis, keeping up with the twists and turns of their ordeal. “What we realized as the years went by was that there was little as journalists or filmmakers that we could do. All three of us attempted to escape the emotional grip of the difficult and consuming subject by taking on new projects, far away from the jungle prison camps.”

By the fall of 2006, however, Bruce, Hayes and Botero began to see the personal dramas that had gripped them for years in a new context. They reformulated their hostage story into a bigger narrative, chronicling “the most wealthy and lethal insurgent army in the world” and the U.S. policies that played a role in creating it. Botero became a central character when he became the only journalist to interview the three American hostages, providing proof that they were still alive five months after their capture.

The authors narrate Hostage Nation from a broad, all-knowing perspective. They disappear into their retelling and shift from one point-of-view to another. They describe the contractors’ plane crash from the vantage of former FBI negotiator. They go deep into the jungle with a low-level FARC soldier who helped run the hostages from one location to the next. The story unfolds piece by piece, revealing intersecting information about drug trafficking, foreign policy, contractor culture, plane safety, the Catholic Church, hostage negotiation and Colombian history.

And they don’t leave the war on drugs out of it. “Plan Colombia,” the U.S. policy conceived during the Clinton administration, expanded in the Bush years, and recently reduced in scale by President Obama, was meant to wipe out guerrilla armies and their cross-border drug trade. It involved heavily contracting and subcontracting military operations. While the U.S. and Colombian governments have declared the policy a success, Hostage Nation says that estimations of declines in cocoa cultivation “could only be interpreted as a twisted analysis of the [U.S.] State Department’s own data.” A State Department report says that cultivation has increased since the three American hostages’ ordeal began, despite the U.S. spending $3 billion in military and nonmilitary aid.

The hostages – Thomas Howes, Keith Stansell and Marc Gonsalves-worked for California Microwave Systems, a subcontractor of Northrop Grumman, which was hired to carry out large chunks of Plan Colombia. When they were taken into the jungle, the U.S. had the benefit of being able to distance itself from private contractors and avoid negotiating, which, in those early post-9/11 years, wouldn’t have sat well with the government. A rescue attempt could have result in the hostages’ murders. When Botero got permission to interview them, the prospects for their release were grim. “As they continued past village after village, each more isolated and impoverished than the last,” the authors write, “Botero felt like a visitor to a war that interested no one.”

The American hostages and Ingrid Betancourt were rescued in 2008; the Colombian army took advantage of an intelligence breach and gave soldiers fake orders to release their high-profile captives. But there are still Colombian hostages left in the jungle and Plan Colombia has not eliminated the FARC or the drug trade. Hostage Nation thus becomes essential reading, an alternate viewpoint, as the fight against drugs is evaluated in Mexico and Afghanistan and around the world.

Further Reading: Out of Captivity: Surviving 1,967 Days in the Colombian Jungle by Marc Gonsalves, Tom Howes, Keith Stansell and Gary Brozek, Imperial Grunts: On the Ground with the American Military, from Mongolia to the Philippines to Iraq and Beyond by Robert D. Kaplan, Until Death Do Us Part: My Struggle to Reclaim Colombia by Ingrid Betancourt

Angilee Shah is a freelance journalist who writes about globalization and politics. You can read more of her work at www.angileeshah.com.

*Photo courtesy kozumel.

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The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism

–Reviewed by Saskia Vogel

Each of us in the West may well have a reason to carry around a guilty conscience, considering our history of colonialism, slavery, and genocide. But are we taking this guilt too far? Pascal Bruckner thinks so.

The Tyranny of Guilt examines how the Western guilt complex may in fact be a major hurdle in fighting today’s atrocities. Bruckner, a prize-winning French essayist and novelist, tackles the subject mostly from the French or European perspective and says that unending guilt is in fact vain and ineffective. The West wallows more than it repays debts, makes amends, or fully understands its role in the world. And in the case of France, Bruckner argues, guilt is also a symptom of the West’s dwindling importance relative to increasingly dynamic “Indian, Chinese, Brazilian, Arab, and Hispanic” cultures.

Western Democracies are populated, as Bruckner memorably puts it, by “self-flagellants” whose masochistic expressions of guilt border on the “suicidal.” He cites as examples the response to the July 7, 2005 bombings of the London transport system. Le Parisien’s headline read, “Al-Qaeda Punishes London.” Then-Mayor of London Ken Livingstone’s responded, “The suicide attacks would probably not have happened had Western powers left Arab nations free to decide their own affairs after World War I.” As with the European response to 9/11, which Bruckner summarizes, there was sympathy for the victims, but the attacks themselves – well, we had it coming. Bruckner’s shows that public discourse in the West is rife with self-hatred and self-blame, which he argues is a threat to clear thinking. How can Western nations assess current affairs if the West by default positions itself as sinners begging for punishment?

Bruckner widens his view from headlines to filmmakers, saints, thinkers, and world leaders, weaving together Western narratives in an eerily effective way. He quotes, for example, Jean Baudrillard giving an “utterly religious justification of the vengeance” of the terrorists against the US in 9/11. Roberto Benigni’s Holocaust film “Life is Beautiful”, which shows a sanitized version of Auschwitz, indicates that Europe is like a murderer trying to “erase the evidence of his crime.” Bruckner reaches back to Immanuel Kant and St. Thomas and forward through Jacques Derrida and President George W. Bush to support his argument, and shows how we choose to narrate ourselves. The power of storytelling is undeniable – is a story of guilt and punishment the most responsible way to chronicle our history?

This is just the tip of Bruckner’s text. Bruckner goes on to discuss the “blunders of the [West’s] disproportionate” focus on Israel, democracy as a religion, and tensions and dependence between the US and Europe. He concludes by setting out a task for the early 21st century: “Reconciling Europe with history and the United States with the world.” He suggests Europe must learn that battles are not won by “compromise” and “incantation” alone, and that the U.S. cannot continue “trying to do good for people no matter what they want.” Bruckner is optimistic about the power of Euro-American cooperation, feeling that in the past it has yielded “marvelous results.” Bruckner calls for extending such cooperation into this century.

Although The Tyranny of Guilt is spellbinding in its practically poetic repetition of key concepts, as political commentary it frequently amounts to argument ad nauseam. Bruckner writes, “There is no doubt that Europe has given birth to monsters, but at the same time it has given birth to theories that make it possible to understand and destroy these monsters.” And then again Europe “is a machine both for producing evil and containing it” – a concept he rephrases several more times. Bruckner also makes sweeping generalizations that beg for closer attention – that, for example, the U.S. was born “from a collective commitment to regard everything as possible,” whereas Europe “was born out of its weariness with sacrifice.” Still, The Tyranny of Guilt is a landmark exploration of the myopia that comes with Western guilt.

Excerpt: “On the whole, the Old World prefers guilt to responsibility: the former is easier to bear; we get on well with our guilty conscience. Our lazy despair does not incite us to fight injustice but rather to coexist with it. Despite our intransient superego, we delight in our tranquil impotence, we take up permanent residence in a peaceful hell.”

Further Reading: The Temptation of Innocence: Living in the Age of Entitlement by Pascal Bruckner and Guilt about the Past by Bernhard Schlink.

*Photo of Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial courtesy Vectrus. Homepage photo courtesy Andreas H. Lunde.

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Chasing the White Dog: An Amateur Outlaw’s Adventures in Moonshine
-by Max Watman

Max Watman traces the popular stereotype of the moonshiner back to an 1877 issue of Harper’s Weekly, which sent an undoubtedly genteel New York writer on assignment to Kentucky to observe the strange specimen: “Clad in garments of butternut, sometimes yellow, oft-times brown, and occasionally blue jeans, and always homespun, with hands in pockets …the moonshiner on arriving in Louisville, where all of his kind are brought after their capture, waddles awkwardly through the streets, with an expression upon his features, if not of awe, most certainly astonishment of the deepest dye.”

But in Chasing the White Dog, Watman finds quite different kinds of moonshine men – starting with the earliest American colonists – and toys with becoming one himself, detailing thoroughly his often failed experiments. Some of Watman’s moonshiners seem straight out of lore – living and dying like cinematic outlaws, bearing names like Jaybird Philpott and Popcorn Sutton and Johnny McDonald. Some are present-day con artists who lace liquor with bleach and sell it to down-and-out customers of illegal bars. But most are devoted connoisseurs in it for the art or the science or simply the old American tradition of making booze, legally or illegally.

In early America, making alcohol was legal and untaxed, and “distilling a harvest of grain was simply good farming,” Watman notes. Finns, Germans, and Scots-Irish were devoted practitioners.  But Alexander Hamilton’s proposed Whiskey Tax ended that era. Poor protesters of the tax, “drunk and armed,” ran off with their stills rather than face off against George Washington’s 13,000 troops. They started the split, Watman writes, between the legal distilling industry and black-market makers – not to mention solidified the one between Federalists and Jeffersonians, and between regulators and free-enterprisers.

When Jefferson repealed the tax, whiskey boomed – there were 14,000 distilleries in 1810, compared to about 20 major and 150 small ones today. Bourbon was born, thanks to land grants for corn growers. “You can’t eat 60 acres of corn,” Watman writes. “You’ve got to drink it.” But the tax came back during the Civil War, and increased tenfold. The moonshine man was “midwife by the stroke of Lincoln’s pen.” The biggest outfit, run in cahoots with the Ulysses Grant administration, made $2 billion a year in today’s dollars.

Prohibition marked the next great government move to control the alcohol market, and to make it a primarily legal, well-regulated, and more centralized business. As Watman sees it, “Since that result is so in line with the historical goals of the federal government, it seems barely a stretch at all to suggest that perhaps that was the real ambition of Prohibition.”

Watman spends a lot of time in the thick of today’s moonshining world. Though the scale of such activity is hard to pin down, Watman knows it’s still a booming business – the alcohol is more expensive than your average liquor store handle – and that most of it is sold in Philadelphia, far from imagined moonshine country. He lurks around stores and suppliers, trying to buy the goods for his own distilling activities without blowing his cover, and manages to make some decent booze after dangerous early experiments. He drinks something like “experimental kerosene-powered mouthwash” from a “nip joint,” or illegal bar. He shoots the breeze with law enforcement, and he attends a trial and finds himself siding with the defense. But the real future of distilling Watman finds at the first-ever distillers’ conference, where he meets makers of small local brews who are changing or working within laws, “little guys” making good products for little to no profit, the sort of devotee lost to taxes and regulation somewhere along the way.

Excerpt: “…farmhouse stills were common, and they were an integral part of the cultures the early settlers brought with them to America. This country was founded by distillers. The bedrock of America’s idealized notion of itself, the buffalo shooters, the deer-skin-clad men who battled and befriended nature and the Cherokee to survive, held kin and autonomy paramount, and they held whiskey a close third. The first Finns to hit these shores, the so-called ‘axe-wielders,’ were slash-and-burn farmers who threw their improvised hunting shanties together from felled trees and torched the rest of the timber so they could plant rye in the ashes….”

Further Reading: Driving with the Devil: Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of NASCAR and Race Day: A Spot on the Rail

*Photo courtesy yvescosentino.

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John A. Rich, Professor and Chair of Health Management and Policy at the Drexel University School of Public Health, applied to Dartmouth on a whim – at the advice of his eye doctor. When he was accepted early decision and went to visit campus with his father, Rich learned that going to Dartmouth had been his father’s hope as well. “My dad had gone to Howard undergrad, and that was really the only choice he had, being an African American man in Washington, DC,” Rich said. “He got an application to Dartmouth, but the tuition at the time was $400. It was unimaginable that his family could pay.” Rich, author of Wrong Place, Wrong Time, told us more about himself before taking to the podium to talk about the impact of violence on the lives of young African American men.

Q. What music have you listened to today?
A. I’m a fan of musical scores. I particularly like Thomas Newman, who wrote the score to The Shawshank Redemption. I usually have that as my background music.

Q. When do you feel most creative?
A. I feel most creative when I am around people who are not afraid to say what’s true.

Q. How would you describe yourself in five words or fewer?
A. Someone who cares about justice.

Q. If you could be anyone in history, who would you be?
A. This is going to sound paradoxical, but I would want to be someone in South who was marching against injustice in the 1950s and 60s. It’s easy to say that now, I know, but I’m fascinated by the costs that people have to reckon with to be courageous. I wonder where I would have stood in that fight.

Q. What is the best advice you have ever received?
A. My dad died of a type of leukemia. I was running a marathon for charity, for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I was nervous about whether I would finish the race. A psychiatrist who was also running said he could help me with anxiety. He developed a mantra that got me through the race, and I just said it ontinuously to myself: “I’m running my race.”

Q. What is your fondest childhood memory?
A. Riding the sleeper train with my father from New York to Washington, DC to visit my grandmother. I remember walking into Grand Central Station at midnight, I must have been five years old and I wasn’t supposed to be up that late.

Q. What is your greatest extravagance?
A. I love food.

Q. What is the last habit you tried to kick?
A. Making lists for everything. Now I have one iPhone list, so I don’t have little stickies everywhere.

Q. What do you wish you had the nerve to do?
A. Give up the salaried job and just live the modest life.

Q. What teacher or professor changed your life?
A. Professor William Cook at Dartmouth College. He was an English professor and one of the few African American professors that I had. It was he who led me to want to major in English, and he taught me that writing was about memorable language.

Q. Who is the one person living or dead you most want to meet for dinner?
A. Nelson Mandela.

To read about Rich’s lecture, click here.

*Photo by Francisco Arcaute.

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Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School, characterizes snitching not as a single act but as an entire system of law enforcement and criminal justice. Especially since the War on Drugs began, she said, the U.S. has seen an increase in the use of informants and “the trading away of guilt,” changing the way we mete out justice, the length of sentences, the determination of who to prosecute, and the prison system. “Everybody knows if they come up with information about each other,” Natapoff said of prisoners, “they can get a deal.” Natapoff, author of Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice, stopped by Zócalo’s offices to chat about what snitching means, the controversial “stop snitching” term, and the question from a young boy – about why police sometimes allow dealers to stay on the street – that spurred her to study snitching.

*Video produced by Laura Villalpando. Photo courtesy Tony Webster.

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“If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die”:How Genocide was Stopped in East Timor
By Geoffrey Robinson

–Reviewed by Angilee Shah

The United Nations has defined genocide as “any act committed with the idea of destroying in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group,” but what does genocide really mean? Where does it come from and how does it feel? How do “ordinary men” become “willing executioners?”

Geoffrey Robinson gives offers an in-depth recounting of genocide in East Timor in “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die.” In August 1999, this country of one million people overwhelmingly voted for independence from Indonesia in a UN-sponsored referendum. By September, 1,500 people were killed, 70 percent of the country’s infrastructure was burnt or destroyed, and 400,000 people were displaced.

The book is a compelling body of documentary and first-person evidence that Indonesian military and civilian leaders orchestrated the shocking violence that marred East Timor’s birth as a nation. Robinson names names and does not shy away from condemning not just the perpetrators of violence, but those who were complicit because they criticized intervention. To be sure, it a sad story, but also one in which international intervention ultimately prevented a much greater disaster. As the title suggests, it is also a testament to import of witnesses in war. While foreigners were being evacuated at the height of the violence, a small number of UN staff refused to abandon the East Timorese who sought refuge and international attention.

Robinson was one of those foreigners who chose to stay. A professor of Southeast Asian history at UCLA, he took a stint as a Political Affairs Officer with the United Nations Mission in East Timor, and lived through the tumultuous events that are the climax of his book. In 1999, he was living and working in the UN compound in East Timor’s capital city of Dili, where 2,000 East Timorese and the UN staff became refugees, barricaded from the unchecked violence that swept the country. So while the book is thick with historical facts, it is never cold or impersonal.

Crucial to this history are the ordinary people, the unexpected leaders and fighters whom Robinson treats with great respect. He describes Sister Esmerelda, who would become a refugee in the UN compound, as “a diminutive Canossian nun in her mid-thirties, whose broad smile and impish manner gave no hint of her inner strength or political inclinations.” Robinson treats his subjects with intimacy and takes great care to portray them and their circumstances honestly.

Ultimately it is this intimacy that makes Robinson’s narrative so compelling. Though he makes a convincing case that there was a systematic attempt to destroy a whole group of people, more important than the political question “Was this genocide?” is the realization that this kind of violence is too often brushed aside or covered up. A genocide book, let alone a book about genocide in a small half-island nation relatively unknown to most of the world, is not an easy sell. Why should we care about East Timor? In this case, the answer is because Geoffrey Robinson cares.

Excerpt: “Out of nowhere, a youngish woman rushed up to the chair of the delegation, the Namibian permanent representative to the United Nations, Martin Andjaba. Seizing his hands, she said, ‘Please do not leave us here. We are so afraid.’ Andjaba, a former South West Africa People’s Organization freedom fighter, first answered somewhat stiffly that the United Nations would do everything possible to ensure their safety. But the woman interrupted and still hold his hands, said: ‘No, you don’t understand. If you leave us here, we will die. You must promise.'”

Further Reading: The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali, A Not-So-Distant Horror: Mass Violence In East Timor, and The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942

Angilee Shah is a freelance  journalist who writes about globalization and politics. She is currently writing from Indonesia. You can read more of her work at www.angileeshah.com.

*Photo courtesy sugu.

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Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius
by Colin Dickey

Our grim fascination with the autopsies of prematurely passed stars and starlets – the craving for those intimate, if clinical, details of the body – is not just a modern phenomenon.

Take the case of Elizabeth Roose, a Viennese actress who died in childbirth in 1808. The critically acclaimed scion of a prominent theater family, Roose came to be the subject of a peculiar indignity, or distinction (it was, after all, a fate that generally only befell the famous). An accountant and amateur scientist, Joseph Carl Rosenbaum, unearthed her body weeks after her death and stole the head, hoping to carve off the remaining flesh, burn away the residue with lime, and preserve what he believed to be the most crucial signifier of human talent: the skull.

Colin Dickey’s Cranioklepty uncovers the obscure history of the study and thievery of the skull – “a scientific fetish, a secular relic” – focusing particularly on 19th century Europe. The study and reverence of skulls dates much further back, of course, but Dickey’s century is a critical one. He captures an era in which pseudoscientific theories granted the skull great authority in the study of human intelligence, talent and behavior. That gravesites and corpses still bore an aura of sanctity, and autopsies a whiff of heresy, gave skulls a totemic allure. The nearness of death – which happened at homes rather than in pale hospitals – and the beginning sparks of celebrity culture made skulls familiar and coveted and display-worthy objects.

Like a historically-minded and writerly TMZ, Dickey hounds the famous and the dead. The skull of Charlotte Corday – who famously stabbed Jean-Paul Marat in his bath – was guarded by the descendents of Napoleon Bonaparte. The German philosopher and poet Friedrich Schiller’s skull was kept on a velvet cushion in the library of a duke, “almost as if it were another book on the shelf.” Francisco Goya died in exile, and when the Spanish government sought to exhume his body 70 years later, gravediggers found no skull. The government telegrammed, “Send Goya, with or without head.” (The head remains missing to this day.) Sir Thomas Browne fretted about death and remains while he was alive, most famously in Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; his skull passed for centuries between thieves and hospitals and libraries. The skulls of the living were studied for signs of talent, even in America – Walt Whitman’s phrenological chart, dotted with head bumps supposedly indicating brilliance, was published in the first three editions of Leaves of Grass.

But the skulls of composers Beethoven, Mozart, and especially Haydn have the most fascinating stories. Beethoven’s skull suffered serious abuse and a botched autopsy; broken fragments were sold off after World War II. Mozart’s was rescued from a mass grave, changed hands many times, and now rests in the Mozarteum.

And Joseph Rosenbaum hung on to Haydn’s for a while. He had badly botched the preservation of Elizabeth Roose’s skull and couldn’t stand the associated smells – but the actress was only a trial run for Haydn, whom Rosenbaum deeply admired, and knew well in life. Rosenbaum stole Haydn’s skull and concealed it well from the many authorities who wanted it for crypts or museums – once even popping it into bed with his wife as the police searched his home.

Haydn’s skull wouldn’t be buried again for a century. As Dickey traces the travels of these and other  men’s bones – from grave to crypt to shelf, from the skilled hands of scientists to the worshipful ones of admirers, across borders and through wars and disasters – he finds that there is more to skulls than morbidity. Stealing them is something of a tribute, an act of love; studying them is at once mystical and medical, ancient and modern. Skulls today, of course, have a primarily symbolic rather than scientific currency. They long ago relinquished their status as the ultimate key of human knowledge, the seat of our selves, to the brain, the folds and grooves and chemicals of which have become our new obsession, our new keys to the mysteries of human nature.

*Photo courtesy hugovk.

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Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?

–Reviewed by Adam Fleisher

Justice is something everybody claims to want even though nobody can really agree on what it means. That’s where Michael Sandel comes in.

The Harvard philosophy professor has turned the concept into an extremely popular undergraduate course, a book, and a television series. His take: Justice is the proper distribution of the goods we value, like “income and wealth, duties and rights, powers and opportunities, offices and honors.” Justice should, depending on your perspective, maximize society’s aggregate welfare, freedom or virtue.

For Sandel, a just society is one that promotes virtue. Americans, he argues, have mistakenly abandoned that goal because of a general discomfort with couching arguments in moral terms – nobody wants to sound judgmental, and legislating morality is “anathema to many citizens of liberal societies.” Instead, when we talk about political and economic justice, we tend to focus on creating wealth. Whether we’re utilitarians seeking the greatest happiness for the greatest number or libertarians pursuing individual freedom, we tend to think free markets, insofar as they facilitate wealth creation, are just. But Sandel argues that focusing on wealth while claiming moral neutrality – instead of acknowledging the moral imperatives behind the policies we advocate – only creates resentment and debases political argument.

Justice uses diverse and divisive political issues to show why focusing on virtue is most amenable to the realization of justice. Sandel frames the abortion debate, for example, between two moral points of view – one holding that life begins at conception, and another holding that it does not. He rejects the conventional assumption that to be pro-choice is to avoid moral questions by insisting that the state take no position and that women should decide for themselves. (Of course, the argument that women have autonomy over their bodies is often couched in deeply moral terms as well.) Sandel’s key point here is an important one: the “keep religion out of politics” mantra isn’t a sufficient response to those who are influenced by religious conceptions of morality.

Overall, however, Sandel’s call for a return to virtue would be much more compelling if Justice did not depict the free market as a moral wasteland. Sandel starts his book with an example of price-gouging, moves on to the huge Wall Street bailouts, and then to the claim that libertarians consider taxation unjust because it violates people’s rights to “do with their money whatever they please.” While there are certainly objections to high tax rates, nobody takes seriously – nor makes a serious argument – that there should be no government, and therefore no taxes. Sandel provides a caricature of a small-wing of free market thinking but presents it as much of the basis for considering the free market a virtuous ideal.

Beyond mischaracterization, Sandel sometimes seems to misunderstand what exactly a market is. Take, for instance, his claim that because the United States does not have universal conscription, the military fills its ranks “through the use of the labor market,” just like employees in any other profession are hired. Volunteer soldiers without better options are therefore victims of the market since they “may be conscripted, in effect, by economic necessity.” However, there is not an actual market for military service. If there were, we would have many armies competing for soldiers – and probably driving down salaries.

Furthermore, Sandel’s argument that the volunteer army makes Americans careless about military affairs or casualties (and thus that soldiers are victims) contradicts the single largest trend in our military strategy over the past several decades. The American public’s aversion to casualties has made for a military reliant on highly complex technology – and the huge sums of taxpayer money that pay for it – to reduce the risk to individual troops. We are arguably better off with a volunteer army in large part because of this technology – soldiers must be extensively trained and prepared to use it. In a conscript army, with more troops and shorter tours of duty, we would not be able to exploit our huge technological edge. And in fact, with a greater supply of troops, the fates of individual troops may seem less significant to Americans. To put it in market terms, when labor is scarce, there’s more of an incentive to invest in capital.

Justice is at times illuminating and encouraging. A clarion call for honest moral debate in politics is refreshing, and obviously compelling. But under the guise of challenging students, readers, and viewers to confront their assumptions and grapple seriously with policy debates today, Sandel at times merely reinforces prejudices about the way the world is and how it works.

Excerpt: “[W]e need a more robust and engaged civic life than the one to which we’ve become accustomed. In recent decades, we’ve come to assume that respecting our fellow citizens’ moral and religious convictions means ignoring them (for political purposes, at least), leaving them undisturbed, and conducting our public life – insofar as possible – without reference to them. But this stance of avoidance can make for a spurious respect. Often, it means suppressing moral disagreement rather than actually avoiding it. This can provoke backlash and resentment. It can also make for an impoverished public discourse, lurching from one news cycle to the next, preoccupied with the scandalous, the sensational, and the trivial.”

Further Reading: Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide and The Case for God

*Photo courtesy stevec77.

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