On George W. Bush

I. On Knowledge

His had been an intellectual decision founded on his conviction that if a little knowledge was a dangerous thing, a lot was lethal.

— Tom Sharpe - Porterhouse Blue

I turned to Tom Sharpe expounding on knowledge a quarter century ago for insight on the 43rd President of the United States. At first glance, I thought his bons mots were a succinct and definitive summary of what we have seen of said President's attitude towards knowledge. Some have speculated about oedipal reasons or ice queen mothering for his essential incuriousity. I demur; one should give him the benefit of the doubt and ascribe his outlook to conscious decision. He has asserted after all that he is "the decider". Also as Sharpe explained, incuriousity can be a deliberate policy, indeed one founded on conviction, if not an instinct towards self-preservation. This is only human and it is clear that there is a lot of conviction in the President. Upon reflection then, Sharpe's formulation can only be a partial rendering.

Knowledge is all the rage these days. Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld even proposed a taxonomy of knowledge, iconic in recent memory, in one his jawboning press conference performances — said taxonomy was incomplete as it turned out, he forgot the unknown knowns, and in the war policy he implemented, he discounted even the known knowns. Robert Waldmann recently added a few prescriptions on the matter. Political discourse in the United States of America has thus been all about knowledge: who knew what, when did they know it, should they have known it and so forth. There have even been acrobatics: "If I knew then what I know now, I would etc."

Well, who knew?

II. On Ignorance

It seems to me that one should turn to the other side of the coin in search of insight on the 43rd President of the United States. Thus we'll consider ignorance. For this we'll go back to 1907 and to Hilaire Belloc's delightful essay On Ignorance. As an avid proponent of the collage and remix, let's see how well a sampling of his toli can flesh out our portrait...

On Ignorance by Hilaire Belloc

There is not anything that can so suddenly flood the mind with shame as the conviction of ignorance, yet we are all ignorant of nearly everything there is to be known. Is it not wonderful then, that we should be so sensitive upon the discovery of a fault which must of necessity be common to all, and that in its highest degree? The conviction of ignorance would not shame us thus if it were not for the public appreciation of our failure.

... the biting shame of ignorance suddenly displayed conquers and bewilders us. We have no defence left. We are at the mercy of the discoverer, we own and confess, and become insignificant: we slink away.

... Note that all this depends upon what the audience conceive ignorance to be... Among very young men to seem ignorant of vice is the ruin of you, and you had better not have been born than appear doubtful of the effects of strong drink when you are in the company of Patriots...

Ignorance is an everyday occurence, something that affects every man. It isn't surprising that those who affect to be Everyman would not be immune from its effects.

One wonders about the moods of crowds. Why do people turn when they do? What is it that causes reassessments and shifts in the cultural zeitgeist? Tipping points are only part of the picture. I continue to ponder the essential difference between those two fables: the boy who cried wolf and the emperor's new clothes. This is not to suggest that the 43rd President of the United States is a wolf or indeed an emperor, although there may be latent aspirations to both characterizations. Rather I wonder about the reception to the messages of those boys in the fables. The one was ignored (he cried wolf too often) while the other was celebrated (everyone laughed at the emperor). When does danger or hubris become plainly evident to all? Perhaps everything is local and our evolutionary make-up conditions us accordingly.

But I digress. Back to ignorance...

Nevertheless... we should rather study the means to be employed for warding off those sudden and public convictions of Ignorance which are the ruin of so many.

These methods of defence are very numerous and are for the most part easy of acquirement. The most powerful of them by far (but the most dangerous) is to fly into a passion and marvel how anyone can be such a fool as to pay attention to wretched trifles...

No one can fault the 43rd President of the United States for lack of passion. He is focused. He is a compassionate conservative. He is a war president. Passion and focus on big, serious and era-defining issues are his concern. War by definition is as big an issue as humankind faces. Would it that small things were considered; that however would reek of Clintonian microsteps, trivialities in essence.

No. Crusades. Mushroom clouds. War. Terror. Big picture. Serious.

There are other and better defences. One of these is to turn the attack by showing great knowledge on a cognate point, or by remembering that the knowledge your opponent boasts has been somewhere contradicted by an authority...

The 2004 US presidential election campaign is perhaps a great illustration of this technique, and in this Karl Rove, sometimes labeled Bush's brain, was in full concurrence. John Kerry knows this all too well.

Yet another way is to cover your retreat with buffonery, pretending to be ignorant of the most ordinary things, so as to seem to have been playing the fool only when you made your first error. There is a special form of this method which has always seemed to me the most excellent by far of all known ways of escape. It is to show a steady and crass ignorance of very nearly everything that can be mentioned, and with all this to keep a steady mouth, a determined eye, and (this is essential) to show by a hundred allusions that you have on your own ground an excellent store of knowledge.

This is the true offensive-defensive in this kind of assault, and therefore the perfection of tactics...

The steady mouth, the determined eye, the repeated calls for resolve, the swagger, the obsession with fitness, the cowboy photo opportunities, the outdoors pose of a "Texan" stand in stark contrast to the Connecticut patrician upbringing. This is deliberate it would seem.

The notion of buffoonery is trickier however. The public gaffes during the Queen's recent visit are a case in point. One should ask: is the steady flow of homespun awkwardness calculated or genuine? Dwelling on bushisms as many do, only serves to lower everyone's guard and cause misunderestimation as the 43rd President of the United States so candidly and memorably put it.

This is a theme Belloc covered a decade earlier in The Modern Traveller, a book whose toli I'm a year behind in addressing (real soon now).

Note the name, Blood, and the reaction to his shrewd manoeuvers:

It saved the situation.
"If such a man as that" (said they)
"Is Leader, they can go their way."

That is an efficient take on ignorance, who has the time to scrutinize closely in this fast-paced world? By and large, our decision-making is done on gut feel and liminal signals, with only lip service paid to due diligence. Most of the time things work out, right?

Lastly, or rather Penultimately, there is the method of upsetting the plates and dishes, breaking your chair, setting fire to the house, shooting yourself, or otherwise swallowing all the memory of your shame in a great catastrophe.

I fear that this is the terrain of the current moment; the aircraft carriers ominously deployed in the Gulf, the saber-rattling on Iran, Syria and such bode ill for all of us. Setting fire to the house, whether to its finances or its foundations is a real temptation. One school of thought on the Middle East misadventures is that if you break eggs over there, the natives will be scrambling amongst themselves. "We fight them over there so that etc". This Scrambled Egg Theory of Mesopotamia is a rather dubious historical legacy I must say. I rather thought that blood was precious for most human beings but it seems that a powerful cohort, and the 43rd President of the United States is among equals in these elite ranks, are determined to provide existence proofs of the quantity theory of insanity. This young century is on course to equal the butchery of its predecessor.

But that is a method for cowards; the brave man goes out into the hall, comes back with a stick and says firmly, "You have just deliberately and cruelly exposed my ignorance before this company: I shall therefore beat you soundly with this stick in the presence of them all."

This you then do to him or he to you, mutatis mutandis, ceteris paribus; and that is all I have to say on Ignorance.

The closest we have come to this last method was when newly elected Congressman James Webb refused to shake the hands of the 43rd President of the United States. Decorum sadly did not allow the two to come to blows and thus provide catharsis one way or the other. Thus one must hold one's breadth until January 2009 keeping in mind, as his putative replacement has noted, that "the last throes can still be a violent period, the throes of a revolution".

The great contribution of American capitalism to the world is the notion that the customer is always right. In a London shop over the weekend, I was reminded that such a sentiment is not a cultural universal (don't ask). Indeed rhetoric can often be alienated from practice, witness no child left behind, heckuva job and so forth. In this vein, the popular majority that the 43rd President of the United States received in the 2004 elections causes me to discount the buyer's remorse that is the current, apparent collective hand-wringing. I actually agree with his notion that we've had an "accountability moment". Moreover, he was indeed clear about his intention of spending that capital. So yes, capital is being spent — in all forms. As to the rest, others can add their assessment. I omitted the dialog that Belloc provided out of a sense of dismay, it predicted too closely the discourse we have been treated to.

So, the 43rd President of the United States leads with his notions on knowledge and seems to be assiduously applying all of Belloc's playbook on ignorance. In this respect, he seems to be crossing the line from genial, if miscreant, rogue to fallen angel in the eyes of the American public. I suspect that this judgement, a fallen angel, is one he would be comfortable with. For my part, I only see Blood, but I have a jaundiced outlook on these things. All power to him I suppose, and history will tell the sorry tale. And that is all I have to say on George W. Bush.

Soundtrack for this note

• Gil Scott-Heron - A Legend in his own Mind
  No comment.
• Manu Dibango - Bush
  A little Afrobeat and jazz-funk excursion taken from the maestro of Makossa's 1975 original soundtrack to Countdown at Kusini. It's nothing too light nor indeed too deep. The bassline and driving horns are augmented by some demented guitar as the band steadily ratchets up the tension building towards the inevitable crash at the end.

File under: observation, profile, knowledge, ignorance, Bush, USA, America, neocons, literature, psychology, culture, Tom Sharpe, Hilaire Belloc, essay, zingers, hatchet job, blood, rogues, Fallen Angels, Things Fall Apart, toli

On Musical Obsession

If you live with a music lover you'll know that there's something not quite right with them. They're damaged goods.

By music lover I mean 'real' music lovers, the kind that Nick Hornby loving depicted in High Fidelity. The main reason that novel is so loved is its systematic mapping of the emotionally stunted psyche of the 'real' music lover. The novel appears sharp and knowing because, in essence, it's a self portrait; the terrain of musical obsession is Hornby's daily minefield. We all know these music lovers and have to deal with their many foibles. (The book inspired the less funny John Cusack film, I've raised my objections to the film previously).

The 'real' music lover (typically male as empirical evidence shows) is someone who is plumbing the depths of musical obsession, who'll engage you in all sorts of musical obscura, evangelizing some middling (from your point of view) or unfailingly under-promoted (from their point of view) artist; he'll be constantly drawing up Top 10 lists on any topic (desert island disks, best B-side, best break up music, best make up music etc), reorganizing their music collection by genre, alphabetically, by mood, by theme, or by date bought, by girlfriend or by some contrived criteria.

They'll kick you out of their record store because you're looking for Stevie Wonder's I Just Called To Say I Love You, while at the same time furiously insist that MC Hammer's Turn This Mutha Out is the shiznit ("You know Early Hammer was quite revolutionary really"). Their bigotry or unerring snobbishness cannot be questioned.

Of course, in this our iPod and file sharing age, their old standby, the mixtape, is dead and rather it's the playlist that matters. Even if it is easy enough for anyone to download 26 versions of Besame Mucho, on the whole though, most of us are content with shuffle serendipity. Still though, the real music lover has embraced these trends and will put the same craft into turning out playlists or into amassing "The Complete Story of Roxanne", those 103 responses to UTFO's 1985 novelty hit Roxanne, Roxanne.

And so, in addition to my other peculiarities, I plead guilty to musical obsession, to Top-10-listopia, to hearing lyrics everywhere. Others can attest to some of my obvious weaknesses. On any given day, I could be going on about Omar, the Crown Prince of soul music in this our millennial age, or declaiming the virtues of the Johnny Kemp's Secrets of Flying album (unfortunately overshadowed by the swingbeat single Just Got Paid - there's a lot more in there, he's a complete artist) or insisting that the peak of Jam & Lewis's Minneapolis Sound was Alexander O'Neal's Hearsay and Cherelle's Affair album as opposed to their production efforts with SOS Band or the higher selling Janet Jackson joints. And so on...

A month ago, on the Chinatown bus returning from New York after vibing with Abbey Lincoln, my cousin was increasingly irritated with the two loud ghetto women sitting behind us. You know the kind, they just hadn't been socialized: "It's inconsiderate cell phone man" with the urban twist. The loud music - it sounded like a boombox not a walkman, the gooselike laughs at how Meldrick has been dealing with his baby momma, their snide cell phone conversations with Bobo and LaFanqua about distressed, shark-skin jeans (I kid you not) and, the last straw, Cousin Ray-Ray's toe operation.

All of which was interesting to me as a cultural anthropologist of sorts, but even I have to admit that their performance was a rising crescendo for the almost 4 hour trip. When it looked as if my cousin was finally about to lose it (we were still an hour away from Boston) and turn around, fists ready and prepared to take off her heels for the imminent combat, she made the mistake of loudly saying "What Have I Done To Deserve This?" Of course that elicited this from me:

"Oh yes. What Have I Done To Deserve This? I know... Hmmm... From the Pet Shop Boys with Dusty Springfield? That would be late eighties or so... 1987 I think."

I immediately begun singing their mantra:

What Have I, What Have I,
What Have I Done To Deserve This?
What Have I, What Have I,
What Have I Done To Deserve This?

And then I started composing a Top 10 list of songs about irritation or annoyance: some favourites:

• Had Enuff by Al B Sure without a doubt
• Dennis Brown laying down roots reggae on I Can't Stand It
• James Brown - I Can't Stand It (I prefer the Godfather of Soul's 1976 version)
• Stevie Wonder - I Ain't Gonna Stand For It from Hotter Than July
• The Pet Shop Boys and Dusty of course. And so on...

True this outburst served to defuse the tension, but for the whole trip, I had been so lost in my thoughts comparing Abbey Lincoln to Amel Larrieux that I hadn't intervened earlier or nudged our neighbours into toning down their aural invasions.

And musical obsession doesn't only intrude in the mundane as above. I live with 24 hour music, it's pervasive in my mindset, at work, at play, and even in love. I assume that it's especially annoying to "The Girlfriend" when it comes to intimacy. From my point of view though, it makes evident sense to quote the occasional lyric, or four. After all, how can you be original in this day and age? Thousands of years of evolution have brought us to down to this. What haven't men and women said to each other before? What haven't Marvin Gaye, Barry White, Al Green or Luther Vandross, those lotharios of longing, whispered carelessly in the dark. Turn Off The Lights, Teddy Pendergrass insistently demanded; Truly I Adore You, Prince almost leered...

But anyway I try to make the effort at least in affairs of the heart, but it's hard to be original... It's so easy to slip in 'I Love More Than You'll Ever Know' as Donny Hathaway put it... A work in progress...

Just last night again, when the same cousin remarked in passing that her roommate would be away for the next few weeks, I was immediately compelled to start singing Wyclef Jean's Gone 'til November.

See You Must Understand
I Can't Work A Nine To Five
So I'll Be Gone Til November
Said I'll Be Gone Til November.
Yo. Tell My Girl, I'll Be Gone Til November
January, February, March, April, May
I See You Crying But Girl I Can't Stay
I'll Be Gone Til November, I'll Be Gone Til November
And Give A Kiss To My Mother.

Then I started thinking about autumn songs. First the obvious:

• Autumn Leaves. I love Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis's version on Somethin' Else, but you can't dismiss Duke Ellington's take on the Indigos suite, not to mention Bill Evans quiet contemplation of the falling leaves on Portrait In Jazz, and what of Rachelle Ferrelle's performance on that one-off and sadly out-of-print album The Manhattan Project (you know, the one with Wayne Shorter, Michel Petrucciani - that one that I spent $45 for the VHS bootleg, hard bop at its best).
• You'd have to add Autumn in New York but which version? Well Billie Holiday can't be wrong but what about Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong's version?
• Not to mention Ben Webster's Early Autumn with his warm saxophone growling as the leaves turned - or is it rather glowing?
• And the vocal perfection of John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman's Autumn Serenade, lyrical tenderness incarnate.

And then onto November songs, what about Kenny Garrett's November 15 from his Songbook? And of course I remembered my favorite November song, Troop's Sweet November

Someday Soon, I Know We'll Come Together.
Even Though I Feel A Change Of Season's Due,
But Maybe Sweet November Will Tell Us A Story
That Will Bring Us Back The Love That We Both Knew.

As you can expect, the conversation degenerated from there on. First she giggled, sighed in exasperation, then just before she hung the phone, pointedly put it:

"There's something not quite right with you, Krantz".

See also

• Found, a playlist
• Annoying, a playlist
• Autumn, a playlist

File under: culture, music, obsession, twisted, soul, observation, damaged, jazz, completist, psychology, life, funny, humour, toli

Tradition and Modernity

A very good article on tradition and modernity by Justus Amadiegwu in the Guardian going over the nexus between superstition, tradition and modernity in Nigeria - this applies equally well to what I've lived through and know of Africa.

I thank God I am still here

I should be dead by now; my twin brother is. You could say I am living on borrowed time, but I prefer to say I am blessed.

Decades ago, my mother committed the then unpardonable sin of giving birth to twins. To western couples, particularly those on IVF, the joy of multiple births is tempered only by recalculation of the household budget; to an Igbo parent in those days, however, there was only one outcome of bearing twins or triplets: the babies' instant death.

There can be no greater contrast of cultural norms than the one between my life as a Nigerian in London and my Igbo upbringing

I am from Imo state but my wife is from Okija, Anambra. The town hit the news earlier this month when 50 bodies and human remains were discovered in the latest ritual killing. Some of the victims were mummified but at least four had been killed recently.

The international media were enthralled by the body count and tales of 'black' magic. It had taken a common murderer fraudulently plying his trade as a dibia, or witchdoctor, no time at all to traduce the traditions of the Igbo people.

The practice of worshipping idols is embedded in the culture. It was part of our ancestors' way of life for hundreds of years before the arrival of the white man and the Christian religion.

Paganism, idol worship, consulting oracles: I have practised them all and seen many things in the process, though I am now a Christian. [...]

Although I have moved away from many of the traditions of my fathers, there are some that remain with me and that I hope to pass on to my own children.

For example, Igbo tradition requires that before a couple who profess to be in love get married, the background of the potential family must be investigated.

If the family are found to belong to the Osuhs or Ohus, they are immediately rejected and the marriage proposal is automatically annulled. This is also the case if there is a history of sudden deaths, madness or long-term illnesses such as MS, leprosy or sickle-cell anaemia.

Talkativeness (especially in women) and flirtatiousness are equally undesirable characteristics and further causes for rejection.

Once the investigation is complete and the family has been cleared of all these traits, the couple receive the blessing of both families to proceed with the engagement.

Yes, mumbo-jumbo - ogwu, otumokpo, juju, voodoo - really does exist in some Nigerian traditions

I have lived through some of these things and I thank God that I am still here to tell the tale.

The context for the article is a touch morbid - ritual killings - obvious fodder for the tabloids - I would have wanted an unprompted commissioning of such an article since this is well worth discussing at any time. He does touch on the guts of the issue: that there is such a thing as culture and tradition and it is a powerful force in human affairs and it informs, competes with, and sometimes overwhelms those other forces in modern life: science, and mathematics, religion, capitalism, economics etc.

What's in the cultural mix as you grow up often translates into your so-called 'values' and has a great deal of influence on your behavior. Thus superstition is alive-and-well even in the highly developed West: What is the fear of Friday the 13th, after all? Why do so many buildings not have a 13th floor? Why is there no #13 in my apartment building? Opportunist politicians the world over exploit these tendencies in the rhetoric of their nationalistic/populist appeals. Dismissing people as pagan or primitive barely captures their essential complexity.

Superstition looms large in African popular culture. In appealing to local, oftentimes rural, audiences, the artist in traditional societies needs to draw on the motifs the audience is dealing with. Consequently African films, music, poetry and fiction cover this territory incessantly sometimes poking fun at these traditional belief systems sometimes lamenting their loss as they intersect with the modern world. This seeps out also into daily life, take for example this recent piece< blockquote cite="http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/africa/3906607.stm">Panic at Nigerian 'killer calls'

Nigerian mobile phone users have been anxiously checking who is calling them before answering them in recent days.
A rumour has spread rapidly in the commercial capital, Lagos, that if one answers calls from certain "killer numbers" then one will die immediately.

A BBC reporter says experts and mobile phone operators have been reassuring the public via the media that death cannot result from receiving a call.

He says that in such a superstitious country unfounded rumours are common. A list of alleged killer numbers has been circulated but no-one is reported to have died from answering the phone.

The BBC's reporter in Lagos, Sola Odunfa, says that the current scare story is reminiscent of a rumour that spread a few years ago that a handshake could cause sexual organs to disappear.

That rumour turned to tragedy as mobs rounded on people accused of making organs disappear. Despite the massive public interest, no-one was found to have lost their organs.

My uncle used to teach a course on these issues 30 years ago at the Harvard Law School looking at it from the legal standpoint (namely how to negotiate issues of law in the context of traditional authority and mores). To this day, this is probably what his students most remember him for, not his legal acuity or insight, but rather this meaty and almost sociological issue and the endless conversation and anecdotes it evokes.

My dad's friend, the philosopher Kwame Gyekye, has the standard academic works in this area at least as it relates to Africa: the general textbook African Cultural Values: An Introduction and the more heavyweight research Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience.

Both are well worth reading to brood over the essential complexity of human behviour. Although I've now lived 2 thirds of my life outside Africa, I can't deny the powerful appeal of some of those traditions. I may live the hi-tech software engineer's life, pose as the jaded and skeptical intellectual but African cultural traditions, warts and all, still contribute to this Koranteng's Toli thing.

See Also: The Nigerian Elections - A matter of confidence

File under: Africa, tradition, modernity, religion, superstition, culture, observation, perception, values, psychology, philosophy