"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.
Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).
Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."
Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."
Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.
Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."
Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
Notes
Care to Read What I Read?
I've embarked on a great reduction in privacy by bookmarking my web-based reading on the "delicious.com" utility. It may tip my hand as to what I have in mind for blogging, but the same may help friends and frenemies alike track my thinking: here is the URL:
Shabbat Shalom. May our arguments be resolved through perceptive words and good deeds only; may we live another week helpful to one another in relative peace.
Photography: Prints & Services
A gentle reminder: I'm in business as a producer of fine art prints and as a provider of shoot-for-fee services, including portraiture and weddings plus assigned photojournalism. My general location: intersection of I-70 and I-81; core camera system: Nikon; transportation: Mustang.
Effort in print-on-demand will not offset the production nor value of signed, limited edition prints made under my own hand. However, for very good convenience, price, and quality, print-on-demand may work out well for many fans and patrons.
Research Services
If you're engaged in funded research in conflict analysis or other areas that may be addressed here and wish to engage my mind in your project, feel welcome to drop me a note at jso@communicating-arts.com.
The wise know the power of language in conversation and its relation to the development of culture. This brilliant interview between Irshad Manji and Imran Siddiqui speaks to the great human mystery that is the arrival and possession of good conscience and the development of related great ethics.
YouTube's "globalcrossover" posted the video about a year ago and there's much in it, especially as regards online publishing of suppressed work in multiple languages, that tells how language and spirituality may work through personalities at their best. One might reference the positive side of the psychology of narcissism -- call it "reparative narcissism" (if I'm following that thinking correctly) -- and still arrive at the same conclusions.
God's good name?
Nature?
The better angels of our nature?
What works in the best of human nature -- inherent kindness and love, thoughtfulness, consideration, conscience and guilt, containment and self-control . . . so many characteristcs and virtues -- simply works.
How we box it up, package it, label it, what we call it . . . perhaps we'll find our way together and get our global heads around that.
"What's going on?" I asked the warlord. "Why aren't they coming for you?"
"I cannot lie to you," Namdar said, smiling at last. "The army comes in, and they fire at empty buildings. It is a drama – it is just to entertain." [1]
In the way of the webcentric blogger's second row seat to history, that above comes via Sherry Ricchiardi quoting for the American Journalism Review (August-September issue of 2009) veteran war reporter Dexter Filkins quoting a Taliban warlord .
"What is striking, say analysts, is how little has changed in Pakistan a year after U.S. special forces burst into a large house in Abbottabad in the early hours of May 2, 2011, and shot bin Laden dead.
"Pakistan's security establishment remains addicted to using, or at least tolerating, Islamic extremist groups as its proxy warriors, despite the deaths of thousands of Pakistani civilians and soldiers and the humiliation of bin Laden being found just steps from the country's premier military academy." [2]
A friend of mine in Lahore has called Pakistan's cultural and political makeup "a salad."
It is sure that, and while I wouldn't worry about the hot peppers taking over, one well may question the officially tolerated predilection for leaving the same growing wild and always more influencing on the character of the landscape.
My guess: the Taliban have turned out out the best military aid packaging stimulus ever.
I'm not going to heavily invest here in an interview-by-interview analysis but note only that I may thin the boundary between my Facebook experience, where I pick up a great variety of circulated material, and this blog with which I feel I could be more active (on that theme, there's a post coming soon, lol).
In the meantime, thanks to Corey Gil-Shuster for putting this together and putting it Out There (on YouTube), so that we may see more (and more) of how our human family has been put together and continue thinking through how many things, not only the spat(s) in the middle east, may for others be made always, continuously, a little bit (or a lot) better as we sail through time together.
I was only nine years old when an Arab neighbor named Abdullahi tricked me into following him to a boat. The boat wound up in Northern Sudan where he gave me as a gift to his family. For three and a half years I was their slave going through something that no child should ever go through: brutal beatings and humiliations; working around the clock; sleeping on the ground with animals; eating the family’s left-overs. During those three years I was unable to say the word "no." All I could say was “yes,” “yes,” “yes.”
The United Nations knew about the enslavement of South Sudanese by the Arabs. Their own staff reported it. It took UNICEF – under pressure from the Jewish –led American Anti-Slavery Group — sixteen years to acknowledge what was happening. I want to publicly thank my friend Dr. Charles Jacobs for leading the anti-slavery fight.
"Israel announced in January that South Sudanese would no longer be allowed to stay now that they have their own country and offered to pay one thousand Euros for each person willing to leave voluntarily by March 31. To Mr. Deng, 53, that move was surprising in light of South Sudan’s having demonstrated its friendship for Israel, including by announcing it would establish an embassy in Jerusalem."
"On April 1, collective protection for south Sudan nationals is set to expire; Jerusalem District Court also issues an injunction forbidding any deportation of South Sudanese nationals before April 15."
" . . . A senior Foreign Ministry official said that the recommendation to extend the collective protection for the South Sudanese for another six month is due to the fact that the conditions for their return haven’t yet matured – not on the part of Israel and not on the part of South Sudan."
Even the most cursory comparison of Ben Lynfield's post with Barak Ravid's in the liberal Israeli news sheet Haaretz spells why one-source reading doesn't hack it on the Internet.
Even in the short post where I had started out to highlight Simon Deng's statement at Durban, plain rapid surface research leads not to a confused story but practically a news programming contest with debunk, deflect, overlook, and indict playing a role on one side and "clear, accurate, and complete" sustained on the other.
Thank God Haaretz chooses to tell completely and plainly its fragment of the overall story.
At the moment, without online data on the fate of the 700 Sudanese refugees hosted by Israel, I hesitate to guess but would gamble a little that deportation would have shown up on the web in the Christian special interest news while extension of "collective protection" would have less suited the successionary impulse in the same editors.
This and similar issues bring up a question I haven't found either a right time or right way of asking: what would be not right, individually or en masse, in any volunteered request for conversion to Judaism?
The question must loom somewhere in monotheist minds.
There are many good things in life to which we not only bring ourselves but block out the static of voices critical, fearful, or even jealous in regard to what we have resolved to undertake. All things being equal, with there being "no compulsion in religion", this one path in faith seems ever off the table when, in fact, it is never off the table for anyone who would wish to bring themselves to it.
Nonetheless, I am enjoying it (after my "forty years in the American Wildness", ao I have become fond of saying).
If any may point out the child who chose to be born into an athiest, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, or other religious tradition, or none at all, please point him out: I should like to hear how he arrived at his decision.
Also: inherent biological processes flowing down from parentage as well whatever adjustments, good or bad, biochmeistry has made to the environment, recreational opportunities and encounters with carcinogens both much included.
While it appears comic hero creator Naif Al-Mutawa has discovered Kiryas Joel (perhaps -- he didn't name the upstate New York township intent on policing morals on the street), he hadn't much else for material from contemperory (and predominantly socially liberal) Jewish culture, and we may take the tactic in the spirit intended: to remap from perhaps a western perspective an adverse mentality, an inherently self- and other destructive content-of-mind, as part of the process of building a greater and healthier global society.
If such a better world should include contributions from Islam, such may be welcomed without compromising any long-established western virtue (click here for Wikipedia on virtue) or hard fought matter improving the distribution of equal rights, freedom (albeit responsible) for the indivudal, and justice (publically observed, expertly weighed, indelibly recorded as a matter of record).
Recieving Daniel Pipes e-circulars and following the import on Pipes' observations of the "99" comic heroes, I posted the same to my favorite Facebook account, one devoted to the development and entertainment of a strongly politically oriented community. After catching a "like" for the post, I thought to lookup the investors (based in Kuwait, privately held company) and found the above video on the author, which, one may notice, was posted to YouTube back in 2010.
I ask the anti-Jihad community, the Islam watchers, the post-9/11 New Conservatives to ask whether out of competitive zeal for our own complex flags or out of defensive habit whether we have grown too reflexive at our "listening posts".
Have we?
A military mentality would ask: "What is it?" "How big is it"? "How powerful is it?" "How extensive is it?" And "What can be done about it."
I'll borrow that mentality for a moment to suggest that the "Islamists" promoting everything awful from contralateral amputation to death to cartoonists, have given everyone headaches (and sorrows), Muslims from Afghanistan to Somalia most of all.
So what may I and thee -- whoever "thee" may be -- do about it?
Isolate the drivers, de-energize the motivations for conflict and the instigation of armed conflict, and repulse its destructive aspect and bring into gait its more productive facility.
Leave alone those who want to live good lives, with God or without, and for those others who believe their good lives should be extracted from their communities through intimidation, patronage, and violence (under cover of ideology, religion, nationalist patriotism), let the whole world commonly reduce their numbers, ease of movement, firepower, and, ultimately, their grandiose delusions.
For a job that large, we could do with some new heroes and ones much, much larger than mere crime fighters and defenders of civic Metropolis.
It won't bother me and it shouldn't bother you if their names derive from and represent every cultural and linguistic tradition on earth, so long as their sense of virtue starts with their own integrity expressed consistently through an above board and rock solid reliable passion for honesty, honest dealing, and the broadest and most tolerant as well as judicious freedom, from pauper to prince, for the human enterprise worldwide.
Some tolerance for criticism would be nice too.
If Islam musters the right stuff for that mission . . . good!
Mere "Trust me" ain't workin' anymore.
Also: perhaps when the world has been made safe again for cartoonist Molly Norris, we'll know something good has been accomplished.
-----
A little update:
I'm not sure I'm chuckling at the brought-to-you-by "Endemol" part. :)
I find repugnant the idea that Christians, Jews, and Muslims, among others, should not put up the best of the cultures they know and borrow the best from cultures discovered or evolving. However, we may be left with confusion over the signs of the new Cain: is the villain's accent Jewish, Russian, Chinese? Is it, will it be, the funhouse malformed mirror of each strain in human build and style?
I may have to watch this series . . . .
Those who have been with me a while on Facebook know I believe that "Evil starts with a lie" but I'll make an exception for works of fiction in which evil may be expressed primarily through an evil will and intention either of the author's. Here, I do not think the author of The 99 Naif Al-Mutawa evil, not any more than Shalom Aleicham or John Updike or Anthony Burgess, and I trust he views Kiryas Joel and other small religious communities across the American quiltwork with much the same eyes as mine.
An associate pointed out that a one-way channel is not an open channel. Such conditions as experienced in Kuwait may lend substance to the claim that The 99 represents a taqqiya-invested assault on the contemporary western sensibility. On the other hand, read on the Independent Lens site the backstory on the story of the making of the comic book and coming series.
As with the realspace cocktail party, the surreal cyberspace one may bury a good thought or two in a flurry of inspired chatyping, so, and as I have stated in a related post, I'm inclined to snip and export some thoughts (out of context) whose expression had been inspired by the want of making a point in a thread continuing on Facebook.
This one comes loosely related to a snit between two members participating in people's diplomacy over the middle east conflict. Enough said about that: my true target here remains a psychological component among conflict drivers, specifically narcissistic scripting:
---
Probably, the discussion should take place where it seems to have been generated or in private. However, I would like to chime in with the suggestion to spend a little time getting our heads around a fascinating subject second only to my interest in myself: narcissism.
:)
I kid around with this but a little because there seem so many pointers to damage or the threat of it when discussing ad hominem attacks, the glorious and inglorious images held and projected by ourselves and others for ourselves and against some others, and the presence of a will to harm others and hide the same under cover of "honor", "faith", "loyalty", including "patriotism", and other self-concept-preserving devices that place innocents in the path of a destructive mentality.
---
A few minutes before signing on the Facebook this afternoon, I had shared this (with a few changes made in this copy) in correspondence with a favorite associate:
---
Have you ever asked X about his relationship with his father or mother?
Part of the theory of narcissism, as I care to know or add my invention to it, is that it functions as a corrective to a damaged ego.
We get beaten up; we write ourselves a better script; and we go forward in quest of the fulfillment of that better image. This perhaps healing and necessary strategy may be part of our "human condition" but as observed around the world, whether motivated by fear of or feelings about dishonor, poverty, or personal and political impotence, the mechanism needs its limits.
In the middle east conflicts, quests for power, so I feel from observation, involve not only the possession of autonomy through the possession of money and the acquisition of the obedience of loyal others but also the sadistic urge to dispossess others of their physical and inspiriting assets: the Jews must lose their businesses and homes; the pretty girl gets acid in the face; the victim of rape needs four witnesses to attest to it (something like that) before being further dispossed of self-esteeem, even the possibility of it, byt being charged with adultery.
Do you see the pattern?
For the worst, this is not a matter of knowing where their nose ends and mine begins.
The desire, urge, and yearning to damage others -- too willfully, as you have put it, "oppress us and abridge our rights" -- is the whole point. They can dress up a two-legged-bomb or an IED in Islamic poetry and rhetorical psychology, but the real psychology is some are out to do mayhem and murder because, frankly, it makes them feel like they're doing something (perhaps "at last"), or have done something, and they are powerful for having gotten away with it.
---
I take care always to say "some" because I really believe it is only "some" and not even the zealous count among them for carrying within their hearts malicious desire plus the ability to energize it in political form and play out the same with degrees of violence shaped by circumstance, social alliance, and opportunity.
Along similar lines, I had last night the privilege of watching Constantine's Sword, the film narrated by James Carroll as a questing figure, one with the book on which the documentary had been based -- Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History -- and otherwise co-written and documented by Oren Jacoby.
Those familiar with the film know it works backwards from an imbroglio involving the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Spring, Colorado having to do with the pervasive on-campus prosyletizing of an evangelical church and efforts by both outside and inside forces to maintain the force as a cohesive Christian sword, a way not in keeping with " . . . that all men are created equal" or with the nation's commitment to the firmest divide between church and state, to the third-century's "miraculous" inspiration of a general inclined toward conquest beneath the sign of the cross, a symbol he himself is responsible for promoting (over images of fish and sheep) as the go-to icon of Christianity behind which his armies would go on to conduct their slaughter, create for him, Constantine, a new empire, and make Rome, sunk back into paganism, forever and irrevocably Christian.
What must Middle Eastern Muslims feel, Mr. Carroll wonders, when George W. Bush throws around concepts like good and evil and uses the word crusade to describe the Iraq war? Mr. Carroll worries that we may be heading toward an all-out holy war between state-supported religious extremists.
---
If you watch the documentary, you'll hear James Carroll note that "No war is holy."
We're learning -- well, at least I hope I'm not alone in this -- what makes for "religious extremist" leaders, and it's not very pretty if you call it "malignant narcissism" (and suggest the evident religious zeal inevitably turns out a cover for other urges) and go about the business of studying and comprehending what that is while also looking into the range of what it is in the needs of the followers (and perhaps of ourselves) that so frequently endorses the distinctly ignoble, inhuman, and outrageous beliefs, dreams, and pursuits of what become history's Caligulas, monsters who cannot contain themselves but handily spread their insanity to legions.
Additional Reference
Post, Jerrold M. "Current Concepts of the Narcissistic Personality: Implications for Political Psychology." Political Psychology (14:1) March 1993, pp. 99-121: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3791395
Post, Jerrold M. Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World: The Psychology of Political Behavior. Ithaca, New York and London, Cornell University Press, 2004.
Those who may wish to follow my photography may do so via my Flickr account.
For the most part, I've been carrying a Panasonic Lumix Lx5 "point-and-shoot" with an extension on it for both UV and Circular Polarizing filters (although the shot below was made with a Nikon D2x) and taking snap shots as I go through the routines of my day.
Of course I would like to travel, and you may imagine, whether armed with a Nikon DSLR or the Panasonic Lumix, what I might come up with in fresh surrounds. Truly, I love the garden I have on the balcony and still find something to shoot down at Fairgrounds Park, which I have to walk around some for health, but I've got that urge to be somewhere else.
Advancing age, declining health -- but not so bad at this time -- uncertain financing, although I might say "steady as she goes" with my lifestyle (my propensity for Amazon book purchases and Orvis wear notwithstanding, and not to mention my getting in decent coffee and a good bottle of wine now and then), and just plain old cussed bachelor singleness (not that I haven't deserved it) gets into the mix and the thought of just walking around somewhere just to walk about -- or, worse, dine with the wine and steak in a strange town -- leaves me a bit flat.
My pony, call it the "Silver Mustang 2000" (with chrome bullits and 16-inch Eagle RSAs) sits in the lot, ever ready to be driven to other than work, the coffee shop, the park, and the grocery store.
How did this happen!?
I am quite aware "in here" that there is an "out there" out there.
Most of "out there" I import through books and through the web, but neither complete a soul: we need our small adventures in realspace too.
I've never failed to find a picture, perhaps "the picture", in my vicinity, but I have had a hard time latching on to compelling subjects, whether "Gardens Down the Road" -- one of the photography themes started and abandoned here (the category's listed to the left) but available for revisiting -- or events fit for "coverage" at a local or regional (road warrior) level.
And it has been years since I've worked with models!
What a shame.
I've become the "Accidental Dilettante".
Not that I am not enjoying it -- the truth is I never imagined being able to be myself, finally, until just about . . . now.
This post is to help me retrieve it, so I don't have to keep going back to Google for that.
However, Googlers take note: "J. S. Oppenheim" has picked up higher ranking in the search engine on the basis of just this one kudo.
I could never quite get the three of me -- writer, musician, photographer -- working together, but Google's algorithms and hot computers have done it: Communicating Arts, The Georgia Boy Cafe at Park Circle, and Mustang Highways, among other appearances seem to be showing up on the same page at last!
I suppose for not being paid to blog, I get to blog all the more freely -- or at least when I feel like it. Ecuador has me feeling like it: for eco-trekkers and their naturalist brethren, it's a gorgeous hunk of earth -- and you will catch some reference to that in the following ntoe -- but it's also very much a frontier state, but not in the 15th Century or 19th Century sense although the ghosts of those eras persist. The State of Ecuador ranges across a 21st Century frontier, one in which the indigenous are connected, educated in key ways, and informed while assorted and contemporary villains, from capitalists to communists -- more correctly: communists acting as capitalists -- and from drug cartel to socialist revolutionaries (the evil seeds of larger stories) infiltrate and roam the countryside, seducing Los Indios ("En Dios" some believe Columbus to have said of the Tainos on the watery eastern and equatorial fringe of the hemisphere at first contact) into cultivating poppy and demanding territorial autonomy, possibly to grow more plants, under the cover of self-determination.
It's hard to say at my lazy level of effort as well as remote location what's really happening Ecuador, but the impression is that of a great story waiting for an intrepid but every street smart young journalist.
The James Belushi character in Salvador comes to mind.
The Ecuador story, however, may have more of menace in it than mayhem.
President Correa seems center-left in his "realpolitik", not So Far Gone on the Far Out There New Old Now Old and Lost Left, and the militaries of the region seem to be playing with the forces of the illicit in both crime and politics -- that is, possibly, the drug runners, the drifting warriors of the FARC, plus whatever and whoever has slipped "in-country" in relation to the evil churning away in Tehran. Such would seem to prey on the good will and remote lot of an isolated rural indigenous constituency, and only time, development, and open cross-cultural, multilingual communications will sort that out.
For my part as regards the prospect of copper mining in Ecuador, I hope all involved will get the full benefit of 21st Century's environmental and labor ethos plus technology. Anything less -- any treatment of development less than state-of-the-art for the industry involved would be not only politically and socially counterproductive but also in its own way culturally archaic and barbaric--and this I would say not only to President Correa and the governing powers in Ecuador's business and political corridors, but also to the Chinese and other customers and investors involved: these days, word gets around about every state, the character of its people, the worth and value of their business, cultural, and social entrepreneurship.
The global consciousness and conscience enabled by global communications would seem to raise the bar as it raises the curtains on what only a few years ago would have been interpreted as reflecting less than good manners in remote places, to put it most mildly.
If mining operations or any other industry today produces death, deformation, environmental degradation, be sure that the same will be exhumed, investigated, recorded, and findings distributed across the global framework, and the time frame for that would seem no longer decades out and historical.
So here's the note:
---
. . . please consider this,
The main problem is that there has been an embargo on technology in Latin America, while technology transfer went to Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and now China, we do not know make a bicycle.
The peasants planted tomatoes and by the climate change, destroyed the tomato plant and now the peasants want to plant drugs to sell drugs to Europe and U.S. with their partners of Muslim brotherhood
Latin America's cities are surrounded by forests, we don't have roads from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic coast, we don't have trains, factories, heavy industry, for this here the environment is very clean and the chemical composition of air is different, even the clean air is sent to other countries.
We have thousand of acres of natural forest, but if we need exploit oil and minery, we can do this also and reforest more trees in other acres also to sell carbon bonds to the oil company and minery company also, that can fund the reforest and preservation of many acres of forests also and everything will be fine.
At this time, the indigenous people present their proposal of the multinational state, this is to keep the control of more land to plant drugs, and promote their culture and receive the muslim people.
We can't be naive, a multinational state, will be to spread Islam in this state within a state, as happened in Yugoslavia, in a few years we will have a civil war in Ecuador like Yugoslavia.
---
True?
Not true?
Cranky?
About right?
Perhaps the veracity of the perspective matters less than the concerns and themes expressed: under-development plus incursion by the drug cartels, old hat new socialists, and, for a predominantly Catholic country, "the muslim people."
Let's not worry the labels--we all have a few of those to carry around wherever we go--but rather the conditions for allowing or enabling the sort of criminal and political sociopaths who really can (and really do) destroy whole regions and states.
I have really wanted to move away from reposting, essentially relaying, the work of other organizations and pundits.
Also note: the above was posted to YouTube in October 2011.
To be candid, when I started this blog in 2006 or 2007, I thought of it as a showcase for a few photographs and short stories. I never imagined I would be engaged with the phenomenon of human conflict as a kind of One-Man-Watching from the World Wide Web's "second row seat to history."
However, having at first clicked offshore to Somalia to read English-language news copy (Shabelle) with curiosity about its environmental issues, here is Oppenheim Arts & Letters now far along with the "Islamic Small Wars" theme and growing awareness of what might be considered global frontier issues, but less those involved with the ideological and religious demarcations that make good cover for hotheads and more those that form the linguistic, social, and psychological determinants for how constituents and leaders think about ethics and power.
As Jews always have from the beginning "gone forth" into greater regions of freedom and responsibility -- and have done so communally, physically, and spiritually -- Pamela Geller has here stepped forward of the all-are-the-same post-modern slush that has led every modern person, Muslims much included, to a positively Orwellian fix, one in which the freedom to speak responsibly, openly, plainly, and freely has been compromised by some choosing to accommodate evil as presented by others who have made themselves powerful in the way of kings and emperors, that is through programs involving bribery, corruption, and patronage on one hand and intimidation, imprisonment, mobsterism, and murder on the other.
Geller seems to understand, as I hope the majority of my peers and readers would, that one has either freedom or does not, and freedom, universally, begins with the freedom to speak openly, honestly, and responsibly and without compulsion.
At minute post 16:19, Geller asks, "Why do I subject myself to this?" and she provides the very best answer: "I do it for art, for music, for love, and for freedom."
So should we all, everywhere in the world: to create, express, love, and to be throughout our short stay our better and best selves for ourselves, for others, for God.
Those who impose on others, sometimes including those as close as family, to conform, derail, and subjugate the same to their own self-aggrandizing purposes?
Let them see themselves in popular reflection as they are or as they have become.
Communicating Arts - Main Web Site
