Oppenheim Arts & Letters

Anne: 070531-1530: Changing Spaces

Jim has graciously asked me to write something for O&AL, and I'm honored to be the first guest writer. 

My chosen topic:  moving.

I've moved a lot more than most people who haven't recently robbed a convenience store or passed a bad check.

Maybe my family of origin is partly "to blame" for that.  I say "to blame" because I'm not sure if my experience of being at home easily in new places is a bad thing or not.  Some things are not good or bad---they just are.

Many people, unless they're military folk, I guess, grow up and maybe eventually live in or near a place where there is some kind of family tradition, some parent who was born or raised in the place, some kind of tie to place.   

My experience was different. 

I was a pastor's kid. 

Dad felt that his effectiveness waned after a certain number of years, that people might choose to start focusing too much on him and not enough on the message if we stayed anywhere too long.  Because of that, I grew up in a state neither of my parents were born or grew up in and lived in five different houses in four different towns (three of which I can remember) before I was 15.

For the past 18 years, I've lived thousands of miles away from where I grew up.  My parents have moved since I left, and they no longer live where I grew up, either. 

There was one "home place" in Portage, Wisconsin before my grandparents died in the late 90's, a place where they had family land, where my grandparents were both born and raised, a place with woods and an old barn and a chicken coop and a hammock and a house, but no one I know well lives there anymore, either. 

There is no official "home place" with traditions and stories and memories going back years and years and years.  Growing up, home for us was where the people we loved were. 

All of that might have something to do with this: along with my childhood moves and the usual dorm shuffles during college, I've moved 12 times since leaving my home state, Iowa, at just-turned-23. 

So, I guess you'd say I'm pretty used to it. 

Was I running when I left my original home in the Midwest? 

Probably. 

All of the other times? 

Usually not. 

I was single longer than most---started seriously dating for the first time at 28, married at 31, separated at 38, legally divorced at just-turned-40. 

I  almost always got along with roommates well, and lived most times with a roommate until circumstances directed otherwise---one roommate left for Korea, another move was a summer sublet, another move was an apartment renovation, still another was a roommate's planned departure for getting her PhD.

My roommates (or "apartment mates") after college have included an elementary school teacher/illustrator, a high school teacher, a Korean business major who wanted me to talk English to him, a former cable channel star and Arena Stage manager, an English graduate student, and a houseful of rotating 20 and 30-somethings, mostly guys.  Then, of course, I was married, and then I was not.

Now, I'm planning to move again.

Sometimes I get tired of moving; sometimes I feel like I've had enough of it.  I've had some wrenching moves and some not-so-wrenching moves.  The toughest as a child was moving during my freshman year of high school (it's a wonder I don't hate the church for that one).  I will never forget my first day at the new school, which was about five times larger than the school I started in and looked to me like a gigantic shopping mall filled with people who all seemed to be disconcertingly certain about where they were going.

The toughest move as an adult was moving into the closet/apartment in which I live now.  I know I can't stay there no matter what I do.  I like things to move forward in life, and I know enough to know that, for me, people are more important than what city I'm in.

My mother has called me "her gypsy," and maybe sometimes that's what I've been. 

When I got my current job and starting traveling (there were more funds when I started and the travel perqs here no longer exist), she said, "I knew they couldn't keep you in that office too long." 

For my job just before this one, I traveled to the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, the Fort Berthold and Standing Rock Sioux Reservations in North Dakota, the Yurok Tribe's home in northern California, the Flatheads' home in Montana, the Seminole Tribe's urban reservation in Florida, the Mashantucket Pequots' Foxwoods Resort in Connecticut, and the Oneida Tribe's land in New York. 

None of that would have been as much fun if I had been afraid to travel, so I'm glad I wasn't. 

I'm stable, despite my moving track record, and reliable, and almost too loyal.  I love to learn; I love to laugh; I love to entertain and enjoy words, acting, music, dance, and even cooking (sorry, my quasi-feminist friends, but I do, even if you think it's a sellout); I love people. 

I learned not too long ago about Aristotle's concept of entelechy, and I think a modern definition of it might be, "willing to work to fulfill one's potential." 

That's what I aim to do in life, though I know I don't always know how to go about that. 

I'm willing to take chances and, sometimes, that means moving.

And, yes, I'm the girl ( woman :) with the cat.

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Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim

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070531-1030: Surfing Conflict

I may have to launch a new blog category: "Warfare on the Internet".

From The First Post, five photographs from the siege of Nahr Al-Bared in Lebanon:

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/index.php?menuID=2&subID=1835

From Reuters, five photographs of Israeli tanks rolling up to secure Gaza against (occasionally) deadly Hamas rocketeering:

http://www.reuters.com/news/pictures/slideshow?collectionId=500

"Baghdad ER Scenes", MSNBC slide show of the 28th Combat Support Hospital in action:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17369389/displaymode/1107/s/2/

On the "Gazingattheflag" blog, photography by Imbedded photographer Chad Hunt with the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan:

http://gazingattheflag.blogspot.com/2007/05/photographer-with-10th-mountain.html

Chad Hunt's own blog: http://www.chadhuntphotography.com/blog/

I started to search for the usual up-to-the-minute "blast and battle" photography from Afghanistan, and . . . nothing (yet).  Zilch.  Zero. 

Is that what peace looks like?

Mountain day
Clear, quiet, prayer
Again and

Again.

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Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim

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070531-0915: Compilation

Posterbating, first thing in the morning--I may have moved 585 feet up into the valley past the first substantial mountain in Maryland, but I'm as much a creature of the Washington, D.C. swamps as anyone.  This is from modelmayhem.com:

N3 Media: For the right, it’s government; for the left, soldiers.  No one much loves authority unless it directly makes them money or saves their collective ass.

Observation: among other things, Vietnam has been characterized as the first televised war, the network news serving up the body count over breakfast and supper.  This struggle may be characterized as the first true Internet war, it’s entire scope, background, and “heat” made available through the front page that is the monitor of a desktop computer.  In this environment, there are no back page stories.

Taray: if you think I’m difficult (and verbose), try this for breakfast:

http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Area=sr&ID=SR3404&Page=archives

Actually, I shouldn’t ascribe to Menahem Milson faults that are my own.  As lengthy as his article is, it’s credible, direct, and thorough.  Match it up to the news; compare to alternative analyses; independently see how it holds up in light of your--or mine or anyone else’s--interpretation of events.

On the Internet, it's true: there is no "back page" news--I could mosey over to Somalia and check in on the obscure Farah Blue's blog, not that I know who he is, really, but he has posted as a correspondent with allafrica.com through the Shabelle Media Network, and there he is in blog space, poised to report either on the conflict or about his life or both.

Speaking of Somalia and the missing Mr. Blue (well, missing from his blog since the middle of January) aside, Aweys Osman Yusuf reports through Shabelle that 35 foreign Islamist extremists in two speedboats clashed with government forces while landing in the Baar-Gaal settlement of Puntland.  The government has given chase, moving in "battlewagons" and personnel.

The daily and weekly death tolls accruing from Islamic and other violence in Somalia may be described as epidemic for their predictable and relentless character: assassinations, bombs, small arms cross-fire.  Strangely, however, the reporting often tells a perfunctory who, what, where and leaves the "why" a mystery, possibly because in the Somalian theater, deaths not immediately attributed to "Islamists" may, possibly, represent murder with only a political tint.

I am only guessing--but why guess when a reporter's but an e-mail away?

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This question may be directed to Aweys Osman Yusuf, who seems to be covering his share of murders: how efficient have police been as regards investigating and laying out the complete stories of that such as Dhage Adde?

Moreover, are you inclined or do you expect to follow the one story—the murder of Dhage Adde—until it yields a complete picture of the event, or do you expect that it will be buried by any number of similar incidents taking place in the course of a week?

I would enjoy hearing from you on this if it suits inclination and you have the moment to bang out an answer.

With best regards,

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There are no slow news days in Somalia.

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Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim

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070530-2030: Small Life

One secret to enjoying life in a small space: delight in small things.

I wish I had as easy a trope for living with a woman.

I have found each advancing estate with a woman quite different in character and challenge, from dancing to dating to spending weekends together and on to the move-in and cohabitation.  As I have not cohabited well, marriage (and divorce) remain foreign to my experience.

I believe no less a prepared figure (monied, sure of himself) than Anthony Hopkins has been reputed to have survived his own marriage and consequent cottage arrangment for all of three weeks.  I've also heard of his driving around the United State incognito for the same period.

On thing I have learned: one who wants a new life may have to say goodbye to the old one.

Goodbye, old dance partners.

Goodbye, my old "gal pal" (that one's so unnaturally painful, I think I'd rather not have a heart than say it; I don't feel I mean it anyway, at least not to the extent of never speaking again).

Goodbye, old dreams because so many of you may not fit having a girl around all the time, much less the cat that sleeps with its chin on my head.

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Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim

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070530-1800: Impossible Dreams

Ahab harpoons his whale only to have it carry him out to sea.

There's a terrible beauty and lesson in that. In fact, we hear about it all of the time: "Be careful what you wish for--you might just get it".

Had no one cautioned Ahab?

Islamic martyrdom has that ring to it: the medieval cause transformed into the destruction of modernity-that's the whale, and each part of its attainment a part of the carrying away, and whether into heaven or thin air, it hardly matters.

Today's reading:

Milson, Menahem.  “Reform vs. Islamism in the Arab World Today.” Special Report No. 34.  The Middle East Media Research Institute, September 15, 2004.

“Ibn Taymiyyah.”  Wikipedia. May 30, 2007.

Among statements read too often, the Arab stereotype of the perpetually quarreling and murderous brothers persists, and yet in order for Al Qaeda (AQ) to set off bombs in Morocco, it's turning out that it recruits through channels elsewhere in North Africa.

Whitlock, Craig.  “From Iraq to Algeria, Al-Qaeda’s Long Reach: Suicide Bombings in Algiers Suggest Network’s Influence in Recruiting, Training North Africans to Fight at Home.  The Washington Post, May 30, 2007; Page A07.

What kind of fighting between brothers is that?

The gist of the gist: AQ recruits from wherever (in North Africa, the Maghreb, or area along the coast from Mauritania to Libya, according to Whitlock) to kill wherever (in the adjacent region, Iraq)-nothing really new there but a good reminder of how divorced the movement has been from state politics since the routing of the Taliban from Afghanistan.

Such may be the want of affinity with a cause and the hubris that is faith in garnering the attention of Allah, that for a price and the promise of martyrdom and passage to heaven, one may recruit a two-legged bomb construction or bomb delivery device and get it to deliver itself among strangers some thousands of miles distant.

While there's little question of responsible governments fighting terrorism, the problem of how to do it has not been solved except through a variety of physical tactics--combat outright, road closings, checkpoints, etc., that and detective and police work.

Alternatively working into the content of Islamic warrior-scholar aspirations and dreams seems relatively better armored by states struggling with freelanced violence on one hand and the installation of authoritarian and racist tenets, credited to the Koran and Hadith, on the other.

You can't put out fire by throwing gasoline at it, but that has been rather the drill.

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Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim

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070525-0800 Morning in the Garden

Anyone who has the slightest interest in the magical, the impractical, the timeless must grow a garden.

I have all of 5'9"x11'6" of outdoor deck with not much of an overhang this year, but it has a railing on two sides and about two inches of fascia board above, enough length for three planters, so far, half a dozen wind chimes, and three hanging baskets.

In bloom: snapdragon, pansies, and petunias.

Leafy decoration: purple Perilla and, in two of the railing planters and one of the baskets, Dusty Miller.

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Many years ago, I lived in an old farmhouse on Muncaster Mill Road that then ran through probably the last exurban fringe left in Rockville, Maryland, and I had a garden 30'x60'.  Lettuce, cucumbers, carrots, pole beans came out of the ground, and to dress up the vegetables, Nasturtiums also.

After work somewhere there in midsummer: a quart of cold beer and a garden fork--what one could do with just that for entertainment.  However, let's not dwell on the "good old days" of sleeping in a sleeping bag on a camping pad on a hard floor in an upstairs room--no television, no library, nothing like a computer on anyone's horizon.

I believe I read through Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams that summer.

I also sang in a band for a while, one of those with a bug name, but made the fatal mistake of cozying up to the leader's girlfriend.  Lesson learned: there's politics everywhere, even down in the basement with a group of guys in Potomac.

Strange life.

Whatever the elements, however, I think it's starting to work, finally, here in my early fifties.

Thank God.

May-June: The Season for Fighting Update

070524-2340

"Analysis: What is Fatah Al Islam?" by Claude Salhani, UPI, May 24, 2007, The Middle East Times updates today's opinion piece. According to Salhani, "The group, led by a Palestinian named Shaker Al Abssi, is believed to number around 200 well-trained and well-equipped fighters, most of whom are Palestinians."

Salhani reports that other nationalities have been involved--Lebanese, Syrians, Yemenis, Bangladeshis, and others--and the group represents a splinter from Yasser Arafat's Fatah Al Intifada movement of the 1980's.

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May-June: The Season for Fighting

I have been reading Raphael Patai's controversial ethnography, The Arab Mind, while monitoring the news from the middle east and elsewhere.  In most of the northern hemisphere, spring makes way for love.  It is the bride's season, the time for dancing around the Maypole, the gentle slip into warm days and cool nights followed by hot days and warm nights chased with beer and the clink of ice in glasses.

In the middle east, it seems as much the season for planting bombs and crawling out of hideouts with AK-47's and shoulder-fired rocket propelled grenades (RPG's) at the ready.

In his book, published in 1973, Patai makes interpretive sense of such abominations.  His sources for behavior so out of phase with the exigencies of contemporary cultures elsewhere:

• The beautiful force that is the Arabic language, and with it, the elision of past and present time that make yesterday's events as if they were bearing as meaningfully as ever on today's, such has been my impression of Patai's description of it;
• The severe public repression and correlating doctrine in law of public displays of sexual affection and being along with a Draconian Puritanism, a formidable brew for aggression, one way or the other;
• The cleaving to religious thought and code in every aspect of life, culminating, ideally, in a state of purity worthy of the ease of an afterlife in heaven, but lending itself also to a pervasive sense of moral judgment bearing down on every act.

And I have driven but half way through the pages.

Personally, I am wary of the vaunted pervasiveness of either the Arab or larger Muslim monoculture: we're at peace (without an occupying presence) with many predominantly Muslim countries (start with Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey and move on to southeast Asia).  Moreover, where Arabs and others find themselves living in proximity within the bounds of a common and comparative established and recognized government, what rancor develops, if any, seems but given to a few.

I have not seen (and hope I never shall see) a global Arab or Muslim uprising despite the barrage of calls to Jihad: again, not only does Islamic warfare against the infidel seem the province of a determined few, as relentless as the guerrilla or low intensity conflict has been, the truth remains--the chief victims of Islamic militants have been Muslims.

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Israel today, as it has done before, extracted about 30 personalities from the Hamas effort, which has otherwise been launching rockets, about 150 recently, at the Jewish democracy (20 percent Arab, giving Israeli Arabs a kind of one in five chance of being victimized--or involuntarily martyred, I suppose--by the same unguided anger as simmers in blood elsewhere).  Of course, while Israel defends itself in its characteristically practical manner, the young men of Palestine must continue defending themselves from one another, a sort of Middle East Side Story all grown up, half way to a century old, and branded into international consciousness and politics.

To Israel's north, the Palistinian camp--really, a small city having the characteristics of a self-governing reservation--of Nahr Al-Bared near Tripoli in Lebanon has emptied of a substantial portion of its approximately 35,000 civilians while an estimated 300 to 500 combatants remaining to fight in it, and armed heavily with freebooted (from somewhere) mil-spec metal, seem to be people known to no one in the camp.

Who is fighting for whom and what? 

This inquiring mind looks forward to the end of this most unpopular battle pitting the Lebanese Army against "Fateh al-Islam", which various news sources describe as Al Qaeda but, really, has anyone had a good, long talk with any of the fighters?

"Syria's ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar Ja'afari, said late yesterday his government had nothing to do with the violence and that Fatah al-Islam's leaders are members of al- Qaeda who had been jailed in Syria for terrorist activities. Members of the group include Saudi Arabians, Syrians and Afghans, Brigadier Suleiman said." ("Fighting Resumes Between Lebanese Soldiers, Militants"--Update7--Tarek Al-Issawi and Massoud A. Derhally, Bloomberg).

Whoever Fateh al-Islam turns out to be in terms of "who"--distinct personalities with names, histories, beliefs, and heartaches--rather than ideology, this, according to today's The Middle East Times ("Lebanon Vows to Crush "Terror" as Refugees Flee") describes how worthwhile the fighting and mayhem have been for the resident Palestinians, who literally don't know Fateh al-Islam from Adam:

"Relief agencies are hoping to get more aid to those still inside the once densely populated shantytown, battered by army shelling into a war zone of shrapnel-scarred houses, rubble-strewn streets, and burned out shells of cars."

I don't know what Allah thinks of it, but for me, the description has become too familiar: everywhere AQ and other militia and militants have been with arms, "rubble-strewn streets, and burned out shells of cars" have formed the dominant impression. 

From the looks of it, the ritual of warfare, the summons to it and timeless intergenerational identity imparted by it, would seem to count for far more than any good political result or religious state of being or grace apart from the divide, mystery, and release from life that is death itself.

To get into detail on what the people look like, outside and in, after days, months, or years of so much violence may wait here to draw more from the province of fiction than journalism.

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Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim

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070524-1900

The apartment's a mess from the foyer back to the office, a clutter of boxes, books, bric-a-brac, but two spaces have been put in repair: the garden on the balcony and the living room, both of which lend themselves to repose. 

I hope we may keep them so.

Anne's transition this summer starts when she wants it too.  Whether I'll fare well with company, I don't know: I've lived alone most of my life, for family--through its attitudes, manipulations, and obligations--has been often the worst part of it.

I don't know whether I'll be able to push Communicating Arts photography into a frothy little business, a necessary part of producing and sustaining family, my own this time.

I don't know whether we'll prove a happy little literary household, up to our noses in books, reveling in it, and publishing.

I don't even know whether my heart will hold out, I have been such a pig in the kitchen, at the table, and down at the bar for years, and this year-and-one-half getting past the fire of winter 2006 has been especially sedentary.

Nonetheless, one looks at what's on the board and plays ahead firmly, willfully, realistically.

I am too old for blind optimism and too young in life to quit on dreams.

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Other Conversations: 070522-1313 MM

The Internet's many online communities may stand in for the family dinner table.  Instead of my father, the trolls play "Bait, challenge, and humiliate."  And when they're not around to provoke one into "writing a letter", other forthright but less antognistic personalities put up or pass along the news and opinion that shapes one's day.  From time to time on this interactive commons,  I'm going to post my responses to someone else's comments from elsewhere with the hope that you'll take them in and care to comment on and correct this writer's ideas as you see fit.

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The reference offered by the original poster at Modelmayhem.com: an op-ed piece by columnist Mark Shields appearing on Ocala.com, "Someday They'll Ask 'Who Lost Iraq'" .

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Frank, I'm never sure whether you're leading or provoking or secretly powering up the middle of the river.

Lebanon, with the intent of killing off a handful of AQ-type guys working out of a Palestinian refugee camp, has been bombing the living shit out of some 40,000 souls for about two and half days near its Tripoli neighborhood.  At the moment, under truce, they're letting into the camp the angels of mercy or scavengers of misery, whichever.

Israel, having made its concessions to the Palestinian cause, has been ramping up the hard line on the continued random stoning of its citizens by rocket: fundamentally, Hamas is at war with Israel, no ifs, ands, or buts and wherever its boys set up a launcher and have the poor luck of being detected, they and the party draw the worst kind of fire: objective, on-target, merciless, remorseless.

Ethiopia, threatened about a year ago by the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia, reports it has removed two-thirds of its forces from the country in the wake of a “regime change” that may be called successful as it leaves behind an interim Federal government, African Union peacekeeping forces, familiar enough warlords who may be interested in getting rich on peace this time around, and, back in the bush, a disassembled AQ-type guerrilla cell that looks like it has no role to play anywhere in the country except that of terrorist.

Morocco (2007):

"RABAT, May 6 (Reuters) - Moroccan security forces broke up a network helping to recruit fighters for al Qaeda's North African branch and arrested around 20 people overnight in several towns across the country, a government official said on Sunday.

The gang was involved in sending volunteers to training camps run by the Algerian-based al Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb, formerly known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), the official said, confirming an earlier report by state news agency MAP."

I guess I’ll have to check out the news from Iraq next, but it’s the same-old, sharing much with the current history of AQ and fringe Islamic cell and militia-level violent moral entrepreneurship elsewhere.  In such wars, or “guerrilla” or “low intensity” conflicts, winning has to do with getting the size of the problem down from state proportions to less exciting criminal ones. 

As much seems to be happening at least in state official terms in Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Morocco.

There are no standing armies in Islam engaged anywhere in other than internally suppressive or loaned-out peacekeeping operations. 

Even Iranian and Syrian forces, if they’re at play at all,  would be working in the shadows through this warfare.

In such bloody street debacles—a bomb goes off somewhere; a freelancer gets off an RPG; a gang slips out at night to “patrol” a  not necessarily unfriendly street with AK-47’s—it may be unfair to ask who is losing what? 

A glance at the “internally displaced” refugee reports tell you that most of those victimized in these conflicts lose their businesses, families, and homes if not their lives, but I have seen nothing to suggest any acquire or lose their religion or obtain any new freedom or security from the intermittent violence promoted by so many small forces scurrying through the dark, all of them either politically unrecognized or officially declared by established governments—not only the United States—as unlawful.