Laila Lalami

This week, the American Library Association observes Banned Books Week, an effort at raising awareness about censorship and the freedom to read. Many books have been challenged, or entirely banned, over the years in the United States, including, at various times, Beloved, The Great Gatsby, Catch 22, The Grapes of Wrath, and (my personal favorite) The American Heritage Dictionary, which was removed from a Missouri library in 1978 because it contained “objectionable” words. Interestingly, the most common initiators of book challenges are parents. You can find a list of classics that have been challenged or banned over the years here.

Back in June, when the governor and the legislature were still fighting over the best way to balance the state’s budget without raising taxes, they agreed upon a series of cuts to public education in California. One of their ideas was to take away $800 million from the University of California system. When I wrote about this for the Nation, I argued that:

The UC budget represents only $3 billion of the state’s budget, but its economic, educational and health benefits are enormous. The UC system employs 170,000 faculty and staff; it educates 220,000 students; its five medical centers serve more than 3.6 million patients each year; and for every dollar it receives in state research funding, it secures six more in federal and private research dollars. Cutting hundreds of millions of dollars from California’s public universities would be an unmitigated disaster. It would result in huge losses in tax revenues for the state and a decline in the quality of healthcare, and it would eventually lead to nothing short of the dismantling of quality public higher education in the state.

In early July, when most faculty and students were away, the administrators of the University of California began sending a series of emails, which seemed to me confusing and contradictory. It eventually became clear that President Yudoff’s plan included salary cuts and furloughs for all faculty and staff, larger classes, reduced enrollment, and higher tuition and fees. Because of the University’s system of “shared governance,” the faculty and staff still believed they would have a voice in how the budget cuts would be implemented on their individual campuses.

So when the UC faculty voted (system-wide) to have at least 6 instruction-day furloughs (out of a total of 26), they expected to be heard. Ordinarily, faculty divide their time between three main duties: teaching, service, and research. It makes sense that at least some of the furlough time be on instruction days. In addition, instruction-day furloughs keep the pressure on the state and force the governor/legislature to be accountable for the effects of continued disinvestment from public education. But on August 21, the University’s administrators announced that “the decision was made to not have faculty furlough days take place on instructional days.” This seems to be a fairly clear violation of the system of shared governance.

In addition, while the administrators claim that the salary cuts were unavoidable, they also somehow managed to vote for pay increases for a couple dozen top administrators way back in May. So the administrators do believe that the cuts are necessary, so long as the people at the very top are not affected.

Most importantly, the students will have larger and fewer classes, and higher tuition and fees. The cost of their education has risen dramatically and, chances are, will continue to rise over the next few years. Meanwhile, there are fewer options for them in the job market.

The UC Board of Regents Chair, Russell Gould, launched a commission, which he will co-chair with President Yudoff. It’s called the “Commission on the Future of UC” and it will likely help redefine the way in which the University will operate in the next few years. It consists of business and professional people, chancellors and deans from UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UCLA, and UC Santa Barbara (but not other campuses—UC Riverside, UC Santa Cruz, UC Merced, UC Davis, UC San Francisco, and UC San Diego), and very few faculty. There is real reason to worry that certain fields and certain campuses will be given a higher priority than those fields/campuses that do not bring in as much money to the University.

It is because of all of this that a group of UC faculty, including faculty on my campus, has organized a walkout for September 24. Our walkout is endorsed by the American Association of University Professors.

From the essay “Corn-Pone Opinions,” which Twain wrote in 1901 but didn’t publish during his lifetime. It first appeared in print in 1923.

Men think they think upon great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side; they arrive at convictions, but they are drawn from a partial view of the matter in hand and are of no particular value. They swarm with their party, they feel with their party, they are happy in their party’s approval; and where the party leads they will follow, whether for right and honor, or through blood and dirt and a mush of mutilated morals.

In our late canvass half of the nation passionately believed that in silver lay salvation, the other half as passionately believed that that way lay destruction. Do you believe that a tenth part of the people, on either side, had any rational excuse for having an opinion about the matter at all? I studied that mighty question to the bottom — came out empty. Half of our people passionately believe in high tariff, the other half believe otherwise. Does this mean study and examination, or only feeling? The latter, I think. I have deeply studied that question, too — and didn’t arrive. We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it the Voice of God.

You can find the essay online here.

Photo Credit: LAT.

The October 8 issue of the New York Review of Books includes this short piece by Gary Wills, a damning account of how little Barack Obama has done to restore the system of checks and balances:

George W. Bush left the White House unpopular and disgraced. His successor promised change, and it was clear where change was needed. Illegal acts should cease—torture and indefinite detention, denial of habeas corpus and legal representation, unilateral canceling of treaties, defiance of Congress and the Constitution, nullification of laws by signing statements. Powers attributed to the president by the theory of the unitary executive should not be exercised. Judges who are willing to give the president any power he asks for should not be confirmed.

But the momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed. It was not created by the Bush administration. The whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch. The monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire national security state, the classification and clearance systems, the expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the “war on terror”—all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941–2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order.

The truth of this was borne out in the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency. At his confirmation hearing to be head of the CIA, Leon Panetta said that “extraordinary rendition”—the practice of sending prisoners to foreign countries—was a tool he meant to retain. Obama’s nominee for solicitor general, Elena Kagan, told Congress that she agreed with John Yoo’s claim that a terrorist captured anywhere should be subject to “battlefield law.” On the first opportunity to abort trial proceedings by invoking “state secrets”—the policy based on the faulty Reynolds case—Obama’s attorney gen- eral, Eric Holder, did so. Obama refused to release photographs of “enhanced interrogation.” The CIA had earlier (illegally) destroyed ninety-two videotapes of such interrogations—and Obama refused to release documents describing the tapes.

You can read it all here.

At one of those dinners that can happen only in Los Angeles, I found myself seated at a table with an American community organizer, an Australian banker, an Israeli model/actress, an Iraqi human rights activist, a French businessman, and an Indian TV producer. Against all better judgment, the topic of Israel/Palestine was brought up. The banker turned to me and said, “I know you and [the Iraqi human rights activist] would disagree with me, but I support AIPAC. So does [the Israeli actress]. I think they’re doing a great job.”

The Iraqi activist and I exchanged a glance, wondering which one of us would open that particular can of worms. I cleared my throat. “Have you heard of J Street?” I began. “It’s a …”

The banker interrupted me. “Yeah, I’ve heard of those guys. They’re a bunch of well-meaning American Jews who don’t know what it’s like on the ground.”

As I said, this gentleman was neither an Israeli nor a Palestinian, so I imagine that whatever he knew about “what it was like on the ground” must have been at second hand. Still, the whole conversation made me realize how entrenched AIPAC was, and how much work an upstart like J Street has to do.

This weekend, the New York Times Magazine ran a rather long article by James Traub about J-Street. The lobbying group’s positions are summarized about halfway through the piece:

According to its “statement of principles,” [J Street] favors “creation of a viable Palestinian state as part of a negotiated two-state solution, based on the 1967 borders with agreed reciprocal land swaps” — the formula envisioned by the Clinton administration in its 2000 negotiations with Yasir Arafat and Ehud Barak. Ben-Ami says he also favors Jerusalem as the shared capital of the two states. On the question of talks with Hamas, classed as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, J Street takes the cautious view that while we should not speak directly with officials, we should engage through intermediaries with the goal of finding interlocutors willing to live in peace with Israel.

This isn’t exactly earth-shattering. In fact, from where I stand, this doesn’t go nearly far enough. So to think that this group (which, let’s remember, is probably closer to representing the views of American citizens than those of a foreign nation) is having such a hard time being heard is really kind of depressing. In the end, as with so much else, it all has to do with passion:

J Street specializes in mounting campaigns that may appeal to the 92 percent [of American Jews] who care about other causes more than they do about Israel. Last September, the organization asked supporters to sign a petition demanding that sponsors revoke an invitation to Sarah Palin to speak at an otherwise nonpartisan rally on Iran. J Street says that more than 25,000 people signed it in 24 hours. [...]

This in turn raises a question about J Street’s prospects. As a lobbying group, would you rather represent the passionate few or the dispassionate many? The National Rifle Association knows the answer to that question. One administration official involved with the Middle East points out that Aipac cultivates single-issue partisans. Wielding the other 92 percent into a potent political force, he notes, will be “a major, long-term and uphill task.” He adds, “I’m not sure it can be done.”

You can read the entire article here.

From Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album,” which is on the required reading list for a class I am teaching this fall:

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

The essay appears in the collection by the same name.

Photo credit: Village Voice.

Last night, when President Obama was delivering his speech on health care reform to Congress, I thought that there was something wrong with my ears. (Something that, as my friend A. pointed out, my health care provider would not be pleased about; they’re liable to re-classify it as a pre-existing condition.) I thought perhaps I had imagined the guy who heckled the President from the floor. But no, I hadn’t. There really is a Congressman Joe Wilson, he’s a Republican from South Carolina, and he really did scream “You lie!” while the President was describing his plan. Why is it so impossible to have an adult, reasonable conversation about health care reform in this country?

Gary Younge lays out a few possible reasons in a short piece that appeared in The Nation this morning. Here is how it begins:

Spare a thought, and maybe even a dime, for Kenneth Gladney. In August he and other members of the right-wing St. Louis Tea Party arrived at a town-hall meeting organized by Missouri Democrat Russ Carnahan to lobby against universal healthcare. In the spirit of this fraught summer, a fight broke out, ending in six arrests.

Who threw the first punch depends on whom you ask. But who got the worst of it was fairly clear. Gladney was taken to the emergency room with injuries to his knee, back, elbow, shoulder and face and ended up in a wheelchair. His troubles were just beginning. Recently laid off, this particular anti-health reform protester, it turned out, had no health insurance. Last heard, he was still accepting donations for his medical expenses.

It’s not difficult to ridicule the American right. Its peculiar blend of paranoia, mania, fantasy and misanthropy has been given full rein these past few months. Those who demanded in July to see Obama’s birth certificate (which does exist) ended August invoking the British healthcare system’s “death panels” (which do not). That most of their claims were verifiably false was of little consequence–to them at least. At one point they insisted that if scientist Stephen Hawking were British and subject to the National Health Service, he would be dead, even though Hawking is British, alive and grateful to the NHS for his care.

You can read the rest here. As for Obama’s plan, I really urge you to watch what Dennis Kucinich has to say about it. We need the public option. Now.

Here is how the French newspaper Le Figaro titled its exclusive interview with Afghan president Hamid Karzaï: Karzai: “Je ne serais pas une marionette des Etats-Unis”. (Karzaï: “I will not be a puppet of the United States.”) It’s the funniest headline I’ve seen in a long time. Such existential angst on his part.

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The Californian artist Sandow Birk has just unveiled a new, monumental project titled American Qur’an, a series of paintings of an English-language Qur’an that has been adorned with scenes from American life. He has been working on this project since 2004, and has managed to finish approximately 60 of the 114 chapters. Some of the paintings are on display at the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco and others at the Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Los Angeles.

I went to see the show when it opened this past weekend. Each of Birk’s paintings is made up of a Qur’anic chapter hand-written in ink, in a style of writing reminiscent of graffiti art. According to the New York Times, the text comes from a copyright-free 1861 English translation by J. M. Rodwell. Beneath the hand-written chapters are pictures in gouache. A few of the illustrations seem to me to be literal or expected (e.g. the chapter titled “The Constellations” comes with a picture of a constellation), but the vast majority are novel or unusual in some way (e.g. the first chapter, the Fatiha, appears with a maze of L.A. freeways.) Most of the pictures are narrative scenes: farmers working in a field; people standing in front of a display of dinosaur bones; workers picking up trash; and so on.

When Jori Finkel of the New York Times asked Usman Madha of the King Fahd Mosque what he thought of the project, he cautioned that some people might find the work offensive. The potential for offense is always there, as with any piece of art. But my take on it is that, although the project is titled American Qur’an, it is a highly idiosyncratic series.

It is not what one might call traditionally “American.” The painted scenes do not take place exclusively in the United States; there are representations of outer space and of a South American pyramid. And those narrative scenes that are from the United States include many different races, ethnicities, and languages. Neither could the project be referred to as a proper “Qur’an”. It is not a book, it is a series of paintings. The text is not in Arabic; it’s in English. And it doesn’t even appear to be entirely faithful to one English version. For instance, I noticed that in Rodwell’s translation, Chapter 86 is titled “The Morning Star” and begins with “By the heaven, and by the Night-Comer! / But who shall teach thee what the night-comer is?” whereas in Sandow Birk’s version, Chapter 86 uses the Arabic title of “At Taariq” and begins with the “By the heaven and that which comes in the night/But who shall teach you what it is that comes in the night.” Chapter 36 uses the proper name “Yasin” as its title and so do several English translations, but Birk uses the title “Human Being.” Birk also includes a couple of misspellings. In Chapter 53 (“The Star”) the word revelation is spelled revalation. All in all, this struck me as a highly personal project, in which an artist tries to make sense of the Qur’an on a highly personal level.

Photo credit: Sandow Birk/Koplin del Rio Gallery

Here is a brief excerpt from Ian McEwan’s Atonement, from the scene in which thirteen-year-old Briony laments having written a play for her brother Leon, instead of a short story:

The title lettering, the illustrated cover, the pages bound—in that word alone she felt the attraction of the neat, limited and controllable form she had left behind when she decided to write a play. A story was direct and simple, allowing nothing to come between herself and her reader—no intermediaries with their private ambitions or incompetence, no pressures of time, no limits on resources. In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world; in a play you had to make do with what was available: no horses, no village streets, no seaside. No curtain. It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled. You said the word castle, and it was there, seen from some distance, with woods in high summer spread before it, the air bluish and soft with smoke rising from the blacksmith’s forge, and a cobbled road twisting away into the green shade…”

I just started work on a new short story, which, I suppose, is what reminded me of this passage from Atonement.

Photo: Eamon McCabe.