To all Hollywood writer nincompoops -- go back on strike

For those of us who are not in the habit of watching the US crime show NCIS, which by now is most likely syndicated on Rustavi along with Prison Escape and all that other salacious Murdoch-esque programs the Georgians and Americans are addicted to, I would like to suggest one gigantic copout, on behalf of my compatriots, why Americans still know virtually nothing about this world they inhabit -- our gods of distraction and ignorant bliss, aka the Hollywood writers, know nothing about this world, or if they really do, they must get some serious power trips out of sowing the seeds of fear in the hearts of ordinary Americans weekdays and throwing benefits for the audaciously hopeful Obama on weekends.

For those of us out of the US mass-culture loop, I thought I would share with you that in tonight's episode of "NCIS", the Hollywood writers not only plagiarized Litvenenko's poisoning (however, this time by way of thallium-laced Cubans as opposed to a polonium-laced martini), but they also went so far as to fabricate a non-existent and therefore secretive naval unit in charge of random inspections of nuclear sites in the former Soviet Union. The poisoning occurred after those good-for-nothing Uzbeks penetrated the unit and paid off an attractive, blond travel assistant to poison the top inspector who was just about to pay a visit to a Tashkent reactor just as those shady Uzbeks were ramping up production of "something", which according to US spy satellite imagery looked an awful lot like the pictures taken of that site in Iraq pre-US invasion where rows of tractor trailers are believed to have levitated over a six-foot high concrete wall.

Do I need to even explain how many things are factually wrong about this plot to people on Megobrebs? I have no idea whether it's possible to lace Cubans with thallium and whether that instrument of death would be nearly as potent as a drop of polonium slipped in a drink (perhaps Jonathan knows), but suffice it to say that there is no such military unit and that the US Departments of Defense and Energy only engage in collaborative inspections of research reactors and weapon depots with the full knowledge and consent of governments of countries composing the former Soviet Union. There's another UN organization called the IAEA, and if Americans could stretch their memories back a few fateful years, they would recall this organization conducting random inspections of supposed nuclear facilities in a certain country, at a time when nearly two-thirds of this country was already technically under US and British military occupation. This organization still conducts random inspections in such evil-empire countries as Iran and North Korea, yet ask an American to spell out what the initials of this organization stand for, and I guarantee the overwhelming majority will return a blank stare (of if you do hear something at all, I imagine it would sound something like, International Assholes Envying Americans). Why is it that the Hollywood writers can't write about those sexy UN nuclear inspectors for a change and how they saved 4,000 American deaths by preventing the next war?

I don't even know where to begin about the Uzbekistan part. It's as if the Hollywood writers didn't even bother consulting the one half to a million ex-Soviets living in Los Angeles who could surely have informed the writers that it was Kazakhstan and the northern extremities of Russia, not Uzbekistan, that housed the brains of the Soviet Union's nuclear program. Uzbekistan has a little test reactor outside of Tashkent, but big surprise to most Americans -- so do most of the Big Ten universities in the Midwest.

At this point, I think the only hope for any of the Central Asian stans being redeemed in the eyes of most Americans after such factual productions as Borat and NCIS is for all of the Central Asian countries to drop the Persian suffix "stan" from their names and to force their populations to convert to mainline Christianity like half of Africa. And, while I'm on this point, I would just like to take the liberty to point out that it's 100 times cheaper and easier for me to purchase over-the-counter birth control and the morning-after-pill in Tashkent than it is in 48 of the 50 US states (leaving out Vermont and Hawaii that permit such insidious and evil things as gay marriage), yet somehow the people of the southern republics of the former Soviet Union always end up looking like US flag-burning (Iranians and Pakistanis), US embassy-invading (Iranians and Serbs), chador-wearing (Iranians and Afghans) suicide bombers (okay, okay -- Uzbeks and Chechens maybe here) in the eyes of Hollywood.

Now, can someone explain to me why it was such a a bad thing Hollywood writers were striking for almost a year if, in the meantime, American Idol resulted in much less dissemination of misinformation to the majority of Americans between ages 2 and 40? Could the writer's strike perhaps explain why a non-institutional candidate could win the Democratic nomination for the first time since McGovern and all because everyone younger than a so-called babyboomer has realized that politics is empowering and fun? Did these young people actually get so bored with Hollywood that they turned to Clinton and Obama duking it out on stage for much-needed entertainment and diversion from "Friends" reruns?

That's probably going a little too far, but I do think its time for Hollywood writers to realize that for too long they have wielded the power of the pen irresponsibly, all the while doing so under the guise of "liberalism". Of course, I fully anticipate that Greg will now accuse me of being all for group censorship, but I have to concede that films like "Osseniy Marafon" would not be so fun to watch without all of its hidden meanings and subtle political imagery (in fact, I think Osseniy Marafon would be downright boring if it had not been for Soviet censorship). The same is true in Iranian films. Censorship, given the right artists, produces some real fantastic works. What say you? Shall we raise that other McCarthy besides Eugene from the grave?

Iranian nationalism in US media (Part II)

I'm probably not the best person when it comes to discussing
Achaemenid Persia, but I would speculate (because I'm not a
archaeologist or historian who specializes in this area) that if
Achaemenid Persians celebrated the vernal equinox, then most likely
Sogdians and Bactrians also celebrated the vernal equinox. And,
Sogdians and Bactrians are generally considered separate ethnic,
linguistic, and political groupings from Achaemenid Persians. Of
course, these groups achieved the apex of their cultural and
economic power around the time that the Achaemenid Empire was
collapsing, that is, about the same time the Greeks were practicing
the first forms of European colonialism in the region, but the idea
that Achaemenid Persians were the originators of Nowruz and that
this idea spread into Sogdiana and Bactria, and not vice versa --
well, there's simply no proof. In fact, Tom can probably help us
here, because he has a Russian friend, Ilya, at the UofC who studies
Sogdian, and I'm sure Ilya can attest to the fact that a number of
modern Persian words today are in fact of Sogdian/Bactrian origin.

Even the idea that Zarusthra or Zoroaster (however you want to spell
the name) was born in modern day Iran is highly controversial for
Azeris and people in Central Asia. There's simply no conclusive
evidence that Zoroaster was born in modern-day Iran. Azeris point to
the central element of fire in Zoroastrianism as evidence that
Zoroastrianism came from the Absheron Peninsula because of the
tendency of oil deposits there to catch fire from the sun. On the
other hand, there are many Persians and Central Asians who believe
that Zoroaster came from the Transoxiana area somewhere in the
vicinity of Merv (aka Mary) or north of Mashad given the prevalence
of Zoroastrian beliefs and practices in Central Asia and Zoroaster's
plentiful borrowings from Hindu texts. Another religion that emerged
around this time was Manichaeism in Babylon. Manichaeism
incorporated many Zoroastrian and Buddhist elements as it spread
from Babylon to Eastern Turkestan. Is it fair to say Manichaeism was
an Iraqi invention because Mani lived there? Probably not. By the
time manichaeism reached either the Mediterranean basin or eastern
Turkestan, that religion had probably changed considerably, either
through its corruption or adaptation, depending on where you stand.

All in all, my point is, the nation-state is the wrong prism for
looking at and talking about history of a people or region if the
modern nation-state doesn't even correspond with historical or
ethnic lines to begin with. Iran is not really Persia pre-British
and Russian colonialism, and it's definitely not the Achaemenid
Empire. I personally don't see how Iran even has the right to
identify itself along ethnic lines if only a little over half of its
citizens in modern-day Iran are ethnically Persian. If anything, the
label Iranian should be much more like the label American, yet
Persians have co-opted that 20th-century creation of their despised
Shah as implying an ethnicity. Why? I argue because and only because
they learned from their 19th and 20th century European colonists how
to behave like nationalists (e.g. Mossadegh). If that's so, I expect
journalists for NPR to be intelligent enough to understand that
Iranian nationalism is no different from German nationalism with
respect to Turks or French nationalism with respect to Algerians.
Instead, we in the US are so uneducated about the people of this
particular country that even the most educated of us see everything
through the prism of radical Islam, completely looking past the fact
that Khomeini was elected on a nationalist/populist platform to lead
a country called not Persia but Iran -- a country where
Iranians controlled all the instruments of power and force, and
where those Iranians just happen to be invariably Persians.

Even worse in this logic and generally unknown to most Americans who read about Iran everyday in their newspapers is the common belief shared by a not insignificant portion of the Persian population of Iran that Iranians descend from Aryans, and by that logic, they are ethnically superior to Turks, Jews, and Arabs who all inhabit the modern-day country called Iran. To me, this is about as close to nazism as you'll find in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world -- even in Germany.

Iranian nationalism in US media

So, I hate to rehash the whole "khash" debate, but I was listening
to NPR Weekend Edition today, and what do I hear, but a story about
Nowruz with an intro line from the NPR announcer claiming that the
pre-Islamic holiday originated in Iran but that it is now celebrated
in many countries from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan.

Is it me, or does anyone think that NPR would ever have the
editorial arrogance or laziness to make the analogous claim that
Easter originated in Germany? Probably not. The fact that a
reputable (and supposedly worldly) western news source can get away
with such utter ignorance of the Caspian Sea basin should not
surprise me anymore, but I am nonetheless appalled that five years
into US-initiated wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and millions of
dollars spent in support of governments in Azerbaijan, Armenia,
Georgia and Uzbekistan, Americans still have almost little to no
understanding about the cultures of the people they're dealing with.
What little understanding they do have of these countries, they seem
to pick up from the respective expats living in the United States
who have their own nationalist agenda to drive home.

If that's true, why then should the Iranian diaspora in the United
States be all that surprised when a President and US Congress
invariably refuse to resume talks with Tehran, and instead opt to
support the nationalist agenda of Israel, if they themselves can
make educated non-Iranian-Americans buy into the hogwash that an
amorphous and ancient holiday that occurs around the time of the
vernal equinox originated in ancient Persia -- a country that at
that time included such modern nation-state entities as eastern
Turkey and Iraq, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan,
Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and western Afghanistan and Pakistan?

So, the point of all this? Even with all of the foreign policy
mistakes that the United States has made in such countries as
Georgia, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq, I don't think the Bush
Administration (by no logic or foreign policy of its own) has faired
all that worse relative to its supposed axis-of-evil enemy, Iran, in
part, because Americans, while they may be downright ignorant of the
Middle East, Caucasus, and Central Asia, are generally uninterested
or even apathetic about promoting the idea of American cultural or
historical superiority (i.e. the difference between nationalism and
patriotism). I would also argue that Russians see this cultural
arrogance in regard to Georgians, much like Turks, Kurds, Tajiks,
Afghans and Arabs see this in regard to Iranian Persians, and
Tibetans and Uighurs see this in regard to Han Chinese. Furthermore,
until there's a more concerted effort on the part of governments to
require their people to delve slightly deeper into the history of
opposing people living on the other side of their borders and often
within, I think there's little hope for overcoming the oppressive
nature of collective historical recollection in this part of the
world.

My question to everyone: Has anyone in the western foreign aid
community ever thought about helping initiate and fund foreign
language and history programs in some of these countries just to broaden understanding where there used to be some modicum before the advent of ethnic-based nationalism leading up to World War I and Cold War bipolarity following World War II?

All you ever wanted to know about Louisiana

Here are some interesting (and a few sad/ironic) facts about Baton Rouge and Louisiana history in general:

LSU keeps a live tiger in a pen adjacent to its football stadium.

The current governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, is the child of Indian immigrants, currently the youngest governor in the US, and (sadly) a Republican.

The current state capitol faces the tomb of Huey Long in one direction and in the other, one of the largest Exxon refineries in the US.

The auditor's room in the former state capitol is called the Exxon room and is devoted entirely to the political career of Billy Tauzin, who I had the undistinguished honor of serving messages to when I worked in the Republican cloakroom in the US House of Representatives.

The other auditor's room has a mechanical Huey Long that recites all of Long's political feats and adds a few moralizing tidbits about Long's rule for posterity's sake. The small office space adjoining that room explores Long's assassination and states that he was assassinated by Dr. Weiss, a Jewish physician, who was angered by a bill Long had sponsored that gerrymandered Dr. Weiss' father-in-law's judicial district out of existence.

Dr. Weiss killed Long with two very small caliber bullets. The bodyguard attached to Long responded by firing 10 bullets into Weiss. Even after Weiss was long dead, other bodyguards arrived and emptied their guns into Weiss.

The Louisiana Purchase would not have been possible if it had not been for Napoleon and the Russians. Napoleon was necessary for two reasons -- first, to force the Spanish to relinquish the Lousiana Territory after the French had gifted the Spanish the territory in recompense for Spain taking the losing side of France in the French-Indian War some forty years prior, and second, to create another expensive European war that required immediate international financing (sound familiar?). Just as is the case now, the Russians were the unspoken war financiers/profiteers, while British banks served as the brokers, taking their cut from the same country, with which they had fought one war and would soon fight another (out of which Lake Erie would remain part of Ohio and a large swath of Washington, including the White House and Capitol, would be burnt to the ground). When Jefferson and his emissaries, James Monroe and Robert Livingston, realized Napoleon wanted to get rid of not just New Orleans but the entire Louisiana Territory, they also realized they needed to come up with 15 million in immediately saleable securities to pay the French. The US could issue the bonds, of course, but in order to make that debt liquid (after all, Napoleon didn't want bonds from a newly created country with no credit history -- he wanted cold, hard bullion), the US needed the help of the Brits and the Russians. After handing over the bonds in exchange for the three treaties that gave the US the right to call the Louisiana Purchase its own, British banks immediately bought the US bonds from the French and then proceeded to sell many of them to the Russians, making the Russians in part responsible for the present-day shape of the United States -- 160 years before the Russians repeated the same folly as Napoleon in selling another piece of land replete in oil and other natural resources to finance their own unspoken war with the US and Europe.

President Jefferson, who is known in Republican circles to this day as the father of states' rights, was adamantly un-states' rights when it came to the Louisiana Purchase. In fact, the very first Republicans from the New England states during Jefferson's presidency were diametrically opposed to the purchase of the Louisiana Territory and sought to derail the purchase by requiring that each state ratify the purchase. Jefferson, a supposed believer in original intent of the constitutional framers, instead, turned to Article II in the US Constitution and argued that the purchase fell under the right of a president to make and sign treaties, using the analogy of a parent buying a child a piece of land. Because the "children" didn't complain too much about the acquisition of 52 million acres of cheap farmland with the added benefit of the largest river in North America serving as a transit route for farm products, the original fears of the New England Republicans eventually came true, and there was a gradual shift in political and economic power away from New England, across the Cumberland Pass, and toward the Ohio and Mississippi Valley regions. So, the next time someone asks, why Ohio and Iowa matter more today than New York and Massachusetts in deciding who becomes the next US President, answer Jefferson!

One final interesting tidbit -- the US consulate stamp on the Treaty of Cession as delivered to Napoleon in 1803 looks almost identical to the stamp used in any US embassy in the world today.

Why the nation-state must go

Maybe I'm going insane from counting computer switches for a living, but I'm thoroughly convinced after reading articles like this that there's no room for the prerogatives of the nation-state in our crowded and interconnected world. The real issue is not if but when and how we will arrive at an international system of governance.

It's all about me

Interesting article in the Washington Post this morning about the rise of narcissism in the United States. The article ends with advice to think about what we have versus what we don't have. Here's a better piece of advice: leave the United States for a few years to see how the rest of the world lives, then when you return, you surely won't be as narcissistic.