Seven Red

A remarkable study was published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers were seeking empirical explanations of collective animal behavior, specifically, the swarming and flocking behavior of starlings. How do starling flocks manage to maintain cohesion, even with rapid directional changes. How do the flocks self-organize? These sorts of studies have exploded over the last ten to fifteen years, as researchers in fields as various as biology, physics, economics, robotics, graphic design, and (humbly) rhetoric have sought to make sense of crowd and swarm phenomena.

The answer to the flocking problem has usually been presented as a “nearest neighbor” operation, which is to say, each bird functions according to a specific algorithm that “programs” responses based on the actions of several other birds in the vicinity. The key here is that flock behavior (and other sorts of crowd behavior, we might suggest, though serious scientists would tell loopy humanities people like me not to stretch empirical work into vague analogies) relies on metric distance: how close birds are to other birds. The current study overturns that long-standing position, arguing instead that flock behavior relies on “topological distance,” or the relative position of, and number of birds between, six to seven other birds, regardless of metric distance (within a given range, of course). This explanation – based on a method of empirical observation and 3D modeling – would seem to account for fluctuations in flock density in a way that metric distance would not.

I just read through the study, so I’ll have to turn over its implications before I irresponsibly and haphazardly apply them to rhetorical interactions (more motion, Mr. Burke!) , but I do find the notion of topological distance interesting. First, I think this causes big problems for prevailing cellular automata theory that continues to operate on nearest neighbor principles. Second, we can now see flocks as cut through with numerous dispersed packs; on a conceptual level, this makes more sense to me than a kind of jigsaw puzzle aggregation of nearest neighbor units. A new day in the study of immanence? Maybe!

For now, Starling Formations over Termini Station, Rome (the study took its starling data from this location):

I’ll be posting a few entries over the next month to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Tet Offensive, which began January 30, 1968 with some smaller scale attacks in I and II Corps, with the main offensive kicking off on January 31. Mostly, I’ll just post some passages from Michael Herr’s classic account in Dispatches; there are certainly more historically detailed accounts out there (Don Oberdorfer’s Tet: The Turning Point in the Vietnam War being at the top of the list), and certainly more military-history styled accounts, but for humor, understated pathos, and just knock-you-down good prose, it’s hard to beat Herr. I had students read the long first chapter, Breathing In, for a class I taught called “The Politics of Ingestion.” They loved it. What did it have to do with ingestion? Well, if you’ve read Dispatches, you’d get a sense of it. The unit – on rhetorical style – was called “The War (on Drugs).” So then, this opening passage from the second chapter, called simply Hell Sucks:

During the first few weeks of the Tet Offensive the curfew began early in the afternoon and was strictly enforced. By 2:30 each day Saigon looked like the final reel of On the Beach, a desolate city whose long avenues held nothing but refuse, windblown papers, small distinct piles of human excrement and the dead flowers and spent firecracker casings of the Lunar New Year. Alive, Saigon had been depressing enough, but during the Offensive it became so stark that, in an odd way, it was invigorating. The trees along the main streets looked like they’d been struck by lightning, and it became unusually, uncomfortably cold, one more piece of freak luck in a place where nothing was in its season. With so much filth growing in so many streets and alleys, an epidemic of plague was feared, and if there was ever a place that suggested plague, demanded it, it was Saigon in the Emergency. American civilians, engineers and construction workers who were making it here like they’d never made it at home began forming into large armed bands, carrying .45’s and grease guns and Swedish K’s, and no mob of hysterical vigilantes ever promised more bad news. You’d see them at ten in the morning on the terrace of the Continental waiting for the bar to open, barely able to light there own cigarettes until it did. The crowds on Tu Do Street looked like Ensor processioners, and there was a corruption in the air that had nothing to do with government workers on the take. After seven in the evening, when the curfew included Americans and became total, nothing but White Mice patrols and MP jeeps moved in the streets, except for a few young children who raced up and down over the rubbish, running newspaper kites up into the chilling wind.

Saigon in the Emergency:

When it comes to bizarre and inscrutable linguistic events, this one really takes the cake.

Apparently – and I’m still not sure I believe it – some people who would otherwise use the “N” word have opted for a substitute. Ready? It’s “Canadian,” as in “There are a lot of Canadians in that neighborhood.”

I’m not smart enough to understand how this transformation would work or spread or gain any kind of traction in a population, so I’ll just point you to the two articles that make the claim:

In the U.S. south, is Canadian a new racial slur?

When is a Canadian not a Canadian?

I was wondering about the sudden appearance all over the US media of the Iraqi flag this week, the totally new Iraqi flag, again. Now, whenever they mention Iraq in the news, you see this new flag as the backdrop or graphic. Its key difference from the old flag is the removal of the three stars, and the Allahu Akbar written (totally weirdly) in Saddam Hussein’s handwriting. Instead, we get virtually the same flag, but with this teched-up-looking Kufic script: Iraq 2.0, get it? Here it is, folks:

Believe it or not, Iraq seems to have been operating all this time with the old Iraqi flag. Two years is a long memory in the Iraq debacle. If you can think back longer than that, you might remember the last attempt to change the Iraqi flag, which happened back in April, 2004 when the geniuses in the Coalition Provisional Authority came up with this doozy (supposedly chosen through a contest), because everybody knows Islamic countries are just dying to get themselves some pale blue and white flaggage…

Needless to say, the fanfare around that flag was as short-lived as its shelf life in Ramadi; it went away quietly, slinking into the closets and storage rooms of conservative think tanks like former CPA uber-liar Dan Senor, hopefully never to be heard of again outside of the beaming and completely painful personal monologues of media moron Campbell Brown. And so the Saddam flag lived on, tagged by the dead dictator, until just this week, when the Iraqi parliament OK’ed this new flag in order to have something to fly at an upcoming summit in the Kurdish region, where Saddam’s handwriting is apparently verboten. Our good friends in the Awakening movement are not so happy:

BAGHDAD — Officials in Iraq’s mostly Sunni Muslim Anbar province are refusing to raise Iraq’s new national flag, which the parliament approved earlier this week.

“The new flag is done for a foreign agenda and we won’t raise it,” said Ali Hatem al Suleiman, a leading member of the U.S.-backed Anbar Awakening Council, “If they want to force us to raise it, we will leave the yard for them to fight al Qaida.”

Yikes. We learn later in the article that none of this really matters, since this flag – which took painful negotiations to pass by a slim vote – is not even permanent and probably won’t end up being the permanent flag, which the parliament has to decide on at some later date. They just needed something to fly at the meeting. But we get the outline of some of the real social conflict that runs through the Awakening movement:

Suleiman of the Anbar Awakening Council, however, said he was angry that the parliament and government toiled away on a new flag rather than dealing with the country’s lack of services.

Which just goes to show that whenever it seems like a frivolous symbolic dispute, it’s really a material question of resources. The threat, however, is interesting. If the Awakening folks are comfortable with outright extortion over an issue like this, one wonders exactly how much the payoff regime is actually paying off, in both senses of the term.

I have hesitated to post on anything related to The War, with the exception of some mild snark aimed David Petraeus’ way, largely because there’s too much know-nothing opinion about Iraq floating around, not too little, so I didn’t really want to add to it. And, indeed, one of the reasons the United States is in the Iraq mess is the utter incapacity among policy-makers to see Iraqis as people, and even smart people. There’s true racist and neo-colonial fuckery at the root of the war – and each “surprise move” by the “wily” Iraqis only confirms it. But I am shocked to see so little attention being paid to, in my view, a major New York Times story about the latest moves and counter-moves, titled Attacks Imperil U.S.-backed Militias in Iraq.

BAGHDAD — American-backed Sunni militias who have fought Sunni extremists to a standstill in some of Iraq’s bloodiest battlegrounds are being hit with a wave of assassinations and bomb attacks, threatening a fragile linchpin of the military’s strategy to pacify the nation.

At least 100 predominantly Sunni militiamen, known as Awakening Council members or Concerned Local Citizens, have been killed in the past month, mostly around Baghdad and the provincial capital of Baquba, urban areas with mixed Sunni and Shiite populations, according to Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani. At least six of the victims were senior Awakening leaders, Iraqi officials said.

Violence is also shaking up the Awakening movement, many of whose members are former insurgents, in its birthplace in the Sunni heartland of Anbar Province. On Sunday, a teenage suicide bomber exploded at a gathering of Awakening leaders, killing Hadi Hussein al-Issawi, a midlevel sheik, and three other tribesmen.

These attacks clearly go to the heart of the counter-insurgency strategy developed by David Petraeus; quelling the Sunni uprising (and concomitant civil war) is not so much about increasing troop strength as it is about providing the disenfranchised Sunnis with a stake in the survival of the Iraqi government. The troop increases were there as stick and boundary, but the plan really operates through the carrot. Since the Shia weren’t going to pay the Sunni off, and since they still appear hostile to full Sunni participation (including revenue sharing), some other compromise had to be made, and that largely happened through payoffs and encouragement of this “Awakening Movement, which is most likely just a palatable “political” front for the payoff regime in any case.

Now, I fully believe that people in Iraq wanted to stop the slaughter that was Summer-Winter 2006, and perhaps a lot of those people even joined this Awakening Movement with that intention, but the cynic in me sees it as largely pretext, an acceptable receptacle for U.S. cash money, where dispersed tribal entities seemed not abstract enough for American negotiators. We learn, furthermore, that the Awakening Movement is largely infiltrated and otherwise populated by the so-called “Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia” and still-hostile Sunnis, and that most of the members still view the Shiite Iraqi government with deep suspicion, if not outright hostility. The only conclusion one can draw is that the payoff regime is a temporary sop, at best, since it seems no closer to addressing the cause of the uprising, but rather seeks to ease the symptoms of Sunni disenfranchisement.

But how temporary? That’s the $64,000 question. Or $1 trillion, as the case may be. The article does not hold out high hopes for the long-term survival of the payoff regime. Once the still-hostile Sunni and “AQM” people saw how the infrastructure worked, they simply turned their attention to destroying it. Will this strategy will work? Can the Awakening constitute a semi-stable entity that tamps down the insurgency for a period sufficient to allow political reconciliation? That’s certainly up in the air at this point. But the underlying structure of the “Surge” does not seem like a solid foundation for long-term stability. Its entire premise is the failure of reconciliation at the level of the State. To the extent that the insurgents recognize this, which they surely do, it seems a very fraught sort of affair indeed.

As I was reading the article, however, I was struck by the detailed reporting on the social structure and relations in various provinces, and this put me in the mind of some of my long-ago Vietnam War research. Knowledgeable readers may recognize the title of this post; it comes from Jeffrey Race’s brilliant War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province. Race works through complex data to present a fairly persuasive case for why, as he puts it, a “revolutionary social movement” took root in Vietnam’s Long An province. It’s a local and detailed study, and I’m not sure we’ve seen similar case studies coming out of Iraq. Yes, I’ve seen even longish journalistic pieces on how the insurgency took root in Anbar (pieces clearly modelled – at least in conception – after War Comes to Long An), but they never provide the real historical depth of Race’s social science masterpiece. So where are the great studies? Where is the War Comes to Long An for Iraq? The Times article points toward a direction such research could take. But we’re still not there yet.

Watched terrible Kevin Bacon revenge fantasy Death Sentence. Brain hurts. Reduced to telegraphic sentence fragments as a result. Usual bourgeois man becoming-criminal to avenge wrongdoing against nuclear family. Gang leader very mean, but also family-oriented. Bacon character preposterous: a bullet-proof risk analyst. Cops completely incompetent, like Bacon escapes from guarded hospital with nothing but his hospital robe to go kill gangsters and the cops manage to show up at his house some time the following day, giving him plenty of time to go home, get clothes, and plot strategy. Absurdities pile up; John Goodman character less believable than a Scooter Libby autobiography. Repeat: brain hurts. Only clever twists on the genre involve a chase scene in a parking garage and the visual transformation of Bacon into scar-bodied gang member. Yes, both done before. Skip it.

I’ve always been fascinated by the rituals of smoking.

There’s a whole routine, for example, that goes into “grubbing cigarettes” (which includes calling it “grubbing”). Now, being a good addict with sufficient means, even in this expensive city, I manage my habit well, which means that I never run out of cigarettes. But other people do, and when they do, they will often grub a cigarette from you. Almost invariably, these are younger people and the very poor. Smokers know this, and there seems to be a ritual to handle it. Here’s how it works:

You’re walking down the street smoking a cigarette. A guy comes up to you (it’s always a guy) with a quarter, or two quarters, or a little stack of dimes, or even a dollar, and makes the initial offer: “Hey man. Can I buy a cigarette off you?” The proper response to this offer is the opposite of negotiation. You say “Keep your money,” and reach into your pocket or bag for your pack. They offer again: “No, really…” thrusting change at you. You wave it off, and hand over the cigarette. The whole thing is a feint, of course. You’re not really supposed to take the money in the first place, and the offerer knows that and you know that the offerer knows that. But it’s part of the ritual. You also, of course, offer a light, a counter-offer which, if things are working well, the other party will refuse by displaying his own lighter. One final element to the ritual: everybody looks at the status of your pack when you actually hand out the cigarette. If you pull out your pack, and you appear to be giving out your last cigarette, the offerer will make another fake good-faith gesture, indicating that he cannot take your last cigarette, it being bad form to do so. Once again, you are meant to wave off this gesture, indicating that you have another pack (true, if you’re a good addict), or that you are just then on the way to the store: “No worries. Got another pack, dude.”

The form of this ritual is essentially the same in every city and town I’ve lived in, from NYC, to Chicago, to San Francisco.

Moreover, you can’t say “no” to the offer, as a flat refusal. You have to come up with some lie, the best one being “Sorry, man. This is the last one.” The offerer nods, accepting the lie, though the offerer knows it is a lie and you know that the offerer knows. Another acceptable lie is “I just gave out three,” although this is usually only deployed at a party or in a bar (and not so much either, anymore).

Finally, there are serial violators of this form. First, you have your college-age to mid-20’s “non-smokers,” who only smoke when they drink, etc. These people are not really part of the culture, so they violate the form of this bargain consistently by never making the initial offer. They just ask, and sometimes – and this is the worst, now – they ask for multiple cigarettes during the course of a night. There’s no more distasteful question to a smoker than “Can I have another cigarette.” Even though this is a dazzling breach of etiquette, these people usually get their cigarette, but the giver will mutter some pretty nasty shit about them as they walk away to smoke it. It’s really taking advantage. The smoker must comply with the request. The smoker actually feels guilty when he or she lies about the “last one” or refuses a request. There’s a gift ethic built into the culture of smoking that compels you to hand out cigarettes to all comers. Why?

That brings us to the last group of grubbers and serial violators: teenagers. Luckily, I don’t lead the kind of life that brings me into contact with under-age teens. I don’t remember the last time I was asked for a cigarette by somebody clearly too young to have one. But it is the big ethical moment in the smoker’s life: Do I give this 14 year-old a cigarette? I’ve gotten bourgeois and proper enough to know that the answer is definitively NO, and to do the whole “Don’t start smoking” routine, but there’s still something uncomfortable about it. This goes to the structural root of the whole gift culture of smoking: everybody starts smoking as a grubber. That is, when you start smoking, you are invariably a bad addict who doesn’t manage the addiction very well. You constantly run out of cigarettes (largely because you don’t really believe you are an addict), and you are therefore constantly grubbing. And, for the most part, you get cigarettes from friends and from random adults.

This is why, I think, the whole ritual plays out as it does. Once you come to terms with your habit, and start managing it well, you are essentially indebted to all those people that supported your habit before, and you pay off that debt by handing out cigarettes to all comers. The offered payment, in this sense, is superfluous. But teenagers don’t feel this debt yet, so they don’t work the ritual. You’re supposed to say NO to the teenager, of course, even though the imaginary payment of the debt would require you to say YES, precisely because you would be replicating the conditions under which you assumed the debt in the first place, this time as the lender.

Of course, I’m using debt very loosely here: none of these are really exchange calculations. You’re “paying back” some random Joe Schmoe in Chicago for all those cigarettes Petey the Greek gave you when you were fifteen. What’s curious is that they have to cloak or disguise themselves as exchange relationships through the form of the ritual.

Addendum: Stupid Smoke Grubbing Jokes you Learn When You’re Fifteen

Grubber: Hey, man. Ya got an extra cigarette?
Grubee: Extra? Nah. They only gave me twenty in this pack.

Grubber: Ya got a smoke?
Grubee: Here ya go.
Grubber: Ya got a light, too?
Grubee: Ya want a fuckin’ lung while you’re at it?

So there’s an extended conversation going on through Facebook email about that favorite topic of all New Yawkahs over 28: What happened to authentic New York? The predictable positions, of course, all come out. Yuppie interlopers ruined New York, the junkies on Delancy, the fancy cheese shop on Smith Street, we like one, not the other, etc. I’ve never known quite what to make of these arguments, but I like Andreas Huyssen’s take in a concise little essay called “Fear of Mice: The Times Square Redevelopment,” which appears in his Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. I saw Huyssen – a kind of Frankfurt School cultural critic – speak now many years ago on Maus as a memory text, and I guess it’s interesting how many of the successful graphic novels perform similar public memory functions (Persepolis being the obvious example, but isn’t Ghost World also a sort of memory text?).

In “Fear of Mice,” Huyssen addresses the Disneyfication of Times Square, the most manifest marker of the New New York, and an obvious locus for the debate. Whether you stand with the heroin addicts and peep shops or with the fucking Olive Garden (there’s a fucking Olive Garden in Manhattan, and people actually fucking go to it!!!) says a lot about where you might stand. Of course, it’s more complicated than that: whether you want junkies and stick-up kids and corrupt cops and crack rocks on Smith Street or the Brooklyn version of Mario Batali’s Po with its grilled guinea hen, pumpkin and scallion fregula is probably more where the argument is these days. In any case, Huyssen argues that both the clean-up mongers and the peep show nostalgists are running the same program: the desperate fear of social change. I especially like that the Sleaze Lovers get labeled the “romantics of marginality” – I am, of course, guilty of quite a bit of this myself, the whole “exit” business from Bey to Negri is vulnerable to just this charge.

No real conclusion here. Maybe it’s a question for others. I think I may be a little too close to the heat of this one to come up with anything interesting to say about it. But it did put me in the mind of one of NYC’s great pre-Great-Clean-Up verses, so here’s a little Gang Starr for your Friday morning. And really, how could you hate on a guy who came up with one of the most bizarre lyrics in the history of American music:

Lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
I get more props and stunts than Bruce Willis

The huh? This was our New York, right on the cusp, Spring 1994, right before Giuliani’s broken windows policing really started kicking in that summer. It was summer 1994: The Rangers won the Stanley Cup, and Giuliani killed working class culture in New York City. Maybe for the better. Like I said, too close to it. But I dare you to listen to “Mass Appeal” without nodding to the sick beat and sample.

babygirl talks. A lot. She says little words here and there like cay-cake (cake), baby-do (her doll), tshu (shoe), kib (crib), and bath (bath). She has little multi-word expressions like “close door,” “dinner time,” “bath time,” “tshu on,” “all done,” etc., etc. And I’ll be damned if she doesn’t seem to understand just about everything we say. We even had the dreaded moment when she mimicked a random goddammit (gammy-et).Ooops. But this morning she belted out her first full communicative, grammatically correct sentence. Sure, when she was a little older than a year, she used to say “Where da ball?” But that seemed purely imitative. She didn’t really want to know where the ball was; she was copying what you’re supposed to say when the ball goes under the couch.

But this. This sentence was motivated and specific. She had closed the door to our bedroom, so she was stuck inside. I was still in bed. She knocked a few times, because she knows knocking thanks to Mr. Brown, who can, among other things, sound like a cow, thunder, a bee, a clock, the rain (if you believe the rain sounds like dibble dibble dibble dop) and, well, the sound of a hand on a door, as in “knock knock.” So she knocked, like Mr. Brown. Nothing. No response. She whined a few times. I pretended to sleep through it. And then:

Mommy! Mommy! Open the door!

I shot up in bed. What’d you say? “The door,” she pointed. I’m thinking you could probably do worse for first sentences. Of course, as you probably suspected, this whole post is just an excuse to show you more cute pictures of the babygirl, so I’ll drop the subterfuge and get right to it.

I know I already posted one video from The National’s Boxer, but I could just have that record on a loop all day. Here’s “Apartment Story,” from the Craig Ferguson show in September: