Sylvia Nasar: Manifold Destiny

On the evening of June 20th, several hundred physicists, including a Nobel laureate, assembled in an auditorium at the Friendship Hotel in Beijing for a lecture by the Chinese mathematician Shing-Tung Yau. In the late nineteen-seventies, when Yau was in his twenties, he had made a series of breakthroughs that helped launch the string-theory revolution in physics and earned him, in addition to a Fields Medal—the most coveted award in mathematics—a reputation in both disciplines as a thinker of unrivalled technical power.

Yau had since become a professor of mathematics at Harvard and the director of mathematics institutes in Beijing and Hong Kong, dividing his time between the United States and China. His lecture at the Friendship Hotel was part of an international conference on string theory, which he had organized with the support of the Chinese government, in part to promote the country’s recent advances in theoretical physics. (More than six thousand students attended the keynote address, which was delivered by Yau’s close friend Stephen Hawking, in the Great Hall of the People.) The subject of Yau’s talk was something that few in his audience knew much about: the Poincaré conjecture, a century-old conundrum about the characteristics of three-dimensional spheres, which, because it has important implications for mathematics and cosmology and because it has eluded all attempts at solution, is regarded by mathematicians as a holy grail.

Yau, a stocky man of fifty-seven, stood at a lectern in shirtsleeves and black-rimmed glasses and, with his hands in his pockets, described how two of his students, Xi-Ping Zhu and Huai-Dong Cao, had completed a proof of the Poincaré conjecture a few weeks earlier. “I’m very positive about Zhu and Cao’s work,” Yau said. “Chinese mathematicians should have every reason to be proud of such a big success in completely solving the puzzle.” He said that Zhu and Cao were indebted to his longtime American collaborator Richard Hamilton, who deserved most of the credit for solving the Poincaré. He also mentioned Grigory Perelman, a Russian mathematician who, he acknowledged, had made an important contribution. Nevertheless, Yau said, “in Perelman’s work, spectacular as it is, many key ideas of the proofs are sketched or outlined, and complete details are often missing.” He added, “We would like to get Perelman to make comments. But Perelman resides in St. Petersburg and refuses to communicate with other people.”

For ninety minutes, Yau discussed some of the technical details of his students’ proof. When he was finished, no one asked any questions. That night, however, a Brazilian physicist posted a report of the lecture on his blog. “Looks like China soon will take the lead also in mathematics,” he wrote.

Grigory Perelman is indeed reclusive. He left his job as a researcher at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, in St. Petersburg, last December; he has few friends; and he lives with his mother in an apartment on the outskirts of the city. Although he had never granted an interview before, he was cordial and frank when we visited him, in late June, shortly after Yau’s conference in Beijing, taking us on a long walking tour of the city. “I’m looking for some friends, and they don’t have to be mathematicians,” he said. The week before the conference, Perelman had spent hours discussing the Poincaré conjecture with Sir John M. Ball, the fifty-eight-year-old president of the International Mathematical Union, the discipline’s influential professional association. The meeting, which took place at a conference center in a stately mansion overlooking the Neva River, was highly unusual. At the end of May, a committee of nine prominent mathematicians had voted to award Perelman a Fields Medal for his work on the Poincaré, and Ball had gone to St. Petersburg to persuade him to accept the prize in a public ceremony at the I.M.U.’s quadrennial congress, in Madrid, on August 22nd.

The Fields Medal, like the Nobel Prize, grew, in part, out of a desire to elevate science above national animosities. German mathematicians were excluded from the first I.M.U. congress, in 1924, and, though the ban was lifted before the next one, the trauma it caused led, in 1936, to the establishment of the Fields, a prize intended to be “as purely international and impersonal as possible.”

However, the Fields Medal, which is awarded every four years, to between two and four mathematicians, is supposed not only to reward past achievements but also to stimulate future research; for this reason, it is given only to mathematicians aged forty and younger. In recent decades, as the number of professional mathematicians has grown, the Fields Medal has become increasingly prestigious. Only forty-four medals have been awarded in nearly seventy years—including three for work closely related to the Poincaré conjecture—and no mathematician has ever refused the prize. Nevertheless, Perelman told Ball that he had no intention of accepting it. “I refuse,” he said simply.

Over a period of eight months, beginning in November, 2002, Perelman posted a proof of the Poincaré on the Internet in three installments. Like a sonnet or an aria, a mathematical proof has a distinct form and set of conventions. It begins with axioms, or accepted truths, and employs a series of logical statements to arrive at a conclusion. If the logic is deemed to be watertight, then the result is a theorem. Unlike proof in law or science, which is based on evidence and therefore subject to qualification and revision, a proof of a theorem is definitive. Judgments about the accuracy of a proof are mediated by peer-reviewed journals; to insure fairness, reviewers are supposed to be carefully chosen by journal editors, and the identity of a scholar whose pa-per is under consideration is kept secret. Publication implies that a proof is complete, correct, and original.

By these standards, Perelman’s proof was unorthodox. It was astonishingly brief for such an ambitious piece of work; logic sequences that could have been elaborated over many pages were often severely compressed. Moreover, the proof made no direct mention of the Poincaré and included many elegant results that were irrelevant to the central argument. But, four years later, at least two teams of experts had vetted the proof and had found no significant gaps or errors in it. A consensus was emerging in the math community: Perelman had solved the Poincaré. Even so, the proof’s complexity—and Perelman’s use of shorthand in making some of his most important claims—made it vulnerable to challenge. Few mathematicians had the expertise necessary to evaluate and defend it.

After giving a series of lectures on the proof in the United States in 2003, Perelman returned to St. Petersburg. Since then, although he had continued to answer queries about it by e-mail, he had had minimal contact with colleagues and, for reasons no one understood, had not tried to publish it. Still, there was little doubt that Perelman, who turned forty on June 13th, deserved a Fields Medal. As Ball planned the I.M.U.’s 2006 congress, he began to conceive of it as a historic event. More than three thousand mathematicians would be attending, and King Juan Carlos of Spain had agreed to preside over the awards ceremony. The I.M.U.’s newsletter predicted that the congress would be remembered as “the occasion when this conjecture became a theorem.” Ball, determined to make sure that Perelman would be there, decided to go to St. Petersburg.

Ball wanted to keep his visit a secret—the names of Fields Medal recipients are announced officially at the awards ceremony—and the conference center where he met with Perelman was deserted. For ten hours over two days, he tried to persuade Perelman to agree to accept the prize. Perelman, a slender, balding man with a curly beard, bushy eyebrows, and blue-green eyes, listened politely. He had not spoken English for three years, but he fluently parried Ball’s entreaties, at one point taking Ball on a long walk—one of Perelman’s favorite activities. As he summed up the conversation two weeks later: “He proposed to me three alternatives: accept and come; accept and don’t come, and we will send you the medal later; third, I don’t accept the prize. From the very beginning, I told him I have chosen the third one.” The Fields Medal held no interest for him, Perelman explained. “It was completely irrelevant for me,” he said. “Everybody understood that if the proof is correct then no other recognition is needed.”

Proofs of the Poincaré have been announced nearly every year since the conjecture was formulated, by Henri Poincaré, more than a hundred years ago. Poincaré was a cousin of Raymond Poincaré, the President of France during the First World War, and one of the most creative mathematicians of the nineteenth century. Slight, myopic, and notoriously absent-minded, he conceived his famous problem in 1904, eight years before he died, and tucked it as an offhand question into the end of a sixty-five-page paper.

Poincaré didn’t make much progress on proving the conjecture. “Cette question nous entraînerait trop loin” (“This question would take us too far”), he wrote. He was a founder of topology, also known as “rubber-sheet geometry,” for its focus on the intrinsic properties of spaces. From a topologist’s perspective, there is no difference between a bagel and a coffee cup with a handle. Each has a single hole and can be manipulated to resemble the other without being torn or cut. Poincaré used the term “manifold” to describe such an abstract topological space. The simplest possible two-dimensional manifold is the surface of a soccer ball, which, to a topologist, is a sphere—even when it is stomped on, stretched, or crumpled. The proof that an object is a so-called two-sphere, since it can take on any number of shapes, is that it is “simply connected,” meaning that no holes puncture it. Unlike a soccer ball, a bagel is not a true sphere. If you tie a slipknot around a soccer ball, you can easily pull the slipknot closed by sliding it along the surface of the ball. But if you tie a slipknot around a bagel through the hole in its middle you cannot pull the slipknot closed without tearing the bagel.

Two-dimensional manifolds were well understood by the mid-nineteenth century. But it remained unclear whether what was true for two dimensions was also true for three. Poincaré proposed that all closed, simply connected, three-dimensional manifolds—those which lack holes and are of finite extent—were spheres. The conjecture was potentially important for scientists studying the largest known three-dimensional manifold: the universe. Proving it mathematically, however, was far from easy. Most attempts were merely embarrassing, but some led to important mathematical discoveries, including proofs of Dehn’s Lemma, the Sphere Theorem, and the Loop Theorem, which are now fundamental concepts in topology.

By the nineteen-sixties, topology had become one of the most productive areas of mathematics, and young topologists were launching regular attacks on the Poincaré. To the astonishment of most mathematicians, it turned out that manifolds of the fourth, fifth, and higher dimensions were more tractable than those of the third dimension. By 1982, Poincaré’s conjecture had been proved in all dimensions except the third. In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute, a private foundation that promotes mathematical research, named the Poincaré one of the seven most important outstanding problems in mathematics and offered a million dollars to anyone who could prove it.

“My whole life as a mathematician has been dominated by the Poincaré conjecture,” John Morgan, the head of the mathematics department at Columbia University, said. “I never thought I’d see a solution. I thought nobody could touch it.”

Grigory Perelman did not plan to become a mathematician. “There was never a decision point,” he said when we met. We were outside the apartment building where he lives, in Kupchino, a neighborhood of drab high-rises. Perelman’s father, who was an electrical engineer, encouraged his interest in math. “He gave me logical and other math problems to think about,” Perelman said. “He got a lot of books for me to read. He taught me how to play chess. He was proud of me.” Among the books his father gave him was a copy of “Physics for Entertainment,” which had been a best-seller in the Soviet Union in the nineteen-thirties. In the foreword, the book’s author describes the contents as “conundrums, brain-teasers, entertaining anecdotes, and unexpected comparisons,” adding, “I have quoted extensively from Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Mark Twain and other writers, because, besides providing entertainment, the fantastic experiments these writers describe may well serve as instructive illustrations at physics classes.” The book’s topics included how to jump from a moving car, and why, “according to the law of buoyancy, we would never drown in the Dead Sea.”

The notion that Russian society considered worthwhile what Perelman did for pleasure came as a surprise. By the time he was fourteen, he was the star performer of a local math club. In 1982, the year that Shing-Tung Yau won a Fields Medal, Perelman earned a perfect score and the gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad, in Budapest. He was friendly with his teammates but not close—“I had no close friends,” he said. He was one of two or three Jews in his grade, and he had a passion for opera, which also set him apart from his peers. His mother, a math teacher at a technical college, played the violin and began taking him to the opera when he was six. By the time Perelman was fifteen, he was spending his pocket money on records. He was thrilled to own a recording of a famous 1946 performance of “La Traviata,” featuring Licia Albanese as Violetta. “Her voice was very good,” he said.

At Leningrad University, which Perelman entered in 1982, at the age of sixteen, he took advanced classes in geometry and solved a problem posed by Yuri Burago, a mathematician at the Steklov Institute, who later became his Ph.D. adviser. “There are a lot of students of high ability who speak before thinking,” Burago said. “Grisha was different. He thought deeply. His answers were always correct. He always checked very, very carefully.” Burago added, “He was not fast. Speed means nothing. Math doesn’t depend on speed. It is about deep.”

At the Steklov in the early nineties, Perelman became an expert on the geometry of Riemannian and Alexandrov spaces—extensions of traditional Euclidean geometry—and began to publish articles in the leading Russian and American mathematics journals. In 1992, Perelman was invited to spend a semester each at New York University and Stony Brook University. By the time he left for the United States, that fall, the Russian economy had collapsed. Dan Stroock, a mathematician at M.I.T., recalls smuggling wads of dollars into the country to deliver to a retired mathematician at the Steklov, who, like many of his colleagues, had become destitute.

Perelman was pleased to be in the United States, the capital of the international mathematics community. He wore the same brown corduroy jacket every day and told friends at N.Y.U. that he lived on a diet of bread, cheese, and milk. He liked to walk to Brooklyn, where he had relatives and could buy traditional Russian brown bread. Some of his colleagues were taken aback by his fingernails, which were several inches long. “If they grow, why wouldn’t I let them grow?” he would say when someone asked why he didn’t cut them. Once a week, he and a young Chinese mathematician named Gang Tian drove to Princeton, to attend a seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study.

For several decades, the institute and nearby Princeton University had been centers of topological research. In the late seventies, William Thurston, a Princeton mathematician who liked to test out his ideas using scissors and construction paper, proposed a taxonomy for classifying manifolds of three dimensions. He argued that, while the manifolds could be made to take on many different shapes, they nonetheless had a “preferred” geometry, just as a piece of silk draped over a dressmaker’s mannequin takes on the mannequin’s form.

Thurston proposed that every three-dimensional manifold could be broken down into one or more of eight types of component, including a spherical type. Thurston’s theory—which became known as the geometrization conjecture—describes all possible three-dimensional manifolds and is thus a powerful generalization of the Poincaré. If it was confirmed, then Poincaré’s conjecture would be, too. Proving Thurston and Poincaré “definitely swings open doors,” Barry Mazur, a mathematician at Harvard, said. The implications of the conjectures for other disciplines may not be apparent for years, but for mathematicians the problems are fundamental. “This is a kind of twentieth-century Pythagorean theorem,” Mazur added. “It changes the landscape.”

In 1982, Thurston won a Fields Medal for his contributions to topology. That year, Richard Hamilton, a mathematician at Cornell, published a paper on an equation called the Ricci flow, which he suspected could be relevant for solving Thurston’s conjecture and thus the Poincaré. Like a heat equation, which describes how heat distributes itself evenly through a substance—flowing from hotter to cooler parts of a metal sheet, for example—to create a more uniform temperature, the Ricci flow, by smoothing out irregularities, gives manifolds a more uniform geometry.

Hamilton, the son of a Cincinnati doctor, defied the math profession’s nerdy stereotype. Brash and irreverent, he rode horses, windsurfed, and had a succession of girlfriends. He treated math as merely one of life’s pleasures. At forty-nine, he was considered a brilliant lecturer, but he had published relatively little beyond a series of seminal articles on the Ricci flow, and he had few graduate students. Perelman had read Hamilton’s papers and went to hear him give a talk at the Institute for Advanced Study. Afterward, Perelman shyly spoke to him.

“I really wanted to ask him something,” Perelman recalled. “He was smiling, and he was quite patient. He actually told me a couple of things that he published a few years later. He did not hesitate to tell me. Hamilton’s openness and generosity—it really attracted me. I can’t say that most mathematicians act like that.

“I was working on different things, though occasionally I would think about the Ricci flow,” Perelman added. “You didn’t have to be a great mathematician to see that this would be useful for geometrization. I felt I didn’t know very much. I kept asking questions.”

Shing-Tung Yau was also asking Hamilton questions about the Ricci flow. Yau and Hamilton had met in the seventies, and had become close, despite considerable differences in temperament and background. A mathematician at the University of California at San Diego who knows both men called them “the mathematical loves of each other’s lives.”

Yau’s family moved to Hong Kong from mainland China in 1949, when he was five months old, along with hundreds of thousands of other refugees fleeing Mao’s armies. The previous year, his father, a relief worker for the United Nations, had lost most of the family’s savings in a series of failed ventures. In Hong Kong, to support his wife and eight children, he tutored college students in classical Chinese literature and philosophy.

When Yau was fourteen, his father died of kidney cancer, leaving his mother dependent on handouts from Christian missionaries and whatever small sums she earned from selling handicrafts. Until then, Yau had been an indifferent student. But he began to devote himself to schoolwork, tutoring other students in math to make money. “Part of the thing that drives Yau is that he sees his own life as being his father’s revenge,” said Dan Stroock, the M.I.T. mathematician, who has known Yau for twenty years. “Yau’s father was like the Talmudist whose children are starving.”

Yau studied math at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he attracted the attention of Shiing-Shen Chern, the preëminent Chinese mathematician, who helped him win a scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley. Chern was the author of a famous theorem combining topology and geometry. He spent most of his career in the United States, at Berkeley. He made frequent visits to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and, later, China, where he was a revered symbol of Chinese intellectual achievement, to promote the study of math and science.

In 1969, Yau started graduate school at Berkeley, enrolling in seven graduate courses each term and auditing several others. He sent half of his scholarship money back to his mother in China and impressed his professors with his tenacity. He was obliged to share credit for his first major result when he learned that two other mathematicians were working on the same problem. In 1976, he proved a twenty-year-old conjecture pertaining to a type of manifold that is now crucial to string theory. A French mathematician had formulated a proof of the problem, which is known as Calabi’s conjecture, but Yau’s, because it was more general, was more powerful. (Physicists now refer to Calabi-Yau manifolds.) “He was not so much thinking up some original way of looking at a subject but solving extremely hard technical problems that at the time only he could solve, by sheer intellect and force of will,” Phillip Griffiths, a geometer and a former director of the Institute for Advanced Study, said.

In 1980, when Yau was thirty, he became one of the youngest mathematicians ever to be appointed to the permanent faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study, and he began to attract talented students. He won a Fields Medal two years later, the first Chinese ever to do so. By this time, Chern was seventy years old and on the verge of retirement. According to a relative of Chern’s, “Yau decided that he was going to be the next famous Chinese mathematician and that it was time for Chern to step down.”

Harvard had been trying to recruit Yau, and when, in 1983, it was about to make him a second offer Phillip Griffiths told the dean of faculty a version of a story from “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” a Chinese classic. In the third century A.D., a Chinese warlord dreamed of creating an empire, but the most brilliant general in China was working for a rival. Three times, the warlord went to his enemy’s kingdom to seek out the general. Impressed, the general agreed to join him, and together they succeeded in founding a dynasty. Taking the hint, the dean flew to Philadelphia, where Yau lived at the time, to make him an offer. Even so, Yau turned down the job. Finally, in 1987, he agreed to go to Harvard.

Yau’s entrepreneurial drive extended to collaborations with colleagues and students, and, in addition to conducting his own research, he began organizing seminars. He frequently allied himself with brilliantly inventive mathematicians, including Richard Schoen and William Meeks. But Yau was especially impressed by Hamilton, as much for his swagger as for his imagination. “I can have fun with Hamilton,” Yau told us during the string-theory conference in Beijing. “I can go swimming with him. I go out with him and his girlfriends and all that.” Yau was convinced that Hamilton could use the Ricci-flow equation to solve the Poincaré and Thurston conjectures, and he urged him to focus on the problems. “Meeting Yau changed his mathematical life,” a friend of both mathematicians said of Hamilton. “This was the first time he had been on to something extremely big. Talking to Yau gave him courage and direction.”

Yau believed that if he could help solve the Poincaré it would be a victory not just for him but also for China. In the mid-nineties, Yau and several other Chinese scholars began meeting with President Jiang Zemin to discuss how to rebuild the country’s scientific institutions, which had been largely destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Chinese universities were in dire condition. According to Steve Smale, who won a Fields for proving the Poincaré in higher dimensions, and who, after retiring from Berkeley, taught in Hong Kong, Peking University had “halls filled with the smell of urine, one common room, one office for all the assistant professors,” and paid its faculty wretchedly low salaries. Yau persuaded a Hong Kong real-estate mogul to help finance a mathematics institute at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing, and to endow a Fields-style medal for Chinese mathematicians under the age of forty-five. On his trips to China, Yau touted Hamilton and their joint work on the Ricci flow and the Poincaré as a model for young Chinese mathematicians. As he put it in Beijing, “They always say that the whole country should learn from Mao or some big heroes. So I made a joke to them, but I was half serious. I said the whole country should learn from Hamilton.”

Grigory Perelman was learning from Hamilton already. In 1993, he began a two-year fellowship at Berkeley. While he was there, Hamilton gave several talks on campus, and in one he mentioned that he was working on the Poincaré. Hamilton’s Ricci-flow strategy was extremely technical and tricky to execute. After one of his talks at Berkeley, he told Perelman about his biggest obstacle. As a space is smoothed under the Ricci flow, some regions deform into what mathematicians refer to as “singularities.” Some regions, called “necks,” become attenuated areas of infinite density. More troubling to Hamilton was a kind of singularity he called the “cigar.” If cigars formed, Hamilton worried, it might be impossible to achieve uniform geometry. Perelman realized that a paper he had written on Alexandrov spaces might help Hamilton prove Thurston’s conjecture—and the Poincaré—once Hamilton solved the cigar problem. “At some point, I asked Hamilton if he knew a certain collapsing result that I had proved but not published—which turned out to be very useful,” Perelman said. “Later, I realized that he didn’t understand what I was talking about.” Dan Stroock, of M.I.T., said, “Perelman may have learned stuff from Yau and Hamilton, but, at the time, they were not learning from him.”

By the end of his first year at Berkeley, Perelman had written several strikingly original papers. He was asked to give a lecture at the 1994 I.M.U. congress, in Zurich, and invited to apply for jobs at Stanford, Princeton, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the University of Tel Aviv. Like Yau, Perelman was a formidable problem solver. Instead of spending years constructing an intricate theoretical framework, or defining new areas of research, he focussed on obtaining particular results. According to Mikhail Gromov, a renowned Russian geometer who has collaborated with Perelman, he had been trying to overcome a technical difficulty relating to Alexandrov spaces and had apparently been stumped. “He couldn’t do it,” Gromov said. “It was hopeless.”

Perelman told us that he liked to work on several problems at once. At Berkeley, however, he found himself returning again and again to Hamilton’s Ricci-flow equation and the problem that Hamilton thought he could solve with it. Some of Perelman’s friends noticed that he was becoming more and more ascetic. Visitors from St. Petersburg who stayed in his apartment were struck by how sparsely furnished it was. Others worried that he seemed to want to reduce life to a set of rigid axioms. When a member of a hiring committee at Stanford asked him for a C.V. to include with requests for letters of recommendation, Perelman balked. “If they know my work, they don’t need my C.V.,” he said. “If they need my C.V., they don’t know my work.”

Ultimately, he received several job offers. But he declined them all, and in the summer of 1995 returned to St. Petersburg, to his old job at the Steklov Institute, where he was paid less than a hundred dollars a month. (He told a friend that he had saved enough money in the United States to live on for the rest of his life.) His father had moved to Israel two years earlier, and his younger sister was planning to join him there after she finished college. His mother, however, had decided to remain in St. Petersburg, and Perelman moved in with her. “I realize that in Russia I work better,” he told colleagues at the Steklov.

At twenty-nine, Perelman was firmly established as a mathematician and yet largely unburdened by professional responsibilities. He was free to pursue whatever problems he wanted to, and he knew that his work, should he choose to publish it, would be shown serious consideration. Yakov Eliashberg, a mathematician at Stanford who knew Perelman at Berkeley, thinks that Perelman returned to Russia in order to work on the Poincaré. “Why not?” Perelman said when we asked whether Eliashberg’s hunch was correct.

The Internet made it possible for Perelman to work alone while continuing to tap a common pool of knowledge. Perelman searched Hamilton’s papers for clues to his thinking and gave several seminars on his work. “He didn’t need any help,” Gromov said. “He likes to be alone. He reminds me of Newton—this obsession with an idea, working by yourself, the disregard for other people’s opinion. Newton was more obnoxious. Perelman is nicer, but very obsessed.”

In 1995, Hamilton published a paper in which he discussed a few of his ideas for completing a proof of the Poincaré. Reading the paper, Perelman realized that Hamilton had made no progress on overcoming his obstacles—the necks and the cigars. “I hadn’t seen any evidence of progress after early 1992,” Perelman told us. “Maybe he got stuck even earlier.” However, Perelman thought he saw a way around the impasse. In 1996, he wrote Hamilton a long letter outlining his notion, in the hope of collaborating. “He did not answer,” Perelman said. “So I decided to work alone.”

Yau had no idea that Hamilton’s work on the Poincaré had stalled. He was increasingly anxious about his own standing in the mathematics profession, particularly in China, where, he worried, a younger scholar could try to supplant him as Chern’s heir. More than a decade had passed since Yau had proved his last major result, though he continued to publish prolifically. “Yau wants to be the king of geometry,” Michael Anderson, a geometer at Stony Brook, said. “He believes that everything should issue from him, that he should have oversight. He doesn’t like people encroaching on his territory.” Determined to retain control over his field, Yau pushed his students to tackle big problems. At Harvard, he ran a notoriously tough seminar on differential geometry, which met for three hours at a time three times a week. Each student was assigned a recently published proof and asked to reconstruct it, fixing any errors and filling in gaps. Yau believed that a mathematician has an obligation to be explicit, and impressed on his students the importance of step-by-step rigor.

There are two ways to get credit for an original contribution in mathematics. The first is to produce an original proof. The second is to identify a significant gap in someone else’s proof and supply the missing chunk. However, only true mathematical gaps—missing or mistaken arguments—can be the basis for a claim of originality. Filling in gaps in exposition—shortcuts and abbreviations used to make a proof more efficient—does not count. When, in 1993, Andrew Wiles revealed that a gap had been found in his proof of Fermat’s last theorem, the problem became fair game for anyone, until, the following year, Wiles fixed the error. Most mathematicians would agree that, by contrast, if a proof’s implicit steps can be made explicit by an expert, then the gap is merely one of exposition, and the proof should be considered complete and correct.

Occasionally, the difference between a mathematical gap and a gap in exposition can be hard to discern. On at least one occasion, Yau and his students have seemed to confuse the two, making claims of originality that other mathematicians believe are unwarranted. In 1996, a young geometer at Berkeley named Alexander Givental had proved a mathematical conjecture about mirror symmetry, a concept that is fundamental to string theory. Though other mathematicians found Givental’s proof hard to follow, they were optimistic that he had solved the problem. As one geometer put it, “Nobody at the time said it was incomplete and incorrect.”

In the fall of 1997, Kefeng Liu, a former student of Yau’s who taught at Stanford, gave a talk at Harvard on mirror symmetry. According to two geometers in the audience, Liu proceeded to present a proof strikingly similar to Givental’s, describing it as a paper that he had co-authored with Yau and another student of Yau’s. “Liu mentioned Givental but only as one of a long list of people who had contributed to the field,” one of the geometers said. (Liu maintains that his proof was significantly different from Givental’s.)

Around the same time, Givental received an e-mail signed by Yau and his collaborators, explaining that they had found his arguments impossible to follow and his notation baffling, and had come up with a proof of their own. They praised Givental for his “brilliant idea” and wrote, “In the final version of our paper your important contribution will be acknowledged.”

A few weeks later, the paper, “Mirror Principle I,” appeared in the Asian Journal of Mathematics, which is co-edited by Yau. In it, Yau and his coauthors describe their result as “the first complete proof” of the mirror conjecture. They mention Givental’s work only in passing. “Unfortunately,” they write, his proof, “which has been read by many prominent experts, is incomplete.” However, they did not identify a specific mathematical gap.

Givental was taken aback. “I wanted to know what their objection was,” he told us. “Not to expose them or defend myself.” In March, 1998, he published a paper that included a three-page footnote in which he pointed out a number of similarities between Yau’s proof and his own. Several months later, a young mathematician at the University of Chicago who was asked by senior colleagues to investigate the dispute concluded that Givental’s proof was complete. Yau says that he had been working on the proof for years with his students and that they achieved their result independently of Givental. “We had our own ideas, and we wrote them up,” he says.

Around this time, Yau had his first serious conflict with Chern and the Chinese mathematical establishment. For years, Chern had been hoping to bring the I.M.U.’s congress to Beijing. According to several mathematicians who were active in the I.M.U. at the time, Yau made an eleventh-hour effort to have the congress take place in Hong Kong instead. But he failed to persuade a sufficient number of colleagues to go along with his proposal, and the I.M.U. ultimately decided to hold the 2002 congress in Beijing. (Yau denies that he tried to bring the congress to Hong Kong.) Among the delegates the I.M.U. appointed to a group that would be choosing speakers for the congress was Yau’s most successful student, Gang Tian, who had been at N.Y.U. with Perelman and was now a professor at M.I.T. The host committee in Beijing also asked Tian to give a plenary address.

Yau was caught by surprise. In March, 2000, he had published a survey of recent research in his field studded with glowing references to Tian and to their joint projects. He retaliated by organizing his first conference on string theory, which opened in Beijing a few days before the math congress began, in late August, 2002. He persuaded Stephen Hawking and several Nobel laureates to attend, and for days the Chinese newspapers were full of pictures of famous scientists. Yau even managed to arrange for his group to have an audience with Jiang Zemin. A mathematician who helped organize the math congress recalls that along the highway between Beijing and the airport there were “billboards with pictures of Stephen Hawking plastered everywhere.”

That summer, Yau wasn’t thinking much about the Poincaré. He had confidence in Hamilton, despite his slow pace. “Hamilton is a very good friend,” Yau told us in Beijing. “He is more than a friend. He is a hero. He is so original. We were working to finish our proof. Hamilton worked on it for twenty-five years. You work, you get tired. He probably got a little tired—and you want to take a rest.”

Then, on November 12, 2002, Yau received an e-mail message from a Russian mathematician whose name didn’t immediately register. “May I bring to your attention my paper,” the e-mail said.

On November 11th, Perelman had posted a thirty-nine-page paper entitled “The Entropy Formula for the Ricci Flow and Its Geometric Applications,” on arXiv.org, a Web site used by mathematicians to post preprints—articles awaiting publication in refereed journals. He then e-mailed an abstract of his paper to a dozen mathematicians in the United States—including Hamilton, Tian, and Yau—none of whom had heard from him for years. In the abstract, he explained that he had written “a sketch of an eclectic proof” of the geometrization conjecture.

Perelman had not mentioned the proof or shown it to anyone. “I didn’t have any friends with whom I could discuss this,” he said in St. Petersburg. “I didn’t want to discuss my work with someone I didn’t trust.” Andrew Wiles had also kept the fact that he was working on Fermat’s last theorem a secret, but he had had a colleague vet the proof before making it public. Perelman, by casually posting a proof on the Internet of one of the most famous problems in mathematics, was not just flouting academic convention but taking a considerable risk. If the proof was flawed, he would be publicly humiliated, and there would be no way to prevent another mathematician from fixing any errors and claiming victory. But Perelman said he was not particularly concerned. “My reasoning was: if I made an error and someone used my work to construct a correct proof I would be pleased,” he said. “I never set out to be the sole solver of the Poincaré.”

Gang Tian was in his office at M.I.T. when he received Perelman’s e-mail. He and Perelman had been friendly in 1992, when they were both at N.Y.U. and had attended the same weekly math seminar in Princeton. “I immediately realized its importance,” Tian said of Perelman’s paper. Tian began to read the paper and discuss it with colleagues, who were equally enthusiastic.

On November 19th, Vitali Kapovitch, a geometer, sent Perelman an e-mail:

Hi Grisha, Sorry to bother you but a lot of people are asking me about your preprint “The entropy formula for the Ricci . . .” Do I understand it correctly that while you cannot yet do all the steps in the Hamilton program you can do enough so that using some collapsing results you can prove geometrization? Vitali.

Perelman’s response, the next day, was terse: “That’s correct. Grisha.”

In fact, what Perelman had posted on the Internet was only the first installment of his proof. But it was sufficient for mathematicians to see that he had figured out how to solve the Poincaré. Barry Mazur, the Harvard mathematician, uses the image of a dented fender to describe Perelman’s achievement: “Suppose your car has a dented fender and you call a mechanic to ask how to smooth it out. The mechanic would have a hard time telling you what to do over the phone. You would have to bring the car into the garage for him to examine. Then he could tell you where to give it a few knocks. What Hamilton introduced and Perelman completed is a procedure that is independent of the particularities of the blemish. If you apply the Ricci flow to a 3-D space, it will begin to undent it and smooth it out. The mechanic would not need to even see the car—just apply the equation.” Perelman proved that the “cigars” that had troubled Hamilton could not actually occur, and he showed that the “neck” problem could be solved by performing an intricate sequence of mathematical surgeries: cutting out singularities and patching up the raw edges. “Now we have a procedure to smooth things and, at crucial points, control the breaks,” Mazur said.

Tian wrote to Perelman, asking him to lecture on his paper at M.I.T. Colleagues at Princeton and Stony Brook extended similar invitations. Perelman accepted them all and was booked for a month of lectures beginning in April, 2003. “Why not?” he told us with a shrug. Speaking of mathematicians generally, Fedor Nazarov, a mathematician at Michigan State University, said, “After you’ve solved a problem, you have a great urge to talk about it.”

Hamilton and Yau were stunned by Perelman’s announcement. “We felt that nobody else would be able to discover the solution,” Yau told us in Beijing. “But then, in 2002, Perelman said that he published something. He basically did a shortcut without doing all the detailed estimates that we did.” Moreover, Yau complained, Perelman’s proof “was written in such a messy way that we didn’t understand.”

Perelman’s April lecture tour was treated by mathematicians and by the press as a major event. Among the audience at his talk at Princeton were John Ball, Andrew Wiles, John Forbes Nash, Jr., who had proved the Riemannian embedding theorem, and John Conway, the inventor of the cellular automaton game Life. To the astonishment of many in the audience, Perelman said nothing about the Poincaré. “Here is a guy who proved a world-famous theorem and didn’t even mention it,” Frank Quinn, a mathematician at Virginia Tech, said. “He stated some key points and special properties, and then answered questions. He was establishing credibility. If he had beaten his chest and said, ‘I solved it,’ he would have got a huge amount of resistance.” He added, “People were expecting a strange sight. Perelman was much more normal than they expected.”

To Perelman’s disappointment, Hamilton did not attend that lecture or the next ones, at Stony Brook. “I’m a disciple of Hamilton’s, though I haven’t received his authorization,” Perelman told us. But John Morgan, at Columbia, where Hamilton now taught, was in the audience at Stony Brook, and after a lecture he invited Perelman to speak at Columbia. Perelman, hoping to see Hamilton, agreed. The lecture took place on a Saturday morning. Hamilton showed up late and asked no questions during either the long discussion session that followed the talk or the lunch after that. “I had the impression he had read only the first part of my paper,” Perelman said.

In the April 18, 2003, issue of Science, Yau was featured in an article about Perelman’s proof: “Many experts, although not all, seem convinced that Perelman has stubbed out the cigars and tamed the narrow necks. But they are less confident that he can control the number of surgeries. That could prove a fatal flaw, Yau warns, noting that many other attempted proofs of the Poincaré conjecture have stumbled over similar missing steps.” Proofs should be treated with skepticism until mathematicians have had a chance to review them thoroughly, Yau told us. Until then, he said, “it’s not math—it’s religion.”

By mid-July, Perelman had posted the final two installments of his proof on the Internet, and mathematicians had begun the work of formal explication, painstakingly retracing his steps. In the United States, at least two teams of experts had assigned themselves this task: Gang Tian (Yau’s rival) and John Morgan; and a pair of researchers at the University of Michigan. Both projects were supported by the Clay Institute, which planned to publish Tian and Morgan’s work as a book. The book, in addition to providing other mathematicians with a guide to Perelman’s logic, would allow him to be considered for the Clay Institute’s million-dollar prize for solving the Poincaré. (To be eligible, a proof must be published in a peer-reviewed venue and withstand two years of scrutiny by the mathematical community.)

On September 10, 2004, more than a year after Perelman returned to St. Petersburg, he received a long e-mail from Tian, who said that he had just attended a two-week workshop at Princeton devoted to Perelman’s proof. “I think that we have understood the whole paper,” Tian wrote. “It is all right.”

Perelman did not write back. As he explained to us, “I didn’t worry too much myself. This was a famous problem. Some people needed time to get accustomed to the fact that this is no longer a conjecture. I personally decided for myself that it was right for me to stay away from verification and not to participate in all these meetings. It is important for me that I don’t influence this process.”

In July of that year, the National Science Foundation had given nearly a million dollars in grants to Yau, Hamilton, and several students of Yau’s to study and apply Perelman’s “breakthrough.” An entire branch of mathematics had grown up around efforts to solve the Poincaré, and now that branch appeared at risk of becoming obsolete. Michael Freedman, who won a Fields for proving the Poincaré conjecture for the fourth dimension, told the Times that Perelman’s proof was a “small sorrow for this particular branch of topology.” Yuri Burago said, “It kills the field. After this is done, many mathematicians will move to other branches of mathematics.”

Five months later, Chern died, and Yau’s efforts to insure that he-—not Tian—was recognized as his successor turned vicious. “It’s all about their primacy in China and their leadership among the expatriate Chinese,” Joseph Kohn, a former chairman of the Prince-ton mathematics department, said. “Yau’s not jealous of Tian’s mathematics, but he’s jealous of his power back in China.”

Though Yau had not spent more than a few months at a time on mainland China since he was an infant, he was convinced that his status as the only Chinese Fields Medal winner should make him Chern’s successor. In a speech he gave at Zhejiang University, in Hangzhou, during the summer of 2004, Yau reminded his listeners of his Chinese roots. “When I stepped out from the airplane, I touched the soil of Beijing and felt great joy to be in my mother country,” he said. “I am proud to say that when I was awarded the Fields Medal in mathematics, I held no passport of any country and should certainly be considered Chinese.”

The following summer, Yau returned to China and, in a series of interviews with Chinese reporters, attacked Tian and the mathematicians at Peking University. In an article published in a Beijing science newspaper, which ran under the headline “SHING-TUNG YAU IS SLAMMING ACADEMIC CORRUPTION IN CHINA,” Yau called Tian “a complete mess.” He accused him of holding multiple professorships and of collecting a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars for a few months’ work at a Chinese university, while students were living on a hundred dollars a month. He also charged Tian with shoddy scholarship and plagiarism, and with intimidating his graduate students into letting him add his name to their papers. “Since I promoted him all the way to his academic fame today, I should also take responsibility for his improper behavior,” Yau was quoted as saying to a reporter, explaining why he felt obliged to speak out.

In another interview, Yau described how the Fields committee had passed Tian over in 1988 and how he had lobbied on Tian’s behalf with various prize committees, including one at the National Science Foundation, which awarded Tian five hundred thousand dollars in 1994.

Tian was appalled by Yau’s attacks, but he felt that, as Yau’s former student, there was little he could do about them. “His accusations were baseless,” Tian told us. But, he added, “I have deep roots in Chinese culture. A teacher is a teacher. There is respect. It is very hard for me to think of anything to do.”

While Yau was in China, he visited Xi-Ping Zhu, a protégé of his who was now chairman of the mathematics department at Sun Yat-sen University. In the spring of 2003, after Perelman completed his lecture tour in the United States, Yau had recruited Zhu and another student, Huai-Dong Cao, a professor at Lehigh University, to undertake an explication of Perelman’s proof. Zhu and Cao had studied the Ricci flow under Yau, who considered Zhu, in particular, to be a mathematician of exceptional promise. “We have to figure out whether Perelman’s paper holds together,” Yau told them. Yau arranged for Zhu to spend the 2005-06 academic year at Harvard, where he gave a seminar on Perelman’s proof and continued to work on his paper with Cao.

On April 13th of this year, the thirty-one mathematicians on the editorial board of the Asian Journal of Mathematics received a brief e-mail from Yau and the journal’s co-editor informing them that they had three days to comment on a paper by Xi-Ping Zhu and Huai-Dong Cao titled “The Hamilton-Perelman Theory of Ricci Flow: The Poincaré and Geometrization Conjectures,” which Yau planned to publish in the journal. The e-mail did not include a copy of the paper, reports from referees, or an abstract. At least one board member asked to see the paper but was told that it was not available. On April 16th, Cao received a message from Yau telling him that the paper had been accepted by the A.J.M., and an abstract was posted on the journal’s Web site.

A month later, Yau had lunch in Cambridge with Jim Carlson, the president of the Clay Institute. He told Carlson that he wanted to trade a copy of Zhu and Cao’s paper for a copy of Tian and Morgan’s book manuscript. Yau told us he was worried that Tian would try to steal from Zhu and Cao’s work, and he wanted to give each party simultaneous access to what the other had written. “I had a lunch with Carlson to request to exchange both manuscripts to make sure that nobody can copy the other,” Yau said. Carlson demurred, explaining that the Clay Institute had not yet received Tian and Morgan’s complete manuscript.

By the end of the following week, the title of Zhu and Cao’s paper on the A.J.M.’s Web site had changed, to “A Complete Proof of the Poincaré and Geometrization Conjectures: Application of the Hamilton-Perelman Theory of the Ricci Flow.” The abstract had also been revised. A new sentence explained, “This proof should be considered as the crowning achievement of the Hamilton-Perelman theory of Ricci flow.”

Zhu and Cao’s paper was more than three hundred pages long and filled the A.J.M.’s entire June issue. The bulk of the paper is devoted to reconstructing many of Hamilton’s Ricci-flow results—including results that Perelman had made use of in his proof—and much of Perelman’s proof of the Poincaré. In their introduction, Zhu and Cao credit Perelman with having “brought in fresh new ideas to figure out important steps to overcome the main obstacles that remained in the program of Hamilton.” However, they write, they were obliged to “substitute several key arguments of Perelman by new approaches based on our study, because we were unable to comprehend these original arguments of Perelman which are essential to the completion of the geometrization program.” Mathematicians familiar with Perelman’s proof disputed the idea that Zhu and Cao had contributed significant new approaches to the Poincaré. “Perelman already did it and what he did was complete and correct,” John Morgan said. “I don’t see that they did anything different.”

By early June, Yau had begun to promote the proof publicly. On June 3rd, at his mathematics institute in Beijing, he held a press conference. The acting director of the mathematics institute, attempting to explain the relative contributions of the different mathematicians who had worked on the Poincaré, said, “Hamilton contributed over fifty per cent; the Russian, Perelman, about twenty-five per cent; and the Chinese, Yau, Zhu, and Cao et al., about thirty per cent.” (Evidently, simple addition can sometimes trip up even a mathematician.) Yau added, “Given the significance of the Poincaré, that Chinese mathematicians played a thirty-per-cent role is by no means easy. It is a very important contribution.”

On June 12th, the week before Yau’s conference on string theory opened in Beijing, the South China Morning Post reported, “Mainland mathematicians who helped crack a ‘millennium math problem’ will present the methodology and findings to physicist Stephen Hawking. . . . Yau Shing-Tung, who organized Professor Hawking’s visit and is also Professor Cao’s teacher, said yesterday he would present the findings to Professor Hawking because he believed the knowledge would help his research into the formation of black holes.”

On the morning of his lecture in Beijing, Yau told us, “We want our contribution understood. And this is also a strategy to encourage Zhu, who is in China and who has done really spectacular work. I mean, important work with a century-long problem, which will probably have another few century-long implications. If you can attach your name in any way, it is a contribution.”

E. T. Bell, the author of “Men of Mathematics,” a witty history of the discipline published in 1937, once lamented “the squabbles over priority which disfigure scientific history.” But in the days before e-mail, blogs, and Web sites, a certain decorum usually prevailed. In 1881, Poincaré, who was then at the University of Caen, had an altercation with a German mathematician in Leipzig named Felix Klein. Poincaré had published several papers in which he labelled certain functions “Fuchsian,” after another mathematician. Klein wrote to Poincaré, pointing out that he and others had done significant work on these functions, too. An exchange of polite letters between Leipzig and Caen ensued. Poincaré’s last word on the subject was a quote from Goethe’s “Faust”: “Name ist Schall und Rauch.” Loosely translated, that corresponds to Shakespeare’s “What’s in a name?”

This, essentially, is what Yau’s friends are asking themselves. “I find myself getting annoyed with Yau that he seems to feel the need for more kudos,” Dan Stroock, of M.I.T., said. “This is a guy who did magnificent things, for which he was magnificently rewarded. He won every prize to be won. I find it a little mean of him to seem to be trying to get a share of this as well.” Stroock pointed out that, twenty-five years ago, Yau was in a situation very similar to the one Perelman is in today. His most famous result, on Calabi-Yau manifolds, was hugely important for theoretical physics. “Calabi outlined a program,” Stroock said. “In a real sense, Yau was Calabi’s Perelman. Now he’s on the other side. He’s had no compunction at all in taking the lion’s share of credit for Calabi-Yau. And now he seems to be resenting Perelman getting credit for completing Hamilton’s program. I don’t know if the analogy has ever occurred to him.”

Mathematics, more than many other fields, depends on collaboration. Most problems require the insights of several mathematicians in order to be solved, and the profession has evolved a standard for crediting individual contributions that is as stringent as the rules governing math itself. As Perelman put it, “If everyone is honest, it is natural to share ideas.” Many mathematicians view Yau’s conduct over the Poincaré as a violation of this basic ethic, and worry about the damage it has caused the profession. “Politics, power, and control have no legitimate role in our community, and they threaten the integrity of our field,” Phillip Griffiths said.

Perelman likes to attend opera performances at the Mariinsky Theatre, in St. Petersburg. Sitting high up in the back of the house, he can’t make out the singers’ expressions or see the details of their costumes. But he cares only about the sound of their voices, and he says that the acoustics are better where he sits than anywhere else in the theatre. Perelman views the mathematics community—and much of the larger world—from a similar remove.

Before we arrived in St. Petersburg, on June 23rd, we had sent several messages to his e-mail address at the Steklov Institute, hoping to arrange a meeting, but he had not replied. We took a taxi to his apartment building and, reluctant to intrude on his privacy, left a book—a collection of John Nash’s papers—in his mailbox, along with a card saying that we would be sitting on a bench in a nearby playground the following afternoon. The next day, after Perelman failed to appear, we left a box of pearl tea and a note describing some of the questions we hoped to discuss with him. We repeated this ritual a third time. Finally, believing that Perelman was out of town, we pressed the buzzer for his apartment, hoping at least to speak with his mother. A woman answered and let us inside. Perelman met us in the dimly lit hallway of the apartment. It turned out that he had not checked his Steklov e-mail address for months, and had not looked in his mailbox all week. He had no idea who we were.

We arranged to meet at ten the following morning on Nevsky Prospekt. From there, Perelman, dressed in a sports coat and loafers, took us on a four-hour walking tour of the city, commenting on every building and vista. After that, we all went to a vocal competition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, which lasted for five hours. Perelman repeatedly said that he had retired from the mathematics community and no longer considered himself a professional mathematician. He mentioned a dispute that he had had years earlier with a collaborator over how to credit the author of a particular proof, and said that he was dismayed by the discipline’s lax ethics. “It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens,” he said. “It is people like me who are isolated.” We asked him whether he had read Cao and Zhu’s paper. “It is not clear to me what new contribution did they make,” he said. “Apparently, Zhu did not quite understand the argument and reworked it.” As for Yau, Perelman said, “I can’t say I’m outraged. Other people do worse. Of course, there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest.”

The prospect of being awarded a Fields Medal had forced him to make a complete break with his profession. “As long as I was not conspicuous, I had a choice,” Perelman explained. “Either to make some ugly thing”—a fuss about the math community’s lack of integrity—“or, if I didn’t do this kind of thing, to be treated as a pet. Now, when I become a very conspicuous person, I cannot stay a pet and say nothing. That is why I had to quit.” We asked Perelman whether, by refusing the Fields and withdrawing from his profession, he was eliminating any possibility of influencing the discipline. “I am not a politician!” he replied, angrily. Perelman would not say whether his objection to awards extended to the Clay Institute’s million-dollar prize. “I’m not going to decide whether to accept the prize until it is offered,” he said.

Mikhail Gromov, the Russian geometer, said that he understood Perelman’s logic: “To do great work, you have to have a pure mind. You can think only about the mathematics. Everything else is human weakness. Accepting prizes is showing weakness.” Others might view Perelman’s refusal to accept a Fields as arrogant, Gromov said, but his principles are admirable. “The ideal scientist does science and cares about nothing else,” he said. “He wants to live this ideal. Now, I don’t think he really lives on this ideal plane. But he wants to.”

Issue of 2006-08-28

servido por mydigest sin comentarios compártelo

Hendrik Hertzberg: TheE “IC” Factor

What is the name of a certain political party in the United States—not the one which controls the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal government but the other one, which doesn’t? The question is a small one, to be sure: a minor irritation, a wee gnat compared to such red-clawed, sharp-toothed horrors as the health-care mess and the budget deficit, to say nothing of Iraq and Lebanon. But it has been around longer than any of them, and, annoyingly, it won’t go away.

Last week, the gnat was buzzing at a high altitude. An e-mail from none other than “President George W. Bush,” arriving last Monday morning in millions of in-boxes, hinted strongly at where the Commander-in-Chief stands on the name issue. To wit:

The Democrat Party has a clear record when it comes to taxes.

And:

Nothing threatens our hard-won reforms and economic prosperity more than a Democrat victory this November.

And:

The difference is clear: if you want the government in your pocket, vote Democrat.

An alternative view is that it’s called the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party itself takes this view, and many nonpartisan authorities agree. The American Heritage College Dictionary, for example, defines the noun “Democratic Party” as “One of the two major US political parties, owing its origin to a split in the Democratic-Republican Party under Andrew Jackson in 1828.” (It defines “Democrat n” as “A Democratic Party member” and “Democratic adj” as “Of, relating to, or characteristic of the Democratic Party,” but gives no definition for—indeed, makes no mention of—“Democrat Party n” or “Democrat adj”.) Other dictionaries, and reference works generally, appear to be unanimous on these points. The broader literate public also comes down on the “Democratic” side, as indicated by frequency of usage. A Google search for “Democratic Party” yields around forty million hits. “Democrat Party” fetches fewer than two million.

There’s no great mystery about the motives behind this deliberate misnaming. “Democrat Party” is a slur, or intended to be—a handy way to express contempt. Aesthetic judgments are subjective, of course, but “Democrat Party” is jarring verging on ugly. It fairly screams “rat.” At a slightly higher level of sophistication, it’s an attempt to deny the enemy the positive connotations of its chosen appellation. During the Cold War, many people bridled at obvious misnomers like “German Democratic Republic,” and perhaps there are some members of the Republican Party (which, come to think of it, has been drifting toward monarchism of late) who genuinely regard the Democratic Party as undemocratic. Perhaps there are some who hope to induce it to go out of existence by refusing to call it by its name, à la terming Israel “the Zionist entity.” And no doubt there are plenty of others who say “Democrat Party” just to needle the other side while signalling solidarity with their own—the partisan equivalent of flashing a gang sign.

The history of “Democrat Party” is hard to pin down with any precision, though etymologists have traced its use to as far back as the Harding Administration. According to William Safire, it got a boost in 1940 from Harold Stassen, the Republican Convention keynoter that year, who used it to signify disapproval of such less than fully democratic Democratic machine bosses as Frank Hague of Jersey City and Tom Pendergast of Kansas City. Senator Joseph McCarthy made it a regular part of his arsenal of insults, which served to dampen its popularity for a while. There was another spike in 1976, when grumpy, growly Bob Dole denounced “Democrat wars” (those were the days!) in his Vice-Presidential debate with Walter Mondale. Growth has been steady for the last couple of decades, and today we find ourselves in a golden age of anti-“ic”-ism.

In the conservative media, the phenomenon feeds more voraciously the closer you get to the mucky, sludgy bottom. “Democrat Party” is standard jargon on right-wing talk radio and common on winger Web sites like NewsMax.com, which blue-pencils Associated Press dispatches to de-“ic” references to the Party of F.D.R. and J.F.K. (The resulting impression that “Democrat Party” is O.K. with the A.P. is as phony as a North Korean travel brochure.) The respectable conservative journals of opinion sprinkle the phrase around their Web sites but go light on it in their print editions. William F. Buckley, Jr., the Miss Manners cum Dr. Johnson of modern conservatism, dealt with the question in a 2000 column in National Review, the magazine he had founded forty-five years before. “I have an aversion to ‘Democrat’ as an adjective,” Buckley began.

Dear Joe McCarthy used to do that, and received a rebuke from this at-the-time 24-year-old. It has the effect of injecting politics into language, and that should be avoided. Granted there are diffculties, as when one desires to describe a “democratic” politician, and is jolted by possible ambiguity.

But English does that to us all the time, and it’s our job to get the correct meaning transmitted without contorting the language.

The job of politicians, however, is different, and among those of the Republican persuasion “Democrat Party” is now nearly universal. This is partly the work of Newt Gingrich, the nominal author of the notorious 1990 memo “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” and his Contract with America pollster, Frank Luntz, the Johnny Appleseed of such linguistic innovations as “death tax” for estate tax and “personal accounts” for Social Security privatization. Luntz, who road-tested the adjectival use of “Democrat” with a focus group in 2001, has concluded that the only people who really dislike it are highly partisan adherents of the—how you say?—Democratic Party. “Those two letters actually do matter,” Luntz said the other day. He added that he recently finished writing a book—it’s entitled “Words That Work”—and has been diligently going through the galley proofs taking out the hundreds of “ic”s that his copy editor, one of those partisan Dems, had stuck in.

In days gone by, the anti-“ic” tic tended to be reined in at the Presidential level. Ronald Reagan never used it in polite company, and George Bush père was too well brought up to use the truncated version of the out party’s name more than sparingly. Not so Bush fils—and not just in e-mails sent to the Party faithful, which he obviously never reads, let alone writes. “It’s time for the leadership in the Democrat Party to start laying out ideas,” he said a few weeks ago, using his own personal mouth. “The Democrat Party showed its true colors during the tax debate,” he said a few months before that. “Nobody from the Democrat Party has actually stood up and called for actually getting rid of the terrorist surveillance program,” he said a week before that. What he meant is anybody’s guess, but his bad manners were impossible to miss. Hard as it is to believe from this distance in time, George W. Bush came to office promising to “change the tone.” That he has certainly done. But, as with so much else, it hasn’t worked out quite the way he promised.

servido por mydigest sin comentarios compártelo

John Updike: Late Works

Last words, recorded and treasured in the days when the deathbed was in the home, have fallen from fashion, perhaps because most people spend their final hours in the hospital, too drugged to make any sense. And only the night nurse hears them talk. Yet, at least for this aging reader, works written late in a writer’s life retain a fascination. They exist, as do last words, where life edges into death, and perhaps have something uncanny to tell us. In 1995, the critic, teacher, and journalist Edward W. Said, best known for his pro-Palestinian advocacy, taught at Columbia a popular course called “Last Works/Late Style.” Until his untimely death, of leukemia, in 2003, he was working on a collection of essays and lectures relevant to the topic; this assemblage, edited and introduced by Michael Wood with the coöperation of Said’s widow, has now been published by Pantheon under the title “On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain” ($25). Said’s central idea, set forth in the first chapter, comes from the German philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903-69), who wrote extensively, with an agitated profundity, on Beethoven’s late works. Adorno found in the disharmonies and disjunctions of these works a refusal of bourgeois order, an “idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal.” In his own not easily understandable words, possibly clearer in the original German:

Objective is the fractured landscape, subjective the light in which—alone—it glows into life. He [Beethoven] does not bring about their harmonious synthesis. As the power of dissociation, he tears them apart in time, in order perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal. In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.

In Beethoven’s case, the catastrophe was fruitful; Adorno credited his late style with presaging the innovations of Schoenberg, whose “advanced music has no recourse but to insist on its own ossification without concession to that would-be humanitarianism which it sees through.” Adorno writes from within a sardonically modern, anti-bourgeois mind-set that welcomes dissociation, catastrophe, and affronts to harmony and humanitarianism. Thus art, at least modern art, makes itself new. Adorno decreed, “The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves.”

The artists Said cites in “On Late Style” are predominantly composers and, in a chapter centered on Glenn Gould, performers. Said, an accomplished pianist and, among his other activities, music critic for The Nation, had an insatiable appetite for musical performances and, though he disclaims a musicologist’s competence, an extensive and technical grasp of music. Beethoven, Mozart, Richard Strauss, Bach: among learned discussions of all these only a few writers are considered at any length, and they—the Sicilian aristocrat Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the French criminal Jean Genet, the Greek Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy—are valued for their “against the grain” qualities of eccentricity and intransigence. A different list of literary performers would be needed for an inventory of late works that answer, perhaps, to what another literature professor, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, has termed the “senile sublime.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in her book “Touching Feeling” (2003), uses the phrase to describe

various more or less intelligible performances by old brilliant people, whether artists, scientists, or intellectuals, where the bare outlines of a creative idiom seem finally to emerge from what had been the obscuring puppy fat of personableness, timeliness, or sometimes even of coherent sense.

A sacrifice of, or impatience with, “coherent sense,” as well as the requisite irascibility and what Said calls “highlighting and dramatizing . . . irreconcilabilities,” can certainly be ascribed to the shimmering late works of Shakespeare, an artistic titan on Beethoven’s scale. Lateness came early to both, both dead in their fifties.

After the composition of Shakespeare’s last tragedies—the opulent, spacious “Antony and Cleopatra” (1606-1607), the cold, rhetorically contorted “Coriolanus” (1607-08), and the rough-hewn, one-note “Timon of Athens” (1607-08)—there is a slackening, as if something had snapped. “Timon of Athens,” apparently unfinished and unproduced, has been thought by some speculative scholars to mark a personal crisis for the writer; no less measured a source than the Encyclopædia Britannica perceived “a clear gulf” between it and the four plays that follow. These plays—“Pericles” (1607-08), “Cymbeline” (1609-1610), “The Winter’s Tale” (1610-11), and “The Tempest” (1611)—are commonly grouped together and called romances. Their form is a crowd-pleasing one, still in wide use: the audience, after witnessing many travails and perils, arrives at a happy, if implausible, ending—storms, terrors, and confusions give way to recognitions, reunions, forgiveness, and reconciliation. But a silvery chill blows through these romances, a deliberate and, at times, brazen use of stage artifice.

Changes had overtaken Shakespeare’s physical theatre. After a decade of performing at the Globe—a London amphitheatre patterned on the inn courtyards where plays used to be staged, with little more scenery than what language could paint on air—Shakespeare’s company succeeded in taking over the Blackfriars theatre and, in 1609, began winter performances there, out of the weather, with more elaborate effects. Spectacle—which Aristotle’s “Poetics” ranked, with Song, as the least of tragedy’s necessary parts, behind Plot, Character, Diction, and Thought—grew in importance under James I. The Stuart court was more open to Continental divertissements than Elizabeth’s had been; masques, performed by masked dancers who invited the audience to join in, enlisted such high talents as Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones.

Shakespeare’s dramas became parades of wonders. “Pericles” brings the medieval poet John Gower onto the stage to shepherd, in quaint tetrameters, its mythological hero back and forth across the Mediterranean. “Cymbeline,” whose plot was memorably characterized by Dr. Johnson as “unresisting imbecility” marked by “the impossibility of the events in any system of life,” caps its absurdities with the rhyming apparition of the hero’s dead parents and brothers, and the descent of Jupiter “in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle.” “The Winter’s Tale” subjects its protagonist, King Leontes of Sicilia, to an insane fit of jealousy at the beginning, and at the end has a statue of his wife, for sixteen years thought dead, dramatically come to life. Shakespeare, who was, after the early death of his son, Hamnet, the father of two daughters, inflicts upon his young romantic heroines, with their pretty names Marina, Perdita, and Innogen, no ordeal that they do not come shining through. As Stephen Orgel observes in his introduction to the Pelican “Pericles,” “Death is acknowledged to be real” in a late tragedy like “Antony and Cleopatra” but is “denied in Pericles, as it is, though to a lesser extent, in Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest.”

Yet the last of these, “The Tempest,” is one of Shakespeare’s masterpieces: the strained contrivances and righted wrongs of the previous romances—“Plot has always been the curse of serious drama,” George Bernard Shaw said, discussing “Cymbeline”—fall simply into place, with the contriver in plain view, his motives and magical means established at the start. Prospero, the unjustly deposed Duke of Milan and self-taught sorcerer, spins the plot before our eyes, beginning with the tempest that lands the cast of characters on his private island. The hero and the contriver merge into an omnipotent artificer. In the fourth act, having provided a suitor for his cloistered daughter, Miranda, he stages a masque, starring Iris, Juno, and Ceres, for Miranda and her swain, Prince Ferdinand. When an unpleasantness left over from earthy reality, the rebellion of his slave Caliban, disturbs the performers, so that “to a strange, hollow, and confused noise, they heavily vanish,” Prospero reassures his audience of two:

These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous
palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.

Tradition regards this stately valediction, this folding up of the sorcerer’s equipment, as not only Prospero’s but Shakespeare’s. The pun on “globe” is cemented in the First Folio printing, which capitalizes the noun. In Prospero’s self-descriptions, the word “art” reverberates. The romancer is a necromancer: “Graves at my command / Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth / By my so potent art.” His command is absolute; even sluggish, recalcitrant Caliban, the surly colonized lone native of the island, grumbles, “I must obey. His art is of such pow’r.” Prospero reminds Ariel, “It was mine art . . . that made gape the pine and let thee out.” Ariel is beckoned by “Come with a thought!” and materializes saying, “Thy thoughts I cleave to.” Only a writer with his quill poised over blank paper has thoughts leap into such instant effectuation. Prospero promises, “Deeper than did ever plummet sound, / I’ll drown my book.”

Why would Shakespeare say his farewell in a play written before he was fifty? He did not, we must make an effort to remember, have posterity’s view of himself. The hectic rough-and-tumble of the Elizabethan theatre, like the television-script mills of today, did not promise high status or literary immortality. He arrived in London in the fifteen-eighties, it is thought, and found employment as an actor; within a few years, the player branched out to become a playwright. By 1592, he was already successful enough to attract bitter words from the rival dramatist Robert Greene, who famously wrote, in “Greenes Groatsworth of Witte”:

There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you . . . in his owne conceit the only Shakes-scene in a countrey.

In the next two decades, Shakespeare wrote nearly two plays every year, besides composing the two long and popular narrative poems “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece,” which were evidently the only publications of his that he ever troubled to proofread. His sonnets were pirated and printed in a jumbled fashion. His duties as playwright and player are deplored as “public means” in Sonnet 111, a lament at Fortune, the “guilty goddess” who did not “better for my life provide / Than public means which public manners breeds” so that “my nature is subdued / To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.”

Dirty work, in other words, though lucrative. For some time, he had been making preparations for a gentleman’s retirement from London to his native Stratford, completing his father’s application for a coat of arms in 1596 and, the following year, acquiring New Place, one of the largest houses in the town. “The Tempest” ends with Prospero claiming his right to “retire me to my Milan, where / Every third thought shall be my grave.” To the playwright’s first biographer, Nicholas Rowe, nearly a century later, early retirement seemed natural enough:

The latter part of his life was spent, as all Men of good Sense will wish theirs may be, in Ease, Retirement, and the Conversation of his Friends. He had the good Fortune to gather an Estate equal to his Occasion and, in that, to his Wish.

True, he was not quite done with London. In 1612, identified as “of Stratford-upon-Avon,” he testified in a civil case involving some former London landlords of his. In 1613, he bought his first London real estate, the gatehouse of the former Blackfriars monastery, near the theatre. Yet evidence suggests that he did not get much use out of this pied-à-terre; in 1616, a tenant occupied it. Presumably, Shakespeare returned to collaborate with John Fletcher on three known plays: the lost “Cardenio,” based upon a story in “Don Quixote” and performed twice at court; “All Is True,” or “Henry VIII,” a patriotic pageant centering on Cardinal Wolsey’s fall and the future Queen Elizabeth’s birth; and “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” another surreal romance. “Henry VIII” involved a masque in which cannons were fired, and on June 29, 1613, a stray piece of ignited wadding landed on the Globe’s thatch and burned down the theatre. It was rebuilt within the year, but Shakespeare was no longer a part owner; there is no mention in his will of his theatre shares.

The end of “the great Globe” seems to have ended Shakespeare’s connection with the stage, three years short of his death. The causes of his death have been much speculated upon; syphilis and alcoholism are mentioned. The vicar of Stratford, around 1662, recorded in his diary that “Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson, had a merie meeting, and itt seems drank too hard.” Park Honan’s biography argues for a case of springtime typhoid fever caught from the fetid stream that ran past New Place into the Avon. Our impression remains that “The Tempest” foretells Shakespeare’s end: it is a lovingly composed late work, the roughness of its predecessor romances smoothed, their dissonances resolved in—as Said says in connection with the final compositions of Richard Strauss—a “recapitulatory and even backward-looking and abstracted quality.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s terminal illness came to pass in the clear light of nineteenth-century graphomania, but the two hundred and fifty years of advances in medical science since Shakespeare’s death leave the American romancer’s diagnosis similarly vague. In early 1864, Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia, wrote in alarm to his old friend Horatio Bridge:

I have felt the wildest anxiety about him because he is a person who has been immaculately well all his life, and this illness has seemed to me an awful dream which could not be true. But he has wasted away very much and the suns in his eyes are collapsed, and he has no spirits, no appetite, and very little sleep.

Hawthorne had returned with his family to America in 1860, after seven years abroad—four as U.S. consul in Liverpool and three more as a sojourner in Italy and England—in outward good health, though within a year Sophia was confiding to his publisher, William Ticknor, of Ticknor & Fields, that her husband was “low in tone and spirits. . . . He has lost the zest for life.”

Settled in a spacious Concord house, the Wayside, with renovations that included a third-floor “tower room” to serve as a study, Hawthorne began to write the successor to “The Marble Faun” (1860), which had been, despite mixed reviews, a considerable commercial success. He began by picking up a tale, “The Ancestral Footprint,” that he had begun and abandoned in 1858; it was based upon an anecdote he had heard at an English dinner party, of an indelible bloody footprint left on a flagstone at the bottom of a staircase in a Lancashire mansion. He attempted to merge this ominous detail with a vision of an American trying to claim an English inheritance; as James R. Mellow puts it in his biography of the writer, “They were, in fact, one theme—and a recurrent one in Hawthorne’s fiction. A lost estate and an ancient crime—Eden and the Fall.” Hawthornian though the materials were, he could not make the story go. He wrote in his journal:

There seem to be things that I can almost get hold of, and think about; but when I am just on the point of seizing them, they start away, like slippery things.

He changed the title from “The Ancestral Footprint” to “Etherege” and then to “Grimshawe”; he shifted the action to a gloomy burial ground in Salem; he filled his margins with, as Edwin Haviland Miller puts it in another biography, “corrections, interpolations, exclamations of frustration, and unanswerable questions as to plot, characterization, and motivation.” Always a stern self-critic, Hawthorne scribbled such cries of despair as “All this amounts to just nothing. I don’t advance a step,” and “I have not the least notion how to get on. . . . I never was in such a sad predicament before.” Prompted by a story Thoreau told him, of a previous resident of the Wayside who had determined to live forever, he took up the theme of a magic elixir, which had already figured in his short story “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment.” He placed his new romance in Concord, took as his hero a half-Indian seminary student undergoing a crisis of faith, and named him Septimius Felton, then Septimius Norton. Septimius, in an encounter that has strong homoerotic and narcissistic overtones, kills a British soldier and finds on his body the formula for eternal life. Hawthorne, wearily climbing the steep stairs to his tower room day after day, accumulated two manuscripts, amounting to almost five hundred pages in the Centenary Edition of his works, and supplied three different endings for his hero—death by hanging, escape to the sea, and a successful career in the Continental Army—but finally gave up.

By 1863, the novelist presented a weakened appearance. “He looks gray and grand, with something very pathetic about him,” Longfellow recorded in his journal. The Civil War was taking a toll; Hawthorne had always distrusted philanthropists, enthusiasts, and great causes, and his continued loyalty to his old Bowdoin classmate Franklin Pierce, the antebellum President actively expressing anti-Lincoln views to New Hampshire audiences, put him at odds with his abolitionist neighbors and in-laws—Emerson and Sophia’s sister Elizabeth Peabody being especially militant. His block in regard to fiction did not keep him, however, from reshaping his English journals into articles for The Atlantic Monthly; they were collected in 1863 into a book of British impressions, “Our Old Home.” Though dismissed by Hawthorne himself as “not a good nor a weighty book,” and freighted with a stubbornly, gallantly retained dedication to the unpopular Pierce, “Our Old Home” sold well enough to whet Ticknor & Fields’s appetite for more Hawthorne.

In December, he showed Fields the first chapter of his final reworking of the elixir theme, now titled “The Dolliver Romance.” In it, his imagination was back on the edge of the burial ground, and had conjured up a likable protagonist, a very elderly guardian of a three-year-old great-granddaughter. Dr. Dolliver needs to live on for her benefit, not from any selfishness of his own; he wears—emblematic adornments characteristic of Hawthorne—an ancient dressing grown of many patches and, to shelter his tiny ward from the unnatural, elixir-fed gleam in his eyes, green spectacles. Fields pronounced the chapter “very fine” and, on the cover of the January, 1864, issue of The Atlantic Monthly, advertised Hawthorne’s forthcoming serialized novel. On February 25th, the author wrote Fields a long and rather manic, self-mocking letter about “the abortive Romance,” stating:

I shall never finish it. . . . I cannot finish it unless a great change comes over me; and if I make too great an effort to do so, it will be my death; not that I should care much for that, if I could fight the battle through and win it, thus ending a life of much smoulder and scanty fire in a blaze of glory.

The smouldering ceased twelve weeks later, when the author died in his sleep, not quite sixty years of age, on a trip north into New Hampshire with Pierce, who had hoped to revive his loyal old friend’s body and spirits with a change of air.

Like one of his blighted, poisoned, or irremediably stained characters, Hawthorne wasted away, while personal demons balked his creative powers. Sophia, rarely at a loss for a phrase, wrote, “It seems to me that more and more delicate melodies are struck out from his mind at every revolution of the earth-ball, so that it gets to be a swan-song almost.” As he stated in the preface to his first novel, “The Scarlet Letter” (1850), he had early determined to build his fiction on the “territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.” This moonlit in-between ground supported many provocative and poetic short stories but really only one novel, the first; the rest, though rarely less than beautifully written, and shot through with shrewd rays of observation, are webs full of gaps that the author was unable or disinclined to fill in. His journals show a sharp-eyed, amused realist, but his imagination, which ripened in the unnatural solitude of his young manhood in Salem, set itself feats of balance on the edge of the unreal that, as the real shadows closed in, he was unable to sustain.

Longfellow, in his memorial poem “Hawthorne,” wrote of his friend’s “wand of magic power,” as if he had been Prospero; but the summoned spirits in the end did not come. Shakespeare in his late romances had the coarse “public means” of stagecraft to solidify his death-denying fictions; Hawthorne, solitary in his Concord tower, had only secluded intuitions, and these darkened and dissolved. The writer depended upon a touch of spookiness, but the man did not believe in spooks. Death was real. As he put aside his second extended attempt to carry “The Ancestral Footprint” to completion, Hawthorne wrote of his protagonist:

Some strange, vast, sombre, mysterious truth, which he seemed to have searched for long, appeared to be on the point of being revealed to him; a sense of something to come; something to happen that had been waiting long, long to happen; an opening of doors, a drawing away of veils, a lifting of heavy, magnificent curtains, whose dark folds hung before a spectacle of awe;—it was like the verge of the grave.

Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd,” also published posthumously, in a state of suspended revision, has fared better with posterity than Hawthorne’s unfinished romances. This tale, less than novella-length, is the most studied and admired of Melville’s works except for “Moby-Dick”—a globally ambitious novel greatly enriched by Melville’s acquaintance with Hawthorne and his elated discovery of the older writer’s dark, symbol-laden short stories. Melville near the outset of “Billy Budd” invokes Hawthorne’s name but in the next paragraph assures the reader that his story is “no romance.” Far from evading death, he steers his narrative straight toward the hero’s hanging. His frequent allusions to classical and Biblical myth, his learned excursions into British naval history decorate but do not divert the tale; like Faulkner at his most surging, he seems confident that the underlying story is simple and predetermined enough to survive any digression.

The setting is Melville’s métier, shipboard, solid and rolling underfoot. There are three essential characters, each with a tragic flaw: gloriously handsome Billy, with his stutter; staunch and sterling Captain Edward Vere, with “a queer streak of the pedantic running through him”; and master-at-arms John Claggart, with an unhealthily sallow complexion and a depraved antipathy to the sunny “moral phenomenon presented in Billy Budd.” As in Hawthorne, there are themes of surrogate paternity and “natural” aristocracy and “elemental evil,” but Melville’s arise within a firmly circumstantial setting—a sailing warship recalled in avid detail from within an age of steam—and a specific historical moment, the year 1797, when the ideas of the French Revolution had sparked the Great Mutiny and a harsh renewal of discipline within the British Navy. At one point in his revisions, Melville deleted the paragraphs explaining this historical context; indeed, his stark story, told in many short segments, feels whittled down, as opposed to Hawthorne’s desperately shifting accretion of “slippery things.”

Melville’s sentences, a little arthritic and desiccated decades after the headlong prose of his prime, and marked, the manuscript (at Harvard) reveals, by many hesitations and revisions, may sometimes grope, but his plot, the Christlike martyrdom of his “fated boy,” moves unflinchingly. Such a fated directness, driven by the yarning, reminiscing authorial voice, can be felt in other late works, such as Tolstoy’s “Hadji Murad,” which, too, was published posthumously. “My vigor sensibly declines,” Melville wrote in late 1889 to a Canadian admirer. “What little of it is left I husband for certain matters yet incomplete, and which, indeed, may never be completed.” Melville was seventy at the time, and “Billy Budd” was almost certainly one of the matters; he had retired from the U.S. customs service in New York at the age of sixty-eight, and was seventy-two when he died. Not long before, Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s son, had visited Melville in his near-total obscurity, and found, in Julian’s words, a “melancholy and pale wraith,” fidgety and nervous, whose “words were vague and indeterminate.” Yet this same man, initially undertaking to write a headnote to one of his poems—poetry had been, after the failure of three successive novels, his only literary exercise for more than thirty years—found vigor enough to crowd onto a naval incident from 1797 most of what he felt about male beauty, human justice, cosmic injustice, and the Christ myth.

Death, one would think, naturally haunts late works; yet perhaps it does not. A negation defies objectification; disappearance has no appearance. Adorno wrote, “Death is imposed on created beings, not on works of art, and thus it has appeared in art only in a refracted mode, as allegory.” What does haunt late works is the author’s previous works: he is burdensomely conscious that he has been cast, unlike his ingénue self, as an author who writes in a certain way, with the inexorable consistency of his own handwriting. “I am tired of my own thoughts and fancies and my own mode of expressing them,” Hawthorne wrote not many months before he died. Turning this way and that in his last creative torment, he kept meeting, with a shudder, his pet modes of imagining, chimeras on the fault line between the imaginary and the actual. Melville, no stranger to self-centered overcomplication, in old age found his way back to an earnest simplicity. Successful late works, shed of “obscuring puppy fat,” tend to have a translucent thinness.

In the twentieth century, James Joyce, asked what he planned to write after the seventeen years’ labor of “Finnegans Wake,” responded, “I think I’ll write something very simple and very short.” His actual last work, carried forward in the French village of Saint-Gérand-le-Puy with the help of Paul Léon, was the list of more than a thousand misprints in “Finnegans Wake”—a significant task, given the unique letter-by-letter difficulty of the text and Joyce’s near-blindness. A few weeks after escaping from Vichy France, he died in Zurich, early in 1941, following an operation for a perforated duodenal ulcer, at the age of fifty-eight. His last great work, whose punning title has Finnegan waking at his wake, could be said to deny the reality of an individual’s death, lost as it is amid the great cycles of history and the tireless babble of humanity:

Onetwo moremens more. So. Avelaval. My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes.

Few authors get to produce works as late in life as another expatriate Irishman, George Bernard Shaw. His last book brought together, with prefaces, the four-act play “Buoyant Billions,” six playlets titled “Farfetched Fables,” and the puppet play, mostly in blank verse, called “Shakes Versus Shav”; they were written when the author was, respectively, ninety-two, ninety-three, and ninety-four years old. We approach work by such an ancient with uneasiness, but the opening preface reassures us that we are secure in the hands of a masterly comedian, an irrepressible truthteller, his faculties intact:

At such an age I should apologize for perpetrating another play or presuming to pontificate in any fashion. I can hardly walk through my garden without a tumble or two; and it seems out of all reason to believe that a man who cannot do a simple thing like that can practice the craft of Shakespear. . . . Well, I grant all this; yet I cannot hold my tongue nor my pen. As long as I live I must write.

Writing, he cheerfully informs us, is no work at all. It is simply a matter of taking dictation: “When I take my pen or sit down to my typewriter, I am as much a medium as Browning’s Mr. Sludge or Dunglas Home, or as Job or John of Patmos. When I write a play I do not foresee nor intend a page of it from one end to the other: the play writes itself.”

The claim is perhaps cagily ingenuous, by a writer often accused of being too cerebral and cool-hearted. With Shaw, whose fame didn’t set in until his forties and whose “Saint Joan,” which in effect won him the Nobel Prize, was written in his sixty-eighth year, we have late works that display little loss of muscle, because his muscles were always concentrated in his head—his mischievous quick eyes, his agile tongue. He and Goethe and Victor Hugo show Americans what they have few native examples to learn from: writing can be a healthy, life-giving activity, sustainable—in Shaw’s case with the help of teetotalism, vegetarianism, and bicycling—through a generous mortal span. His imminent death had no terrors for him—rather, the reverse. In the brief but pithy preface to “Buoyant Billions,” Shaw writes of spiritualists, “They believe in personal immortality as far as any mortal can believe in an unimaginable horror.” No such horror need apply for belief to this buoyant spirit. His “Farfetched Fables” grapple blithely with the atomic bomb and its threat of global annihilation, and his antic puppet play quotes Prospero’s “great Globe itself” speech and caps it with the saucy lines

Immortal William dead and turned to clay
May stop a hole to keep the wind away.

Graham Greene, blessed with a longer life than his suicidal impulses, his hazardous travels, and his pessimistic novels would have presaged, saw his books shrink in size, from the respectable bulk of the best-selling “The Honorary Consul” (1973) and “The Human Factor” (1978) to such quirky bagatelles as “Doctor Fischer of Geneva; or, The Bomb Party” (1980), “Monsignor Quixote” (1982), “J’Accuse—The Dark Side of Nice” (1982), “Getting to Know the General” (1984), and “The Captain and the Enemy” (1988). Greene’s last book, edited and introduced by him but ushered into publication by Yvonne Cloetta, his mistress, in obedience to his deathbed request, is “A World of My Own: A Dream Diary” (1992), a selection of the dreams he habitually recorded in the last twenty-five years of his life. The dreams of this somewhat sinister writer show his subconscious to have been, on the whole, a salubrious and well-illumined site, full of books, public personalities, and cheerful candor. The last dream finds Greene writing a verse on his own death “for a competition in a magazine called Time and Tide (“My breath is folded up / like sheets in lavender. / The end for me / Arrives like nursery tea”), and the first reverts to an Edwardian childhood as he sees a train that “consisted of pretty carriages” and boards the next one:

I was much struck by the kindness and jollity of the passengers, who welcomed me and made room for me in a very packed carriage. They all wore strange clothes—Edwardian or Victorian—and I was fascinated by the stations we passed. On one wide platform children were playing with scarlet balloons; another station was built like a ruined Greek temple; at one point the track narrowed and the train went through a kind of tunnel made with mattresses.
I had never in my life felt such a sensation of happiness.

Publishing his dreams was for Greene a way of reëntering a past that had become permeable and as fascinatingly fantastic as a dream. Remembrance, always an element in the manipulated data of fiction, is often finally fruitful in purer form, when living presences that once crowded and threatened the rebellious imagination have been rendered by the passage of time mistily distant and legally impotent. Not only Melville turned to the past; the familiar American careers of Hemingway and Faulkner end with reminiscence—of the innocent Paris of Hemingway’s young manhood and artistic apprenticeship in “A Moveable Feast,” and of Yoknapatawpha County and Memphis as experienced by an eleven-year-old boy in Faulkner’s “The Reivers: A Reminiscence.”

The past in one sense recedes but in another gains in interest as the writer ages and the stage of the present empties of decisive action. Henry James at the outset of the twentieth century brought to a triumphant climax his sustained practice of fiction with three stately novels that are marvels of prolonged design and elaborate sensibility—“The Wings of the Dove” (1902), “The Ambassadors” (1903), and “The Golden Bowl” (1904). He then, always an industrious critic and essayist, quite turned from the disguises and shifts of fiction. He went back to America for the first time in twenty-one years and wrote of what he saw and what he remembered in “The American Scene” (1906). He revisited his creative, European past in the eighteen autobiographical prefaces to the twenty-four volumes of the New York edition of his selected works (1907-09). And he wrote two volumes of autobiography, “A Small Boy and Others” (1911) and “Notes of a Son and Brother” (1914).

However, in 1909 his stagestruck side, still smarting from the hooted failure of his play “Guy Domville,” in 1895, was appealed to by a request from the Duke of York’s Theatre that he contribute a play to a London repertory season organized by J. M. Barrie and the American producer Charles Frohman. He responded, intensely, by writing a play in the last weeks of 1909, called “The Outcry,” based upon a newsworthy incident wherein a public protest prevented the American plutocrat Henry Clay Frick from buying a Holbein portrait from the Duke of Norfolk. In May of 1910, the death of Edward VII closed London’s theatres, and James, who had not been well himself, responded to this latest theatrical frustration by turning the unproduced “Outcry” into a novel, using the play’s dialogue little changed and nestling it in prose that closely resembles stage directions; the characters, announced by butlers, busily enter and exit. Reading it, one has a clear vision of a proscenium stage as it entertains quarrels and clinches in brisk succession. A jaunty curiosity not two hundred pages long, “The Outcry” is seldom pondered by contemporary Jamesians but at the time was something of a success, outselling “The Golden Bowl.” In its high-spoken mood of romp and rampant intellectuality, not to say the feminism forthrightly embodied by its conquering heroines, it resembles a play by Shaw, who was also invited to contribute to the doomed repertory season.

The cumbersome though finely painted charabanc of the late James style is pulled swaying along by a frisky pony of a plot, farcical and romantic, designed for stage-lit action. This most expatiatory and archly loquacious of novelists is obliged to hold the reins tight. The patter of his incongruous verbal felicities is invigorating; the style itself participates in the comedy. We feel on our faces—we, the reader and the sixty-seven-year-old author—the breeze of the senile sublime, a creativity liberated from its usual, anxiety-producing ambitions. The playful labor of this translation of drama into narrative was undertaken, Jean Strouse tells us in her introduction to the newest reprint of “The Outcry,” in the wake of “an acute depressive breakdown” brought on by the tepid reception of the New York edition, to which James had devoted heroic editorial effort, introducing and at times drastically revising his life’s work.

Iris Murdoch’s descent into the forgetfulness and incoherence of Alzheimer’s disease was vividly described in the memoirs “Iris” and “Elegy for Iris,” by her husband, John Bayley. The motion picture, starring Judi Dench, based on the memoirs shows the formerly prolific, consummately intelligent novelist pitifully struggling with the manuscript of the novel that was her last, “Jackson’s Dilemma” (1995). The novel was well enough received by critics: the San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle Review called it “the kind of poetical feast that Shakespeare provided in The Tempest. . . . She has never written more lucidly or more lyrically”; Harold Bloom in the Times Book Review said it demonstrated “Murdoch’s particular mastery.” I read “Jackson’s Dilemma” fearing that the author—who didn’t remember writing the book by the time she received finished copies from the publisher—had embarrassed herself, but the novel is not a steep falling off. It has wispy, stylized, and casually irrational elements, but so do her major works. The protagonist of “The Sea, the Sea” (1978) is miraculously rescued from a maelstrom by his cousin, an adept in yogic levitation; in “The Philosopher’s Pupil” (1983), a flying saucer sends out a ray that blinds the novel’s hero. The membrane between our chaotic inner lives and external material reality is permeable in Murdoch—she writes of the U.F.O. incident, “The inner is the outer, the outer is the inner: an old story, but who really understands it?” An early novel like “The Flight from the Enchanter” (1956) presents no fewer puzzles and implausibilities than the last. The most prominent weakness of “Jackson’s Dilemma,” for me, lies with the eponymous Jackson; one of Murdoch’s many spoiled priests, wistful for faith but not secure in it, he has no clear role (or dilemma) among the restless and self-indulgent English élite as they impulsively, wastefully shuttle from country home to London and back. We end in Jackson’s head: “Is it all a dream, yes, perhaps a dream. . . . Death, its closeness. . . . Was I in prison once? I cannot remember. At the end of what is necessary, I have come to a place where there is no road.” Perhaps presumptuously, we imagine ourselves admitted to the mind of the author, as she feels her grip on the real world loosening. But her creative artistry lasted up to the verge of what Hawthorne called “a drawing away of veils, a lifting of heavy, magnificent curtains.”

Hawthorne’s inability to carry forward and complete “The Ancestral Footprint” was, in Adorno’s term, a “catastrophe” for him personally. His struggles to find the key—the handle—demonstrate what a precarious feat it is to write a novel, organizing a host of inventions and polished details into a single movement toward resolution. Like sex, it is either easy or impossible. His failing physical health, his daughter Una’s worsening mental health, his ambivalent and unfashionable feelings about the Civil War, the confinements of his happy marriage—he had his excuses, but there are always excuses not to do the job. He had no trouble, even as his block worsened, turning his English journals into lively, sharp-eyed, realistic essays, while, in false loyalty, perhaps, to the attic-dwelling night-walker he had been in his youth, he tried to pen fiction by waning moonlight.

He drank excessively, it was rumored, and Henry Green—an aristocrat of a non-Puritan sort—certainly did. There is a kind of gallantry, a Rimbaudesque flamboyance, in Green’s premature embrace of silence; he produced the novel intended (he hinted) to be his last, “Concluding” (1948), when he was forty-three. He then let his creative instincts be seduced, by midlife affairs with younger women, into two more novels, “Nothing” (1950) and “Doting” (1952), both dialogue-dominated, and written with an impeccable economy, but their translucence feels clouded by an air of corruption and defeat, especially “Doting,” with its madly bibulous ending.

A geriatric ebb of energy is bound to affect late works, not necessarily to their detriment. A “Billy Budd” produced in Melville’s thirties might have been as full of bumptious bombast as “Mardi.” The later work’s style, pedestrian and legalistic at intervals, at others slips into a metaphoric vein as primally strange as imagery in Hawthorne and “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Of the demonic Claggart:

But upon any abrupt unforeseen encounter a red light would flash forth from his eye like a spark from an anvil in a dusk smithy. That quick, fierce light was a strange one, darted from orbs which in repose were of a color nearest approaching a deeper violet, the softest of shades.

Outer becomes inner; the images take on a heated life of their own, freed from reality. “Late style,” Said wrote in paraphrase of Adorno, “is what happens if art does not abdicate its rights in favor of reality.” How real is death to those who still live? When the Shavian torrent dwindled to a trickle, it still twinkled; in his preface to “Buoyant Billions” Shaw tells us that death is real, but in such a sprightly fashion that we do not believe it. Art comes, it may be, from the death-denying portion of the psyche, deeper than reason’s reach. Repeatedly, Shakespeare’s sonnets defy time:

Yet do thy worst, old Time; despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.

The last four plays that can be assigned to Shakespeare’s exclusive authorship, the romances, deny death the last word, though deaths occur: in “Cymbeline,” the odious Cloten dies; in “The Winter’s Tale” the staunch Antigonus, with the famous stage direction “Exit, pursued by a bear,” on the unreal seacoast of Bohemia. In all of them, the climactic events defy plausibility with wonderful returns from the dead or the lost. “The Tempest,” like Beethoven’s late compositions, refuses, in Adorno’s phrase, to “reconcile in a single image what is not reconciled.” Said wrote, “What I find valuable in Adorno is this notion of tension, of highlighting and dramatizing what I call irreconcilabilities.” “The Tempest” affirms Prospero’s death wish and retirement, and also Miranda’s wonder, her naïve eagerness to live and to love. She has not yet come to the end of what is necessary. Father and daughter, far from irreconcilable, are onstage together.

servido por mydigest sin comentarios compártelo

Nicholas Lemann: Amateur Hour

On the Internet, everybody is a millenarian. Internet journalism, according to those who produce manifestos on its behalf, represents a world-historical development—not so much because of the expressive power of the new medium as because of its accessibility to producers and consumers. That permits it to break the long-standing choke hold on public information and discussion that the traditional media—usually known, when this argument is made, as “gatekeepers” or “the priesthood”—have supposedly been able to maintain up to now. “Millions of Americans who were once in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff—and that many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession,” Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who operates one of the leading blogs, Instapundit, writes, typically, in his new book, “An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths.”

The rhetoric about Internet journalism produced by Reynolds and many others is plausible only because it conflates several distinct categories of material that are widely available online and didn’t use to be. One is pure opinion, especially political opinion, which the Internet has made infinitely easy to purvey. Another is information originally published in other media—everything from Chilean newspaper stories and entries in German encyclopedias to papers presented at Micronesian conferences on accounting methods—which one can find instantly on search and aggregation sites. Lately, grand journalistic claims have been made on behalf of material produced specifically for Web sites by people who don’t have jobs with news organizations. According to a study published last month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, there are twelve million bloggers in the United States, and thirty-four per cent of them consider blogging to be a form of journalism. That would add up to more than four million newly minted journalists just among the ranks of American bloggers. If you add everyone abroad, and everyone who practices other forms of Web journalism, the profession must have increased in size a thousandfold over the last decade.

As the Pew study makes clear, most bloggers see themselves as engaging only in personal expression; they don’t inspire the biggest claims currently being made for Internet journalism. The category that inspires the most soaring rhetoric about supplanting traditional news organizations is “citizen journalism,” meaning sites that publish contributions of people who don’t have jobs with news organizations but are performing a similar function.

Citizen journalists are supposedly inspired amateurs who find out what’s going on in the places where they live and work, and who bring us a fuller, richer picture of the world than we get from familiar news organizations, while sparing us the pomposity and preening that journalists often display. Hong Eun-taek, the editor-in-chief of perhaps the biggest citizen-journalism site, Oh My News, which is based in Seoul and has a staff of editors managing about forty thousand volunteer contributors, has posted a brief manifesto, which says, “Traditional means of news gathering and dissemination are quickly falling behind the new paradigm. . . . We believe news is something that is made not only by a George W. Bush or a Bill Gates but, more importantly, by people who are all allowed to think together. The news is a form of collective thinking. It is the ideas and minds of the people that are changing the world, when they are heard.”

That’s the catechism, but what has citizen journalism actually brought us? It’s a difficult question, in part because many of the truest believers are very good at making life unpleasant for doubters, through relentless sneering. Thus far, no “traditional journalist” has been silly enough to own up to and defend the idea of belonging to an élite from which ordinary citizens are barred. But sometimes one will unwittingly toss a chunk of red meat to the new-media visionaries by appearing not to accord the Internet revolution the full measure of respect it deserves—as John Markoff, a technology reporter for the Times, did in 2003 in an interview with Online Journalism Review. Jeff Jarvis, a veteran editor, publisher, and columnist, and, starting in September, a professor at the City University of New York’s new journalism school, posted the interview on his blog, BuzzMachine, with his own post-facto reactions added, so that it reads, in part, this way:

MARKOFF: I certainly can see that scenario, where all these new technologies may only be good enough to destroy all the old standards but not create something better to replace them with. I think that’s certainly one scenario.
JARVIS: Pardon me for interrupting, but that made no frigging sense whatsoever. Can you parse that for me, Mr. Markoff? Or do you need an editor to speak sense? How do new standards “destroy” old standards? Something won’t become a “standard” unless it is accepted by someone in power—the publishers or the audiences. This isn’t a game of PacMan.
MARKOFF: The other possibility right now—it sometimes seems we have a world full of bloggers and that blogging is the future of journalism, or at least that’s what the bloggers argue, and to my mind, it’s not clear yet whether blogging is anything more than CB radio.
JARVIS: The reference is as old-farty and out-of-date as the sentiment. It’s clear that Markoff isn’t reading weblogs and doesn’t know what’s there.
Hey, fool, that’s your audience talking there. You should want to listen to what they have to say. You are, after all, spending your living writing for them. If you were a reporter worth a damn, you’d care to know what the marketplace cares about. But, no, you’re the mighty NYT guy. You don’t need no stinking audience. You don’t need ears. You only need a mouth.

To live up to its billing, Internet journalism has to meet high standards both conceptually and practically: the medium has to be revolutionary, and the journalism has to be good. The quality of Internet journalism is bound to improve over time, especially if more of the virtues of traditional journalism migrate to the Internet. But, although the medium has great capabilities, especially the way it opens out and speeds up the discourse, it is not quite as different from what has gone before as its advocates are saying.

Societies create structures of authority for producing and distributing knowledge, information, and opinion. These structures are always waxing and waning, depending not only on the invention of new means of communication but also on political, cultural, and economic developments. An interesting new book about this came out last year in Britain under the daunting title “Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture.” It is set in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and although its author, Mark Knights, who teaches at the University of East Anglia, does not make explicit comparisons to the present, it seems obvious that such comparisons are on his mind.

The “new media” of later Stuart Britain were pamphlets and periodicals, made possible not only by the advent of the printing press but by the relaxation of government censorship and licensing regimes, by political unrest, and by urbanization (which created audiences for public debate). Today, the best known of the periodicals is Addison and Steele’s Spectator, but it was one of dozens that proliferated almost explosively in the early seventeen-hundreds, including The Tatler, The Post Boy, The Medley, and The British Apollo. The most famous of the pamphleteers was Daniel Defoe, but there were hundreds of others, including Thomas Sprat, the author of “A True Account and Declaration of the Horrid Conspiracy Against the Late King” (1685), and Charles Leslie, the author of “The Wolf Stript of His Shepherd’s Cloathing” (1704). These voices entered a public conversation that had been narrowly restricted, mainly to holders of official positions in church and state. They were the bloggers and citizen journalists of their day, and their influence was far greater (though their audiences were far smaller) than what anybody on the Internet has yet achieved.

As media, Knights points out, both pamphlets and periodicals were radically transformative in their capabilities. Pamphlets were a mass medium with a short lead time—cheap, transportable, and easily accessible to people of all classes and political inclinations. They were, as Knights puts it, “capable of assuming different forms (letters, dialogues, essays, refutations, vindications, and so on)” and, he adds, were “ideally suited to making a public statement at a particular moment.” Periodicals were, by the standards of the day, “a sort of interactive entertainment,” because of the invention of letters to the editor and because publications were constantly responding to their readers and to one another.

Then as now, the new media in their fresh youth produced a distinctive, hot-tempered rhetorical style. Knights writes, “Polemical print . . . challenged conventional notions of how rhetoric worked and was a medium that facilitated slander, polemic, and satire. It delighted in mocking or even abusive criticism, in part because of the conventions of anonymity.” But one of Knights’s most useful observations is that this was a self-limiting phenomenon. Each side in what Knights understands, properly, as the media front in a merciless political struggle between Whigs and Tories soon began accusing the other of trafficking in lies, distortions, conspiracy theories, and special pleading, and presenting itself as the avatar of the public interest, civil discourse, and epistemologically derived truth. Knights sees this genteeler style of expression as just another political tactic, but it nonetheless drove print publication toward a more reasoned, less inflamed rhetorical stance, which went along with a partial settling down of British politics from hot war between the parties to cold. (Full-dress British newspapers, like the Times and the Guardian, did not emerge until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, well into this calmer period and long after Knights ends his story.) At least in part, Internet journalism will surely repeat the cycle, and will begin to differentiate itself tonally, by trying to sound responsible and trustworthy in the hope of building a larger, possibly paying audience.

American journalism began, roughly speaking, on the later Stuart Britain model; during Colonial times it was dominated by fiery political speechmakers, like Thomas Paine. All those uplifting statements by the Founders about freedom of the press were almost certainly produced with pamphleteers in mind. When, in the early nineteenth century, political parties and fast cylinder printing presses developed, American journalism became mainly a branch of the party system, with very little pretense to neutral authority or ownership of the facts.

A related development was the sensational penny press, which served the big cities, whose populations were swollen with immigrants from rural America and abroad. It produced powerful local newspapers, but it’s hard to think of them as fitting the priesthood model. William Randolph Hearst’s New York papers, the leading examples, were flamboyant, populist, opinionated, and thoroughly disreputable. They influenced politics, but that is different from saying, as Glenn Reynolds says of the Hearst papers, that they “set the agenda for public discussion.” Most of the formal means of generating information that are familiar in America today—objective journalism is only one; others are modern academic research, professional licensing, and think tanks—were created, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, explicitly to counter the populist inclinations of various institutions, one of which was the big media.

In fact, what the prophets of Internet journalism believe themselves to be fighting against—journalism in the hands of an enthroned few, who speak in a voice of phony, unearned authority to the passive masses—is, as a historical phenomenon, mainly a straw man. Even after the Second World War, some American cities still had several furiously battling papers, on the model of “The Front Page.” There were always small political magazines of all persuasions, and books written in the spirit of the old pamphlets, and, later in the twentieth century, alternative weeklies and dissenting journalists like I. F. Stone. When journalism was at its most blandly authoritative—probably in the period when the three television broadcast networks were in their heyday and local newspaper monopoly was beginning to become the rule—so were American politics and culture, and you have to be very media-centric to believe that the press established the tone of national life rather than vice versa.

Every new medium generates its own set of personalities and forms. Internet journalism is a huge tent that encompasses sites from traditional news organizations; Web-only magazines like Slate and Salon; sites like Daily Kos and NewsMax, which use some notional connection to the news to function as influential political actors; and aggregation sites (for instance, Arts & Letters Daily and Indy Media) that bring together an astonishingly wide range of disparate material in a particular category. The more ambitious blogs, taken together, function as a form of fast-moving, densely cross-referential pamphleteering—an open forum for every conceivable opinion that can’t make its way into the big media, or, in the case of the millions of purely personal blogs, simply an individual’s take on life. The Internet is also a venue for press criticism (“We can fact-check your ass!” is one of the familiar rallying cries of the blogosphere) and a major research library of bloopers, outtakes, pranks, jokes, and embarrassing performances by big shots. But none of that yet rises to the level of a journalistic culture rich enough to compete in a serious way with the old media—to function as a replacement rather than an addendum.

The most fervent believers in the transforming potential of Internet journalism are operating not only on faith in its achievements, even if they lie mainly in the future, but on a certainty that the old media, in selecting what to publish and broadcast, make horrible and, even worse, ignobly motivated mistakes. They are politically biased, or they are ignoring or suppressing important stories, or they are out of touch with ordinary people’s concerns, or they are merely passive transmitters of official utterances. The more that traditional journalism appears to be an old-fashioned captive press, the more providential the Internet looks.

Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University who was the leading champion of “civic journalism” even before there was an Internet, wrote in the Washington Post in June that he started his blog, PressThink, because “I was tired of passing my ideas through editors who forced me to observe the silences they kept as professional journalists. The day after President Bush was re-elected in 2004, I suggested on my blog that at least some news organizations should consider themselves the opposition to the White House. Only by going into opposition, I argued, could the press really tell the story of the Bush administration’s vast expansion of executive power. That notion simply hadn’t been discussed in mainstream newsrooms, which had always been able to limit debate about what is and isn’t the job of the journalist. But now that amateurs had joined pros in the press zone, newsrooms couldn’t afford not to debate their practices.”

In PressThink, Rosen now has the forum that he didn’t before; and last week he announced the launch of a new venture, called NewAssignment.Net, in which a “smart mob” of donors would pay journalists to pursue “stories the regular news media doesn’t do, can’t do, wouldn’t do, or already screwed up.” The key to the idea, in Rosen’s mind, is to give “people formerly known as the audience” the assigning power previously reserved for editors. “NewAssignment.Net would be a case of journalism without the media,” he wrote on PressThink. “That’s the beauty part.”

Even before the advent of NewAssignment.Net, and even for people who don’t blog, there is a lot more opportunity to talk back to news organizations than there used to be. In their Internet versions, most traditional news organizations make their reporters available to answer readers’ questions and, often, permit readers to post their own material. Being able to see this as the advent of true democracy in what had been a media oligarchy makes it much easier to argue that Internet journalism has already achieved great things.

Still: Is the Internet a mere safety valve, a salon des refusés, or does it actually produce original information beyond the realm of opinion and comment? It ought to raise suspicion that we so often hear the same menu of examples in support of its achievements: bloggers took down the 2004 “60 Minutes” report on President Bush’s National Guard service and, with it, Dan Rather’s career; bloggers put Trent Lott’s remarks in apparent praise of the Jim Crow era front and center, and thereby deposed him as Senate majority leader.

The best original Internet journalism happens more often by accident, when smart and curious people with access to means of communication are at the scene of a sudden disaster. Any time that big news happens unexpectedly, or in remote and dangerous places, there is more raw information available right away on the Internet than through established news organizations. The most memorable photographs of the London terrorist bombing last summer were taken by subway riders using cell phones, not by news photographers, who didn’t have time to get there. There were more ordinary people than paid reporters posting information when the tsunami first hit South Asia, in 2004, when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, in 2005, and when Israeli bombs hit Beirut this summer. I am in an especially good position to appreciate the benefits of citizen journalism at such moments, because it helped save my father and stepmother’s lives when they were stranded in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina: the citizen portions of the Web sites of local news organizations were, for a crucial day or two, one of the best places to get information about how to drive out of the city. But, over time, the best information about why the hurricane destroyed so much of the city came from reporters, not citizens.

Eyewitness accounts and information-sharing during sudden disasters are welcome, even if they don’t provide a complete report of what is going on in a particular situation. And that is what citizen journalism is supposed to do: keep up with public affairs, especially locally, year in and year out, even when there’s no disaster. Citizen journalists bear a heavy theoretical load. They ought to be fanning out like a great army, covering not just what professional journalists cover, as well or better, but also much that they ignore. Great citizen journalism is like the imagined Northwest Passage—it has to exist in order to prove that citizens can learn about public life without the mediation of professionals. But when one reads it, after having been exposed to the buildup, it is nearly impossible not to think, This is what all the fuss is about?

Oh My News seems to attract far more readers than any other citizen-journalism site—about six hundred thousand daily by its own count. One day in June, readers of the English-language edition found this lead story: “Printable Robots: Advances in Inkjet Technology Forecast Robotic Origami,” by Gregory Daigle. It begins:

From the diminutive ASIMO from Honda to the colossus in the animated film Iron Giant, kids around the world know that robots are cool yet complex machines. Advances in robotics, fuel plans from NASA that read like science fiction movie scripts.
Back on Earth, what can we expect over the next few years in robot technology for the consumer?
Reprogram your Roomba? Boring.
Hack your Aibo robot dog? Been there.
Print your own robot? Whoa!

On the same day, Barista of Bloomfield Avenue, the nom de Web of Debbie Galant, who lives in a suburban town in New Jersey and is one of the most esteemed “hyperlocal bloggers” in the country, led with a picture from her recent vacation in the Berkshires. The next item was “Hazing Goes Loony Tunes,” and here it is in its entirety:

Word on the sidewalk is that Glen Ridge officialdom pretty much defeated the class of 2007 in the annual senior-on-freshman hazing ritual yesterday by making the rising seniors stay after school for several minutes in order to give freshmen a head start to run home. We have reports that seniors in cars, once released from school, searched for slow-moving freshman prey, while Glen Ridge police officers in cars closely tracked any cars decorated with class of 2007 regalia. Of course, if any freshman got pummelled with mayonnaise, we want to know about it.

What is generally considered to be the most complete local citizen-journalism site in the United States, the Northwest Voice, in Bakersfield, California (which also has a print version and is owned by the big daily paper in town), led with a story called “A Boost for Business Women,” which began:

So long, Corporate World.
Hello, business ownership—family time, and happiness.
At least, that’s how Northwest resident Jennifer Meadors feels after the former commercial banking professional started her own business for Arbonne International, a skin care company, about eight months ago. So far, it’s been successful, professionally and personally.

Another much praised citizen-journalism site is Backfence.com, headquartered in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Last month, it sponsored a contest to pick the two best citizen-journalism stories; the prize was a free trip to a conference held by Oh My News, in Seoul. One winner was Liz Milner, of Reston, Virginia, for a story that began this way:

Among the many definitions of “hero” given in The American Heritage Dictionary is “A person noted for special achievement in a particular field.” Reston is a community of creative people, so it seems only right that our heroes should be paragons of creativity. Therefore, I’m nominating Reston musician and freelance writer, Ralph Lee Smith for the post of “Local Hero, Creative Category.”
Through his performances, recordings, writings teaching and museum exhibitions, this 78-year-old Reston resident has helped bring new life to an art form that had been on the verge of extinction—the art of playing the mountain dulcimer. He has helped to popularize the repertoire for this instrument so that now mountain music is everywhere—even in slick Hollywood films.

In other words, the content of most citizen journalism will be familiar to anybody who has ever read a church or community newsletter—it’s heartwarming and it probably adds to the store of good things in the world, but it does not mount the collective challenge to power which the traditional media are supposedly too timid to take up. Often the most journalistically impressive material on one of the “hyperlocal” citizen-journalism sites has links to professional journalism, as in the Northwest Voice, or Chi-Town Daily News, where much of the material is written by students at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, who are in training to take up full-time jobs in news organizations. At the highest level of journalistic achievement, the reporting that revealed the civil-liberties encroachments of the war on terror, which has upset the Bush Administration, has come from old-fashioned big-city newspapers and television networks, not Internet journalists; day by day, most independent accounts of world events have come from the same traditional sources. Even at its best and most ambitious, citizen journalism reads like a decent Op-Ed page, and not one that offers daring, brilliant, forbidden opinions that would otherwise be unavailable. Most citizen journalism reaches very small and specialized audiences and is proudly minor in its concerns. David Weinberger, another advocate of new-media journalism, has summarized the situation with a witty play on Andy Warhol’s maxim: “On the Web, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.”

Reporting—meaning the tradition by which a member of a distinct occupational category gets to cross the usual bounds of geography and class, to go where important things are happening, to ask powerful people blunt and impertinent questions, and to report back, reliably and in plain language, to a general audience—is a distinctive, fairly recent invention. It probably started in the United States, in the mid-nineteenth century, long after the Founders wrote the First Amendment. It has spread—and it continues to spread—around the world. It is a powerful social tool, because it provides citizens with an independent source of information about the state and other holders of power. It sounds obvious, but reporting requires reporters. They don’t have to be priests or gatekeepers or even paid professionals; they just have to go out and do the work.

The Internet is not unfriendly to reporting; potentially, it is the best reporting medium ever invented. A few places, like the site on Yahoo! operated by Kevin Sites, consistently offer good journalism that has a distinctly Internet, rather than repurposed, feeling. To keep pushing in that direction, though, requires that we hold up original reporting as a virtue and use the Internet to find new ways of presenting fresh material—which, inescapably, will wind up being produced by people who do that full time, not “citizens” with day jobs.

Journalism is not in a period of maximal self-confidence right now, and the Internet’s cheerleaders are practically laboratory specimens of maximal self-confidence. They have got the rhetorical upper hand; traditional journalists answering their challenges often sound either clueless or cowed and apologetic. As of now, though, there is not much relation between claims for the possibilities inherent in journalist-free journalism and what the people engaged in that pursuit are actually producing. As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away.

servido por mydigest sin comentarios compártelo

Jon Lee Anderson: The Battle for Lebannon

On a deceptively peaceful afternoon in the last week of July, Ali Fayyad, a Hezbollah strategist, puffed on a cigar and spooned up a dish of ice cream. Three scoops: chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. We were sitting in Lina’s Café, on Rue Hamra, in downtown Beirut. For eleven days, the city had been shuttered, nearly empty of people and traffic, as the Israeli military pounded Beirut’s southern suburbs and the south of the country, where Hezbollah, the “Party of God,” had dug its tunnels and bunkers and stored thousands of Iranian-built missiles. Bridges, tunnels, roads, and apartment buildings lay in ruins, and almost three-quarters of a million Lebanese had fled their homes in fear. But for the moment, at least, Ali Fayyad ate his ice cream in peace. Some of the shops were open, and more people were out on the street, because Condoleezza Rice was in town to meet with the Lebanese leadership and everyone figured—rightly––that the Israelis would hold fire over downtown Beirut until she left.

Fayyad is a burly man in his forties. As a member of the Hezbollah politburo, he is close to the group’s supreme leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, and everything he told me at Lina’s, about the cross-border abduction of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of eight others on July 12th, and the all-out armed conflict that followed, was an authorized version. “Our aim is to get Israel to return Lebanese lands”—he meant Shebaa Farms, a small strip of land occupied by Israel since 1967—“and to release three of our prisoners,” Fayyad said. “One of the prisoners has been held for almost thirty years.” He was referring to Samir Kuntar, a Lebanese man who, in 1979, killed an Israeli man and his four-year-old daughter. (Another daughter, who was two, was accidentally smothered when her mother tried to keep her quiet in the crawl space where they were hiding.)

“We’ve made many efforts to have them returned, and have tried everything, including diplomacy, with no results,” Fayyad said. “So we were left with no other choice but to kidnap Israeli soldiers. The idea was ‘prisoners for prisoners.’ And we have exchanged prisoners with Israel in the past.”

If that really was Hezbollah’s plan, it went wrong from the beginning. Tensions were already high, because of the Hamas kidnapping of an Israeli soldier in Gaza, two weeks earlier, and Israel responded with bombing raids, including one, the next day, on Beirut’s airport. That night, a rocket fired from Hezbollah territory hit Haifa, and more missiles, in both directions, soon followed, resulting in casualties and the threat of regional war.

Fayyad seemed both surprised and offended by the scale of the Israeli attack, which he said Hezbollah never expected. Although Hezbollah’s rockets were landing in Haifa, Nahariya, Safed, and Nazareth, he also claimed that it had been reluctant to target civilians. “First, for humanitarian and moral reasons, and, second, because when civilians are killed we come out as the losers,” he said. “Far more of our people get killed than Israel’s.” Still, for Fayyad, the events had the logic of reprisal: Israel had hit “civilian infrastructure,” and so Hezbollah fired rockets into “occupied Palestine,” by which he meant all of Israel.

The past two weeks have represented a return to first principles for Hezbollah, which was founded in the early eighties, after Israel invaded Lebanon. The group became known internationally when it was accused of bombing the United States Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, killing two hundred and forty-one American servicemen; that was followed by attacks on Israeli targets around the world. In Lebanon, Hezbollah draws support, in the Shiite community and beyond, for its role in driving the Israeli occupation forces out of the country in 2000. Since then, Hezbollah has presented itself as a political party, gaining two posts in the Lebanese cabinet and fourteen seats in the parliament. But, rather than disarming, it bolstered its military capacity, with Iranian and Syrian help. Now that it is under siege, the contradictions of its position—as part of the Lebanese state, but also as a clandestine body that subverts it—are plainer than ever. On July 14th, Nasrallah went on television and addressed Israel directly: “You wanted an open war. We are heading toward an open war, and we are ready for it.”

The Israelis, led by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his novice Defense Minister, Amir Peretz, quickly shifted their aims from retrieving the soldiers to destroying, or at least crippling, Hezbollah. Hundreds of Lebanese had already been killed, most of them civilians; dozens of Israelis had been killed, about half of them civilians. As Fayyad considered these numbers, he puffed on his cigar and said that Israel, and not Hezbollah, had made the greater strategic miscalculation.

“The real battle started four days ago, when the Israelis moved their troops into Lebanon, and it became a ground war,” he said. “That is the preferred situation for Hezbollah. They fought four days to take Maroun al-Ras, just one mile from the border, on very open ground, with tanks—four days.” A few days after our conversation, control of Maroun al-Ras was still in dispute, and Israel was facing more resistance than expected in the village of Bint Jbail.

But Hezbollah’s interests are not reducible to the conventional terms of a casualty balance sheet. Hezbollah has embedded itself deep within Lebanese society, in effect creating a state within a state, with an extensive social-service network. Even if Israel manages to dislodge Hezbollah’s fighters, Nasrallah will likely remain the most powerful politician in the country, in part because the chaos of the last weeks has exposed the weakness of the government. Most of the Lebanese analysts I spoke with said they believed that Hezbollah had, on its own terms, been significantly strengthened by the conflict.

The damage to Lebanon, meanwhile, has been catastrophic. Fayyad said that he had arranged to evacuate his father from the family home in a village near the Israeli border, but he emphasized that Hezbollah’s forces would not leave south Lebanon without a fight. “You must remember that the point of resistance is not to hold ground and face off in front of another position,” Fayyad said. “That is classical warfare, but we are guerrillas. If the Israelis want to take the territory all the way up to the Litani River, do you think they can do it without heavy casualties?”

Fayyad finished his ice cream and stubbed out his cigar. Before we left Lina’s, he said, “This doesn’t mean that the battle isn’t difficult for us. It is. It’s painful, too. But the longer it goes on the harder it will be for them.”

Across town, the talks between Condoleezza Rice and the Lebanese faltered the moment she announced that the Bush Administration would not yet press Israel for a ceasefire. “It doesn’t do any good to raise false hopes,” she said after a meeting with Lebanese, European, and U.N. officials in Rome two days later. “It’s not going to happen. . . . I did say to the group, ‘When will we learn?’ The fields of the Middle East are littered with broken ceasefires.”

On July 23rd, the day before Rice’s visit, I’d made my way toward the cities and towns of the Shia south––Hezbollistan, as some call it. I drove from Beirut with a few photographers, taking back roads to bypass the mangled highway interchanges and bridges. The only cars we saw were racing in the opposite direction, to the relative safety of the north, usually in caravans of seven or eight. Most were packed with families, who had attached makeshift white flags to the sideview mirrors. The previous week, an Israeli missile had hit a van full of refugees, killing sixteen of them. Some drivers flashed their lights, warning us not to proceed; most passed by at high speed, the expressions on their faces grim, intent, and scared.

Approaching Tyre, we saw that a bomb had gouged out a crater, twenty feet across and twenty feet deep, in the middle of the road. Nearby, a black S.U.V. sat accordioned and empty; it had crashed into a telephone pole. From the sky came the whoosh of a fighter jet and, much closer, the whine of a drone.

We pulled over to make way for a convoy of refugees. One driver, a man wearing a white T-shirt and steering a large black Mercedes-Benz, had several frightened-looking women and children in the back seat. As he slowed down to edge past the crater, he yelled out to us, in English, “We will never go back! We must leave this country.” In another car, a woman pointed to a child and said, frantically, “Down syndrome.” A teen-ager poked his head out of yet another car and exclaimed wildly, “U.S. Embassy!” A muffled explosion sounded, coming from beyond the city.

Over the next half hour, several more groups of cars made the run. One had its roof caved in and one of its sides smashed; it seemed impossible that anyone could drive it, but, as it came nearer, I saw an older man behind the wheel, his body bent and his head low to one side. As he passed, he called out that he had been with a woman—“a journalist like you”—and added, “She’s dead.” Later that day, news reports confirmed that a twenty-three-year-old Lebanese photographer, Layal Nejib, had been killed when an Israeli missile struck near her car on the road south of Tyre.

We turned north, to a hospital in Sidon. A large group of people—men, women wearing chadors, and children—were talking and crying at once. I recognized the man in the white T-shirt who had passed us by the crater. He appeared to be in shock, walking back and forth, trembling and shouting; several men were trying to calm him down. He was soaked with sweat. Three members of his family had been wounded. I walked up to the man and said that I had seen him less than an hour before. He turned and shouted, accusingly, “You were there and I talked to you—and then they hit us!”

Near the hospital, a mosque lay in ruins. Next door was a technical college and school run by the Hariri Foundation, which was established by the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated in a car bombing in February, 2005. (A preliminary U.N. report implicated Syrian intelligence; the investigation is incomplete.) One of the mosque’s white domes, still intact, was propped up, bizarrely, on top of the debris. Strips of the mosque’s red carpet, shredded by the explosion, hung from the branches of nearby trees.

A man approached and told me that he was a teacher at the Hariri school. I asked him why he thought the Israelis had hit a mosque, and he said, simply, “It was a Hezbollah mosque.” As he led me onto the grounds, a caretaker began yelling in Arabic about “Israel” and “America,” but the teacher shooed him away. I found a leaflet that had been dropped by the Israelis. It showed caricatures of Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad; Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; and Khaled Mashal, a Hamas leader based in Damascus, playing flutes around an urn; from it emerged the bearded face of Nasrallah. “At your service,” the caption read.

A younger man came up to me and, when we were out of earshot of others, said that Hezbollah had kept bombs in the basement of the mosque, but that two days earlier a truck had taken the cache away. It was common knowledge in Sidon, he said, and everyone was expecting the mosque to be hit. When, the previous evening, displaced people from the south had gathered on the grounds, they had been warned away.

“Everybody wants to end this Hezbollah regime, but nobody can say anything,” the young man said. He told me that he had been to the United States. “I know how the people are there, what they eat and how they live and think, and we don’t have anything like that here. We would like to live like that, without all this”—he waved toward the ruined mosque—“normally, the way you do.” He hoped that the Israelis would be successful. When another Lebanese man came up and joined us, he stopped talking. Before we parted, I asked him if he was a Christian. He looked surprised. “No,” he said. “I am Muslim. Sunni.”

Sunni and Christian politicians often publicly declare their solidarity with the Shiite Hezbollah, which routinely refers to itself as a Lebanese national “resistance movement.” But the sectarian fault lines have been affected by the current crisis. The population is estimated to be thirty-five per cent Christian, thirty-five per cent Shiite, twenty-five per cent Sunni, and five per cent Druze, and government posts are allocated to specific groups—the Prime Minister must be Sunni, for example. “Civil war is on everyone’s mind, but it’s the one thing nobody wants to talk about,” an affluent Maronite Christian businessman told me over dinner at a restaurant in a Maronite enclave in the hills above Beirut. I was there with two couples—the other man, also a Christian, was a well-known former government minister—on the restaurant’s terrace. Like many people with money, they had moved their families to the hills. The restaurant’s sound system was playing a song by Fairouz, Lebanon’s most famous singer and a national idol, whose beautiful laments evoke emotions in the Lebanese the same way that Edith Piaf once did for the French in wartime.

My hosts had been telling me, with a certain pride, how the monasteries and schools in the area had taken in thousands of Shiite refugees from the south. “This kind of thing has never happened before,” the former minister said. “Most of the people from these two communities have never had this sort of contact with each other. But they have been taken in, and they are getting along.” He saw it as a promising sign of “inter-communal solidarity.” After all, he said, the attacks had been directed not only against the Shiites but against Lebanon’s infrastructure.

Down the table, the businessman said that he wondered why, with all the resources Hezbollah had at its disposal—it receives an estimated hundred million dollars a year from Iran—it hadn’t done more to protect its civilian population. “Why didn’t Hezbollah prepare for this?” he said. “Where is the food, the medicines? Where are the shelters for the people? Maybe, out of this, people will begin to question why they had to suffer because of the will of one man.” He meant Nasrallah.

Speaking about the Shiite refugees, who were now dependent on aid handouts, his wife asked, “What will happen when October comes and winter begins? Will they stay? Will they have homes to return to? All through the civil war, I stayed in Lebanon—I never wanted to leave—but in just two weeks they have destroyed everything we have built in the fifteen years since the war ended, and now I don’t want to stay anymore. This time, I want to leave.”

A moment later, a distant rumble could be heard. “Are those bombs?” she said. “Is that what I am hearing? Here?” Neither her husband nor the ex-minister acknowledged her. But then there was another, louder explosion, and she asked again.

“We are hearing Fairouz,” the ex-minister said sternly, cocking a thumb toward the sound system. He said this as if to tell her, “Don’t spoil the evening,” but afterward he brooded, and everyone at the table sat silently, listening to the music and, unavoidably, to the explosions in the distance.

When I arrived at the Hezbollah stronghold of Haret Hreik, in Beirut’s predominantly Shiite southern suburbs, it had just been pummelled, as it had every day since the bombing began. Most of the residents, who lived in concrete apartment blocks, had left. It had been risky for reporters to go to the neighborhood, both because of the Israeli bombardment and because of the remaining Hezbollah sentinels, who were tense and suspicious. But now Hezbollah was conducting a press tour of its ruins.

I found my way to the rendezvous point, at a bombed-out highway interchange, where fifty or sixty journalists had gathered—reporters, photographers, and television cameramen. An energetic young man named Hussein Naboulsi, who runs Hezbollah’s press office, announced that the tour would be fast, and that no one should stray from the group. He then headed off so quickly that people had to sprint to keep up. Hezbollah men kept an eye on the sky, and on us.

We walked past entire apartment blocks that had been flattened. The streets were littered with chunks of concrete, insulation material, twisted aluminum shutters, broken glass, and dangling electrical wires, and it became difficult to walk. Naboulsi paused and waved his arms and said loudly, “You see? This is where ordinary people live. This is what the Israelis do.”

In front of a row of wrecked shop- fronts, he declared, “This is revenge against Lebanon, the only country that has shown itself able to defeat Israel.” We reached an open area where the buildings had been completely levelled. Naboulsi pointed to some rubble and said, “This is where the Hezbollah Media Relations office used be. Now there’s no place for me to work.” He claimed that, apart from this and a center for social charity, there hadn’t been any Hezbollah offices around there—only civilian targets. He then led the group away from the area where, I had heard, Hezbollah’s security headquarters had stood. In Beirut, many people believed that Sheikh Nasrallah was still in the neighborhood, in a bunker, although there were also rumors that he was in Damascus or at the Iranian Embassy.

Naboulsi suddenly yelled, “Jet fighters in the sky!” He urged the journalists to hurry to their cars; the tour was over.

One evening, on a rooftop balcony in the eastern-Beirut district of Ashrafieh, I met with Jamil Mroue, a secular Shiite and the editor of Beirut’s English-language newspaper, the Daily Star. Mroue, a big, handsome silver-haired man of fifty-six, nursed a glass of whiskey and looked out over the sea, where two gray American destroyers were prowling the Mediterranean. After staring at the ships for a minute, Mroue began to vent his frustration.

“Even after 9/11, there is this expectation in the U.S. and Israel that some unspoken middle class is just sitting there waiting to inherit the ruins of whatever country it is that they are obliterating. But there is no calculation that, if they flatten Lebanon and Nasrallah comes out of hiding and is given a microphone to deliver a speech, he can topple governments. He has been extraordinarily empowered by this. Israel and America are still obsessed with destroying hardware. But if you do this with Hezbollah you just propagate what you want to destroy”—that is, an unmoored fighting force. “Do I want to live under Hezbollah?,” he said. “No, I don’t. But the same errors that the Americans made in Iraq are the ones being made here. You get rid of Nasrallah not by destroying his guns but by helping to create a sustainable society.”

Mroue went on, “In the beginning, in the eighties, Hezbollah controlled the night, but by 2000 it controlled the day, even as the Israeli soldiers were huddled in their bunkers.” He said that it was unfair to ask Lebanon’s fragile government to do what the Israelis couldn’t in their eighteen-year occupation. “Do you want to use a sledgehammer? Well, do you remember the Israeli minister who compared Arabs to lice? Try hitting lice with a sledgehammer!”

Mroue sipped his whiskey and said, “Hezbollah will most likely come out of this with its infrastructure shattered, but then comes the soapbox with the highly cerebral underdog—Nasrallah—and there will be a camera crew there from CNN or Al Arabiya, and he will go on camera and say ‘Do this,’ and people will.”

Mroue’s point of view was common not only among secular Shiites but among Christians and Sunnis who normally had little use for Hezbollah yet despaired of the effect of Israel’s bombing and the Bush Administration’s refusal to rein in the Olmert government.

“Before the war, probably eighty or ninety per cent of Lebanese were against Hezbollah,” Mroue said despondently. “But now I’d say it’s around fifty, teetering on sixty per cent—in favor.” Those numbers were guesses; the breadth and depth of Hezbollah’s support is one of the great uncertainties in the crisis. Mroue cited an old Saudi tribal proverb: “If you know the price of a man’s ransom, kill him.” The ransom was the price that would be exacted by the slain man’s tribe in revenge for his death. “In other words, if you know what the costs will be for your actions, and you can afford them, go ahead,” Mroue said. “But here, who knows what the price of the ransom is?”

Hussein Rahal runs Hezbollah’s information bureau, and, like other Hezbollah officials, he had gone underground. I met him by prearrangement in a borrowed office in a government building. Rahal was a study in gray: he wore a gray suit, had cropped gray hair, and had a gray stubble beard. He was taking the long view. “We have lived in this situation before. All wars end, and when this one does we will be victorious, because we will stand fast, and the situation we have now will be changed. Right now, the neoconservatives, as part of their strategy to reshape the Middle East, are encouraging Israel to escalate its war against Lebanon, which means that the U.S. Administration is taking a leading part in a war, one that the American people have no say in.” Rahal paused, and added carefully, “But Hezbollah does not want to cause any harm to the American people.” He went on, “The U.S. runs the risk of bringing down the Lebanese state it says it wants to support. And if this happens it could take the whole region into a new stage of the conflict—and who benefits from that?

“War is always two-sided, and you must test both sides’ ability to stand fast. We have weapons that we did not have in 1996. The casualties for Israel in a ground war will be very high. And we have only one choice, and that is to survive.”

The broadcast facilities of Hezbollah’s television station, Al Manar, were bombed––the Israelis consider it the group’s most powerful propaganda arm—but it somehow managed to stay on the air. When I asked Ibrahim Mussawi, the editor of foreign news at Al Manar, about the damage the country had sustained, he said, “We’ve managed with thirty-five billion dollars of national debt”—Lebanon’s current debt. “What will it cost to rebuild the new damage? Four, five billion? If we could manage thirty-five, then we can manage forty billion. Bad as it is, maybe some good can come out of this; maybe after this it will be the right time to settle all our problems in Lebanon, all of the ‘isms’ we are famous for: nepotism, corruptionism.” Mussawi seemed to be suggesting that the best solution for Lebanon’s ills, when the war was over, was a government led by the Party of God.

For now, it is not clear who is running Lebanon. Rice came to Beirut in part to express support for Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, who came to power after the “Cedar revolution,” the mass protests against Syrian interference in Lebanon that followed Hariri’s murder. Siniora, a Sunni, had criticized Hezbollah, but was openly in despair about the lack of U.S. support for a ceasefire; in Rome, he called the air war “barbaric.”

One politician Rice pointedly snubbed during her visit was the country’s President, Émile Lahoud, a Maronite who is widely seen as a tool of Syria. I met with him at the Presidential palace a few hours before Rice arrived. He was deeply tanned, and looked like an older, fleshier version of Tony Blair.

Lahoud told me how pleased he was that I had come to Lebanon to see the “truth” of what was happening. “Unfortunately, Americans have a very erroneous picture,” he said. “It’s—you know, they have a very strong media. Israel is all over the world.”

He spoke vehemently about the “infamy” of the Israeli attacks. “The Israelis said it was because of the taking of two hostages. Well, it is not true. They want to break the infrastructure, because Lebanon is a very big competitor of Israel, from the touristic point of view and with anything—regional trade, finance. So the Israelis don’t want Lebanon to prosper.” He added, “But the most important reason is that they want to take revenge, because we liberated our land.”

I asked Lahoud if he believed, as I had heard other Lebanese say, that Israel wanted to spark a civil war in Lebanon. “Yes,” he said. “Israel is happy when Lebanese fight each other.” He added, “Washington wants whatever Israel wants, unfortunately. For many reasons. The main one, you know”—Lahoud gave me a knowing look—“the lobby, and elections.

“Look, you can see the bombs from here,” Lahoud said. He led me to the window, and we looked down at the southern suburbs. A plume of gray smoke was rising rapidly.

On July 27th—the morning after Israel lost nine soldiers in clashes with Hezbollah, and two days after its missiles hit a U.N. outpost, killing four observers—I met a Western diplomat in Beirut. He told me that, while both Hezbollah and Israel had miscalculated, Hezbollah, at this point, had the advantage. “The casualties inflicted by Israel’s air campaign play right into Hezbollah’s hands. Hezbollah certainly thinks it’s winning. Even if it loses popularity among Druze, Sunnis, and Christians, its popularity remains high among Shiites, and for Hezbollah that’s all that really counts.”

Pointing to his head, he said, “In the end, the battle is between the ears. If, as a result of this, the Lebanese people get sick of Hezbollah, and if they turn on it and disarm it, that would be great.” A less favorable scenario was for the fighting to end inconclusively, with Hezbollah allowed to return to its former status. Still, he said, that might at least “show the Lebanese that there are serious consequences for supporting Hezbollah.”

The diplomat said that if anyone had benefitted from the confrontation, it was the government in Tehran. “Iran’s role in this has been huge,” he said. “I don’t know what role, if any, it had in the abductions, but I think it does encourage Hezbollah’s fighting on the border, and its arms shipments have been impressive. Without any cost to Iran, Lebanon is getting devastated, Israel is taking hits, and the Iranians are getting distraction from the nuclear issue. They must be very happy right now.”

The degree to which Hezbollah, fortified by its sponsors in Iran and Syria, has constrained Lebanon’s political dialogue was brought home to me by Nayla Mouawad, Lebanon’s Minister of Social Affairs. Mouawad, a Maronite, is the widow of former President René Mouawad, who was assassinated in 1989, the main suspects being Syria or a domestic political opponent. When I asked about Hezbollah, Mouawad chose her words very carefully. “We thought we needed Hezbollah to be a part of the government, and we gave it ministries to give it confidence to join in the nation-building. We thought that we could not implement a settlement by force, but through national dialogue.” Mouawad said that she wanted a ceasefire, but that afterward the Lebanese Army should assume control of the entire country. She was worried about it, though. “Divisions still exist in this country,” she said. “If a comprehensive settlement is not implemented, we are going to have problems. There will be people counting their losses—and the losses are tremendous—and looking for someone to blame.” She added, “Lebanon is paying the price for Syrian and Iranian interests.”

She noted that the Lebanese government agreed with some of Hezbollah’s demands, including the return of Shebaa farms and prisoners. “We need to convince Hezbollah that only a strong Lebanese nation and state could preserve its future as a party, as a Lebanese party—not as an armed political faction.” Mouawad paused, and said, “I am very much aware that the moment we are living now may be better than the one we are going to live through.”

Despite its losses, Hezbollah remains conspicuously in control in Beirut’s southern suburbs. Outsiders are stopped and interrogated by men who seem to materialize out of nowhere, riding on motor scooters. A few days after the press tour, I returned to visit an underground refuge for displaced Shiite civilians; a Hezbollah official had approved the visit.

My car pulled up outside the Farms Superstore, a modern supermarket in a concrete-and-glass building. After a round of questioning, I was allowed to proceed but only in the company of a Hezbollah man, who carried a black portfolio. Like most Hezbollah men, he wore a light beard, in the Iranian fashion. He led the way down into the three-level parking garage beneath the store, a vast, clean space of rubberized gray floors and support columns. There were no vehicles in sight; instead, at every other column or so, there were Lebanese families sitting and reclining on reed mats and foam-rubber mattresses. Each family had neat bundles of blankets and plastic bags of clothing and food. A few had electric fans, and one group was gathered around a television. They were mostly women and children, with some older men and teen-age boys; I saw few men in their twenties or thirties. The Hezbollah man said that there were three hundred and sixty families in the garage—approximately two thousand people.

In one corner, children played on swings, a slide, and a small carrousel. Our escort said that Hezbollah had provided the equipment. He added that Hezbollah had set up a clinic and a pharmacy.

As we walked down to the next level, two teen-age boys, who had been squabbling, began throwing punches at one another. The escort grabbed them and sent them away with a reprimand. A few minutes later, we were approached by a young man named Ali. He held the hand of a wide-eyed girl of six or seven. He said he was from the southern town of Marjayoun. “I have been here six days,” he said. “I am tired, but I’m not scared.” He said that he had volunteered his services to Hezbollah, patrolling the refuge at night, “to see if anyone needs anything.” Speaking of the Hezbollah leader, who the night before had made a television appearance, he said, “Sheikh Nasrallah said last night that it will last a long time. So here I am.”

A middle-aged woman in a black chador came over. When I asked if she minded living underground, she smiled and said, in a gravelly voice, “It’s all the same to me. If Israel and America want to do this to us, all we can do is to bear the situation, so if we have to stay underground we will. We don’t mind staying here as long as the boys are O.K.”—a reference to Hezbollah’s fighters—“and as long as Sheikh Nasrallah is fine. We can bear anything. Death is normal to us, and, anyway, it means we’ll go to heaven.” She told us that four children had been born in the underground garage. Two were boys, and they had been named Waaed, which means “the promising one,” and Sadeq, which means “the truthful one,” “because Sheikh Nasrallah says, ‘We have the promise of liberating the south.’ ” She added, “We don’t think the Israelis will come to Beirut, but, if they do, we know what to do with them.” A young pregnant woman standing next to her laughed and made lunging, stabbing motions with her hand.

Issue of 2006-08-07

servido por mydigest sin comentarios compártelo

Jon Lee Anderson: Castro's Last Battle

Late one Friday afternoon in March, a crowd gathered for a rally in downtown Havana to denounce an incident that had occurred the previous evening in San Juan, Puerto Rico. During a game between Cuba and the Netherlands in the first international Baseball Classic, a spectator held up a sign to the television cameras which said “Abajo Fidel”—“Down with Fidel”—and shouted similar sentiments to the Cubans on the field. Among them was Antonio Castro, an orthopedic surgeon, who is the Cuban team’s doctor and one of Fidel Castro’s sons. A Cuban official angrily confronted the protester, whereupon Puerto Rican policemen detained him. He was released after receiving a lecture about freedom of speech. Cuba won, 11–2, but the following day, in a tone of high umbrage, Cuba’s official Communist Party newspaper, Granma, decried the “cynical counter-revolutionary provocations” of U.S. and Puerto Rican officials.

The rally was held, as are most such events in Havana these days, outside the U.S. Interests Section, a sleek seven-story building on a curving stretch of Havana’s seaside promenade, the Malecón. In the absence of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba, the Interests Section serves as the de-facto embassy. (The building is technically part of the Swiss Embassy.) Six years ago, during the custody battle over Elián González, the five-year-old boy who was rescued after his mother and others drowned while trying to reach Florida in a motorboat, Castro ordered the construction of a permanent protest forum on a traffic island in front of the Interests Section. Today, the Anti-Imperialist Tribunal, as it is known, consists of a raised stage studded with klieg lights atop a bunkerlike command center. A large banner bears a photomontage of men with guns, houses burning, people weeping, and the baleful verdict “You did this.”

The rally was not open to the general public. Guarding the approaches at road barricades were several dozen policemen. A few hundred people, mostly sports officials, athletes, and their relatives, listened as a baseball player told the crowd, “In the face of the shameless robbery of our players, and the constant attacks against our people, they have still not been able to undermine the quality of our team!” An elderly black man got up onstage and said that in his youth he had played baseball in the United States. “I learned of that country’s racism personally when I was forced to sit in the back of buses, eat in kitchens,” he said. He was followed by the mother of one of the ballplayers. After denouncing the “provocation” in Puerto Rico, she signed off with “Viva Fidel!”

Fidel wasn’t there, although, like most Cubans, he takes baseball very seriously. (For years, there was a popular myth that as a student he was scouted by an American major-league team.) Castro, who will celebrate his eightieth birthday on August 13th, appears less and less frequently in public, and only rarely at events where foreigners are present. For decades, Castro’s legendary stamina served him well. He was thirty-two when he overthrew Cuba’s dictator, Fulgencio Batista, in 1959, with a guerrilla army of bearded fighters that included Ernesto (Che) Guevara. Castro presented himself as a nationalist, determined to eradicate Cuba’s gangster-run casino culture and end its reputation as “the whorehouse of the Caribbean.” Once in power, he moved quickly to the left, nationalizing large plantations (his mother’s was among those seized) and foreign-owned businesses, and moved closer to the Soviet Union. In 1961, the C.I.A., with the help of Cuban émigrés, organized the Bay of Pigs invasion to remove Castro from power. The invasion was ignominiously defeated, and since then, despite a U.S. trade embargo and numerous assassination attempts, Fidel Castro has outlasted nine American Presidents. He is the world’s longest-serving ruler.

In June, 2001, Castro fainted from heat exhaustion during a lengthy public address, and in 2004, after delivering a speech, he stumbled and fell, shattering his left kneecap and breaking his right arm. Although he still gives the long speeches for which he is famous, his hands sometimes tremble and he walks unsteadily; he has occasional bouts of forgetfulness and incoherence; and he sometimes falls asleep in public. In briefings to Congress last year, the C.I.A. reported that Castro was suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Castro has mocked the report and said that, even if it were true, he would be able to stay in office—citing Pope John Paul II as his model.

This spring, a friend of Castro’s, a veteran Party loyalist, told me that the Cuban leader was angustiado—literally, “anguished”—over his advancing years, and obsessed by the idea that socialism might not survive him. As a result, Castro has launched his last great fight, which he calls the Battle of Ideas.

Castro’s goal is to reëngage Cubans with the ideals of the revolution, especially young Cubans who came of age during what he called the Special Period. In the early nineties, the collapse of the Soviet Union brought a precipitous end to Cuba’s subsidies, and the economy imploded. The crisis forced Castro to allow greater openness in the island’s economic and civil life, but he now seems determined to reverse that. In a speech last November, Castro said, “This country can self-destruct, this revolution can destroy itself.” Referring to the Americans, he said, “They cannot destroy it, but we can. We can destroy it, and it would be our fault.” And in May, during an angry, seven-hour televised panel discussion that he convened to protest his appearance on the Forbes list of the world’s richest leaders (the magazine estimated his net worth at nine hundred million dollars), Castro said, “We must continue to pulverize the lies that are told against us. . . .This is the ideological battle, everything is the Battle of Ideas.”

Castro has approached the campaign in the manner of a field marshal, with a Central Command of ideological loyalists drawn from the Communist Youth Union, the U.J.C. Some Cubans refer to them sarcastically as “the Taliban.” A better analogy might be the Red Guards: the Battle of Ideas has, in a sense, become Cuba’s Cultural Revolution, although it does not have the same violent intensity. Castro’s Central Command organizes marches and dispatches specially recruited “battalions” of Trabajadores Sociales, or Social Workers, which now intervene in most areas of daily life. Earlier this year, when Castro announced that Cubans should begin using more energy-efficient light bulbs, the battalions went from house to house across the country to deliver the bulbs and make sure that they were installed.

Privately, many Cubans regard the Battle of Ideas as a spectacle they must tolerate but which is irrelevant to their lives. Most of them do not earn enough money to eat well, much less live comfortably. As a result of the island’s endemic shortages, almost everyone has some contact with Cuba’s black market. The tension between the public Cuba of rallies and tribunals and this hidden one is growing, and a number of Cubans and American officials I spoke to fear that the pent-up chaos could erupt into open unrest upon Castro’s death: looting, rioting, and revenge killings. Senator Mel Martinez, of Florida, who left Cuba as a fifteen-year-old, in 1962, said, “My hope is that there will be one of those wonderful European revolutions, like the Velvet Revolution, without violence, but because of what’s gone on—the repression and the iron grip of those in power for so long—there could be a vacuum, and that creates a potential for violence.” Cubans worry about how the United States, and the exile community in Miami—which has been poised for Castro’s departure for decades—will respond. For them, and for Castro’s possible successors, this is an exceedingly anxious time.

Jokes about Fidel Castro’s putative immortality once formed a canon in Havana. In one, Castro is presented with the gift of a Galápagos turtle, but he declines it after learning that it might live for more than a hundred years. “That’s the problem with pets,” Castro says. “You get attached to them, and then they die on you.” Most jokes now start from the opposite premise. For example: Castro has died, and his body is lying in state. Mourners have lined up to pay their respects. At the head of the line is Felipe Pérez Roque, Cuba’s forty-one-year-old Foreign Minister, who is often called Felipito. (Behind his back, he is also called a Taliban.) Pérez Roque stands before Castro’s coffin, his head bowed, while Ricardo Alarcón, the president of Cuba’s National Assembly, waits his turn. The minutes drag on; Alarcón becomes impatient and taps Pérez Roque on the shoulder, whispering, “Felipito, what are you waiting for? He’s dead, you know.” Pérez Roque whispers back, “I know he is; I just haven’t figured out how to tell him that.”

Very few Cubans will speak on the record about “the succession.” Castro recently confirmed that, as many Cubans believed, he expected his brother Raúl, who is the Defense Minister, to inherit the leadership of Cuba’s Communist Party. In an interview with a European journalist, he said that he had “no doubt” that if he died the National Assembly would elect Raúl. But because of Raúl’s own age—he is seventy-five—the received wisdom in Havana is that he will share power with a civilian triumvirate made up of Pérez Roque; Alarcón, who is sixty-nine; and Carlos Lage, the country’s economics czar, who is fifty-four. Aurelio Alonso, a sociologist and editor who is a Communist Party member, told me, “This used to be a taboo subject, but Fidel has begun to speak about it lately. Anyway, Fidel’s exit doesn’t concern me in terms of who succeeds him; it’s known that there is a relief team prepared”—he mentioned Alarcón, Pérez Roque, and Lage. “This doesn’t mean there won’t be upset. There will be.”

One evening in April, I met with Alarcón in the Baroque Presidential Salon of the venerable Hotel Nacional. The Nacional, with rooms that overlook the Malecón, was built in 1930, and in its pre-Castro heyday it was the Havana residence of gangsters like Meyer Lansky. Today, it is the hotel of choice for visitors like Leonardo DiCaprio, Muhammad Ali, and Naomi Campbell. As we looked at our menus, the manager informed me that Al Capone had once dined in the same room.

Hearing this, Alarcón smiled somewhat uncomfortably. He is a slim, loquacious man with a boyish face and a prominent forehead, and was wearing, as usual, a white guayabera shirt. He began speaking about Cuba’s long and complicated relationship with the United States. “Fifty years of the same U.S. policy, which is, it has to be said, a failed one,” he said. “Of course, now they are waiting for the next generation, based on the idea that this government is finished. Well, if that’s the way it is, I guess I’m done with, too, because I’m a member of the outgoing generation.” Alarcón paused. “A half century in France passed from the time of the monarchy of Louis XVI, the great revolution, the guillotine, all the counter-revolution that ensued, Bonapartism, the bourgeois republic of the thirties. All the twists and turns that France underwent took place in the same period of time that we have managed to keep the Cuban revolution in power. Not even Robespierre could say that; Napoleon couldn’t say that. Hey, we’ve done a lot!”

Alarcón has dealt with Americans for more than forty years. He left Havana University to head the Foreign Ministry’s U.S. office in 1962, when he was only twenty-five, and became Cuba’s Ambassador to the United Nations in 1966. In 1992, Castro made him Foreign Minister but, less than a year later, moved him to the comparatively low-profile post of president of the National Assembly. At the time, the position was widely seen as a demotion, but it gave Alarcón experience with domestic politics in Cuba for the first time since his youth. And he has continued to be Castro’s chief adviser on the United States. (He interrupted our dinner at the Hotel Nacional to take a call on his cell phone from Castro.) Alarcón was also intimately involved in the case of Elián González, acting as the chief adviser to the boy’s father, Juan Miguel González, who travelled to the United States to fight relatives in Miami for custody of his son. Two and a half months later, when Elián was finally flown home, Alarcón greeted him at the airport. For Castro, Elián’s return was a major symbolic victory over his opponents in the exile community.

Alarcón’s latest cause involves the Five Heroes, as they are known in Cuba—five Cuban spies who are serving prison terms in the United States. In January, 1996, Alarcón, in the midst of secret negotiations with the Clinton Administration about improving relations, told the Americans that Cuba had received information that Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami exile group, was planning illegal flights to drop leaflets over Havana. They had made such flights before, and the Administration had offered to do what it could to stop them. The White House passed Alarcón’s information on to Florida’s F.B.I. headquarters, but nothing was done to prevent the aircraft from taking off. The Cuban Air Force shot down two of them, killing four Cuban-American men. In retaliation, President Clinton signed the Helms-Burton Law, tightening the embargo against Cuba. The F.B.I. also stepped up the search for Cuba’s sources, and the Five were arrested in September, 1998. In 2001, a Miami jury found them guilty of charges that included “espionage conspiracy” and, in the case of one, the murder of the Brothers to the Rescue pilots. They were given sentences ranging from fifteen years to two consecutive life terms. (Last August, an appeals court ordered a new trial, saying that the men had not received a fair trial because of “pervasive community prejudice.”)

Alarcón acknowledges that the Five were spies, but he argues that they intended the United States no harm, and that their sole purpose was to prevent terrorism. “Look, these were five people who were performing a mission,” he said. “Just as the United States believes it should have a greater capacity to know and to predict, Cuba has for a long time had a need to defend ourselves, with the difference that the terrorism against Cuba has been sponsored by the United States.”

Alarcón has made it his personal crusade to bring the Five home; every conversation with him turns to them. I asked him whether there was an element of guilty conscience involved. Hadn’t Cuba indirectly betrayed the men’s presence in Miami? Alarcón replied, “Don’t think for a minute that Cuba gullibly gave out information that somehow gave the Americans leads to find them. We may be amateurs in baseball, but in this subject we really are professionals.”

Like most of those in Castro’s inner circle, Alarcón is determinedly self-effacing in public and never contradicts his boss, but because of his amiability and his long experience with Americans—who generally like him—most Cubans see him as a moderate. He is a familiar and reassuring figure for foreigners visiting Cuba; while I was in Havana, he hosted a delegation from Vietnam, and also Louis Farrakhan. Alarcón has long been a top contender for the position of Prime Minister in a transitional government. But nothing is certain; Castro has been known to abruptly shift people from one position to another. Alarcón may also have serious competition from Pérez Roque, who is perceived as the chief spokesman in Castro’s Battle of Ideas.

Pérez Roque is a short, wide-bodied man whose demeanor is reminiscent of a bull terrier’s. He became Castro’s personal secretary at the age of twenty-one, and remained in the job for seven years. No one doubts that he is devoted to Castro, whose opinions and policies he assumes with a fervency that is unparalleled, even in Cuba. In 1999, Castro made him his Foreign Minister. Pérez Roque was only thirty-four, and seemed gauche and ill-prepared; he was nicknamed Fax, in the sense that he was merely a transmitter of Castro’s utterances. He has grown into the role, though, and earned a measure of respect, if not popularity. The veteran loyalist told me that it was clear that Castro had “chosen” Pérez Roque to lead the succession team under Raúl’s temporary supervision, but that Pérez Roque was “too narrow-minded” for the next generation of Cubans. Other Cubans I talked to agreed. Everyone recalled how, after Castro fainted in 2001, it was Pérez Roque who stepped up to the microphone and, in a display of zeal, rallied the crowd with shouts of “Viva Fidel! Viva Raúl!”

I lived in Havana during the Special Period. The government couldn’t afford to import fuel; bicycles replaced cars on Havana’s streets, and there were daily blackouts lasting up to twelve hours. Many people did not have enough to eat, subsisting on the Cuban staple chícharo—split-pea porridge—or on sugar and water. Crime spiralled. Castro responded by permitting limited private enterprise and the legal use of the dollar, and by opening Cuba to mass tourism, measures that saved the regime.

In the past year, Castro—empowered by shipments of cheap oil from Hugo Chávez, the President of Venezuela, and by Chinese investments—imposed a heavy tax on dollar transactions. This has made Cuba much more expensive for foreigners, although European package tourists continue to stay in all-inclusive beach resorts, where they have little contact with Cubans. This seems to be the way Castro wants it. “Fidel has always felt revulsion toward tourism, because it encourages prostitution and increases social inequalities,” Aurelio Alonso told me. “Tourism is bad because it creates a contrast between a population that lives very badly and a population that lives very well.” In a recent speech, Castro referred to Cuba’s family-run private restaurants, paladares, another Special Period concession, saying, “I know this pains our neighbors to the north, but it could well be that in a few years there will be no paladares left in Cuba.”

The reforms of the Special Period were carried out by Carlos Lage, the third member of the relief team. Lately, however, Lage appears to have been sidelined, at least in terms of domestic economic policy; instead, one Party insider told me, Castro was micromanaging it. “This has people worried, because, as we all know, the economy is not Fidel’s strong suit,” she said.

An Eastern European diplomat said, “To me, the one distinguishing feature of this dictatorship”—he added quickly, “But please don’t use that word!”—“is how Fidel is building what comes afterward. His problem was that, after he opened up the economy, in the nineties, a new social stratum appeared here; it has its own political views and has produced leaders who supported those views. After some stabilization of the economic situation, Cuba’s leaders began to think about how to get rid of those social strata.” He went on, “I think they are doing all of this to prepare for the social problems that are inevitable when Fidel dies.”

The contradictions of Cuban society are unsettlingly evident. Satellite-television dishes are banned, but many people install them secretly, and often tune in to anti-Castro Miami stations. The prostitutes who congregated openly on Havana’s streets in the hard years of the nineties are less visible today, but, despite a crackdown on the sex trade, they are still around. One evening, I went to a popular Havana night spot directly across the Plaza de la Revolución from the headquarters of the Cuban Communist Party Central Committee. It was swarming with young jineteras, as they are called, and their foreign—mostly much older Italian or Spanish—“boyfriends.” One girl, who asked if I wanted a “date,” looked fifteen, or younger.

I visited a veteran Party member who, as we sat on her terrace drinking tamarind juice, complained at length about Castro’s most recent drive—a grandiloquently proclaimed energy-saving campaign, one of the central features of which is to provide every Cuban household with a new Chinese-manufactured pressure cooker. “After forty-seven years of revolution, we get pressure cookers?” she said bitterly. They were not even free. “Energy is his latest obsession, and, like all of his other obsessions in the past”—she listed a few of the more quixotic ones, including Castro’s doomed effort, in the eighties, to breed a “super-cow”—“we have no choice but to go along with them.”

She told me that it was time for Castro to step down. “When I see Fidel speaking nowadays, it’s as if I am seeing my great-grandfather there, talking away for no reason in particular. He’s got nothing to say anymore. It’s a great pity, too,” she said. “The people here still respect him—even though they don’t listen to him anymore. After him, there’s no one else. So his successors are going to open up, because they will have to; they aren’t stupid. The people are fed up.”

One Sunday afternoon, I went to Lenin Park, on the outskirts of Havana. A salsa band was playing for a crowd of four or five hundred mostly young people, who were dancing and drinking beer from paper cups. When the concert ended, a couple of hundred youths began walking out of the park along the road to the city.

A police van was parked in the middle of the road, with a dozen blue-uniformed officers standing around. Suddenly, one of them hit a teen-ager with his nightstick. Other officers came over and joined in, kicking and hitting the boy. Then they dragged him to the van and threw him into the back. Several youths were holding their faces with their hands and stumbling, and I realized that the officers had blinded them with pepper spray.

In the next five minutes or so, the officers beat and arrested eight or nine young men, none of whom, as far as I could tell, had done anything to provoke them. People in the crowd simply stared, or moved away, out of striking range of the policemen. I asked a man what the youths had done, and he said quietly, “Nothing. Someone probably mouthed off to one of them. The cops are just trying to show who’s boss. They always do this.”

The onlookers might be far less restrained in Castro’s absence. During the summer of 1994, at the height of the Special Period, after clashes between the authorities and would-be migrants, hundreds of men and youths rioted along the Malecón. Castro went to the scene and, with his nervous bodyguards, waded into the melee. The rioters were holding rocks and bricks, but when they saw Castro they dropped them and applauded. The tumult, which had been expanding dangerously, began to dissipate. After Castro left, police riot squads arrived, along with truckloads of stick-wielding men from an élite workers’ brigade, who then chased, beat, and arrested the remaining rioters.

It is hard to imagine any of Castro’s potential successors having the authority to pull off such a move, and a bout of unrest might spread across the island if left unchecked, or if the security forces overreact. If Raúl is in charge, moderation will not be a foregone conclusion. Despite his reputation for warmth, Raúl can be impulsive, dogmatic, and, at times, brutal. In 1959, he oversaw the surrender of Santiago, Cuba’s second-largest city, while Castro made his way toward Havana. There, in the most notorious act of retribution to follow the guerrillas’ victory, Raúl presided over the execution of more than seventy soldiers and officers, who were machine-gunned and then dumped into a pit. More recently, in 1996, Raúl orchestrated a purge of Party intellectuals, whom he accused of being contaminated by “capitalist ideas.”

In the past few years, Castro has increased the number of police officers in Havana considerably, and given them salaries equivalent to those earned by doctors. Many of the police are drawn from Cuba’s rural eastern provinces, where the government has strong support, and are held in contempt by many of the comparatively cosmopolitan habañeros.

After the 1994 riots, Castro relieved some of the pressure on the regime by temporarily allowing people to leave the island by sea. As many as thirty thousand Cubans tried to reach Florida in the space of three weeks, in what became known as the “rafters’ crisis.” To forestall another sea exodus, the U.S. significantly increased its legal immigration quota for Cubans and instituted a “dry foot, wet foot” policy, under which those intercepted at sea by the Coast Guard are deported and those who manage to reach dry land are allowed to stay. This reduced the numbers for a while, but last year almost three thousand Cubans were stopped at sea and repatriated—double the figure for 2004. There are fears both in Cuba and in the United States that social instability after Castro’s death could provoke a huge wave of emigration. According to some scenarios, this could be used to justify American military intervention.

Many young people in Cuba today wish for nothing more than to emigrate. On my latest trip, a longtime Party member confessed that he had recently helped his own son leave Cuba. “We have a lot of very good young people, but they don’t like to be administered,” he said. “And I’m afraid that the revolution has not yet learned that the consciences of others do not need to be administered.”

Randy Alonso Falcón, who is thirty-six, is one of the most recognizable figures in the Battle of Ideas. Alonso, the host of the political talk show “La Mesa Redonda Informativa”—“The News Round Table”—is on the national directorate of the Communist Youth Union, and is also a member of the Central Command for the Battle of Ideas. Everyone calls him Randy.

One morning in April, I met Alonso, a short man with an easygoing demeanor and a heavily pockmarked face, outside the Anti-Imperialist Tribunal. He gestured toward the Tribunal’s most recent innovation, the Mount of Flags, a cluster of a hundred and thirty-eight steel poles, as high as a hundred feet and rising from a series of concrete plinths, flying black flags that block the view of the Interests Section from the street. The Mount of Flags was Castro’s response to the U.S. chargé d’affaires’ installation, in January, of an electronic ticker in the Section’s windows, offering uncensored news reports twenty-four hours a day. To make room for the flags, the Cubans had appropriated the Americans’ parking lot. “Naturally, if they are going to fuck with us, we will fuck them, too,” Alonso said.

We drove east out of Havana to the Villa Panamericana, a complex of sports facilities built to host the 1991 Pan American Games. One building had been converted into the School for Social Workers. Begun in 2000 for underprivileged—and potentially antisocial—youths, the school had turned out more than ten thousand graduates, and its alumni form the core of the Social Workers battalions. Alonso said that the leaders of the Battle of Ideas decided where to deploy the battalions by studying secret “opinion polls.” “Every day, we receive five thousand opinions that we get from across the country,” he told me. “It’s not a survey. There are activists who hear things, and then they send in exactly what was said.” These polls, if they can properly be called that, are one of Castro’s favorite sources of information.

At the school, a large, rambling prefab concrete facility, we joined Enrique Cabezas Gómez, the director, who is one of Castro’s protégés. He invited us into a reception room with three of his students, and began a disquisition on the school’s role in the Battle of Ideas. He continued, without pausing, for three hours.

As he spoke, the students listened quietly. It was hard to gauge their enthusiasm. Cabezas mentioned that recently, when Castro, as part of an ongoing Battle of Ideas anti-corruption drive, replaced employees at Cuba’s gas stations with the Social Workers, they unearthed systemic graft and theft. Some Cubans I spoke to predicted that it was just a matter of time before the Social Workers themselves were corrupted. Most didn’t believe that the anti-corruption campaign would work, because the many ruses that Cubans had devised for their survival were too deeply embedded. One Cuban told me that after the government had a fleet of cargo trucks equipped with G.P.S. to prevent pilferage, the drivers figured out how to use condoms filled with water to disable the devices. Confirming this story, a Western European diplomat told me that his biggest concern for Cuba’s future was the prospect that a powerful network of criminal Mafias would emerge, as they had in the former European Socialist states.

In Havana, I visited a Cuban couple whom I’ve known for many years, and was shocked to see how they were living. Some of their furniture had been sold, and they both looked thin. Now in their sixties, they were getting by on the equivalent of about sixty dollars a month—more, in fact, than most Cubans earn. The wife told me, “You know, to live in Cuba we have only three alternatives, known as the three R’s—robar, remar, or rezingarse.” Robar is “to steal.” Remar is “to row”—as in to take a boat to Florida. Rezingarse is a play on the word resignarse, “to resign oneself,” but in Cuban slang zingar is “to fuck,” so rezingarse means, literally, “to fuck yourself.”

On June 2nd, the day before Raúl Castro’s seventy-fifth birthday, Granma published an eight-page special supplement titled “Raúl Up Close.” The article included headings such as “The Chief,” “Patriotic Values,” and “Capable, Responsible, and Brilliant.” In a typical passage, Raúl is described as “affable, affectionate, human, understanding; who knows how to be serious and demanding but is, at the same time, friendly and capable of listening to a story or enjoying a joke—a profoundly human being.” The article ends with Fidel explaining why Raúl should succeed him: “I choose him not because he is my brother, because the whole world knows how much we hate nepotism, but because on my honor I consider him to have sufficient qualities to substitute for me tomorrow in case I die in this struggle.”

A couple of days later, I received an e-mail from a friend in Havana about the supplement: “Everyone here thinks this means ‘the electoral campaign’ has begun”—that is, the campaign to prepare Cubans for Raúl’s succession to power.

Raúl rarely appears in public with his older brother. Foreign journalists are never invited to his speeches, and he never grants interviews. In my visits to Cuba during the past fifteen years, I have seen Raúl only once in person, at the annual May Day rally in the Plaza de la Revolución, in 1993. He had joined the rest of the Politburo on a podium, standing near, but not next to, Fidel. While Fidel gazed solemnly over the proceedings, Raúl bantered with the others.

In those days, a mantle of secrecy surrounded the Castro clan. Most Cubans did not know the name of Castro’s wife, or even how many children they had. Since then, however, several members of Cuba’s First Family have begun a kind of gradual début that seems intended to prepare them for more public roles. Dalia Soto del Valle, Castro’s wife of some forty years (it is not clear when, or whether, they were legally married), has become more visible since the Elián González standoff. She is the mother of five of his sons: Alexis, Alexander, Alejandro (Castro has a fascination with Alexander the Great), Antonio, and Angel. In 2000, I had lunch with Antonio Castro, the oldest, at the orthopedic hospital in Havana, where he was doing his residency before signing on with the baseball team; he was polite but reserved. Alexis was rumored to be the more troubled son; a couple of years ago, however, he began appearing at events as a photographer for Juventud Rebelde, the U.J.C. newspaper. The less known brothers are Alexander, who works as a cameraman for Cuban television; Alejandro, who is a computer programmer; and Angel, the youngest, who is not known to have found a profession.

Castro divorced his first wife, Mirta Díaz-Balart, the mother of his firstborn son, Fidel, in 1955. She remarried and has lived in Madrid for many years, though she often travels to Cuba to visit her son. She has never spoken publicly about her former husband, but her nephew, Lincoln Díaz-Balart, a Republican congressman from Florida, is one of Castro’s most ardent critics. Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart, or Fidelito, is a Soviet-educated nuclear physicist, and ran Cuba’s atomic-energy commission until the early nineties, when he was removed from the post; Castro said during a trip to Spain that he had fired his son for “incompetence.” Lately, however, Fidelito has reëmerged, and is now said to be an adviser to his father. One evening last April, I was at a restaurant in Old Havana when a chauffeur-driven Lada pulled up, and Fidelito came in. He had a beard and bore a striking resemblance to his father, with the same pronounced Roman nose and proud profile. It was as if Fidel Castro himself, thirty years younger, had just walked by.

Castro also has a daughter, Alina Fernández, the product of his affair with a society woman, Naty Revuelta, in the late fifties. In 1993, Alina, who had long been estranged from her father, fled to Europe in disguise and later settled in Miami, where she hosts a radio show, “Simply Alina,” dedicated to attacking him.

Raúl Castro and his M.I.T.-educated wife, Vilma Espín, the head of the Cuban Women’s Federation, have four children, and they, too, have been more visible lately. When I had dinner with Ricardo Alarcón this spring, he told me that Raúl’s eldest daughter, Mariela Castro Espín, a sexologist, had been lobbying the National Assembly to reform Cuba’s laws on behalf of transsexuals and transvestites. She has been “driving me crazy,” Alarcón said, laughing.

I had heard about Mariela’s role as the godmother of Cuba’s transsexuals and transvestites when I attended a transvestite show at a house in western Havana. The occasion was the birthday of Imperio, one of the island’s most famous transformistas (as transvestites who perform in cabarets are called), a slim, handsome mixed-race man in his mid-thirties. In a large upstairs room, there was a bar, and a hundred or more gay men applauded and blew kisses as Imperio danced and lip-synched to songs by Gloria Gaynor and Rocío Jurado. I was struck by the openness of the event; I had been to a transvestite show in Havana in the late nineties, but it was a clandestine affair. Until very recently, Cuba’s gays, and transvestites in particular, were harassed and frequently arrested by the police. Imperio’s friends told me that the change was due to Mariela Castro.

I went to see Mariela Castro at the Instituto Nacional de Educación Sexual, CENESEX, which is housed in an old nineteenth-century mansion in the Vedado district, with a wide porch and shade trees on the grounds. Mariela, an attractive, relaxed-looking woman in her late thirties, has been the director of CENESEX since 2000. We sat down in a small upstairs office to talk.

“Look, a lot of people think that we’ve been able to do what we’ve done because of family relations,” she said. “On the contrary, sometimes family connections are an obstacle in life—I can’t make my proposals through my father or mother, because neither of them would allow that. Whatever I do, I do through official channels. What happens, though, is that when I go to these official channels the people don’t know how to react, because of my family connections. They ask, ‘What does your father say about this?’ And I say, ‘It doesn’t matter what my father says.’ ”

Three years ago, Mariela said, some transvestites complained to her that the police were harassing them, and asked for her help. “I felt really bad for them, because I felt that the revolution had some very beautiful proposals, but changing people’s attitudes takes a lot longer than we would sometimes like.” When there are problems with the police, “we go straight to the police station,” she said. “Speaking honestly, the cultural level of the policemen is not always good.” She had spoken to the Ministry of Defense—run by her father—but said that initially it had been difficult to convince her father that there was a need for change.

In the sixties and seventies, the military, under Raúl’s control, presided over notorious camps known by the acronym UMAP (for Military Units to Help Production), where homosexuals, including Reinaldo Arenas, the late author of “Before Night Falls”—as well as some unemployed and religious Cubans—were “rehabilitated” through forced labor. During the eighties, men who were H.I.V.-positive were forcibly quarantined in medical asylums known colloquially as sidatorios (“AIDS,” in Spanish, is SIDA). In the past decade, official policies have relaxed, but laws guaranteeing sexual freedom are still nonexistent. Mariela told me that her legal team was preparing a brief that proposed specific changes in the penal and civil code; for example, transsexuals who had had sex-change operations would be able to marry and to enjoy the same inheritance and pension rights as heterosexual spouses. She said that her next project was to secure similar rights for Cuba’s gays, lesbians, and bisexuals.

First, though, Mariela was enlisting the transvestites in the Battle of Ideas. “I thought it would be good if they had a social mission,” she told me. She said that two groups of transvestites had already completed training as sexual-health Social Workers. “Every time we have a course graduation ceremony, we let them put on their transvestite shows right here—the whole spectacle, just as they like it to be. It may not be to my aesthetic taste”—Mariela smiled—“but it is theirs, and we respect that.”

Both Mariela Castro and Ricardo Alarcón implied that the Battle of Ideas had initiated a sort of social and cultural opening. During our dinner at the Nacional, Alarcón mentioned that he had volunteered to inaugurate a recent exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe in Havana. “That raised some eyebrows,” he said. Political openness is a different matter: over a four-day period in March, 2003, beginning the day before the United States invaded Iraq, Cuban authorities arrested seventy-eight dissidents, including labor unionists, human-rights activists, and journalists; many are still in jail. But the government seems serious about its initiatives in the arts—there are, for example, a host of new art and dance schools, and educationalextension programs—in part as a means of getting Cuba’s youths off the streets.

Abel Prieto, Cuba’s Culture Minister, told me, “The appetite for culture, the social prestige of the artist, of the intellectual, of the writer, has grown enormously. There was a time when parents thought that the arts would turn their sons into gays, or their daughters into sluts, but now everyone wants to have an artist in the family.”

Prieto is well over six feet tall, and, with his muttonchop sideburns and shoulder-length hair, he cuts an incongruous figure as a senior Communist Party official. One of his proudest achievements was having one of Old Havana’s plazas dubbed Lennon Park, with a bronze statue of John Lennon. (In the sixties, the Beatles’ “decadent” music was banned.) He talks openly about using pirated programming on state television: “We don’t pay copyright for television material—we are blockaded. So we take a lot from the Discovery Channel, for instance.” When we visited Havana’s main art museum, an entourage of admirers followed him from gallery to gallery.

Prieto had told me that the arts scene in Havana had become less conventional, and more “disquieting,” though I saw little evidence of this at the museum. A couple of days later, however, I visited a fringe exhibition put on by students at the School of Fine Arts. Their work was much more political than what I had seen elsewhere in Havana. In one display, a Cuban peso coin with the official slogan “Patria Libre o Muerte” (“Free Fatherland or Death”) had been cut so that it read, “Patria Libre o Suerte” (“Free Fatherland or Luck”). In one part of the room, an old reel-to-reel tape recorder and speaker blared out, in an endlessly repeating loop, an extract of a patriotic speech by Castro, and in front of it was a placard that read, “Just talk to me about baseball.”

Castro’s greatest obstacle, if he is to insure that his succession plan survives him, is the United States, which has, in effect, been trying to force a transition in Cuba for five decades. In that time, the relationship between Washington and the exile community in Miami has, more often than not, been unhealthily close. During the first years of Castro’s rule, U.S. policy was to try to overthrow him by force, or to assassinate him. The C.I.A. set up an office in Miami—then its largest for clandestine operations—and recruited thousands of exiles, forming a paramilitary organization that attacked Cuba’s interests. That aspect of the C.I.A.’s operations had mostly wound down in the seventies, but by then the anticastristas had formed groups of their own. Cuban exiles with C.I.A. links carried out bombings and assassinations aimed at Cuba and its allies, including the 1976 murder of Orlando Letelier, Chile’s Ambassador to the United States, in Washington, D.C.

The hard-liners within Miami’s Cuban-exile community are now mostly elderly men themselves, but they are still a volatile factor. Castro has used the case of Luis Posada Carriles to argue that America has a double standard in its war on terror. Posada Carriles, a Cuban who holds Venezuelan citizenship, has spent the past forty-five years trying to kill or depose Castro. He is wanted in Venezuela for allegedly helping to plan the midair bombing of a Cuban passenger jet near Barbados in October, 1976, which killed all seventy-three people on board. (Cubans, citing recently declassified C.I.A. and F.B.I. documents that appear to support them, accuse the agency of having had prior knowledge of the attack.) In between escaping from a Venezuelan jail and—as he admitted to the Times—planning the bombing of hotels in the summer of 1997, killing an Italian tourist, Posada Carriles worked for Oliver North’s program to resupply the Contras in Nicaragua. Last year, he surfaced, holding a press conference in Miami, and Hugo Chávez demanded his extradition. Posada Carriles was detained, but after several months a federal judge ruled that although he had entered the country illegally, the U.S. would not deport him to Cuba or Venezuela, because he might be tortured. He is now appealing to remain in the United States, on the ground that he worked covertly on its behalf for many years.

In Miami, I met with Santiago Alvarez, a prominent Cuban exile and a close ally of Posada Carriles, in his office in a Hialeah strip mall. Alvarez, who runs a construction business, is a rough but good-looking man of sixty-four. “Look, Posada Carriles is not a saint. He is a Cuban freedom fighter, and he has made some mistakes,” Alvarez said. “But what’s happened here is that Fidel Castro has mounted a big show.”

Alvarez went on, “As an anticastrista, I look upon Bush’s attempt to harden the embargo with a certain pleasure. On the other hand, I can see how loosening it might well be the best weapon against Fidel. For instance, a relaxation on the restrictions of visits to the island—this could help us conspire against the regime. I do not believe that Fidel Castro will ever fall from power through the activities of a few dissidents. I maintain that he must be brought down by armed force.”

Alvarez said that the time to attack is while Castro is still alive. “After Fidel dies, it will be a different game,” he told me. “And what happens if he lasts another ten years? We can’t wait that long. I would feel ashamed if I waited for him to die before I returned.” (Soon after our meeting, Alvarez was arrested for illegal possession of machine guns and a grenade launcher. He is now awaiting trial.)

Senator Martinez didn’t want to comment directly on the Posada Carriles case, because it was in the courts. But he denied that it had anything to do with the war on terror. “Cuba began the practice of hijacking airliners, and if Luis Posada Carriles bombed an airliner”—Martinez paused—“without condoning any specific act of violence, there was a hostile state of affairs at the time. This is no longer an issue and is just being used by a failed regime to keep people stoked up. We need to talk about the future, not the past.”

In December, 2003, President Bush appointed Senator Martinez as co-chair of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, along with Colin Powell. Their mandate was to find ways to “hasten the end of Castro’s tyranny,” and to develop “a comprehensive strategy to prepare for a peaceful transition to democracy in Cuba.” The result of their work was a five-hundred-page report, issued in May, 2004, that included guidelines for everything from setting up a market economy to holding elections. It also recommends “undermining the regime’s ‘succession strategy.’ ”

“I looked for lessons from Iraq, for things the Cubans will need,” Martinez told me. “For instance, a governmental structure should remain in place. As in Iraq, in Cuba there are those with blood on their hands, but that’s not the case with everyone. And there are issues like the electrical grid, housing, and nutrition. What we learned in Iraq is that there would be a disruption of these things in an extraordinary moment.”

The report, which the Bush Administration adopted as policy, recommended the appointment of a Cuba transition coördinator. The person named to the new post was Caleb McCarry, whose previous position was staff director for the House Foreign Relations Committee’s Western Hemisphere subcommittee. When I spoke with McCarry, he said, “My function is to be the senior U.S. official in charge of planning and supporting a genuine democratic transition in Cuba, and to work on it now.” He is, in effect, the Paul Bremer designate of Cuba. As with Iraq, however, the United States is hampered by its inability to operate openly in Cuba, and by its reliance on information from exiles and dissidents. And it does not seem to have a candidate for Castro’s replacement.

McCarry said that, while the transition would be in Cuban hands, “we will be there to offer very concrete support.” The U.S. is already channelling money and aid to the opposition. Two leading dissidents, Osvaldo Paya and Elizardo Sánchez, have said that this tactic has been counterproductive, and criticized it as heavy-handed meddling. Many of the dissidents arrested in 2003 were accused of illegally receiving American funds. (In a speech, Castro called them “mercenaries.”)

McCarry emphasized that the Administration would not regard the accession of Raúl Castro as a satisfactory outcome, even if it was accompanied by economic reforms. “We will continue to offer support for a real transition,” he said. “You know, this is not an imposition. It’s an offer, a very respectful offer, with respect for the sense of Cuban nationhood.”

Not all exiles are in agreement with U.S. policy. Damian Fernández, a Cuban-American who runs the Cuba Research Institute, at Florida International University, told me, “There are some lessons to be learned from the experience in Iraq. Do we really want a transition, a clean break with the past, or do we want succession, which would mean keeping some of the old state and the orderliness that would bring? The fact is that it’s unlikely there’ll be a tabula rasa after Fidel dies. But this Administration has this line on transition that ‘if we push we can make it happen.’ ”

In Havana, the so-called Bush Plan is regularly denounced on lurid billboards and by Castro’s deputies. Felipe Pérez Roque said that the U.S. transition plan would “take away Cubans’ land and their houses and schools, in order to return them to their old Batistiano owners, who would come back from the United States.”

Cubans are receptive to such talk. Many are living in homes that were confiscated from owners who fled the country, and the prospect of being made homeless by returning exiles frightens them. “The day when Cubans will rise up is when the gentlemen from Miami arrive and try to appropriate people’s homes, and to give orders,” one Cuban academic told me. (Martinez, whose own childhood home is now a youth center, said that a “vehicle” might be devised to restore homes to exiles or to compensate them, but he acknowledged that Cubans on the island had a claim to them as well. “The last thing we want to do is make people who’ve suffered so much feel more insecure,” he said. “I think the exiles should have a say, and I think it will be helpful, in terms of being able to provide resources and ideas. They can help lead Cuba to the economic miracle, which, given the Cuban people’s abilities, I think it should have. It is also their right—I should say our right—to be allowed a role.”)

In a speech in March, Ricardo Alarcón called the Bush Plan “annexationist and genocidal.” In private, afterward, he was only slightly less adamant, telling me that it was “profoundly irresponsible, made up by people who prefer to ignore reality and who try and change it capriciously. Maybe it’s a messianic thing.”

He added, “For us, our relation with the U.S. is the one great theme, the big problem. There is no other single issue of such force, of such permanent and universal importance to us, than having the U.S. normalize relations with Cuba.” Under the Bush Administration, all contacts have ceased, he told me, with the sole exception of low-level meetings over the “wet foot, dry foot” immigration policy. “There is nothing at all going on,” he said. “Nada.”

Cuba didn’t win the Baseball Classic, but it came close. On the night of the final match, in San Diego on March 20th, against Japan, large video screens were set up around Havana. I watched in the Parque Central, in Old Havana, along with hundreds of Cubans. By the bottom of the first inning, when Cuba scored, the plaza had become an animated wall of noise and celebration. Cuba’s winning streak didn’t hold, however, and Japan won, 10–6. Even so, the next day officials in Havana orchestrated a huge homecoming for the team, with a victory procession through Havana, along streets filled with flag-waving Young Pioneers, culminating in a rally in the city’s sports stadium which was presided over by Fidel Castro himself.

The stands of the sports stadium were filled with thousands of students and Social Workers. A huge placard showed Che Guevara’s face in a Pop-art rendition of blue, red, and orange. I also noticed quite a few people wearing red T-shirts decorated with an image of Hugo Chávez.

We were waiting for Fidel. I stood among a group of Cuban newsmen. The first Politburo member to appear was the ancient General Guillermo García Frías, a former peasant and guerrilla fighter who is famous for his passion for cockfighting. Next came Ricardo Alarcón. As the minutes dragged on, the students in the stadium began chanting, “Fi-del! Fi-del!” Carlos Lage appeared next, and Chávez’s brother Adan, Venezuela’s Ambassador. Suddenly, everyone stood and, as a new roar came from the youths in the stands, I spotted Castro’s bodyguard, José Delgado, a bald, bull-chested man with worried eyes. If Delgado was there, it meant that Castro was about to arrive.

Castro emerged from behind the tribune and, amid more cheers, took a seat. His personal secretary, Carlos Valenciaga, a pale man with spectacles and a large black portfolio, sat behind him. The ceremony began immediately. Dancers dressed in white guajiro peasant costumes were followed by modern dancers in yellow Lycra body stockings. Finally, Cuba’s baseball team walked out and stood in formation, each player holding the hand of a small child in uniform, as a singer lauded them for turning down the offer of “millions of dollars” to “betray the fatherland.” At the appropriate moments, Castro, like everyone else, waved a little Cuban flag.

A local journalist pointed out a pale, overweight photographer, and told me that he was Alexis Castro. Like the other photographers, Alexis spent more time staring up into the stands, watching his father, than he did watching the athletes, and periodically raised his camera, with its long zoom lens, to shoot pictures of him.

One by one, the players trooped up to greet Castro. He clapped each of them on the back, smiling, and presented them with new bats, which two young women in military tunics handed to him. When Antonio Castro, the team’s doctor, stepped forward, however, he and his father shook hands formally. Then it was time for Castro to speak.

In a tone of grandfatherly admonishment, Castro said that so many Cubans had watched the Classic that “our electrical grid was at risk of collapsing.” He said that what Cuba’s team had achieved was colossal. “The fact that a modest little island in the Caribbean managed to compete against a country like Japan in an international sports event—this is an occurrence of great magnitude!”

Castro then began shuffling some clippings he had brought with him; he grumbled that they were out of order. A couple of minutes rolled by before he found what he was looking for, an article praising Cuba’s performance in the Classic from one of the international wire agencies, and he proceeded to read it out loud. Castro’s voice was tremulous. He finished reading the dispatch, and then he read another, and another, and another, for more than a half hour. The students in the bleachers around me were, by now, clearly bored. Many fidgeted or talked. Some slept. As Castro read commentaries from Miami’s El Nuevo Herald, ESPN, and the BBC, it struck me that he was sharing information from sources that were out of bounds to most Cubans. But if he was aware of the paradox he didn’t show it. When he was done with the articles, he talked for another hour about Cuba’s achievements in medicine and education. The restless din in the stadium grew, but Castro seemed oblivious. I tried to read the faces of the members of the Politburo who were seated near Castro, but all I saw was their disciplined and neutral expressions.

servido por mydigest sin comentarios compártelo

David Denby: Loners

Bill Murray has strong cheekbones, a lordly crest of hair, and thin lips that he presses together in an act that suggests self-containment more than disapproval. In Jim Jarmusch’s new “Broken Flowers,” as in “Rushmore” and the recent “Lost in Translation,” the teasing ironist-clown of twenty years ago has vanished. At the age of fifty-four, Murray has become rather imposing—he holds the camera with little flickers of amusement in his eyes and tiny changes of emphasis and color in his voice. He’s now a major actor, but in a specialized way: he doesn’t extend himself much, and it’s initially hard to imagine him as what he’s supposed to be in “Broken Flowers,” an indomitable Don Juan who leaves dozens of disappointed girls in his wake. In America, it’s usually the smiling, eager fellows, the guys who never stop asking, who become successful mashers, but Murray, as he comes off here, has too much pride to ask. His character, called Don Johnston, is a loner who says very little. When his latest girlfriend (Julie Delpy) walks out on him, he sits silently on a leather couch in his big living room, topples over, and goes to sleep. As far as we can see, he doesn’t want a girl; he doesn’t want anything.

Murray’s linking up with Jim Jarmusch is a case of Mr. Cool meeting Mr. Cool, and the result is intriguing and elegant, but not quite satisfying. Certainly, “Broken Flowers” is the best thing Jarmusch has done since his early deadpan comedies, “Stranger Than Paradise” (1984) and “Down by Law” (1986). But Jarmusch still works out of a minimalist aesthetic in which the arbitrary and the unexplained rule the screen. We’re not meant to ask such things as why a retired computer entrepreneur like Don Johnston would live in what appears to be a forlorn upstate New York town; or why he has no interests or friends except for a chattering, good-hearted busybody, Winston (Jeffrey Wright), who lives next door. In conventional Hollywood terms, Don has no backstory—the swirl of life around and inside him that would make his actions credible. He’s a hollow man, neutered, disconnected from everything. That, of course, is the point, but Jarmusch and Murray have combined to make him empty without establishing the reasons for the desert in his soul. How much of this movie is devoted to a freshly imagined fictional character, and how much is the product of both men’s disengagement from the world?

On the same day that Don’s latest flame leaves him, he receives an anonymous letter from someone who says that she is an old girlfriend, informing him that she conceived a son with him almost twenty years ago. Who’s the old girlfriend? Is there really a son? Winston, an amateur sleuth, sends Don out on the road in search of the four women he was dating two decades earlier. Since the letter was written on pink stationery, Winston tells Don he must take the women pink flowers and look for pink in their houses. It’s a very strange quest, and, as Don tools around, half curious to see the women again, half embarrassed by what he has to ask them, the movie turns into an absurdist travelogue. We see Don looking at maps, sleeping on airplanes, driving through rural and suburban landscapes in a rented car—“a stalker in a Taurus,” he calls himself—but the travel scenes are purely formal, like the chorus of a ballad. Don is stuck in Jarmusch’s depressed version of America: the women’s homes—a lower-middle-class bungalow, a sterile McMansion, an austerely modernist house in the suburbs, and a backwoods shack—are equally unappealing, drained of life. The cinematographer, Frederick Elmes, produces an even, gray light, which is quite handsome, in a neutralizing way, but also sobering, almost punitive—it says that this banal American stuff is all that there is.

Jarmusch’s women, who don’t suffer the burden of trying to be cool, have always been more alive than his men. Ellen Barkin threw a memorable fit in “Down by Law,” and in one of the sketches in “Coffee and Cigarettes” Cate Blanchett, playing two roles—an obnoxious star and her envious cousin—briefly smacked some life into that remote exercise. Jarmusch has made Don’s old lovers vastly different from one another, and some of the actresses do extremely well in their brief appearances, especially Sharon Stone as a hard-luck blonde who doesn’t demand too much from life, and Jessica Lange as an iron-willed fraud who “talks to animals.” Creating hollows of silence and embarrassment, a hushed expectation in which anything can happen, Jarmusch is good at the awkwardness of lost love, the sadness of diminished expectations: the women are getting by, but they’re not happy or creative, and Don’s encounters with them are either bittersweet or just plain bitter. They all have a fondness for pink—any one of them could be the mother of his child. But Don makes no more than a gesture at connection, and as the movie ends we’re left wondering: is Jarmusch’s cool really a kind of fear equal to Don’s fear of life? “Broken Flowers” is all of a piece; it’s maliciously observed, and it has a neat formal style. But it’s an art object without the energy or courage to be a work of art.

In “Grizzly Man,” which opens August 12th, the indefatigable Werner Herzog has made a brilliant documentary about an American saint and fool—a man who understands everything about nature except death. This innocent is one Timothy Treadwell, a college athlete from Long Island who dropped out of school after an injury, failed as an actor, and became a California surfer who drank too much. He was a routine product of American dislocation—a washout, even—until the moment in 1989 when he had an epiphany in Alaska. Up there in the wilds, Treadwell fell in love with the enormous grizzlies that come down from the mountains in the warm weather, when the salmon are running. Starting in 1992, and for a dozen summers after that, he lived among the animals in the Katmai National Park and Preserve, almost always alone, and always without a weapon. His special province was a densely shrubbed plot of land—the Grizzly Maze, he called it—which he turned into a private petting zoo. He gave the animals—many of them weighing seven or eight hundred pounds, and outfitted with claws like yellow scythes—such names as Mr. Chocolate and Aunt Melissa, stroked their noses with his hand, and reigned in this peaceable kingdom as a kind of benevolent god. In his own eyes, he was protecting the bears from poachers and from the indifference of the park service. Treadwell was a fearless man, who could face down an enraged animal with a pointed finger and the words “Don’t you do that. I love you.” He was also an implacable cornball and sentimentalist, a celebrator of nature and of himself, who was capable of rhapsodizing over a steaming pile of bear droppings, which he insisted on calling poop. His Dr. Doolittle act worked extremely well, right up to the moment when it stopped working at all. In October, 2003, Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were attacked and devoured by a hungry long-nosed grizzly that either came down from the mountains late or lingered after the other bears had left.

We know all this because Treadwell, a media-type guy, had a digital video camera with him during his last five summers in Alaska and shot a hundred hours of footage, which, after he died, fell into the eager hands of Werner Herzog. The great German filmmaker interviewed some of Treadwell’s adoring friends and ex-girlfriends; he also talked to a variety of local naturalists and park-service officers, most of whom thought that Treadwell “stepped over the line” that separates humans from animals. Herzog then wove the “found” footage into a startling meditation on innocence and nature. Narrating in his extraordinary German-accented English, Herzog is fair-minded and properly respectful of Treadwell’s manic self-invention. He even praises Treadwell as a filmmaker: as Treadwell stands talking in the foreground of the frame, the bears play behind him or scoop up salmon in sparkling water; in other shots, a couple of foxes leap across the grass in the middle of a Treadwell monologue. The footage is full of stunning incidental beauties.

In a way, “Grizzly Man” is the ultimate nature documentary, for it chronicles the nature of man as well as the nature of animals. Herzog, investigating Treadwell’s earlier life, interprets him as a spiritually chaotic outcast from civilization, an impatient misfit who relieved his misanthropy with neurotic protestations of love in the wilderness. As Herzog frames it, the entire movie is a very dark joke. Yet there’s an element in the comedy which Herzog may not have intended: the contrast between the self-dramatizing American, with his naïve egotism and optimism, and the hyper-cultivated European, who brings his own burden of despair to nature. Whereas the tormented Treadwell longs for harmony and doesn’t seem to understand that death is at the center of any ecological balance, Herzog sees nothing but death. Looking into the eyes of a bear that comes close to Treadwell’s camera, he discerns cruelty and mercilessness rather than hunger. Neither man, it seems, is willing to admit that a bear is a bear is a bear.

servido por mydigest sin comentarios compártelo

David Denby: GETTING THE STORY

On November 15, 1959, while luxuriating in abundant literary and social success in New York, the young Truman Capote was called to an unexpectedly spartan test. On that day, in Holcomb, Kansas, two ex-cons looking for money and thrills murdered four members of the Clutter family on their farm. A few weeks later, Capote, who had been eager to expand the boundaries of journalism, went to investigate the case for The New Yorker. Whatever his ambitions, Capote was an odd man for a police-blotter job. He was born in 1924 in New Orleans, and grew up in Alabama, Connecticut, and New York, where he went to the Trinity School for a while and worked briefly as an office boy at this magazine. For years, many readers (and, in particular, writers) have wondered how this habitué of Le Pavillon and La Côte Basque, with his high, thin, goose-quill voice and his floating palms, could possibly have gained the trust of the straightforward men and women of rural Kansas. In “Capote,” which stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, the writer, Dan Futterman, and the director, Bennett Miller, satisfy that curiosity. “Capote,” which draws extensively on Gerald Clarke’s 1988 biography, is devoted almost entirely to the five years in which Capote lived and wrote “In Cold Blood,” an assignment that became a four-part series, a best-selling book, and a literary classic. Small-scaled and limited, “Capote” is nevertheless the most intelligent, detailed, and absorbing film ever made about a writer’s working method and character—in this case, a mixed quiver of strength, guile, malice, and mendacity.

Moviegoers who have followed Philip Seymour Hoffman’s supporting work in such films as “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “Cold Mountain” sensed that he had a lot more to give, and here it is. As the cinematographer, Adam Kimmel, moves in close, Hoffman’s Capote looms up like some strange Rushmoric outcropping—heavy-domed skull, golden hair, pink skin, double-peaked upper lip, owlish glasses, and blue eyes that occasionally peer directly at the bruised ego and longings of the person in front of him. Hoffman starts with the physical and works inward to the soul. He’s only a few years older than Capote was when he went to Kansas, but his thicker features seem to forecast the coarsening of face and body and the spreading spiritual rot that afflicted the writer in the years after the book came out. As Hoffman plays him, Capote is an actor, too: a wounded personality who remade himself; a public figure capable of facing down scorn. Holding forth at parties with cigarette and glass in hand, he dispenses rancorous gossip in a way that cuts off any possible life beyond his perfect sentences.

Although Capote, working hard, eventually befriended several people in Holcomb, his first foray there would have been a disaster were it not for his childhood pal Nelle Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), who was soon to publish “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and who came along as his assistant. As Capote waltzes around the dour courthouses and landscapes in a sheepskin coat and an enormous Bergdorf’s scarf, Lee makes the initial contacts and performs the introductions. Never taking a note, he boasts of near-total recall; he boasts, too, of the book he’s going to write before he has written a word of it. He sobers up only when he sets eyes on one of the captured murderers, Perry Smith. (The movie almost dispenses with the other killer, Dick Hickock.) As Perry, Clifton Collins, Jr., is not as sensual and insinuating as Robert Blake, who crooned his way through the role in the frightening 1967 movie version of “In Cold Blood,” but he’s darkly handsome, with an abashed, yearning manner. Alone with Perry in his cell, Capote is stunned: this beautiful sociopath is material—a gold mine, in fact—and also a sympathetic human being whose miserable childhood and need for recognition match Capote’s own history and ravenous hungers. “It’s O.K. It’s Truman. It’s your friend,” Hoffman says in his strangely incisive baby voice. In those early moments of interest and empathy, the masterpiece is born.

Perry warms to Capote’s attentions, and the rest of the movie turns into a complicated struggle between the two of them, with a desperate Perry telling Capote enough of his story to try to motivate the writer to help him, and a devious Capote both kid-gloving and bullying Perry until he opens up and describes the night of the murders. Determined to create a new form—the “nonfiction novel”—Capote gets in deep with Perry. As the court appeals go on, staying the executions, their relations become an artistically necessary but morally questionable mixture of affection, fascination, and exploitation. But by 1965, Capote, exhausted from his bouts of research and writing, turns ruthless and antic; Hoffman swings back to party mode as Capote privately and publicly longs for the men to hang so that he can finish his manuscript.

Strictly speaking, this intense little movie is not an independent film: it was a dying major, United Artists, that entrusted a reported seven million dollars to the former high-school friends Dan Futterman, an actor, and Bennett Miller, who had directed only the documentary “The Cruise.” But “Capote” is unimaginable without the independent-film movement of the past twenty years or so. Apart from some sweeping shots of an extremely horizontal Kansas (the movie was actually shot in Manitoba), the filmmakers work intimately, with an easy, unstressed understanding of such things as Capote’s homosexuality and the fervent solicitude that his friends felt for him—solicitude mixed with jealousy, exasperation, and dismay. No doubt people will pick at inaccuracies in the portrait and say, “That’s not Truman,” but “Capote” is Truman enough—and an image likely to make any writer grimace in recognition. There are some oddities: Harper Lee’s character is a little fuzzy, and the filmmakers turn William Shawn (Bob Balaban), the editor of The New Yorker, into an aggressive force who pushes the plot along. For the record, Shawn was not in the habit of demanding the bloody details in stories about murder, or of rushing off to the Midwest to keep his writers company at executions. Finally, the filmmakers’ suggestion that Capote never recovered from the death of Perry Smith, or from the success of “In Cold Blood,” strikes me as doubly sentimental. Capote was ultimately done in by alcohol. Yet, however one interprets it, the finale is acrid: the chronicler of death triumphs, and then has nowhere to go but to his own inglorious end.

At his best, the CBS news broadcaster Edward R. Murrow was swift, precise, grimly humorous, and effective. Murrow, who first came to prominence in the nineteen-thirties and became a star with his radio broadcasts from London during the Blitz, could go straight down the center of a subject without seeming banal. He was an insider who could imagine what it felt like to be an outsider. He could position himself as a witness to history while adhering to the forms of modesty. “Good Night, and Good Luck,” George Clooney’s account of Murrow’s historic assaults on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, in 1954, imitates many of Murrow’s best qualities. This is an elegant and stirring entertainment about the hard-drinking, hard-smoking reporters of “See It Now,” the show that Murrow and the producer Fred Friendly put together every week—a group of men and women who marshalled their courage and their skills to overcome a noxious atmosphere of intimidation.

Clooney praises his hero without false illusions. Murrow, for all his journalistic virtues, was very canny about show business. As much as Humphrey Bogart or William Powell, he cultivated the stylized suavity of the thirties, and David Strathairn, another fine actor emerging from supporting roles, gets the streamlined Murrow look perfectly—the pomaded jet-black hair, the thick brows and the unblinking eyes, the cigarette smoke curling up into the frame. Clooney, who wrote the movie with the film’s producer, Grant Heslov, drew heavily on Murrow’s broadcast scripts, and Strathairn, tucking his chin, and angling his head slightly, delivers Murrow’s curt, rhyming syntax with appropriate clipped diction and firm emphasis. Murrow’s manner was stern, appraising; his seriousness was elevating, rewarding even, which was why many people were also embarrassed by what clearly humiliates Murrow in the movie—the interviews, in his other program, “Person to Person,” with such celebrities as Liberace, whom he gamely quizzes on his marital plans.

The newsroom atmosphere, with its surges of bravado and caution, its teasing give-and-take, is entirely exhilarating, but the hand of commerce lingers over the giddy professional moments. “Good Night, and Good Luck” is a before-the-fall movie. In a couple of tense scenes, Clooney shows us that the chairman of CBS, William S. Paley (Frank Langella), after supporting Murrow for years, was ready to rein in his star to appease the sponsors. The issue, then as now, was how a commercial medium should address the public interest. There’s little gravy in attacking Joe McCarthy in 2005, and that’s only a small part of what Clooney is up to. His real intention appears to be to deliver a blow to the patella of a conglomerate-controlled press corps that, until recently, has indulged the Bush Administration’s most extravagant smears and lies. He has completely succeeded.

Issue of 2005-10-10

servido por mydigest sin comentarios compártelo