Acronyms

The Western media has taken to using the term 'DAESH' to refer to the group formerly known as ISIS/ISIL. 'DAESH' is an acronym for the Arabic term Dawlat al-Islāmiyya fī al-Irāq wa s-Shām, but it has a couple of homonyms which are less than flattering:

Daesh also sounds similar to the Arabic words daes — which means someone who crushes something underfoot - and also dahes — which is someone who sows discord.

Recently, a group of armed thugs have taken to intimidating the congregation of a mosque in Texas- substitute a trucker's cap for an Afghan pakol, and there's not much of a difference in the look of these asses and ISIS.

I have decided to refer to these homegrown extremists by the acronym 'DOUCHE': Destroying Our Usual Comity for Hateful Extremism.

Jolly Diwali, then Melancholy

This afternoon, after a morning spent coaching, I went to a local Indian restaurant for their Diwali buffet. Needless to say, having not eaten breakfast and having spent a couple of hours teaching children how to fight (and having a good friendly brawl with my friend Gentle Jimmy G. and a nice fight with technical tips for one of the teenage counselors who chaperone the smaller kids), I was ravenous, so I descended on the sumptuous spread of dishes like a newly awakened Kumbakharna. The buffet presented a great selection of dishes from throughout the Indian subcontinent, from Southern iddli with sambar and coconut chutney and goat jalfrezi to Northern saag paneer and Chinese-Indian delicacies like gobi Manchurian and diaspora dishes such as chicken tikka masala. To finish the meal, there were Diwali sweets, and those addictive fried-milk balls, gulab jamun... a former co-worker of mine, a Trinidadian woman of Indian descent, would make a beeline for the gulab jamun whenever she went to an Indian restaurant. At any rate, I staggered out of the restaurant, contemplating how gauche it would be to unbutton my pants... Diwali mission accomplished!

Diwali is the Hindu festival of lights- one of its origins lies in the celebration of the return of Rama, his wife, Sita, and his brother Lakshmana to the city of Ayodhya after years of exile and war, as recounted in the Ramayana. While exiled, Sita was abducted by the ten-headed rakshasa king Ravana, who ruled the island nation of Lanka. In their invasion of Lanka, Rama and Lakshmana are aided by an army of monkeys, led by the divine Hanuman and the king Sugriva.

A good single-volume introduction to the Ramayana is a gloriously written 'retelling' of the epic by William S. Buck. Here is how Buck describes the sacrifices that Ravana performed in order to force the god Brahma to grant him a boon:


And at the end of every thousand years, Ravana cut off one of his heads and threw it into the fire as a sacrifice, until nine heads were gone and but one day remained before he would cut the last one. That day was passing. Ten thousand years and Ravana's life were about to end together.

Ravana held the knife to his throat, when Brahma appeared and said,"Stop! Ask me a boon at once!"

"I am glad that I please you," said Ravana.

"Please me!" said Brahma. "Your will is dreadful, too strong to be neglected; like a bad disease I must treat it. Your pains make me hurt. Ask!"

"May I be unslayable and never defeated by the gods or any one from any heaven, by Hell's devils or Asuras or demon spirits, by underworld serpents or Yakshas or Rakshasas."


After defeating several gods in battle and forcing them into servitude, the thunder god Indra approaches Vishnu/Narayana, the Preserver of the Universe, for advice:


"How shall we bring down Ravana?" asked Indra. "Because of Brahma's boon is the Demon King strong, and for no other cause of his own. Help me, you are my only refuge, there is no other for me. I will gather my storms again and attack Lanka, give me your permission to fight Ravana once more!"

"Never!" said Narayana. "Don't you understand that Brahma's words are always true? Do not falsify the three spheres of life. I would not have let you fight in the first place, though you were right to resist and Ravana was wrong. Ravana asked Brahma- Let me be unslayable by every creature of Heaven and of the underworlds. And Brahma promised-So be it. That boon is unbreakable, yet will I cause Ravana's death. That is the truth. Only ask me...."

"Ah," said Indra, "from disdain Ravana did not mention men or animals and took no safeguard against them. He eats men; they are his food and why should he fear them? Lord, on Earth, life resembles Hell again. We need you again. Look at us, see us, and bless us. For the good of all the worlds, Lord Narayana, accept birth as a man."

"I already have."


Spoiler alert, the man in whom Vishnu manifests as an avatar has his wife abducted, and just happens to assemble an army of monkeys and bears...

Buck's Ramayana is beautifully told, it's the sort of book that I have inserted numerous tiny bookmarks in to mark particularly felicitous passages... I can't recommend it highly enough. Buck also wrote an equally gorgeous retelling of the epic Mahabharata, which also occupies a position of prominence on one of my bookshelves.

I promised melancholy, and not just in order to rhyme with jolly and Diwali. William Buck died at the age of thirty-five, and the world was deprived of further interpretations of Indian myth from the man. This webpage and its comment thread shed some light on the life and career of William Buck, including the possibility that he used his family's considerable wealth to hire Sanskrit translators, but I fully believe that he was the one who interpreted the translations in a particularly pleasing prose.

As a simple postscript, I think Smut and zrm would disown me if I didn't insert a reference to Buck Dharma somewhere.

Quick, Fall Back on the 'Post a Video' Gambit!

It's almost midnight... I really want to post something on Friday. Hey, how about posting a video? I was toying with the idea of posting a video by pop genius Marshall Crenshaw, but was unable to decide between the humorous 'Cynical Girl' or the earnest 'Whenever You're on My Mind'. Luckily, I found a video of him playing an entire concert at NYC's long-gone midtown Manhattan venue, the Ritz:





The Ritz was a great venue, and it was right near the Afghan Kebab House, which was a cheap, good place to grab a bite to eat before a concert... Midtown Manhattan wasn't quite the corporate dysneytopia that it now is.

Sugary Entanglement at a Distance

Every once in a while, it seems that there's a weird interconnectedness in the universe... for instance, some guy in the Southern Hemisphere writes a post about pigeons eating nonpareils, then a few days later, a guy in the Northern Hemisphere wins some nonpareils in a random prize drawing run by the guy who organizes the local bar's Tuesday Trivia Battle:

The running joke is that Joe, the trivia organizer/MC, has stock in a company that sells insulin pumps, what with all of the candy he gives out. At least he's not giving it out from a van... at least not on Tuesday nights.

At any rate, the nonpareils were delicious:

Who you calling a pigeon?

Making a Killing

Today's source of outrage is the news that, three days after horrific terrorist attacks made on innocent civilians by fundamentalist Sunni Islamic extremists, the U.S. State Department approved the sale of smart bombs to a society run by fundamentalist Sunni Islamic extremists. The Saudis are currently fighting a Shiite insurgency in Yemen, a religious conflict that has re-ignited Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. After yesterday's long post about the danger to the West of using religious fanatics in various proxy wars, we have an news item about the sale of cutting-edge weapons to people who have shown themselves to be our enemies since September 2001 in order to facilitate a sectarian war. Great, just fucking great... at least Boeing and Raytheon will be making a killing.

It's a pity the smart bombs aren't really smart... there's no way to talk them out of detonation:





I imagine some of those munitions, labeled 'Made in the USA' will find themselves used on Christians, Jews, and Yezidis as well as Shiites. Is it too soon after Paris to talk about blowback?

Steyn on Western Civilization

Tengrain is a national treasure, one of those guys who reads the right-wing's bloviations so you don't have to subject yourself to them. Recently, he covered statements by Canada's most toxic export (Alberta bitumen is a distant second), Mark Steyn, made in response to the Paris terrorist attacks. Please read all of Tengrain's excerpt of Steyn... I'm just going to touch on one paragraph:


“…But that’s not true, is it? He’s right that it’s an attack not just on Paris or France. What it is is an attack on the west, on the civilization that built the modern world – an attack on one portion of “humanity” by those who claim to speak for another portion of “humanity”. And these are not “universal values” but values that spring from a relatively narrow segment of humanity. They were kinda sorta “universal” when the great powers were willing to enforce them around the world and the colonial subjects of ramshackle backwaters such as Aden, Sudan and the North-West Frontier Province were at least obliged to pay lip service to them. But the European empires retreated from the world, and those “universal values” are utterly alien to large parts of the map today."


The problem with Steyn's characterization of Western Civilization is that it distorts the West's interaction with the developing world. To put it mildly, the Great Powers of Europe did not export the benefits of Western Civilization to Africa, Asia, and the Americas, they looted their colonies and used divide-and-conquer to keep their subjects under their heels. To the colonizers and the mercantilists, the colonies were a source of natural resources and cheap labor. Rather than trading with the natives as equals, the 'men of the West' used force of arms to subjugate and enslave populations, propping up and arming local strongmen who would facilitate wholesale theft. Put succinctly, Western Civilization failed to live up to its noblest ideals. Even those philosopher-heroes who espoused the loftiest sentiments tended not to live by them. The "universal values" Steyn mentions only applied to white males of the gentry. The implementation of the freedoms birthed by the Enlightenment really only took place in the early 20th Century, when women's suffrage was granted, and their benefits didn't accrue to various minorities until the 1960s. The real relationship between Western Civilization and the colonies is perhaps best summed up by a cartoon by William H. Walker in the March 1899 edition of Life magazine

Western Civilization's interaction with the developing world in the 20th century continued in the same old oppressive fashion- the inhabitants of the Third World were largely seen as inconvenient squatters on natural resources, or convenient cannon fodder in proxy wars. Even post-World War 2, the 'West' preferred to topple nascent democracies and to install dictators in order to steal petroleum, to undermine left-leaning governments, to crush independence movements in former colonies. Our current problems with Islamic fundamentalist terrorists stem from the use of Islamist radicals as proxies in the Cold War and the U.S. government's continued support for an autocratic regime that has been exporting fundamentalist Sunni Islam, combined with an early 20th century divide-and-conquer policy in the Middle East. An even more grievous lapse was the failure of the U.S. to give economic aid to the Afghans after they expelled the Russian army... we once treated our enemies better than we now treat our allies.

The benefits of Western Civilization simply did not accrue in "ramshackle backwaters such as Aden, Sudan and the North-West Frontier Province". The 'West' could have engaged with the world in a generous fashion, establishing democratic societies instead of kleptocracies. Instead, centuries of colonialism have resulted in decades of blowback. Even more perniciously, the colonizer's mentality has come back to haunt the citizens of Western countries, with declining wages, higher mortality rates, and substandard infrastructure. Perhaps the most glaring example of the contempt that our elites hold for democracy was the naked dictatorial yearning by the guy who acted as ISIS' midwife:





There's a Steyn stain on Western Civilization, and that stain is hypocrisy- a yawning gulf between noble ideals and base policies, a sustained, systemic failure of Western Civilization to act in civilized fashion. At its best, Western Civilization, with its pluralism, secularism, and concern for minority rights, holds the greatest promise of a happy, healthy society... we of the West should try it sometime. Maybe that would result in a world in which terrorist movements gain no traction.

Tonio K. summed up the thesis of this post in 4:11:





To return to a serious note, interrobang has a couple of great posts

Quelle Horror, Vraiment

I woke up this afternoon to horrible news, the series of coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris which claimed the lives of over one hundred victims. I haven't been to Paris in a decade, so it's hard to reconcile the scenes of carnage with the City of Light that I remember... it's especially jarring to see crimson carnage sullying a city characterized by the rosy life.

This has been a terrible year as far as terror attacks in France are concerned, starting with the Charlie Hebdo attack and continuing with the attempted trainboard massacre. This new horror is the nadir of a bad year.

Right now, my sympathies and well-wishes go out to the French people. I feel a kinship with Parisians- my mother's father's mother left Paris to escape from an arranged marriage, only to fall in love with a merchant seaman from Alsace-Lorraine, and my mother spoke both French and Swiss-German at home as a young girl. While in Paris, I noted that the French people were much more hospitable than American popular culture would lead one to believe. I hope that the French government responds to these terror attacks in a wise faction... fourteen years ago, the metropolitan area which I call home came under attack, and my government responded to these attacks by launching a war against innocent bystanders, a war calculated to line the pockets of administration apparatchiks with our tax dollars and Middle Eastern petroleum reserves, a war which caused much of the blowback that led to these current attacks. I hope that President Hollande is prudent... skulls need to be cracked, but they have to be the right ones.

May Liberté, égalité, fraternité never give way to nihilistic fundamentalism or a paranoid security state. Vive la France! Bon Courage!