Uprising in Iran

Elections in Iran on Friday returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to a second term as president. Supporters of challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a conservative reformer, have taken to the streets in protest. Violence has broken out, and people have been shot to death by police. Remarkably, the Islamic republic’s leading cleric, Ali Khamenei, has called for an investigation of the election results. So have other members of the Iranian ruling class.

Regardless of the outcome, the United States needs to stay out of this. Mousavi’s supporters and Iran experts are clear about this. Given the history of U.S. intervention in Iranian affairs since World War II, and the anti-Americanism that was a theme of the 1979 revolution, any effort by our government to promote the opposition is guaranteed to backfire and to help unify and expand Ahmadinejad’s support. This is why Mitt Romney’s remarks this weekend have been self-serving and irresponsible. Obama’s balancing act — expressing doubt about the election’s fairness without taking sides — is the right move for this moment in the chess game.

The Web and Twitter have offered ringside seats to the events in Tehran in particular, although protests seem to be occurring throughout the land. By far the most active tweeter has been Raymond Jahan @StopAhmadi. His summary of events in Tehran today (which I’ve embellished with other news):

• Large crowds throughout Iran — millions, according to protesters — took to the streets on Sunday and today. Presumably the largest crowd was at Tehran’s Azadi Square (surrounding the Freedom Tower), the site of historic demonstrations that brought down the Shah’s regime in 1979.
• People claimed to see snipers around Azadi Square, and some people were killed or injured by gunfire. Photos of bloodied corpses were sent out by cell phone or Internet, despite sluggish bandwidth. Britain’s Channel 4 captured a police shooter on video. In general, foreign journalists have been prevented from broadcasting, and some at least have been asked to leave the country.
• In Tehran and Rasht, authorities called individuals to intimidate them, saying their phones were bugged. Jahan seems to doubt that the government has done much bugging. Activists have been using pay-as-you-go calling cards to evade any surveillance.
• A rumor was circulating Sunday that some of the police who rode motorcycles into crowds of protesters were actually Hezbollah Arabs imported from Lebanon to take stern measures against Iranians. The rumor, which seems to be false, stoked antagonism between police and the crowd, and encouraged violence. Using motorcycles to break up dense crowds did nothing to help the situation. A video shot this weekend by an Italian journalist shows some protesters protecting a battered policeman from the crowd that had pulled him from his motorcycle and set it on fire. Fleets of motorcycle cops can be seen in much of the video footage from Tehran.
• The headquarters of the Basij paramilitary force was burned today after a protester was killed outside.
• The rallying cry of the protesters is Allah o akbar, the Persian form of the Islamic motto “God is most great.” Abbas Barzegar, an Iranian Ph.D. candidate at Emory University, has warned Western observers (in the Guardian) against forgetting that Iran remains a very religious country. But he seems to assume that Ahmadinejad’s supporters have a monopoly on piety, and this seems far from the truth.
• Ahmadinejad was dismissive of the massive protests, comparing them to the reactions of fans whose team lost a soccer match. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, whose authority is independent of the executive branch, issued a bland statement congratulating Iranians for their large turnout and commitment to democracy. Later, as I mentioned, he announced that the election must be investigated — an apparent victory for protesters.
• There has been uncertainty about scheduled mass rallies. Rumors circulated by Twitter and email that one rally set for today was actually a government trap. Protesters suspect that those rumors, plus a round of news that tomorrow’s rally had been canceled, originated with government agents.
• Video has shown police or security officers entering homes and beating people severely, in one case leaving a man motionless on the ground. Dormitories at the university in Tehran were invaded Sunday night.
• Iranians are suspicious of the ill-timed maintenance shutdown this evening by Twitter. Shutdowns are notoriously frequent on Twitter, but under these conditions, people in Tehran suspect the worst. Tweeters are objecting with the hashtags #TwitterStayUp and #NoMaintenance.

Resources for keeping up with the news:

• Live blogging at huffpost.com has been going on since Saturday.
• Informed Comment, Juan Cole’s authoritative Mideast blog, criticizes the plausibility of election returns and makes a case for fraud by the government. He deals with (and rejects) the theory that Western journalists spent too much time in affluent North Tehran, overlooking broad-based rural and working-class support for Ahmadinejad.
• Wikipedia article on the protests is a site for hammering out a neutral account of what’s happening. Also see the discussion page.

The piano in the corner

I have not found myself able to write either about my academic work, local affairs, or the wide world — even as I anxiously watch events unfolding in Iran. What I can offer is a discovery in online music.

Magnatune.com has a certain downloadable album of classical piano music — an album that perhaps could not have been made before music went online, and that some will sneer at. Robert F. Tucios introduces From the Lobby of the Cooper Arms this way:

The piano, a bruised Brambach baby grand, lies at rest in a quiet corner of the still majestic grand lobby of the Cooper Arms, one of a handful of resort high-rise beach apartments and hotels to pop up on the shoreline of Long Beach in the 1920’s. This cool ornate interior serves as a communal living room, echoing with activity and sheltering the building’s residents and visitors from the noise of the world outside.

I descend the elevator, say my hellos and walk to the corner of the lobby, music in hand.

I sit down and play for a while.

You can listen to the results here (or here for low bandwidth).

If nothing else, this recording is a historical document, preserving the imperfections of the typical 20th-century piano that never saw the inside of a concert hall or recording studio. The imperfect tuning, mysterious clicks and pops, and uncooperative acoustics are typical of the vast majority of impromptu piano concerts in homes, halls, and lobbies. I’m delighted that someone took the trouble to capture all this in a recording — and that the recording is this listenable.

Robert F. Turcios is a graphic designer and talented amateur pianist. On Cooper Arms he records a judicious selection of both standard and interesting short piano pieces. (“Claire de lune” is here, but not “Für Elise” or, thank God, “The Entertainer.”) Classical mavens will already have “definitive” recordings of all of them, but they won’t have anything like this.

You may find it worth looking into a Magnatune membership. Magnatune only sells on the Web and splits proceeds 50-50 with musicians. For a flat monthly fee, you can either stream or download unlimited amounts of music from the company’s catalog. It’s a little heavy on electronica and New Age for my taste, and the company is a bit dense about classical and pre-classical titles. Still, there is plenty of good music to discover here.

Saturday baroque (on Monday)

I’m in awe of this concert by Jordi Savall in Italy. The music is French, including something by Marin Marais. And I’ll shut up now.

Getting over Ayn Rand

Those schlocky paperbacks are a residue of my adolescence. Mixed in with Hubbard and Asimov and other mid-century know-it-all entertainers, Ayn Rand’s novels peered from the racks at Horton’s Shop’n Basket on Oxford Road. Facing the Emory University campus, Horton’s always carried an abundance of cheap literature for the young, self-infatuated idealist. It was a great resource while I was in high school, and I consumed its paperbacks zealously — but somehow, as if guided by instinct, I avoided Ayn Rand.

A case of erroneous premises, no doubt.

There’s a beautiful essay on the erstwhile Alisa Rosenbaum (Ayn Rand) by Jenny Turner — three years old, but new to me — here at the London Review of Books site. If you don’t have time for it, at least read this:

The great thing about Objectivism, according to its fans, is that it offers ‘a moral defence of capitalism’. Objectivism proves that capitalism is good and necessary, and more, a moral inspiration. It does away with the need for nationalism, war, religious fundamentalism. It does away, too, with bourgeois sentimentality, that tiresome mime-act of having to pretend that one cares deeply about the little people.…

Objectivism is at least modern, with no harking back to thatched cottages or yeoman militias; and it does claim a horror of political violence, and nationalism and racism, the last denounced as ‘collectivism of the very lowest sort’. You can see, in a way, how it might offer a sense of life’s grandeur, coupled with a thrilling disdain for guilt, duty, service and so on. One can just about see how such ideas might have struck small-town 1950s teenagers – as astonishing as Elvis, in their way.

But really, storytelling was Rand’s talent, and it is in her novels that her vision takes its truest shape. …

Nasty sex and scenes of wanton cruelty and destruction are not unusual in novels and movies. But Rand’s nastiness has an earnestness to it, a desire to transform naughty frisson into iron principle. And as for sex, so for politics. Popular stories of the 1940s and 1950s are full of people being rapacious and unkind, but for Rand, noir has to become a system of world history. Her ethics are doggedly, insistently supremacist…. Good guys recognise other good guys immediately: the novels are full of heart-warming chats between a hero and a noble tramp or plumber. Bad guys stammer, and bluster, and let their weak chins wobble as their dull eyes look down at the floor.… 

Post-Rand, Objectivism has become more secular and suburban, but as is the way with suburbs, also more widespread. If nothing else, Objectivism might inject romance, victimhood, entertainingly bohemian personal chaos, into the otherwise uneventful right-wing life — …

Slavoj Žižek sees Rand as one in a line of ‘over-conformist authors who undermine the ruling ideological edifice by their very excessive identification with it’. Rand’s mad adoration of capitalism ‘without its communitarian, collectivist, welfare etc, sugar-coating’, he argues, actually serves only to make the inherent ridiculousness of capitalism ever more plain.

But it’s not just capitalism that Rand makes ridiculous by her worship. It’s also the mystique of Modernism, the idea that ‘good’ taste in aesthetic matters equates, somehow, with ‘good’ morals. And it’s also intellectuals and intellectualism. Especially that model of intellectualism that goes with bohemianism and free love and swirling garments, and cigarettes and cigarette-holders, and making much of one’s personal freedom, and having a position on everything, because that’s what being an intellectual is all about.

We’ve all met that kind of intellectual in the academy. Some of us have been that person, at least for a little while.

Yet another Siegelman update

The “Free Don Siegelman” lobby has been active, but Obama’s Justice Department seems unimpressed. In April the dismissal of the Ted Stevens case raised hopes that Siegelman’s prosecution might also be found improper. And in May, a federal judge in Alabama sent a strongly worded letter to Attorney General Eric Holder on behalf of Siegelman.

Siegelman fans are enthusiastic, but I remain unmoved. (In the past I disclosed my own bias here and criticized Siegelman’s case here.)

The Stevens case: In 2008, Republican Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska was convicted of hiding gifts worth a quarter of a million dollars. But after Obama took office, Holder found that federal prosecutors had acted improperly by failing to share notes from an interview with a key witness, whose courtroom testimony conflicted with what he had initially told interviewers. Stevens is probably guilty as charged, but because of the misconduct by prosecutors, Holder requested that all charges against Stevens be dismissed on appeal.

The Stevens case had been bad for Siegelman, because it showed that even the Bush Justice Department was not entirely partisan in pursuing corruption cases. (Siegelman has always claimed he was prosecuted solely because he was an up-and-coming Democrat.) If prosecutors had held off, there is no doubt that Stevens would have been re-elected in November. Instead, he lost by a very narrow margin to his Democratic challenger.

Still, the outcome of the Stevens case prompted seventy-five of Siegelman’s colleagues (he was state attorney general before winning election as governor) to petition Holder to review Siegelman’s case. Many Democrats have expressed impatience with Holder’s decision to await the results of a review by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility. The assumption seems to be that only Democrats can give a Democrat a fair hearing.

Judge Clemon’s letter: The next stage in Siegelman’s trial proceedings will be a sentencing hearing before Judge Mark Fuller. Earlier this month, prosecutors dismayed Siegelman supporters by recommending that the government seek to extend Siegelman’s sentence from seven to twenty years.

Judge U.W. Clemon sent a letter to Holder demanding an investigation of Siegelman’s prosecutors, whom he accused of raising “unfounded” charges, “poisoning” the jury pool, and “judge-shopping.” In 2004 federal prosecutors did try to avoid having Siegelman’s corruption case tried before Clemon, whom they regarded as a Siegelman ally. Clemon barred much of the prosecution’s initial evidence against Siegelman, and after long months of maneuvering, the prosecution brought new charges against Siegelman and hospital executive Richard Scrushy, who contributed money to Siegelman’s lottery campaign in exchange for a seat on the state board that regulates hospitals. This case was heard by Judge Mark Fuller instead of Clemon, and a jury found both Scrushy and Siegelman guilty.

Where the prosecutors found Clemon too friendly to the governor, Siegelman supporters view Fuller as unfairly biased against him. They were particularly incensed that the judge had Siegelman led out of the courtroom in shackles, then imprisoned him in Louisiana rather than close to home. Of course, these indignities are imposed on innumerable convicts every day in the name of the American people. Is a man of Siegelman’s standing supposed to be exempt from such things? His supporters seem to think so.

The latest salvo against Judge Fuller accuses him of holding a grudge against Siegelman for reasons that frankly aren’t clear to me after digging into Andrew Kreig’s Huffington Post article. It seems that because Fuller is the principal stockholder in Doss Aviation, a military contractor that receives nearly all its income from the federal government, he is therefore liable to be biased toward the government’s case. This is pretty thin soup. While I don’t think much of people who pull down unearned incomes derived from the extravagant mark-ups associated with defense contracting, I also don’t see how it would play a greater role than, say, a portfolio of federal bonds — to say nothing of drawing a federal salary — in biasing a federal judge in favor of the government.

Kreig’s article portrays a Missouri attorney named Paul B. Weeks as a hero for raising this issue. He’s getting help from Jill Simpson, the self-styled Republican volunteer, whom state Republicans claim not to know, and who has been so diligent in trying to vindicate Siegelman.

Siegelman’s contribution to this dust-up is a press release recycling the tired myth that U.S. attorney Alice Martin’s husband is “Karl Rove’s best friend in Alabama.” Rove has become the all-purpose liberal bogeyman, the very mention of whose name is supposed to make us angry and intolerant.

Holder and Obama are under a lot of pressure to let Siegelman off. The handling of Ted Stevens’ case, when it would have been easy and politically expedient to continue to prosecute him, speaks well of Holder’s respect for the law. But it doesn’t bode well for Siegelman.

Creek War symposium live online

From the Auburn University press people:

The College of Liberal Arts at Auburn University invites the public to dialogue with scholars from around the nation during a two-day symposium on the Creek War and the War of 1812 on May 22-23, 2009 at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art in Auburn. The event will also be available via the web at connect.auburn.edu/cah.

The symposium, co-sponsored by the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and Horseshoe Bend National Military Park in Daviston, AL will feature scholars from around the nation, including Gregory Dowd (A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815), David and Jeanne Heidler (Old Hickory’s War: Andrew Jackson and the Quest for Empire) and Gregory Waselkov (A Conquering Spirit: Fort Mims and the Red Stick War of 1813-1814).

For more information about the symposium or the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities visit www.auburn.edu/cah or call 334-844-4946.

Update: Video from the symposium will be podcast later this summer, most likely in July. Plans are to include some footage from a tour of the Horseshoe Bend battlefield. Podcasts from the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center are distributed through iTunes; a search for auburn draughon will take you there.

The poetry of Mike Huckabee

I appreciated Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination.

Remember the bleak winter of 2007-2008? That was when Rudy Giuliani, Warlord of the New York Marches, was the party’s crown prince, destined to face off against Her Royal Highness the Queen Consort (also of New York). Barack Obama and John McCain were a couple of no-chance long shots.

It was a grim, joyless time, and Huckabee’s aw-shucks populism, which so plainly got on the nerves of his party’s junta grande, was about the only touch of humanity in the race. My state is both needy and knee-jerk Republican, and I thought Huckabee might at least give us a way to, you know, “send a message.”

And that’s what we did, although by the time we voted, Huckabee was on the way out and Obama was steaming ahead. When I canvassed for the Obama campaign (in Condoleezza Rice’s old neighborhood, as it happened), my canvass partner, an African American soldier just back from Iraq, told me his dream ticket would list Obama for president, with Huckabee as his running mate.

Anyway, there’s a story going around about Huckabee and a poem he just posted on his blog. It’s about Nancy Pelosi.

Here’s a story about a lady named Nancy
A ruthless politician, but dressed very fancy
Very ambitious, she got herself elected Speaker
But as for keeping secrets, she proved quite a “leaker.”

Now that’s embarrassing.

It reminds me of the guy in Florida, standing in front of his motor home, who cornered my vacationing friends and me until he’d finished reciting all the sing-song verse he’d written for his wife over the years. Imagine the Ancient Mariner as a guy who wrote rhymes for Hallmark. It was like that.

Compared to Huckabee, though, that guy was Robert Frost. Give that ex-governor a J. Gordon Coogler Prize.

To be fair, not every line of Huckabee’s verse is all that bad. Some of it approaches the level of Ogden Nash’s more mundane verse — which is to say it lacks the eccentricity that makes Nash interesting.

Huckabee is clearly trying to be funny. Maybe he should borrow a few tricks from Nash’s bag. He ended his Pelosi poem with this mishmash:

I say it here and I say it rather clear-
It’s time for Nancy Pelosi to resign and get out of here.

W.W.O.N.D.? Well, maybe something like:

I say it here, and I say it rather clear—
It’s time for Nancy Pelosi to step down, pack her bags, take a powder, hit the road, and sashay out of here.

It could work. Anyway, if you’re going to talk about something as far-fetched as persuading a Speaker of the House to resign, you might as well do it in eccentric verse.

A nest for growing souls

To learn a language is to gain another soul. Charlemagne is supposed to have said that, or something like it, probably in Old High German. I’ve always admired the saying, and I believe it.

F’rinstance, when I speak German (the only language besides English that I’m anything like fluent in), I often find myself acting and feeling like a different person. A younger, less knowing person, I think — possibly because my German is far less sophisticated than my English, and I can’t speak the language without thinking in it.

Today I happened on The Language Nest, a blog by Jack Martin of William & Mary College. He’s a linguist who studies “endangered languages, especially those native to the southeastern United States.” I have a copy of the dictionary he co-authored of Creek/Muskogee, the principal language of Alabama until about 1800 (and a language I’m determined to learn).

The most recent posts cover some interesting online tools I didn’t know about, and that don’t apply only to language learning: namely, an online drawing program, image editing program, T-shirt printing service, and comic strip generator for people who can’t draw.

A tip for cash-strapped academic libraries

Drop your subscriptions to Elsevier journals. Crooked Timber digs into the scandal around the publisher’s astroturf “journals” of corporate-funded medical findings.

Things have certainly fallen off since the 1670s, when the House of Elzevir was ready to publish the work of that radical poet John Milton.*

Saturday baroque

I’m feeling both melancholy and fond-of-my-fellow-mortals today. The perfect piece for the occasion is “Les voix humaines (Human voices)” by Marin Marais.

So take four minutes and listen to this recording at Last.fm. It’s by a Montreal viola da gamba duo, also called Les Voix Humaines [website].

Or you might watch this video of a live performance with two viols and a theorbo.