Powered by Twitter Tools

In the meantime, I’ve added a link to my Twitter feed (ch_infamous) in the right sidebar and will be publishing an automatic weekly Twitter digest. Not a substitute, I know, but please bear with me.

Than you for reading,

Josh

A little too ideological. A little too alarmist. A little too convenient for the War on Terror.

A young Pakistani journalist named Manal Ahmad, currently a student at my alma mater, was in Lahore on Christmas break preparing to attend her cousin’s wedding when the assassination happened. Yesterday she managed to send an email to students and professors at the school offering her personal take on the situation. It was an enlightening read, raw but reasoned, and eloquent. Most importantly, it offered a viewpoint that, for whatever reason, hasn’t featured much in mainstream US media reports.

Manal consented to let me reprint her email here. This is admittedly something of a departure for Ch-infamous, but I think the story is big enough, and the mainstream coverage one-dimensional enough, to justify the detour.

[NOTE: The email is long-ish. I toyed briefly with the idea of summarizing it but quickly decided it was best to deliver it one piece. I think you'll understand why.]

Dear all,

I am just stunned right now…It’s Friday morning and the whole city is pretty much shut down, people aren’t going to work, all the markets are closed, even the gas stations, the streets are deserted save for police vans, and Lahore looks like a ghost town. Buses aren’t running, neither are domestic flights and trains. Last night all mobile phone networks (except one) were down, but those are working now and so is cable TV and Internet (sporadically), so we can at least watch the news (most news channels were restored after the emergency blackout some weeks ago). I am dying to go out in the streets with a camera and talk to people, but my parents have me besieged in the house so far because its not safe.

I don’t know what to think. We didn’t like Bhutto, but this is just… shocking. When we heard the news, Thursday evening about 7pm, I was at my cousin Mina’s house preparing for her mehndi. A Mehndi is the main fun music-dance-henna celebration that precedes a wedding. All us girls were dressed in brightly colored ghararas, skirts, with bangles, henna on our hands and orange flowers in our braided hair, the house bustling with people before we departed for the plush tented ground next door where the Mehndi was supposed to take place, when an uncle watching the news in another room rushed out and said Benazir had been injured during a suicide blast at her rally in Rawalpindi and CNN had pronounced her dead.

It didn’t sink in. We were just like, no, it can’t be. She’s probably just hurt. It’s a rumor. Seconds later the electricity went out, so we couldn’t watch the TV, and phone lines were jammed, so we just forgot about it because nobody wanted to mar the evening’s happiness, an evening we had been looking forward to and preparing for for months.

But when the time for the event came, and all the family went down to the tent to receive the guests, and no guests arrived, we began to worry. It was confirmed that Benazir was dead, from fatal gunshots – now news started to trickle in that rioting had started in Pindi, Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore. Mobs of angry supporters of the PPP, Benazir’s party, were blockading thoroughfares, burning cars and tyres and storming gas stations in the older parts of the city. We started receiving calls from friends saying they were stuck inside their homes because of fires burning outside or from fear of being mobbed on the streets, or stranded in traffic holdups for 2 hours at a stretch. Like everyone else at the mehndi, I was in disbelief. We tried to shake it off, the young people especially, because it was my cousin’s Mehndi, a time we ought to be laughing, celebrating, happy. My cousin, too, ignored it best as she could, smiling in spite of the fact that her closest friends weren’t there beside her, but we all knew that something terrible had been unleased with Bhutto’s murder, with terrible consequences in the hours, days and weeks to come. Benazir Bhutto had been a friend of the bridegroom’s family, and was even invited to the post-wedding party on the 29th of December.

At the end, only 50 of the 200 expected guests made it to the mehndi event. There was no music and no dancing, the DJ went home without playing a single song, nobody saw the dances we had been practicing for 2 weeks, the bright lights inside the tent were turned off – The nation was officially in mourning, though it was more out of fear of mindless retaliation. But we were still lucky – we later heard that two other outdoor tented wedding events in the city had been stormed by angry rioters bearing flaming torches, and guests had been beaten with sticks.

I tuned into local TV channels this morning to see them making a martyr out of Benazir, like her father was made before her. Black and white photos of her in her youth, mournful music playing in the background, everything designed to induce tears in even her opponents. But I don’t agree with that. It is not the job of the media to eulogize political leaders, living or deceased, and play up people’s emotions to such a degree – and Western media like CNN & BBC are following suit. Their coverage is appallingly one-sided, why I do not understand. It is a sad day, no doubt, I am sad that this happened, I am sad for Benazir and her family, but I am sadder still for Pakistan, and what has followed since last night. There is complete anarchy on the streets of Karachi, and in Larkana, Bhutto’s ancestral village in Sindh. It is mindless violence. People are burning banks, hospitals, bazaars, trains, all for the death of one person.

And the images and comments on TV are just fanning the flames. Nobody is calling for an end to the violence, for people in Pakistan to calm down and not attack each other. It is not the end of the world. Benazir’s death does not mean Pakistan has “lost” all hopes for democracy, as the Western media is portraying it. As always, the media ignores history, ignores the past, and right is ignoring all critical voices. Did she do any good when she was in power before? Why did this happen to her? Who is responsible? I don’t know, and I don’t know when we will know, if ever. Many people here seriously doubt the supposed Al-Qaeda link – it does seem convenient to dump every act of violence in this region on that mythical monster.

One can blame Musharraf’s government, for failing to provide adequate security at the rallies, for declaring emergency and the general instability that created – but people in Pakistan, intellectuals, the educated cadres, are angry at another party too – the U.S. government. It is well-known that the U.S. govt ‘engineered’ Bhutto’s return to Pakistan, forcing Musharraf to drop corruption charges against her though he was unwilling to do so (while Nawaz Sharif did not get the same treatment). Bhutto as well as Musharraf knew of the dangers involved in her return, in the compromise she struck up with Musarraf, in the kind of claims she was making, her open support for U.S. policies, and what she would do if she were Prime Minister – yet she courted danger, she invited danger by sticking her head out out of her armoured vehicle at the rally in Liaquat Bagh yesterday, the same place where Pakistan’s first Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan was assasinated in 1951.

And now, now that the country seems to have descended into chaos, many Pakistanis feel that other parties may have something to gain – Musharraf’s opponents within the country, for instance, or even the U.S. govt, for an opportunity to intervene ‘more’ directly in the affairs of this strategic, Muslim majority nuclear power.

That’s another thing the foreign media needs to back down on – the nukes issue. The nukes are not going anywhere, and remain firmly in the control of the army, as they always have. The Western obsession with Pakistan’s nukes is maddening, and really the very least of our worries right now. Our worry is the safety of the citizens from crazy mobs and corrupt, toady, sham democracies like the kind the upcoming elections are likely to bring into power. The elections now seem utterly pointless and farcical with the two key opposition parties not running anymore (Benazir’s PPP and Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N), and only the ruling government in Punjab PML-Q and the MQM (both Musharraf’s allies) in the running. If the U.S. wants stability in Pakistan, then it needs to stop thinking about neutralizing our nuclear weapons or demonizing the religious factions or propping up dictators or so-called democrats, and instead directing its aid towards schools, hospitals and village-level development, political institutions and legal systems and helping Pakistan honor its constitution and its laws. There is no other way.

As I speak, the city of Karachi is in flames. The army has been called in, and a friend in Karachi feels a Musarraf-PPP showdown is looming in the city. The PPP, now under the chairmanship of Benazir’s husband Asif Zardari, a thug of the higher order, feel invincible because of their loss. “Any voice of criticism against the PPP (in Karachi) is like signing your death warrant,” my friend says.

But we don’t want to be at the PPP’s mercy, or Zardari’s mercy, of all people. We want to live our lives in peace, have our weddings and funerals in peace. My cousin’s wedding, scheduled for tomorrow at a big banquet hall in a fancy hotel, is now cancelled, and there will now just be a small reception at their house.

We are sick and tired of politics. We don’t care who’s ruling anymore – we just want peace.

And we need prayers for Pakistan, prayers and positive support.

Still in shock,

Manal
December 28th, Lahore

[Interesting thing to note here: Japan's population has been shrinking since 2005, a trend that has the country more worried than relieved.]

More photos posted on the Vietnam 2007 slide show and more notes below (see first post here):

HOI AN: I’d conceived of this jaunt through Vietnam as an anti-reporting trip, meaning next to zero background research—meaning, in turn, that we arrived in Hoi An with next to zero idea about the place. According to Let’s Go and the Rough Guide, it was an important center for trade with China in the 16th and 17th centuries. Seems plausible enough. There are quaint little clusters of Chinese-style houses in the old part of town, and quite a bit of Chinese writing on the walls—all of it pan-Asian picturesque in way that would make a San Francisco fusion restaurant designer wet his skinny black pants.

But the architecture is only a backdrop. The real reason to visit to Hoi An, as we discovered on our arrival, is to load up on cheap custom-fit clothing. The entire old quarter is packed with tailor shops, each with its own poster-sized testimonial from one foreigner or another describing it is the cheapest, nicest, most efficient and most reliable shop in town. Shirts for $5. Suits for $40. Sun Yat-sen-style jackets with horrifying silk embroidered dragons running up the side, $25.

We ran into a few people who said they fly in on yearly wardrobe recharge trips. It’s like 1970s Hong Kong died and was reborn in midget form a few hundred miles to the east. (Not ashamed to admit we joined the frenzy. Snagged a suit and a couple shirts at Yaly Couture—a swank juggernaut of a shop staffed by 200 tailors and 150 svelte little siren-like seamstresses—for $300. Chump change it’s not, but the suit, black cashmere, fits like nothing I’ve experienced before. Almost makes me wish I was the kind of person who wears real clothes.)

In our one concession to cultural immersion, we decided to take a cooking class. Sadly, ten minutes into a pre-class tour of the market with the other students, somewhere near the seafood stalls, Kyle told me he felt like he was going to vomit (food poisoning). He then grabbed a moto taxi back to the hotel and made good on his prediction.

The class was advertised as a “hands-on experience.” In reality, most of the dishes were already half-assembled before we arrived and our hands spent most of their time wrapped idly around chilled glasses of chardonnay. The chef, though, was entertaining—a cocky kid with a set of pre-formed jokes, which he delivered deadpan like an embittered Howard Cosell. Example: “Please don’t say ‘yum.’ If you say ‘yum’ in Vietnam, it means you’re horny.”

HUE: This was the capital of Vietnam during the Nguyen Dynasty (equivalent to the Qing in China, except the Qing self-destructed before it could be co-opted by foreigners). The chief attraction here is the old Imperial City, modeled on the Forbidden City in Beijing but much smaller and in some ways more interesting. The complex took a beating during the war. Whether out of laziness or a desire to preserve the scars of foreign aggression, the government has left most of the palace in a deconstructed state. The startling thing is there are no signs or barriers to keep tourists from crawling around in the rubble, which makes for an interesting quasi-archaeological experience, incongruous extension cords and strings of cheap electric lanterns notwithstanding.

Kyle was keeping things down pretty well by the time we got there, so we tried to book another cooking class at a women’s culture center. Hue is famous for its food, which we’d already sampled liberally, but the class was a no-go. The women’s center, apparently, won’t crack an egg for less than 10 students at a time. Instead, we went to the beach, where I sat down with the new John McPhee book (Uncommon Carriers, an excellent read, particularly the bit about UPS) and, for the first time in a long while, managed to achieve a state of total relaxation. I also managed to achieve a searing, lop-sided sun burn that still hurts a week later.

The next day we made the only truly bad decision of the trip, which was to take the overnight train back to Hanoi to meet our flight back to the US. I’d sold the idea to Kyle on the grounds that you never really get to know a country until you ride its rails. The ride itself wasn’t too bad, if you take away the screaming child whose mother kept its urine in a bucket under the bottom bunk of the sleeping compartment. But the timing was horrible. After 12 hours on the train, we had three in Hanoi before doing 16 on the flight back to San Francisco. Kyle, who had to take another flight from Oakland to Utah, was not pleased. I was too comatose to feel much of anything.

HANOI—Flew in here on the 25th after a frenetic week that included dozens of last-minute preparations for my impending move to Beijing, falling inebriated out of a comandeered limo after a graduation dinner in San Francisco, and packing up my apartment a half-hour before Kyle arrived from Salt Lake City for the connecting flight. Kyle was late getting his luggage in Oakland, which left us 90 minutes to catch our flight to Hong Kong across the bay at SFO. We made it time thanks to a blissfully wreckless friend and her deceptively fast junk heap of a VW Jetta. Not the ideal way to start a vacation, but it had the side-benefit of making me tired enough to sleep the entire 13 hours to Hong Kong, despite being wedged between two large and figedity Chinese women. Also slept most of the way from Hong Kong to Hanoi, this time with the entire row to myself.

I’d been to Hanoi once before, during the Tet holidays in 2002, when I was still living in Beijing. For all the talk of Vietnam being the new China, the city seems pretty much the same. The price of pho has risen to a larcenous full dollar per bowl (what next? a dollar fifty?), but the streets are still sleepy, the people still relatively subdued, and tourists still unfortunately and inexplicably incapable of waiting until they return home to don their “Good Morning, Vietnam” and “Same Same But Different” t-shirts.

Managed to meet up with Nguyen Qui Duc, regional editor of Pacific Time, and Bobby Chinn, the half-Chinese/half-Egyptian libertine celebrity chef-owner of Restaurant Bobby Chinn. Duc met us for coffee near our backpacker hotel north of Hoan Kiem lake, nearly drowned us in travel advice, then took us to the unbelievable four-story French villa he rents on the edge of the Old Quarter, where he trotted out his latest art project: a collection of deconstructed musical toys that he uses to choreograph strange little post-modern dances (he has one posted on YouTube):

On Duc’s recommendation, we went to the excellent Museum of Ethnology, which I missed last time, to see an exhibit on Vietnam’s subsidy-era economy: glass cases filled with old food stamps, old radios and bicycles, and old makeshift appliances. There’s also a nicely done recreation of a cramped pre-1985 Hanoi apartment, home to 8, with pig noises coming from the bathroom. Most striking part are the testimonials roundly slamming the miseries of the state-controlled economy and praising the current era of relative prosperity—Party propaganda no doubt, but the sort of mea culpa the Chinese government, at least in its current state, would never have the guts to produce.

Best experience by far, though, was the morning exercise routine around Hoan Kiem, which starts every day around 5am and appears to attract damn near the entire city. The main attraction, for us at least, wasn’t the old people doing tai chi—a common enough site elsewhere in Asia. Instead, it was mass jazzercise routine around a statue of Ly Tai Do on the east side of the lake (see photo). Imagine a hundred women, teenage to geriatric, bumping and gyrating to 80’s club music like Rosie Perez in the intro to Do the Right Thing. I have no idea where they learned these moves, but the effect is fantastic. Now if only some one would teach them the running man…

The food, it goes without saying, was damn fine. On a recommendation in the “Let’s Go” guide, we stood in line at Pho Gia Truyen (49 Bat Dan, west of the Old Quarter) and had what very well may be the best pho on God’s earth. Couldn’t figure out what they do to make it that way, but it made me want to cry. Also had some fine bun cha (cold rice noodles with barbequed pork) behind the Water Puppet Theater. Heard tell of an eel-noodle place somewhere in the Old Quarter but ran out of time. Hopefully on the way back.

HA LONG BAY: Still there and still stunning, but now swarming with tourists, even in the low season. While riding on the boat, we met a twenty-something woman from Texas, a manager at some dot-com, who now lives in Nob Hill and was on one of those horror-show three-week tours of the entirety of Southeast Asia with her mother. Managed to get her in trouble when she mentioned how much she loved Polk Street and I said, “Yeah, all those transvestite hookers are interesting, aren’t they?” Mom was not pleased.

HAO LU: The capital of Vietnam during the Dihn Dynasty (968—980AD), established after the distintegration of the Tang in China allowed Vietnam to (temporarily) throw off the yoke of Chinese rule. We went here on a lark after our flight to Danang got cancelled and we found ourselves with an extra day. Nice little spot: karst-like mountains jutting out of the ground with rice fields and a few temples nestled between them. We were there for the rice harvest, which was probably the most interesting bit. They had it spread out in raw form (i.e., still encased in brown chaff) all over every flat surface, including the temple courtyards, to dry it out before sending it off to get processed.

TAM COC: Another picturesque little place, packaged together in tours with Hao Lu. Main attraction is a series of low caves carved out of the mountains by a shallow river running past bucolic rice paddies. Former rice farmers gather in tin boats in the main part of town to pick up tourists and paddle them through the caves. Hilarity ensued when Kyle and I (combined weight: 400 lbs) boarded a boat being driven by a diminutive 12-year-old and nearly sunk the bow. Kid was a trooper, but we started lagging behind the others in our tour group and eventually had to have his dad meet us half way to take over the paddling.

Coming up: Hoi An and Hue.

India’s Department of Telecommunications (DoT) passed an order to ISPs Friday to block several websites. The list is confidential. Indian ISPs have been slowly coming into compliance. SpectraNet, MTNL, Reliance, and as of Monday afternoon, Airtel. State-backed BSNL and VSNL have not started yet but likely will soon. The known list of blocked domains is *.blogspot.com, *.typepad.com and geocities.com/*.

Yes folks, the Indian government has decided to censor blogs and refused to explain why. This morning Shivam Vij managed to talk to Dr Gulshan Rai, director of CERT-IN, the only body authorised to issue directives to ISPs. His response: “Somebody must have asked for some sites to be blocked. What is your problem?”

No word as to why just yet and haven’t confirmed this myself. One comment on the post points to terrorism as justification. Another cautions the whole thing may have been a misunderstanding on the part of Indian ISPs, who could have taken a request to block a few specific blogs and expanded it on their own.

Or perhaps certain ideas about information control have already started leaking south through the recently reopened Silk Road border crossing at Nathu La.

Damned globalization.

A bit early to be issuing condemnations, of course. But if this is true, it don’t look good.

A recent graduate of the journalist factory I attend just altered all of us to an op-ed piece in Times by Anya Kamenetz (a young Village Voice columnist I’ve never read before), on the unpaid internship and the various reasons why it needs to be eradicated.

Kamenetz’s op-ed is better researched, and probably more thoughtful, than the rant I posted on the same topic a month ago. Curiously, her headline–”Take this Internship and Shove It”–is the same as mine was, minus the “Right Up Your Ass.” Karenetz does a nice job articulating the “more subtle effects” of the unpaid internship on the economy as a whole (a topic that I, in my haze of indignation, neglected almost completely):

In an information economy, productivity is based on the best people finding the jobs best suited for their talents, and interns interfere with this cultural capitalism. They fly in the face of meritocracy — you must be rich enough to work without pay to get your foot in the door. And they enhance the power of social connections over ability to match people with desirable careers. A 2004 study of business graduates at a large mid-Atlantic university found that the completion of an internship helped people find jobs faster but didn’t increase their confidence that those jobs were a good fit.

(How much worse are the socioeconomics of this equation for journalism? Public watchdog? Blue collar boys with pen and notebook sticking it to the Man? Not so much anymore.)

She also points out an interesting labor statistic: Less than 5% of “young workers” (age range undefined) in the US hold a union card, compared to the overall national rate of 12.5%. “How,” she asks, “are twentysomethings ever going to win back health benefits and pension plans when they learn to be grateful to work for nothing?”

In the end, Kamenetz’s swipe at the institution feels limp-wristed, a little too plaintive. But the point is the same: The unpaid internship is a cancer of the American economy that should be subjected to repeated rounds of unrepentant chemotherapy.

Former Vice President Al Gore became the latest Democrat to pull out of a speech at the University of California, Berkeley to avoid crossing a picket line for university janitors, landscapers and cafeteria workers.

Gore was scheduled to deliver a talk next Tuesday on global warming but canceled to honor a picket threatened by members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees over wages and pension contributions.

The article went on to list the other Democrats who withdrew from Berkeley appearances at AFSCME’s request: Howard Dean, Dennis Kuncinich, state Senator Liz Figeroa, Assemblywoman Carol Liu and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (a man saint-like in his support for the university system’s students and workers).

Here’s what the wire didn’t say: According to conversations I’ve had with university people who’ve tried to accommodate AFSCME, as soon as the union threatened to picket Nunez’s commencement address, the speaker got them on the phone with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who promptly promised them a 4% pay increase (the “last minute proposal” mentioned in an earlier AP report). They rejected it. They were later offered the opportunity to paste literature on every seat in the auditorium where Gore was to speak, plus five-minutes at the podium ahead of the VP’s appearance—hundreds of media and sympathetic Berkeleyans served up on a PR platter. That, too, they rejected.

The union website says a five-year veteran of the UC Berkeley janitorial force earns $11.54 an hour, while he or she could be earning $18.30 at a nearby community college [link]. That’s shameful of the university. It’s bullshit, in fact.

But bullshit might also be what that five-year janitor might be saying about the union’s strategy for getting his wages increased. Rejecting an offer of help from the Speaker of the Assembly? How else is this supposed to be solved? With a mop fight in front of the Chancellor’s house?

I really don’t understand. It’s like protest is booze, and the union is a bloated homeless person so drunk and full with it that he turns up his nose at an offer of food. (See alcoholic ketoacidosis.)

This comes just a few days after the union–which represents the university’s janitors, food servers and grounds workers–shut down Howard Dean’s graduation speech at Boalt Law School.

Now it does my heart good to see one of America’s struggling labor unions finally find the sack to clamp down on two anti-labor facist politicians like Gore and Dean. But why not take it all the way and cherrybomb the toilets at the journalism and law schools? God knows students and faculty in both buildings love to sodomize the little guys.

Sarcasm aside, what really takes this into the realm of the ludicrous is the union’s baffling rejection of its own success. According to my sources—which, unfortunately, have to remain anonymous for now—the union had Arnold Schwarzenegger on the phone promising wage increase if they would stop protesting the presence of (formerly) elected officials at Berkeley, a promise they rejected as too uncertain. The union was also reportedly offered time to speak at the Gore event, rejecting that as well.

It’s always been evident to me, and I assume to many others, that the aim of protest is to get one’s grievances heard. So what is this union doing? Is this part of some nuanced scheme, the genius of which we’ll all appreciate later? Or is this just another Berkeley politics masturbation story?

Everything I know about this comes second-hand or off-the-record, so I’ll have to leave it here for now, but stay tuned…

[Full disclosure: I'm a journalism student at Berkeley. I'm also one of people helping to manage the climate change conference, of which Gore's appearance was to be the main draw.]