Back at Stanford ... applause and protest (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

Three Stanford police were outside the Stanford Bookstore at 4 p.m. today.  Book theft?  No, a book signing.  Condoleezza Rice, professor of political science and Hoover fellow, made a rare appearance — sans secret service or personal bodyguards — to promote her new memoir, Extraordinary, Ordinary People.

One student held a sign outside the glass doors: “Condi’s signature is dripping with blood.”  He was remonstrating with a swarthy man in a suit who seemed to be holding a photographer’s camera lens … no, it was a full Pepsi Cola bottle.  I had arrived a few minutes late, and didn’t have a chance to see the playing out of that little drama.

Fortunately, Prof. Rice was a few minutes later than I was.  I waded towards the basement “textbook area,” where students were crowding the balustrades and peering downwards.  I elbowed my way downstairs, mildly squashing myself beside two Asian students, who were speaking in Chinese and thumbing through the first pages of her book.

It’s diplomatic to say someone “hasn’t changed” in decades — but Condi Rice really hasn’t changed.  I remember her as a young associate professor of political science in the mid-80s.  A couple of decades and thousands of hours of workouts later (hers, not mine), she really does look the same, wearing a sleek brown jacket and trousers.

She didn’t talk about the controversial Bush years:  Everyone expects “the obligatory secretary of state memoir,” a policy memoir with names and insider’s details, she said.  “Indeed I have started and will finish that book.”

Instead, she wanted to talk about “extraordinary, ordinary people” John and Angelena Rice.  Her mother taught English and was one of Willie Mays’s early teachers.  She had told him, recalled Rice, “Son, you’re going to be a ball player, and if you have to leave class a few minutes early…”  The rest of her remark was lost in laughter.  Her father had been a Presbyterian minister and founder of Westminster Presbyterian Church.

Part of what makes extraordinary people, she said, is extraordinary times.  Birmingham, Alabama, was “the most segregated city in America,” she said, a place where “racism was quite hard-edged.”  For the Stanford students who formed most of the crowd, it was a description of the lost and unimaginable reality – for some, a world that died before even their parents were born.

Rice recalled the “horrors of Birmingham,” where she lost a childhood friend in the 16^th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four young girls in 1963, during the time the city was called “Bombingham.”  Nevertheless, in the close-knit neighborhood of Titusville where she grew up, the children were taught “We could not have a hamburger at Woolworth’s, but you could become president of the United States.”

In addition to the secretary of state, the community produced the president of the University of Maryland at Baltimore, two Pulitzer prizewinners, and a host of other luminaries who flew by my ear faster than my pen could write.

Rice said she was taught: “There are no victims.  You cannot control your circumstances, but you can control your response to circumstances.  You will have to be twice as good.”  Adversity would give them an armor to defend themselves against “them.” “’They’ will have to respect you.  That was the mantra,” she said.  Education was the key.

Studying in Denver

She recalled her grandfather, a sharecropper who was determined to get an education.  After one year at Stillman College he was out of money and told he could not continue.  He asked how the other kids could stay.  They have scholarships, he was told; on the other hand, if he wanted to become a Presbyterian minister…  “That was exactly what I had in mind,” her grandfather decided on the spot.  His son adopted the same calling.

Rice remembered the collapse of Jim Crow and the passage of the Civil Rights Act.  She and her parents watched The Huntley-Brinkley Report announce the passage of the act, which the local news called “the so-called Civil Rights Act.”

The Rice family was anxious to find out the truth.  They went to a movie theater, and then a restaurant.  As they entered the restaurant, “People looked up, suddenly realized it wasn’t illegal, and went back to eating.”

However, a few weeks later she was served a hamburger that tasted odd.  Where’s the beef?  She showed her parents:  it was  onions, not hamburger.

She had trained as a pianist – but changed her mind when she faced a future of “teaching 13-year-olds to murder Beethoven.”

The default mode was international relations.

Her mother died of cancer in 1985. Her father died on Dec. 24, 2000 – a week before his daughter went to Washington as national security advisor.

Titusville kids valued education -- here she's in Boston

She admitted she misses them both, when she travels and still wishes to send them snapshots, or when she walked in the Holy Land she thought of her Presbyterian father, or when she went to Aïda, the first opera she had attended with her mother.

“But when you’ve been that close, your mother and father never leave you,” she said.  Her father would tell her, “You’re God’s child, and you are prepared for what is ahead of you.”

“There’s no better gift that they can give you – that sense that you are prepared for what is ahead of you.”

She started her brief talk after Stephen Krasner’s fulsome introduction, and was finished by 4.20 p.m.  The next hour and a half was reserved for book signing – row by row, to prevent chaos.  The crowds at the balustrades had doubled.

Outside, the Stanford police still lingered.  I asked one of them who the swarthy man was – not suprisingly, he was another policeman.

No protests?  The officer indicated about ten people, milling and languidly talking among themselves.  It didn’t look like much of a demo.  “They were doing the megaphone about 10 minutes ago,” the officer reassured me, and they had been passing out leaflets.  It was quiet now.

“That’s the way we like it,” he said. “Nice and peaceful.”

He fights for democracy in Iran (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

In a friendly chat with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who is trying to drum up support for his leadership,  Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, offered these words of wisdom:

“The Iraqi nation is vigilant and aggressors cannot dominate this country again,” Mr Khamenei told Mr Maliki, according to a statement put out by his office. “May God get rid of America in Iraq so that its people’s problems are solved.”

Solved for which people? I doubt it will improve much for women, if Iran is to be held as a role model:  Sakineh Mohammadi-Ashtiani‘s former lawyer said, after he legged it to Norway, “In Iran, unfortunately, one could say women are in a real situation of slavery.”

So much remains to be “solved” — her fate, and the fate of others like her.  And nukes.  And “fuel swaps,” and … and…and… Will any of it work?  This, from Abbas Milani‘s new book, The Myth of the Great Satan:

“Of the many problems plaguing U.S.-Iranian relations in the last thirty years, the most elemental problem is the one most easily overlooked or ignored: the United States plays by the normal rules and logic of diplomacy while the clerical regime plays by its own idiosyncratic rules.  Trying to deal with the regime only through traditional channels of diplomacy is akin to fighting an agile terrorist insurgency with the ponderous might of a regular army.  While it is clear that there is no military solution to America’s ‘Iran problem,’ it is no less clear that a new paradigm, equipped to counter the Iranian regime’s self-serving rules of conduct, needs to be developed.  The Iranian regime’s agility is rooted in its despotism; the ponderous pace of American policy is the price society pays for democracy.  The challenge is to match Iran’s agility without sacrificing the principles of democracy.”

Milani writes that a number of factors have resulted in a “diplomatic disparity between the regime, with its double talk and outright lies, and the United States, trying to play by the traditional rules of diplomacy.  Tagiyeh, a Shiite concept allowing the faithful to lie in the service of faith, provides clerical leaders with a theological cover for their lies and obfuscation.”

We’ve written about Milani before here and here — and did a Q&A with him a while back here.  He is a relentless advocate for Iran’s Green Revolution, and says the solution to our problems is to back democracy in Iran.

Literature as “moral insurance”

“As a form of moral insurance, at least, literature is much more dependable than a system of beliefs or a philosophical doctrine. Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material suppression of literature – the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books – we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history.” — Joseph Brodsky, 1987 Nobel lecture

At the time, I had reservations about Joseph Brodsky‘s absolutist view of literature as “a kind of moral insurance.”  I am less ambivalent now.  I was reared … or rather, I reared myself … on the novels of Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and the Brontës; I suppose the great heart of the 19th century formed much of my moral and political education.

Great-hearted Hugo

As Susan Sontag said, “Reading should be an education of the heart.”  In a world where offline reading is occurring less and less, I wonder where and how such a shaping of the heart will occur.  (The graphic novel is a promising form — but, as in the case of “Borderland,” I think it is better as an appeal to pre-existing values, and lacks the nuance required for “the education of the heart.”)

Yesterday, I ran across this 1997 article, “A No-Fault Holocaust,” in U.S. News and World Report:

‘In 20 years of college teaching, Prof. Robert Simon [of Hamilton College] has never met a student who denied that the Holocaust happened. What he sees quite often, though, is worse: students who acknowledge the fact of the Holocaust but can’t bring themselves to say that killing millions of people is wrong. Simon reports that 10 to 20 percent of his students think this way. Usually they deplore what the Nazis did, but their disapproval is expressed as a matter of taste or personal preference, not moral judgment. ‘Of course I dislike the Nazis,’ one student told Simon, ‘but who is to say they are morally wrong?’

She refused punditry

The article also discusses a Chronicle of Higher Education piece by Kay Haugaard, a writer who teaches at Pasadena City College, about Shirley Jackson‘s famous 1948 story, ‘The Lottery,’ which used to be a staple of high school reading lists.  The story:  A sunny small-time American town that gathers every year to implore an unnamed force to grant a good corn harvest. Annually, the citizens draw slips of paper from a wooden box to select a victim for human sacrifice. A young mother draws the losing card, and is stoned to death by the community.

“Until recently, she says, ‘Jackson’s message about blind conformity always spoke to my students’ sense of right and wrong.’ No longer, apparently. A class discussion of human sacrifice yielded no moral comments, even under Haugaard’s persistent questioning. One male said the ritual killing in ‘The Lottery’ ‘almost seems a need.’ Asked if she believed in human sacrifice, a woman said, ‘I really don’t know. If it was a religion of long standing. . . .’ Haugaard writes: ‘I was stunned. This was the woman who wrote so passionately of saving the whales, of concern for the rain forests, of her rescue and tender care of a stray dog.’ …

“The search is on for a teachable consensus rooted in simple decency and respect. As a spur to shaping it, we might discuss a culture so morally confused that students are showing up at colleges reluctant to say anything negative about mass slaughter.”

Jackson refused to explain “the meaning” of her story, except to tell the San Francisco Chronicle a month after the story was published in the New Yorker:

Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.

According to one critic, Jackson intended “a sensitive and faithful anatomy of our times, fitting symbols for our distressing world of the concentration camp and the Bomb.”  But what to do when readers are tone-deaf to “symbols” and even meaning?

Mind, Jackson’s story was written at a time when anyone’s stoning seemed unthinkable and archaic, and not part of the daily news — today?  different story.  Think of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, among others.

Undoubted courage (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

So I wonder at the popular appeal of the Dalai Lama last week, and the euphoria at his teaching, which suggests that our compassion should be motivated by the universal search for happiness, and also by the knowledge that compassion contributes to our own physical well-being — it lowers our blood pressure, releases endorphins, etc., etc., etc.  Is compassion motivated this way compassion at all — or just an extension of endless cycle of self-help routines? Is that the only common denominator left? And how will such a self-serving compassion help one when the Nazis bang on the door, looking for the Jews? Or when the NKVD asks for names during a Lubyanka interrogation?  The most immediate response — to lower one’s blood pressure, reduce one’s heartbeat — is to hand them over.

What bugs me is that the Dalai Lama — the man who faced off bloody Mao Zedong, one of the last century’s immortal genocidaires — is a man of endless courage.  He knows this stuff.  It’s a peculiar reverse case of our current malaise — he walks the walk, but why doesn’t he talk the talk?

Without a compensatory virtues of independence of mind, and, beneath that, courage — which the ancients believed is the foundation of all virtues — is there any compassion at all?

The Dalai Lama has come to town. I will be covering his speech at Maples Pavilion tomorrow morning, and later in the day, “Harry’s Last Lecture” at Memorial Church.  I have already written about why he is returning to Stanford here.  (Clue:  It’s not the palm trees or the ipods.)

(Update on Oct.16:  Coverage on the articles here, here and here.  VIDEO BELOW.)

Tonight, I returned briefly to his 1990 autobiography, Freedom in Exile, in which the spiritual, the superstitious, the mythical, and the matter-of-fact are tossed in a uniquely Tibetan salad.

He recalled the summer 1950 earthquake that, to him, was an “omen from the gods, a portent of terrible things to come.” He remembered crashing “like an artillery barrage” a few days before news of the Chinese invasion.  He was 15 years old:

“Some people even reported seeing a strange red glow in the skies in the direction from which the noise came. It gradually emerged that people had experienced it not only in the vicinity of Llasa but throughout the length and breadth of Tibet …

HHDL doesn't think he told "the whole story"

Now from very early on, I have always had a great interest in science. So naturally, I wanted to find a scientific basis for this extraordinary event. When I saw Heinrich Harrer a few days later, I asked him what he thought was the explanation, not only for the earth tremors, but more importantly for the strange celestial phenomena.  He told me he was certain that the two were related. It must be a cracking of the earth’s crust caused by the upward movement of whole mountains.

To me, this sounded plausible, but unlikely.  Why would a cracking of the earth’s crust manifest itself as a glow in the night sky accompanied by thunderclaps and, furthermore, how could it be that it was witnessed over such immense distances? I did not think that Harrer’s theories told the whole story.  Even to this day I do not. Perhaps there is a scientific explanation, but my own feeling is that what happened is presently beyond science, something truly mysterious. In this case, I find it much easier to accept that what I witnessed was metaphysical.  At any rate, warning from on high or mere rumblings from below, the situation in Tibet deteriorated rapidly thereafter.”

Browsing through the book, what’s remarkable is the equanimity of tone, which blunts the edge of drama at Chinese lies and betrayal, even though he admits to being at times “scared” and “furious.”  He had to slip away to escape, in disguise, to slip the tens of thousands who had gathered to protect him from the Chinese:

HHDL and his Cambridge-educated sidekick (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

“We left Lhasa at dead of night. It was cold but very light, I remember. The stars in Tibet shine with a brightness I have not seen anywhere else in the world. It was also very still and my heart missed a beat every time one of the ponies stumbled as we made our way stealthily from the courtyard at the foot of the Potala, past the Norbulingka and Drepung monastery.  Yet I was not really afraid.”

In Nepal, in the 1970s, I remember interviewing a monk who had been one of about 2500 in one of Tibet’s monasteries.  When the Chinese attacked, they had four antiquated rifles to defend themselves.  Sipping Tibetan tea as we spoke (and sipping is all you can do unless you’ve acquired the taste for it; it has butter and salt in it), I remember his patient voice and calm smile as he told of the onslaught of the modern Chinese forces.  I also remember sophisticated Tibetan hoteliers who had been shepherds in the Tibetan mountains, alone for days with their yaks.  Tibetan practicality again.

For all of them, the story of their own exile began with the Dalai Lama’s end flight into India, never to return:

“After bidding these people a tearful farewell, I was helped on to the broad back of a dzumo [a cross between a yak and a cow — and no, I couldn’t find a photo on google], for I was still too ill to ride a horse.  And it was on this humble form of transport that I left my native land.”

If you have a romantic image of the Dalai Lama chewing on his pen, scribbling his autobiography, you should know I have it on very sound authority that the Dalai Lama does not actually write his own books.  Who is the culprit?  I suspect Jinpa Thupten, the Cambridge-educated sidekick and translator, now a member of the faculty of McGill University of Montreal.

Liu Xia and Liu Xiaobo: "Visible and invisible prisons"

Two writers were awarded Nobel prizes this year — but only one of them won for literature.  In the brouhaha over his Nobel prize for peace, it’s easy to forget that Liu Xiaobo is a writer. Kind of a twofer, with Mario Vargas Llosa.

Liu Xiaobo is a writer, of course, but what kind of writer? From what I could glean on the web, he appeared at first to be a writer in the way all academics are writers.  His essays,  Critique on Choices – Dialogue with Le Zehou and Aesthetics and Human Freedom earned him glory in academia. The former critiqued the philosophy of a prominent Chinese cultural philosopher Li Zehou.

Then I found this from NPR over the weekend:

Mr. Liu is 54, a writer who became a dissident because, as he said, “an honest writer must live by his words.” In his essay, Philosophy of the Pig, he praises ordinary citizens who challenge China’s totalitarian rule, and castigates intellectuals who, he says, “feel brave because the government lets them write about sex, incest and human defects. In China, everybody has the courage to shamelessly challenge morals. Rare are those who have the courage to challenge reality.”

"A hard stone in the wilderness"

He was jailed after saving hundreds of lives in Tiananmen Square.  After his release 20 months later, he said, “I hope to be a sincere Chinese intellectual and writer. This can put me back into prison—which is what happens to people like me in China.”

He is, of course, in jail again.  His wife, the painter, poet, and photographer Liu Xia, said to Deutsche Welle:  “I can only visit him, bring him books and write to him. They have allowed him to read and write for a year now. And he’s been allowed to see the sun twice a day for a year and a half. He is also allowed to go outside and move around – one hour in the morning, one hour in the afternoon.”

Liu Xiaobo‘s tireless work for human rights in China has rather overwhelmed his writing.  But I daresay every writer would rather be known for his writing, rather than for doing time.

So this, from NPR.  It’s a letter to his wife, Liu Xia, written last year from prison:

Sweetheart … I am sentenced to a visible prison while you are waiting in an invisible one. Your love is sunlight that transcends prison walls and bars, stroking every inch of my skin, warming my cell, letting me maintain my inner calm, magnanimous and bright, so that every minute in prison is full of meaning.

Given your love, sweetheart, I look forward to my country being a land of free expression, where … all views will be spread in the sunlight for people to choose without fear. I hope to be the last victim.

I am a hard stone in the wilderness, putting up with the pummeling of raging storms, and too cold for anyone to dare touch. But my love is hard, sharp, and can penetrate any obstacles. Even if I am crushed into powder, I will embrace you with the ashes.

(Finally, I found more of his writings here.)

He did not live long enough to see bad lineation

It started with Billy Collins. Now Allen Ginsberg has entered the act, via Publisher’s Weekly.

In July, we discussed the searing, red-hot topic of the day: the e-book and its effect on a poem’s lineation:

Poet Billy Collins has come out decisively against the e-book. The AP story is here.

His reason:  It’s difficult to manage a poem’s line breaks on the electronic screen, which has a disturbing tendency to break lines at awkward places and slide the remaining text onto the next line flush left, as if it were a new line.  Why it’s taken Collins so long to notice this is unclear — he could have seen it in any of his online reviews.

Robert Pinsky is confident the technical problems can be fixed, but that adds that besides the problems with portable e-readers, “most word processors treat verse as though each line were a paragraph. So, for example, typing a Wallace Stevens poem with capital letters at the beginning of the lines can be mildly annoying,” Pinsky says.

Now Craig Morgan Teicher at Publisher’s Weekly is ranting about the eBook version of Ginsberg’s Collected Poems and the screwed-up lineation.  “This is not ‘Howl,'” he howls:

“Ginsberg broke his poem into what he called “strophes,” those long lines that hark back to Whitman.  The indentations you see above are meant to indicate that the line keeps going beyond the end of the page, until the next left-justified line.  Ginsberg was careful in his liniation, and part of the poem’s impact is in seeing that “who” sticking out again and again on the left side of the page.  The digital version pays no mind to this whatsoever.  What we get is not the poem itself, but a kind of poor transcription of it.”

Just like we said.  Now, if we can just get Teicher to spell “lineation,” we’re in business.  He’s setting a bad example.  Galleycat repeated the misspelling.