Author: Marc Alan Di Martino

This is a man

Roberto Saviano has been living undercover since his book Gomorrah was published three years ago. It is an inconvenient book for some people, and Saviano has paid a heavy price. He walks around with seven carabinieri, frequently changes residence, and has no private life to speak of. Because of his book.

This is a man who has rendered a great and necessary service to his people, a man who has the courage to speak unequivocally about the cancer devouring his country. But Saviano’s message doesn’t stop there. His message goes beyond Naples, beyond Italy, beyond Europe (the Camorra has its tentacles all over the place) to the world. It is a message of liberty in the face of terrorism.

Last night on the Italian program Che tempo che fa, Roberto Saviano was given a two-hour platform to have his say. He was flanked by novelists Paul Auster and David Grossman, and (in New York) Indian writer Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City. What brought all these writers together was perhaps an enemy common to all: terror.

Bloggers’ Blues

I don’t usually read the high-powered bloggers that pop up on WordPress every time I log in to this blog (mostly they’re about business, and I’m not too interested), but today one caught my eye and I clicked. Here’s what he/she had to say about life on the internet:

“Everything you say/write can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion someday, somehow. Your behavior on the web can cost you a new job, a promotion, your career, your marriage, your friendships, endorsements, and even take you out of contention for college scholarships, military/law enforcement service, or public office.

So please, please, PLEASE, for your own sake THINK about what you are about to post to the web (especially blogs, social networking sites and Twitter). Before you click “send,” “publish” or “update,” assume that everyone you know will read your comment. And by everyone, I mean your boss, coworkers, parents, grandparents, exes, recruiters, future employers, and yes, even your kids (even if you don’t have any yet).”

This is wise advice from a guy/gal who knows the ins and outs (there are a great many comments on this post) of blogging. And I’m listening. Because there is nothing the young blogger wishes for more than to be read by people he/she doesn’t know. But who really ever thinks of the consequences of what one writes? I suppose if I ever convert to Catholicism I will regret my recent post on the pope’s remark about condoms. Which brings me to the whole notion of anonymity, which has in a sense been bugging me for some time.

Not long ago, Yaacov Lozowick attempted a blog-duel (The Judeo-Arab Conspiracy) with a certain anonymous figure who turned out to be too shadowy for anyone’s good. Lozowick cancelled the blog because he had doubts about his opponent’s identity (Lozowick uses his own identity to blog). His reasoning was the following:

“Already then we had a built-in problem, in that my identity is clear and transparent, and Google will tell you all about me, while Ibrahim ibn Yusuf is not the person’s real name. I was willing to accept this, since I know from experience how hard it is, perhaps even impossible, to find an Arab willing to engage an Israeli in dialogue between equals.”

It turns out that Ibrahim ibn Yusuf wasn’t an Arab at all, which defeated the logic of their brief encounter. I have had similar discussions with people about the importance of anonymity/transparency–especially when dealing with weighty issues like the Israeli-Arab conflict or Islam in general.

As anyone can plainly see, I may be a nobody, but I have opted for transparency on this blog.

If I can’t stand by my own positions publicly, then what’s the point of going public?

Pope Condemns Witchcraft

The New York Times reports today that the Pope Benedict XVI was embraced by the people of Angola, in Africa. They further report that the crowd of faithful Angolans wasn’t the least bit fazed by the controversy surrounding the pope’s poo-pooing of condoms as a useful way to fight HIV (and various other STDs, unwanted pregnancy, etc…). Here’s the clincher, at least for me:  

“The only people who use condoms are those with no faith,” said Simba Teresa, a 45-year-old street vendor, trying to wave away the heat with a continuing flap of her hand. She said three of her five children had died as infants, a common story in a country with one of the worst child mortality rates in the world. “Faith is everything,” she said. “You put your life in God’s hands.”

Now, we live in a world where it is no longer able to claim absolute ignorance of certain things, namely that if you want to have sex without risking making babies–and therefore ending up with too darn many of them–you can put on a rubber. Unless you are a Catholic–no, wait…unless you are a Catholic living in an underdeveloped region of the world. Italy, for example, is home to Vatican City and a healthy majority of Italians still identify with being Catholics, but all of them have recourse to condoms (and, more importantly, use them). The ones who don’t aren’t supposed to be doing the nasty anyway.  So this just goes to show that while most mainstream Catholics will pay lip service to the pope, most of them realize he is full of hot medieval air when he says these things.

One thing the NYTimes article did not report that the Italian media did was Benedict’s plea to the Angolans to abandon their old time religion: witchcraft, animism and all, and get with the new. My guess is that he meant the Catholic Church, that big, democratic holy roller-rink of a faith. I, for one, don’t see much difference between the doctrine of transubstantiation and, well, lesser known forms of religious witchcraft.

Hannah Arendt on Caryl Churchill

“One can hardly overestimate the disastrous effects of this exaggerated goodwill on  the newly Westernized, educated Jews and the impact it had on their social and psychological position. Not only were they faced with the demoralizing demand that they be an exception to their own people, recognize “the sharp difference between them and others” and ask that such “separation…be also legalized” by the governments, they were expected to become exceptional specimens of humanity. And since this, and not Heine’s conversion, constitutes the ticket of admission into cultured European society, what else could these and future generations of Jews do but try desperately not to disappoint anybody?”

This is Hannah Arendt writing about the illusion of Jewish emancipation in Europe. Of course, in those days the difference was between Jewish Jews (you know, the ones with the full beards and yarmulkas) and cultured, Europeanized Jews. The latter, Arendt is saying, in order to be admitted into the bosom of European society, were expected to distance themselves from their brethren in the East (Russia, Poland), i.e. to become non-Jewish Jews.

I bookmark this page from The Origins of Totalitarianism in order to draw a quick parallel. In today’s Europe, “good Jews” are still asked–perhaps more than ever–to distance themselves from their brethren in the East, namely Israel. Of course, not only in Old-New Europe, but even in brand new North America this is true. Jews everywhere are told that they must choose between their troublemaking brethren in the East or the goodwill of their non-Jewish neighbors.

Pope Benedict XVI, enemy of Africa

Pope Benedict XVI, in a plane on his way to Africa, had this to say about AIDS: ”You can’t resolve it with the distribution of condoms.”  The New York Times reports that there are about 22-million people in sub-Saharan Africa infected with HIV. The story is here.

At times I tell myself this man is joking. He seems to be a caricature of a cartoon of a pope. And then, when he has had his say, he appears genuinely distraught that his statements upset some people. I mean, who can be serious when they tell others to control themselves sexually through abstinence? The popes–who one might suppose have no experience, and therefore no real advice to offer–can’t even control their own men, so what other term is there for this but hypocrisy?

First impressions

Not half a day into it and I’m already having serious doubts. Not only is the name quote unquote seriously overused by bloggers (which means I will eventually have to revert to my own name to avoid further confusion), but I am shocked that this didn’t occur to me at the very first moment. No matter.

Macy Halford at the New Yorker has the dope on the new vogue of vampire fiction. She nobly dives in where I fear to tread. Plus, sooner or later I hope to confront David Plotz, A. J. Jacobs and the recent trend in rediscovering the Bible and writing about it as if it had been dug up from some archaeological backwater (think Gilgamesh). Oh boy, books are fun!

Then there is a whole slew of other stuff that deserves attention, the pesky Durban 2 conference next month foremost among them. Who said it was just books?

Between the leaves

Well, this is happening.

The name “quote unquote” comes from a book I’ve been reading, “Explaining Hitler” by Ron Rosenbaum. The author is interviewing George Steiner about his obsession with Adolf Hitler (he wrote a novel about it) and he keeps quoting Steiner as saying “quote unquote”. This is something we Americans do a lot. We do it with our finger, too, which drives some people mad.

It occurred to me that this succinct phrase tells us an awful lot about the way we think, that our mental processes are able to encompass punctuation and parenthetical digression without losing themselves in abstraction. So this is the essence of quote unquote: to write about things as they happen, to digress but not to get lost in Proustian waterfalls of verbiage, and–and this is the point–to be able to say something useful about all those books in my life. I can’t say there will be no other talk, but in the end it all comes down to reading. And writing about what you read.