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06 febbraio How Do We See Red? Count the Ways.Valentine’s Day is nearly upon us, that sweet Hallmark holiday when you can have anything your heart desires, so long as it’s red. Red roses, red nighties, red shoes and red socks. Red Oreo filling, red bagels, red lox. As it happens, red is an exquisite ambassador for love, and in more ways than people may realize. Not only is red the color of the blood that flushes the face and swells the pelvis and that one swears one would spill to save the beloved’s prized hide. It is also a fine metaphoric mate for the complexity and contrariness of love. In red we see shades of life, death, fury, shame, courage, anguish, pride and the occasional overuse of exfoliants designed to combat signs of aging. Red is bright and bold and has a big lipsticked mouth, through which it happily speaks out of all sides at once. Yoo-hoo! yodels red, come close, have a look. Stop right there, red amends, one false move and you’re dead. Such visual semiotics are not limited to the human race. Red is the premier signaling color in the natural world, variously showcasing a fruitful bounty, warning of a fatal poison or boasting of a sturdy constitution and the genes to match. Red, in other words, is the poster child for the poster, for colors that have something important to say. “Our visual system was shaped by colors already in use among many plants and animals, and red in particular stands out against the green backdrop of nature,” said Dr. Nicholas Humphrey, a philosopher at the London School of Economics and the author of “Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness.” “If you want to make a point, you make it in red.” What is it, then, to see red, to see any palette at all? Of our famed rods and cones, the two classes of light-sensing cells with which the retina at the back of each eye is supplied, the rods do the basics of vision, of light versus shadow, tracking every passing photon and allowing us to see by even a star’s feeble flicker, though only in gunmetal shades of black, white and grim. It is up to our cone cells to capture color, and they don’t kick in until the dawn’s earylish light or its Edisonian equivalent, which is why we have almost no color vision at night. Cones manage their magic in computational teams of three types, each tuned to a slightly different slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, the sweeping sum of lightwaves that streams from the sun. As full-spectrum sunlight falls on, say, a ripe apple, the physical and chemical properties of the fruit’s skin allow it to absorb much of the light, save for relatively long, reddish lightwaves, which bounce off the surface and into our greedy eyes. On hitting the retina, those red wavelengths stimulate with greatest fervor the cone cells set to receive them, a sensation that the brain interprets as “healthy, low-hanging snack item ahead.” In fact, human eyes, like those of other great apes, seem to be all-around fabulous fruit-finding devices, for they are more richly endowed with the two cone types set to red and yellow wavelengths than with those sensitive to short, blue-tinged light. That cone apportionment allows us to discriminate among subtle differences in fruit ruddiness and hence readiness, and may also explain why I have at least 40 lipsticks that I never wear compared with only three blue eye shadows. Whatever the primary spur to the evolution of our rose-colored retinas, we, like most other animals with multichromatic vision, have learned to treat red with respect. “In the evolution of languages,” Dr. Humphrey writes, “red is without exception the first color word to enter the vocabulary,” and in some languages it’s the only color word apart from black and white. It’s also the first color that most children learn to name, and that most adults will cite when asked to think of a color, any color. Red savors the spice of victory. Analyzing data from Olympic combat sports like boxing and tae kwon do, in which competitors are randomly assigned to wear red shorts or blue, Dr. Russell Hill and his colleagues at the University of Durham in Britain found that the red-shorted won their matches significantly more often than would be expected by chance alone. What the researchers don’t yet know is whether the reds somehow get an subconscious boost from their garb, or their blue opponents are felled by the view. After all, said Dr. Geoffrey Hill, a biology professor at Auburn University in Alabama and no relation to Russell Hill, “I’ve seen some of my biggest, toughest students, these tough, athletic guys, faint right to the floor at the sight of one drop of bird’s blood.” Red refuses to be penned down or pigeonholed. It has long been the color of revolution, of overthrowing the established order. “Left-wing parties in Europe have all been red,” Dr. Humphrey said, “while the conservatives, in Britain and elsewhere, go for blue.” Yet in the United States, the color scheme lately has been flipped, and the red states are said to be the guardians of traditional values, of mom and pop, of guns and red meat. Context, too, changes red’s meaning. A female bird may be attracted to the bright scarlet sheen of a male’s feathers or of a baby bird’s begging mouth, but will assiduously avoid eating red ladybugs that she knows are packed with poisons. Given red’s pushy reputation, design experts long thought people felt uncomfortable and worked poorly when confined to red rooms. But when Dr. Nancy Kwallek, a professor of interior design at the University of Texas at Austin, recently compared the performance of clerical workers randomly assigned for a week to rooms with red, blue-green or white color schemes, she found that red’s story, like the devil, is in the details. Workers who were identified as poor screeners, who have trouble blocking out noise and other distractions during the workday, did indeed prove less productive and more error prone in the red rooms than did their similarly thin-skinned colleagues in the turquoise rooms. For those employees who were rated as good screeners, however, able to focus on their job regardless of any ruckus around them, the results were flipped. Screeners were more productive in the red room than the blue. “The color red stimulated them,” she said, “and they thrived under its effects.” And the subjects assigned to the plain-vanilla settings, of a style familiar to the vast majority of the corporate labor force? Deprived of any color, any splash of Matisse, they were disgruntled and brokenhearted and did the poorest of all. 20 novembre The Inconvenient Death of Brad Will
Around the world, activists and friends who knew Will—and many people who didn't—were having the same visceral reaction. Within hours of his shooting by plainclothes gunmen firing on a group of striking demonstrators, images of his murder ricocheted around the Web. There were photos of Will's limp body being carried through the streets by frantic demonstrators screaming for help. Equally shocking were the pictures posted by El Universal and other Mexican media showing his alleged killers firing brazenly into the crowd, as if aiming at the cameras. The same gunmen who shot Will also wounded a photographer for the Mexico City daily Milenio, who was at Will's side. When images of the shooters aired on Mexican TV, viewers began phoning in to identify the gunmen. They have since been confirmed in the media as the police chief and two officers from Santa Lucia del Camino, the municipality where Will was shot, along with the town councillor for the state governing party, his chief of security, and the former head of a neighboring barrio. Then came the most horrifying evidence of all: Will's final videotape, uploaded on the Web the next day. In his zeal to capture the state-backed repression of the popular uprising that has rocked Oaxaca for the last five months, Will succeeded in recording his own murder. Armed with an HD camera he had picked up on eBay, Will went to Oaxaca to document the broad-based movement of striking teachers, peasants, urban residents, and left-wing forces that had seized control of government offices and taken over the central square to demand the removal of governor Ulises Ruiz. But by becoming the first American journalist killed in the unrest, Will became a pretext for Mexican president Vicente Fox to send in 4,000 federal police officers to put down the revolt, which Fox characterized as "radical groups, out of control," who "had put at risk the peace of the citizenry." Since then at least two more protesters have died in the heavy clashes with federal police, who stormed the barricades with tear gas and water cannons, and more than 80 demonstrators have been arrested as the federales continue to vie for control of the city.
Looking back at the trajectory of Will's life, it's not surprising that he would land in the center of this Mexican standoff. Will was always drawn to global flash points where the battle lines are drawn in stark black and white. Over the course of his restless 36 years, he seemed to hit every activist node: squatting in the East Village, staging tree-sits in the Northwest with Earth First, and hopping freight trains to anarchist gatherings. He braved tear gas and rubber bullets during the anti-globalization battles in Seattle, Quebec, Prague, and Genoa (where a demonstrator was shot dead in the street by police). In 2004, I remember him being everywhere during street protests surrounding the Republican National Convention in New York, video camera in hand. He reveled in these clashes, always returning with tales of glory, folk songs about resisting the police, and reports of the free food and fun he'd had along the way. When the heady Seattle-style direct-action movement in the U.S. toned down following 9-11, Will took his video camera south, following the wave of popular uprisings in Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, and finally Mexico. Friends say he was consumed with overlooked social struggles around the world. "He was one of the most dedicated activists I ever worked with," says Brooke Lehman, one of the owners of the radical Bluestockings bookstore on the Lower East Side, who met Will in 1998. "You could pretty much guarantee if there was a cause or an action, Will would be there. He felt a tremendous responsibility to do media where other media outlets wouldn't go, or were afraid to go." Yet in the wake of his shooting, even his most diehard anarchist friends are struggling to reconcile the worth of his activism with the risks he took on the day of his death. What propelled him to join that group of rock-throwing demonstrators as they chased down these firing gunmen through the outskirts of Oaxaca City? Was he incredibly brave, or just naive? Or perhaps too high on adrenaline to fully weigh the risks he was taking? There had been other occasions that made people wonder—like the time Will stood on the roof of his East Village squat as a wrecking crane slammed into the building. Last year he was arrested and nearly killed by military police while trying to film the forced eviction of an urban squatters camp in Goiânia, in central Brazil. "Brad was one of these young activists I met coming to New York in the early '90s who were very brave and high-minded, and also willing to take risks and make sacrifices that kind of startled me," says Seth Tobocman, publisher of the radical zine World War 3 Illustrated. "He was schooled in the Earth First philosophy of putting your life on the line. Part of the training is that these 400-year-old trees are harder to replace than a human being. Your life is less important than the environment you're saving." And that philosophy, Tobocman believes, informed Will's life to the end. "He went to shoot pictures of paramilitaries and police shooting into a crowd of people. I don't think there was a mistake here. He was doing what somebody should do, and he decided that person should be him."
"Brad told me his mom kept a picture of him dressed up as a giant sunflower during one of the garden protests [in NYC] on her coffee table. He was really happy about that," says Dyan Neary, a former girlfriend and close friend, who first met Will in 2001 when he was doing video tech work for the left-leaning cable broadcast Democracy Now. The affection of Will's family is apparent in the scores of photos posted online by the family (at bradwill.org), which show the young Will as a shy Boy Scout, posing proudly with sailing trophies as a young teen, beaming as a college grad in cap and gown, and looking surprisingly clean-shaven at his brother's graduation. There are also pictures of him smiling during numerous family ski trips and vacations to Hawaii, New Zealand, and Baja—images that suggest a world of privilege very different from the low-rent, dumpster-diving lifestyle Will embodied in New York City. In an interview earlier this year with El Libertario, an anarchist paper in Venezuela, Will bemoaned his sheltered upbringing in a largely white and conservative town. "The community was completely closed, my parents were on the right, it was a struggle to open my life," he told the newspaper. "I didn't know much about the truth of the world, but little by little I forced my eyes open, without the help of anyone." Will said he started questioning the government and the media during the first Gulf war, while he was studying literature at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. He became intrigued with ideas of anarchism and ecology. But his real political awakening happened when he went to study poetry with Allen Ginsberg and other radical artists at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in 1993. Will managed to attend classes without paying tuition. "We basically squatted school," says Jenny Smith with a laugh. Smith, a writer and massage therapy student from Brooklyn, met Will at Naropa when she was 18. "Ginsberg really loved Brad," Smith recalls. Friends say Ginsberg gave Will several original, handwritten poems that he brought with him to New York, later lost when the building he was living in burned down. Another influential professor was Peter Lamborn Wilson, a/k/a Hakim Bey, who was then urging activists to create "temporary autonomous zones"—liberated spaces outside of social norms and government control. Smith remembers one of Will's first-ever protests: a mock gay wedding to protest the evangelical Promise Keepers, who were holding an outdoor luncheon at the University of Colorado in Boulder. "Brad was the groom, Peter Lamborn Wilson was presiding, and the bride was our friend Pasq, who was like the gayest man in all of Colorado," she says. "This was at a time when gay marriage wasn't even on the cultural radar," Smith notes. Yet the heterosexual Will bravely locked lips with Pasq long enough to shock the Promise Keepers. Through Wilson, Will learned about Dreamtime Village, a radical arts commune in rural Wisconsin devoted to new theories of permaculture and hypermedia. There, Will hooked in to the circuit of nomadic punks, anarchists, and "freaks," including a zine artist known as Fly, who introduced him to the world of Lower East Side squatting. "He was so, so young and full of wonder, he didn't even know what a squat was," Fly recalls. Yet Will was immediately enthralled by the idea of fixing up an abandoned building and living rent-free. Will arrived in New York in 1994 and stayed briefly in an extended rent-strike building on Avenue B with artist Loyan Beausoleil, whom he'd met at Dreamtime. Beausoleil remembers him back then as a "really sweet, earnest guy." For years afterward, she says, Will would spontaneously show up outside her door to help carry wood up six flights for her wood-burning stove. "He would just be out there at 7:30 in the morning. I didn't even have to tell him when the delivery was coming."
In 1995, Will moved into the East 5th Street squat, a big hulk of a building occupied by a mostly young crew of punks, artists, and travelers, as well as a few seasoned street denizens. Back then the place was still raw, with little running water, caved-in floors, and electricity cadged from a light pole on the street. But Will fixed up an apartment and was soon engaged in all the protests and eviction battles going on in the neighborhood. He was there for the birth of the Lower East Side pirate radio station, Steal This Radio, staging clandestine broadcasts from squats around the neighborhood to avoid detection by the FCC. Will is probably best remembered in the neighborhood for his heroics on his East 5th Street roof, after a fire in February 1997 ripped through the building, prompting the city to move immediately to tear it down. Determined to stave off the destruction of what private engineers had told residents was a still salvageable building, Will somehow snuck through the lines of riot police and got back inside. I recall him waving his arms frantically from the roof as the wrecking crane slammed into the cornice, sending a cascade of bricks to the street. There's an interesting twist to the 5th Street saga: It turned out his space heater supposedly started the fire. Everyone hailed him as a hero for climbing up on the roof to face down the demolition. But, in fact, he was being blamed by the other squatters for costing them their homes. Tobocman says Will's stunt on the roof ultimately made up for the tragedy, because the fact that the city was knocking down the building with a person still inside helped the squatters win a $120,000 settlement. More importantly, it set a precedent by establishing that squatters in city buildings have the right to due process, that they can't just be tossed out of their homes. That's one of the reasons that 11 former squats were later legalized by the Bloomberg administration. "I almost feel like he wanted to die up there, he felt so guilty about what happened," commented one friend, who asked not to be named. But others say there was no death wish in Will, just an inordinate lack of fear. That same summer Will hopped trains out West to take part in forest blockades in Northern California, and later a tree-sit in Oregon. Afterward he came back to New York and trained activists here in the Earth First tactics he'd learned—whether it was chaining themselves down in defense of community gardens or setting up metal tripods to block traffic during Reclaim the Streets demonstrations. In early 2000, Will and a group of activists camped through most of the winter in a giant frog they'd fortified with welded "lock boxes" to defend a Puerto Rican community garden slated for condominiums. After getting arrested during the protests that shut down the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999, Will got swept up in the anti-globalization crusade, traveling to all the big demonstrations in Prague, Quebec City, Genoa, Zurich, Sweden, and Barcelona. An interview he did with Fly for her book PEOPs begins: "I was in Europe for 6 months and I was in 4 riots," then goes on to describe a seemingly endless running battle with police, braving tear gas, chucking cobblestones, and lighting up flaming barricades. By 2004, Will's mug shot was flashed on Nightline as one of the top 50 "leading anarchists" in America, based on a trumped-up police report released just prior to that year's Republican National Convention. And he was good friends with Jeffrey Luers, a/k/a "Free," the eco-activist sentenced to 23 years for torching SUVs in Oregon. Yet looking back through Will's dogged dispatches, which used to arrive via e-mail under a variety of pseudonyms—"b.rad," "b.strong," or sometimes just "unknown"—one senses real passion and searching behind Will's frenzied pace of living. That seemed particularly true after 9-11, when Will began documenting protests and social struggles in Latin America. His former girlfriend Dyan Neary, who traveled extensively with Will between 2002 and 2003, says his experiences in Latin America drove him to define himself more seriously as a journalist—albeit a partisan one. In Ecuador, Will helped Neary sneak a video camera into a women's prison to make a film about all the children who were growing up inside the jail. Using money they collected at benefits in New York, Will and Neary financed numerous mutual-aid projects, such as helping set up a pirate radio station in Fortaleza, Brazil, and helping fund a free school for poor kids in Lima, Peru. After spending a month camping out with landless peasants in Brazil in 2003, they even donated one of their video cameras to them. "For us, it was all about mutual aid," explains Neary. "We weren't into being imperialist activists or top-down NGOs. They didn't need us to tell them how to organize or create community; they were already doing that themselves. We gave people money to help give them a voice, or just to fund what they were doing. And because we were staying with them and learning and experiencing so much." But by 2005, friends were beginning to wonder whether Will was taking these experiences too far. In February 2005, Will was nearly killed during the forced eviction of 12,000 squatters from an urban encampment in an abandoned industrial area of central Brazil. He was beaten and arrested by Brazilian military police and had his camera seized during the brutal raid, which killed at least two people and injured scores of others. His report of the police storming the encampment is shockingly visceral—written in the punctuation-free, stream-of-consciousness style that used to infuriate his editors at Indymedia, the left-wing alternative-media website where he worked: it was pandemonium -- everyone was running and screaming -- as i ran i saw them coming from my flank -- and aiming to shoot again not more than thirty feet away -- then all hell broke loose -- suddenly there was gas, rubber bullets, concussion grenades on all sides -- immediately i recognized the sound of real bullets -- i tried twice to stop and film but only for seconds until bullets flew near by Yet after he was released, Will was e-mailing back home asking friends to ship him another camera so he could document the aftermath. "A lot of us were really concerned for his safety," recalls Lehman. "We even had a meeting about it. We wanted him to come home." Neary says Will found the experience in Brazil chastening; she says he felt only his American passport kept him from being killed. "For the first time he realized he was not invincible," she says. Will came home, but he didn't slow down. He immediately began hustling up lighting and stagehand jobs to buy a new camera and finance more travels. "Over the past year or so, Brad worked his ass off—sometimes 60 hours a week or more," recalls Brandon Jourdan, a filmmaker and former roommate who worked with Will at Indymedia. "Some of his friends thought he was working too much," recalls Jourdan. "But he was working toward a goal. He wanted to build support for the social movements in Latin America because he really saw the need to make connections between what's going on there and what's happening here." In January he traveled to the Yucatan to document the first leg of the Zapatistas' so-called Other Campaign to challenge Mexico's electoral system, following Subcomandante Marcos and his supporters as they toured the region. Will then boarded a plane south to Venezuela to attend the World Social Forum, where he shot footage of Hugo Chávez rallying his adoring left-wing fans. But he also trekked out to the northwest border with Colombia to document indigenous peoples protesting the Chávez government for allowing foreign companies to mine their land. "Brad was not a cheerleader for leftist governments," says Jourdan. "He understood the leftist movements in Latin America were an improvement over the right-wing neoliberal order that's been imposed on these countries, but his core belief was in grassroots movements from the bottom up. "What inspired him about these social movements was that they were not dependent on these single-leader figures like Chávez or Evo Morales. He saw the Zapatistas and the movement of landless peasants [in Brazil] as harbingers of real democracy and social justice." But it wasn't until Oaxaca in the fall of 2006 that Will saw, at last, the potential for a revolution.
The crackdown became a flash point for discontent over Oaxaca's governor, Ulises Ruiz, who protesters believe was fraudulently elected, and his political machine, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Soon, the teachers were joined by all sorts of leftists, trade unionists, neighborhood block committees, students, and indigenous and peasant groups, who took up the call for the governor's resignation.
The Ruiz opposition united as APPO, the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca, and seized control of government buildings, forcing Ruiz and his bureaucracy to retreat to hotels on the outskirts of the city. Radio and TV stations were also seized as APPO pledged to make the state "ungovernable." Protesters and local residents occupied police stations and began erecting nightly barricades and lighting bonfires on the streets and highways. Although ignored by mainstream media in the U.S., the revolt in Oaxaca was being hailed by leftists here and abroad as the next Paris Commune or a sequel to the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. Will's roommates, who shared a small rent-controlled apartment with him in South Williamsburg, recall him staying up late to monitor APPO's pirate radio broadcasts over the Internet. Remembers Brandon Jourdan: "He was excited by the fact that activists had staked out their own autonomous area. He was drawn to that. He wanted to document the fact that people were organizing and trying to take control of their own lives from this corrupt political machine." By late September, Oaxaca was reaching a tipping point. Peasant and indigenous councils affiliated with APPO had seized control of local governments in most of the state. Yet as APPO upped the ante, so did the police and paramilitary forces loyal to the PRI. Since August, plainclothes police and so-called Priistas had been staging drive-by attacks on the more than 2,000 barricades maintained by protesters across the capital to prevent incursion by state police. At least 10 demonstrators had been killed in the city, including the husband of a teacher shot during a peaceful march. Friends in Mexico warned Will that the situation in Oaxaca was getting out of hand, way too risky for an American with only halfway decent Spanish skills. Al Giordano, publisher of the Narco News Bulletin, a radical website devoted to news of the drug war and Latin America, posted excerpts of an e-mail exchange he had with Will just before he left. Will had been seeking contacts in Oaxaca from Giordano, whom he had known since their days doing pirate radio broadcasts on the Lower East Side's Steal This Radio in the mid '90s. On September 26, Will wrote: hey al it brad from nyc—it would be great to get yr narco contacts in oaxaca—i am headed there and want to connect with as many folks as posible—are you in df?—i should be stopping though there and it would be great to go out for a drink solid brad
Giordano says he pleaded with Will not to go to Oaxaca City: Our Oaxaca team is firmly embedded. There are a chingo of other internacionales roaming around there looking for the big story, but the situation is very delicate, the APPO doesn't trust anyone it hasn't known for years, and they keep telling me not to send newcomers, because the situation is so fucking tense... If you are coming to Mexico, I would much more recommend your hanging around DF-Atenco and reporting that story which is about to begin. The APPO is (understandably) very distrustful of people it doesn't already know. And we have enough hands on deck there to continue breaking the story. But what is about to happen in Atenco-DF needs more hands on deck. Will responded the same night, undeterred: hey thanks for the quick get back—i have a hd professional camera—i have heard reports about the level of distrust in oax and it is disconcerting—i think i will still go
He flew to Mexico City, where he spent a night at the Centro de Medios (Free Media Center). Activists there also tried to discourage Will from going to Oaxaca City, suggesting he'd be better off covering the struggles of APPO in the countryside, where there were fewer journalists on the ground and also fewer risks. But Will was determined to be on the front line of the battle unfolding in the provincial capital. He moved into an apartment with three radical teachers from California who were also reporting for Indymedia, and began acting as a human rights observer for CIPO, a rights group whose members say they have been the targets of police repression. He also befriended a British journalist and a Spaniard doing human rights work, who took Will for reporting runs on his scooter. Will began camping out in the zocalo where APPO had its central encampment in the city and was helping man the barricades at night. He immediately threw himself into the thick of things, as evidenced in his last online dispatch, on October 17, which he posted on the NYC Indymedia site. It tells the story of marching to visit the body of a compañero gunned down by police at a neighborhood barricade: went inside and saw him -- havent seen too many bodies in my life -- eats you up -- a stack of nameless corpses in the corner -- about the number who had died -- no refrigeration -- the smell -- they had to open his skull to pull the bullet out Will seems to have been propelled by the drama of the events he was witnessing: what can you say about this movement -- this revolutionary moment -- you know it is building, growing, shaping -- you can feel it -- trying desperately for a direct democracy . . . whats next nobodies sure -- it is a point of light pressed through glass -- ready to burn or show the way -- it is clear that this is more than a strike, more than expulsion of a governor, more than a blockade, more than a coalition of fragments -- it is a genuine peoples revolt Neary says she spoke to him just days before his shooting: "He told me that he was a little scared, but that he felt this was a crucible, that it was inspiring, but definitely that things were getting sketchy. Still, he knew he had to be there." According to Jourdan, Will seemed more worried about getting his camera settings straight than the violence escalating around him. Jourdan says Will phoned him up the night before he died, seeking technical advice. He'd just gotten a request for footage from Telesur, a Caracas television station that broadcasts throughout Latin America, and he wanted to know how to convert his video footage to PAL, a broadcast format used outside of the U.S. "He was concerned about the growing intervention by the Priistas," Jourdan recalls, using the Spanish nickname for supporters of the state's ruling PRI. "And he was worried about federal police pushing in. He said he thought at any time stuff could shift."
Things did shift. Will's last video tells the story. It opens with Will conducting interviews with local residents and activists defending the barricade outside the university's radio station, which had come under fire by unidentified gunmen that morning. A man on the barricade says a group of 100 or more Priistas firing rifles had attacked the barricade and forced the demonstrators to retreat from the street. They regrouped and drove out the Priistas, though one of their compañeros was later grabbed and beaten up. "We are the townspeople here who are fighting for our rights!" exclaims one local woman. "We don't want to live in a state of repression, of attacks and assassinations, and compromises," she shouts, gesturing up the street, where an SUV is ablaze. Walking up the street, Will pans over the billowing clouds of smoke coming from the truck, which reportedly belonged to one of the Priistas but had been set aflame by the demonstrators after they chased the gunmen away. Shots ring out, and Will takes shelter beneath a tractor trailer while trying to zoom in on the shooters. Looking out between the wheels, he zeroes in on a small traffic island, where a man in a white shirt is firing a pistol from behind a tree, surrounded by several other men in civilian clothes. It's a surreal scene. At one point a man on a bicycle pedals slowly past the intersection, as if nothing were going on. And then the Priistas retreat down a side street, with the shadow of Will's camera tracking them. "White shirt," Will says, identifying the shooter for the group of young men in hoodies and bandannas as they pursue their attackers through the barrio with their own rudimentary weapons: sticks, rocks, slingshots, and homemade rocket launchers used to set off flares—generally used by the APPO members to warn of an attack. "Where, where?" a demonstrator asks. "Over there, on the corner," Will answers. "Vamanos, vamanos! [Let's go!]" the young men shout. The gunmen appear to retreat inside a two-story house from which they continue firing. A young man rushes up and tries to bash through the flimsy metal garage door with a stick. It's crazy; he could be shot at any second. Yet Will has positioned himself at the side of the door, as if ready to storm in. He and the other demonstrators are forced back by a hail of gunfire. Then the demonstrators back a dump truck down the street to serve as cover. Eventually they crash the truck though the garage door of the house, which is reportedly owned by one of the shooters. More shots ring out, and a demonstrator fires a flare down the road, which witnesses say was reportedly to ward off a different group of shooters on the ground. Will is standing on the side of the street behind a group of demonstrators, trying to capture the exchange, when he gets hit. The sound of a single shot is followed by that of his final, pitched cry of pain. The footage swirls as Will falls, but the camera, dangling from his neck strap, continues to record the frantic scene as the demonstrators run with his body amid another hail of gunfire. "Vamanos! Vamanos!" they shout. Finally the camera is set down on a ledge but stays on to record a few more rounds of gunfire, then it goes black. Press photos show his fellow protesters struggling to revive him. In an interview with Free Speech Radio News, one of the demonstrators described how they carried Will's body past the barricades to a VW Beetle, but it ran out of gas on the way to the hospital. "We tried to wave down a cab and some passing cars, but no one wanted to stop because of the violence that day," said the man, who declined to give his name for fear of reprisals. So they carried Will's body several more blocks, amid a sudden downpour, until a truck finally stopped and took Will to the Red Cross. According to the man, Will had been squeezing the man's finger to let him know he was still alive. "He died in my arms, about four or five blocks before we got to the hospital," the man said.
The U.S. embassy and news accounts initially reported that Will had been caught in a "shoot-out" between police and protesters. Indeed, the PRI-controlled pirate radio station Citizen Radio called Will an "armed terrorist" and claimed that Will had been firing back at the shooters. While that claim is absurd, it now appears that there may have indeed been some level of crossfire between APPO and the gunmen. APPO has always declared itself a nonviolent movement, whose weapons—rocks, sticks, Molotov cocktails—are used only in self- defense. Yet pictures published in El Universal and La Crónica de Hoy identify at least three men with pistols as APPO supporters. According to Gustavo Bilchis, a freelance photographer who says he was nearby when Will was shot, some of the demonstrators did pull out guns after the Priistas had opened fire on them. "At that point, people were feeling, 'They are shooting at us, so we need a gun to protect ourselves.' But always they wait until the PRI shoots first," Bilchis said. He added that it was clear to him that Will was brought down by a PRI gunshot. Now many are wondering whether Will was targeted as a foreign journalist. A tall and lanky gringo, Will would have been an easy mark, and it's significant that the Milenio photographer was shot right next to him. Will's tape shows him being taken down by an isolated shot, as he's standing in back of about a dozen other protesters. Will was also hit on the side of the torso, perhaps in the barrage of gunfire that followed. According to La Jornada, the coroner removed two AR-15 rifle bullets from his body. Witnesses have said the shot that first hit Will appeared to come from the roof or second floor of the house where the gunmen were hiding. Nevertheless Oaxaca attorney general Lizbeth Cana put the blame for his death on APPO, whom she has compared to an "urban guerrilla group." Similarly, when asked at a news conference whether he was concerned about a possible human rights violation committed against an American journalist working on foreign soil, a U.S. State Department official told reporters: "I have no indications of that," adding, "Well, you know, it is unfortunate anytime you have peaceful political protests that get out of hand that result in violence." Officials at the U.S. embassy say they are pressing for a "swift and thorough" investigation into the circumstances of Will's death. But at this stage the investigation is being conducted by the state attorney general—who is, of course, a member of the same party as the alleged killers. On November 4, two local PRI officials were formally charged with Will's murder. But three others are now reportedly on the lam, including municipal policemen Juan Carlos Soriano and Juan Carlos Sumano, and PRI militant Pedro Carmona, who was initially identified as the person who fired the shot that killed Will. Meanwhile, activists on the ground in Oaxaca say there are calls on PRI radio to "shoot foreign journalists with cameras" if you see them. At least two independent journalists have been beaten up by police since Will's death, and a photographer for a local Mexican weekly was roughed up and detained for 48 hours, according to the watchdog group Reporters Without Borders. It now appears that Will may have been doing more than simply filming the assaults on demonstrators by gunmen. Other activists say that in the days before his death, he was following members of PRI and police in the streets in order to gather evidence against them. That seems to be what he is doing right before he gets shot, if you watch his footage closely. "White shirt," he calls out to the other demonstrators, identifying a shooter. "Over there." If so, he may have crossed the line from journalist to APPO sympathizer in a way that made him a target.
What would have made Will cross that line? Even as he becomes a martyr to the Oaxacan uprising he celebrated, close friends who loved him are still struggling to understand what he was doing that day—and why. "Brad was a journalist in the way Orwell and Hemingway were, in terms of getting in there and being partisan," argues Seth Tobocman, referring to the writers' support for the anti-fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War. "He wasn't there as a neutral party. He was there because the causes he covered meant something to him." "I think his death should be a wake-up call," Tobocman continues. "People like Brad and Rachel Corrie were taking risks for a lot of us, and they get victimized because there aren't a lot of people doing it. If more people did what Brad did, maybe he wouldn't have died." But others say Will's death should be a warning to other activists who plunge headfirst into foreign hot spots without fully understanding the context and the cost. "I think he romanticized the risk and felt kind of invincible because of being a foreigner with a camera there," says Matt Power, a contributing editor at Harper's, who credits Will with schooling him in his first direct action: climbing a City Hall tree in a sunflower costume to protest former mayor Rudy Giuliani's destruction of community gardens. Power also hopped freights with Will: They once got arrested together while riding a boxcar from Pennsylvania to Virginia one Fourth of July weekend, watching the fireworks erupt across the American countryside. "We got busted when Will got cocky and went to talk to the engineers," Power says with a laugh. Yet as much as he praises his friend as an "elder statesman" of activists, Power sees Will's death as in some ways inevitable: "Always before in his life he'd get in trouble, and then come up smelling like roses—from eluding police during Critical Mass rides to all these other protest actions that he did, and I think it finally caught up to him. "I remember this one time he was blowing fire in the middle of a Critical Mass ride in Times Square. The cops went to grab him and he threw his bike over his shoulder and ran up over the roof of a cab and got away. It was amazing." The repercussions go beyond Will's own tragic murder. While it would be wrong to blame Will for the violent crackdown on APPO by federal forces, journalists on the ground say it sets an ugly precedent. In the words of Giordano: "Anytime the local forces of repression can't contain a rebellion in Mexico and want the feds to storm in, the recipe now exists: Kill a foreign journalist."
Neary says Will knew what he was getting into. And he did it anyway. "The last time I saw him was back in August," she says. "I told him, 'I love the work you do. But you don't always have to be on the front lines. You're not invincible.' I said to him, 'Watch out, listen to the silent places inside you. You matter too.' " "He told me, 'I've got to be part of the revolution,' " Neary recalls. " 'There's stuff going on down there that I have to see. This is what drives me. This is where I've got to be.' He always put himself on the front line. Once he was there, turning back was not an option." It would be easy to see Will's life as a classic case of upper-middle-class rebellion. But Neary says his passion ran deeper. "He wanted to get to the things that were slipping through the cracks," Neary says, "the people whose faces will never make the news because of what and who they are." That was Will's objective: giving people who had no names in the media a presence. He was traumatized by world events and the fact that people were dying around him. "He felt these people didn't have a choice to be in their situations," Neary says, "but he had choices and he was using that privilege to help give people a voice." Will's journalism was always aimed at the activist crowd. He didn't bother much with translating his radical perspective to a broader audience—let alone properly punctuating his sentences. In the wake of Will's death, at last, his reporting did go mainstream. His murder spotlighted the social upheaval in Mexico, which is ready to explode. It's not just APPO's popular takeover in Oaxaca, but also the larger battle over the contested national election and the widening polarization of rich and poor in Mexico as multinational corporations gobble up land and resources. Americans don't pay much attention to festering discontent south of the border, just to the consequences: the flood of immigrants crossing over, along with an increasingly violent drug trade. The American government's response: put up a multibillion-dollar wall. For now, Will's murder may have put a chink in that wall. His death, however briefly, made the crisis in Oaxaca impossible to ignore here. On Sunday, November 5, tens of thousands of APPO supporters from across Mexico descended on the capital to stand in solidarity with the besieged demonstrators. Though violence is ongoing—one protester was shot when gunmen opened fire on the march—APPO has managed to hold off federal forces seeking to wrest away control of the university campus and is still controlling parts of the city. The battle is not yet over.
Additional reporting: Bill Weinberg Editor's note: This piece was updated online on November 14. 08 novembre Colombia's Student Movement Resistshttp://www.worldpress.org/Americas/2534.cfm Elizabeth G. Walsh
On the morning of Oct. 5, Julián Andrés Hurtado, a 29-year-old student leader at the University of Valle in Cali, Colombia, died from gunshots to the head. Julian, who was just one week away from graduation, served as a student representative to the academic council of his school, the largest public university in Cali. The attack on Hurtado, which occurred in his neighborhood at midnight the night before he died, marked the one-year anniversary of massive student protests following the assassination of Johnny Silva, another student leader who was killed—many suspect by the police—on the university’s campus. Students at the University of Valle responded to the news of Hurtado’s death immediately, gathering on campus and releasing a communiqué declaring, “It is clear that this act is political … we are dealing with a crime of the state.” Three thousand students left the campus to protest, and immediately upon entering the street, found themselves fired upon by gunmen concealed in a black car with tinted windows. Fortunately, no one was injured in this attempt. Colombian university student leaders such as Hurtado are no strangers to threats. In July threats arrived by email to members of the National University Federation, from a source calling itself “Free Colombia 2006-2010,” accusing them of being “guerrillas dressed up as students.” The threats expressed support for the hard-line policies of President Álvaro Uribe and warned the students to leave their universities and homes. 13 agosto On the Recentness of What We KnowNYT
August 9, 2006
Talking Points
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
The other night I took the dogs for a walk in the pasture. It was a cloudless evening with low humidity, a rare event in this damp, northeastern summer. I always look up at the stars when I’m outside in the dark, but all too often, even here in the country, they’re obscured by haze. Not that night. They shone with a brightness, a clarity I’d almost forgotten. Cassiopeia, Corona Borealis, Lyra, the red light of Arcturus in the west, the diffuse band of the Milky Way arching overhead—their presence was overwhelming. And yet, somehow, when the stars look close to earth it’s easier to imagine how far away they really are. It was a warm July night, but I could almost feel the chill of space. I’ve been watching the stars for nearly half a century now. Not much has changed up there. The sky is a memory in itself. I stared at the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter through a small telescope of my own when I was a boy in Iowa. I spent part of a summer watching meteors while I was helping my family build a house in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and part of a winter star-gazing from the top of a mesa on the Hopi Reservation, where somehow the smell of cedar mingled with the light of the moon. The only thing that has changed in all that time—apart from a few new satellites crossing the sky—is the state of my knowledge. * * * The same could be said for the whole of humanity. Besides a supernova here and there or a comet fluttering past, the night sky visible to the naked eye has barely changed as long as our species has been looking at it, unlike the stories we use to describe what we see up there. In a metaphorical sense, each human culture, separate in time or place, has lived under a different celestial roof. The metaphors for the heavens have changed over time, but not nearly as much as what we know about the universe itself. I say “we,” as in what “we” know. I really mean what “they” know—astronomers, mathematicians, astrophysicists, cosmologists. Unlike scientists, most of us tend to live easily, almost unknowingly among our assumptions—another word for our ignorance. But the business of science is to formally test assumptions, better known as hypotheses. You can feel the tension between these two ways of knowing in a few lines from the movie "Men In Black" The scene is the Manhattan waterfront. Will Smith is still in shock after his first encounter with aliens. Tommy Lee Jones says to him, “Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the earth was flat. And fifteen minutes ago you knew that people were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.” Obviously, what everybody knows isn’t a very high standard of proof. And things that can be proven — matters of scientific fact — don’t always surface as common knowledge. * * * Every few years I go through a bout of cosmological reading, a reprise of what to me is now mostly a familiar story. In a way, it’s like re-reading Raymond Chandler or great chunks of Dickens. The plot comes back to me as I go, but with a new ending every time. I started in childhood with an oversized, illustrated book about the solar system, a place where everything was just as we would like to believe it might be, a cozy people living in a handmade cosmos. The last time I wandered off into the universe, literarily speaking, I found myself, a little confused, on the far shoals of M-theory and the various anthropic principles. I’m never sure what’s going to set me off. It could be a news item about a flyby of Saturn or a new photograph from the Hubble Space Telescope or even a walk with the dogs at night. But however it begins, it always turns into a desire to frame the small questions of life with the big question of existence itself. Most books about cosmology for general readers begin by telling the story the way Tommy Lee Jones tells it in "Men in Black"—as the history of what we know. The authors walk you, step by step, through the sequence of astronomers who have taught us about the cosmos—Copernicus, Galileo and so on. What you learn about the nature of the universe in a history like that is less important, at first, than what you learn about the decay of dogma and improvements in scientific methodology and equipment. There are good reasons for telling the story this way. You get a feel for the passion of discovery, and you confront one of the basic cosmological questions —"How do they know that?" But as the pages turn and the chronicle nears the present, the story changes. Suddenly, it’s no longer a history of the development of science, a book about the human capacity for learning. It turns into a book about the nature of the universe we actually live in. The night sky never looks quite the same again. * * * The last time I lost myself in a good book about cosmology, just a few months ago, I counted down, as always, from the past to the present—from Aristarchus to Einstein to Weinberg. Usually, the dates in the history of science seem abstract, almost equidistant in the past: 1543, 1632, 1905 — it’s all ancient history. But this time, for some reason, I found myself weighing the dates of various discoveries—the ones that define our present idea of the age and dimensions of the universe—against the time-scale of my own life and the lives around me. I tried to picture what the universe looked like — or rather what it was thought to look like — around the year my dad was born — 1926 —- or the year I was born — 1952. It was like going the wrong way in one of those analogies meant to convey the immensity of time. You know the ones. “If the age of the earth is the distance from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Empire State Building , then mankind originated in the Garment District.” The current picture of the universe rests, of course, upon the ancientness of what we know—the long series of carefully tested assumptions that make each new accession of knowledge possible. But I am overwhelmed by the recentness of what we know. * * * Take, for instance, a relatively fundamental set of facts, something "everybody knows." Earth belongs to the solar system, and the solar system, with the Sun at its center, belongs to a galaxy called the Milky Way, which is about 100,000 light years across. The Milky Way is one of perhaps a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe, each one containing perhaps a hundred billion stars. But until 1925, many astronomers believed — on the available evidence — that the Milky Way contained the whole of the observable universe, and that our galaxy was thus the only galaxy. Astronomers had seen and catalogued plenty of galaxies — they were called nebulae in those days — but there was no way to know how far away they really were. In 1923, working at the Mount Wilson Observatory, near Pasadena, Edwin Hubble discovered a Cepheid variable star in the nebula called Andromeda, the first ever found in a nebula. Thanks to Henrietta Leavitt’s research on these stars — which vary in brightness over a period of time, with a predictable ratio between the two — Hubble was able to calculate the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy, as we call it now. It was vastly more distant than anyone had guessed. By his calculations, Andromeda was 900,000 light years away — well outside the Milky Way. In a sense, Hubble had turned the universe inside out. Hubble was wrong about one thing. Andromeda is the closest galaxy to us, but it is actually 2.5 million light years away, not 900,000. You can see it with the naked eye if you look just below and to the right of the constellation Cassiopeia on a very dark, clear night. It’s worth knowing, somehow, that in another 3 billion years Andromeda will collide with the Milky Way. Perhaps "violently intersift" is a better way of putting it. * * * To a casual naked-eye observer on Earth it makes no practical difference whether the universe is the size of the Milky Way or much, much bigger. In fact, it makes little difference whether we’re looking up at stars scattered across empty space or at an empyrean of concentric crystalline spheres. The night sky overhead would look the same. Or would it? Actually, I don’t think so. What we see when we look up into the darkness of a summer night isn’t just a pattern of pinpoint lights. We’re also looking up at the state of our knowledge and the contents of our imagination. Does our own galaxy encompass the whole observable universe? Or is it only one among a huge number of galaxies in a vastly larger universe? The difference is enormous. Both are theories. One was plausible before 1925. The other is now true. The revolution in imagining who we are, or rather where we are, is nearly Copernican. In the years since, there have been many, many discoveries more astonishing than Hubble’s path-breaking calculation of Andromeda’s distance, including his discovery, several years later, that the universe is expanding. But measuring that Cepheid variable in Andromeda fascinates me. It’s tempting to construe its effect solely in human terms, to say, with a vainglorious sniff, that it diminishes the place of humans in the universe. Ah, well. There is no end to that. One of the central problems of cosmology all along has been getting a true sense of scale. The age of the universe, its size, its origin, whether it’s static or expanding or contracting — these things are all interrelated, and they all depend on being able to measure distance accurately out to the far reaches of the universe. The more we know, the smaller we humans seem to loom against the universal backdrop. Luckily, what matters isn’t how big or important we are. It’s how interesting the universe we live in is. My maternal grandfather, who was born in the 1880’s, used to marvel at the fact that in his lifetime humans had gone from horse-drawn carriages to the moon. I like to think of it a different way. He was born about the time astronomers finally proved that the ether — the peculiar light-carrying substance through which all celestial bodies were supposed to move — does not exist. He was married around the publication of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. He died a few years after Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson found the lingering echo of the Big Bang with a radio telescope in New Jersey. I cannot imagine that my grandfather was aware of any of these discoveries. And yet within his lifetime, the dimensions of the universe increased by a factor I am not mathematician enough to work out. Call it ten to the plenty. * * * In 1931, Edwin Hubble concluded that the universe was 1.8 billion years old, a nonsensical number since geologists had already shown that the rocks on earth are nearly twice as old. (Recent knowledge in itself!) In 1952, the scale of distance was recalculated with greater accuracy, and suddenly the age of the universe doubled to 3.6 billion years, much older but still a problematic figure. In 1955, the universe aged another 1.9 billion years overnight, again thanks to a clearer understanding of the things that shine in the dark. In the past 80 years the universe has expanded faster and aged faster — in the minds of humans — than it is doing in actuality. The current age of the universe, as measured in 2003, is now 13.7 billion years, give or take 200 million. That is another way of saying that the distance to the edge of the observable universe is 13.7 billion light-years. What astronomers are seeing when they look at a galaxy like Abell 1835 IR1916 — 13.2 billion light years away — is light (or radiation) that was emitted 13.2 billion years ago, light that is about 3 times older than the planet we live on. Imagine a galaxy just a little farther away, at the extreme edge of what astronomers can observe. Suppose that it emits light even as you’re reading this sentence. How far away will the edge of the observable universe be when that light reaches us? The answer is somewhere between 78 and 90 billion light years. In fact, we — that is, "they" — have no idea how much of our universe lies beyond the threshold of observability. There is even sober speculation that our universe is merely one of a possibly infinite series of universes, that we live in a multiverse. Oddly, one of the best arguments for the multiverse is the simple fact that we exist. * * * Science is mostly a tale of continuity. Scientists today are working within the same professional framework — the same idea about how they do what they do, what hypotheses are, what evidence is — as scientists a century ago. That is the strength of the endeavor. The change from one picture of the universe to another is incremental, based on work that obeys the self-regulating, international standards of the scientific enterprise. But I find myself marveling at its discontinuity, too. What has changed, of course, is the technologies available to scientists, which have exploded at a revolutionary pace. The result is that you don’t have to go far back in time before the best idea of what the universe looks like is very different from the idea we have now. In 1920 there was one galaxy and now there are one hundred billion. In 1955 the universe was 5.5 billion years old. Now it is believed to be two and a half times older — an estimate with a considerably higher degree of precision. For many years, the Big Bang was a conceptual possibility, the logical implication of an expanding universe. (What happens when you run the film of an expanding universe backwards?) But in 1965, Penzias and Wilsonfound an evenly diffused radiation permeating the sky, with a temperature of 2.7 degrees Kelvin. They had discovered the Cosmic Microwave Background — residual radiation from the Big Bang. The Cosmic Microwave Background has been measured again and again, most recently in 2003 by a satellite called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP, which occupies a stationary post 1.5 million kilometers from earth. Measurements from WMAP support a theory of inflation first proposed by Alan Guth in 1979 and since refined. It says — and the evidence confirms — that at an unimaginably short time after the Big Bang, the universe experienced an abrupt inflation, doubling in size over and over again until inflation stopped an unimaginably short instant later. The result is the relatively smooth and geometrically flat universe we find ourselves living in. WMAP also suggests that the universe is made of 4 percent atoms (now called baryonic matter), 22 percent dark matter, and 74 percent dark energy. As an idea, dark matter first popped up in the 1930’s. Dark energy is the thought of the past few years. No one knows what either of them is, except that without them the behavior of the universe makes no sense. It’s worth remembering, too, that the modern idea of the atom — that is, the old-fashioned modern idea, well before quarks — only came together in 1932, when the neutron was discovered. * * * Someone, somewhere, is likely to be shouting, "Aha!" about now. "You’re saying that our so-called scientific knowledge is only a projection of sorts and that there is no scientific truth, only relativistic assumptions — culturally created ideas — about the universe around us. Isn’t that what you’re saying?" Thanks for asking. The answer is no. Science is a cultural enterprise, of course, like everything else humans do, and it sometimes suffers from characteristically human flaws. But the recentness — or, to put it another way, the evolution — of what we know about the universe around us doesn’t reveal the indeterminacy of science. It reveals the extraordinary intellectual and imaginative yields that a self-critical, self-evaluating, self-testing, experimental search for understanding can generate over time. We know the universe to be a very different — and in every way more amazing — place than we did even a generation ago. We have no idea how much more surprising it will turn out to be in the years — not to mention the eons — ahead, should we manage to survive as a species that is able to do science. If what you want from life is a constant, fixed, unchanging truth, then the spate of fresh news from science can only seem bewildering. But the unchanging truths that people cling to in this inconstant world tend to rest on unexamined and untestable assumptions. At their best they are permanent ethical truths, which cannot be contradicted by the open-ended possibilities of scientific exploration. At their worst, they are mere dogma and deserve to be contradicted. To me, the open-endedness of science isn’t its failing. It is its very beauty. Each answer is merely the prelude to the next question, and you never know when you’ll come upon an answer that forces you to rethink almost everything. This is as true in biology — itself overwhelmed by recent knowledge — as it is in cosmology. Yet many people can’t help hoping for a final set of answers. "So how old is it really — and how big is it really?" they ask about the universe, with an emphasis on "really." The fact that the answer depends on when you happen to ask it — 1931, 1955, 2003, today — seems to many people to imply that science has no answers worth giving. But this is simply the bias inherent in living in the "now." Stated as a sentence, that bias goes like this: "We’re here now, so we expect some answers." Think about those analogies meant to convey the immensity of time. They always end in the present. Mankind emerges in the Garment District or at 11 seconds to midnight, and then what? The clock stops at the current time, as if the game is over. But there is no time limit on the questions science asks, and there is very little likelihood of a final set of answers. Humanity emerges, looks up at the stars, and soon there is a probe in space telling us that most of what exists is stuff we can’t identify. Who would want it any other way? * * * Thinking about the recentness of what we know is a way, I suppose, of thinking simultaneously about the strangeness of the past and the strangeness of the present — the reciprocal strangenesses that time brings about. I have a hard time trying to imagine the universe as it might have been in, say, 1920 — the whole of it packed into the Milky Way. But then I have an equally hard time imagining what it would have been like to be a hired hand on my grandfather’s farm in 1920. The changes in the way we live loom far larger in most of our minds than any changes in the theoretical model of a universe that most of us think about — if we think about it at all — only on a dark, clear night. But the changes go together. I am at best the kind of cosmological reader who has to skip the math. As a result, my grasp on most of what astronomers have learned in my lifetime is largely esthetic. I admire the finished painting, but I have no real conception of what it means to apply the paint. And for me, in fact, the old forms of knowledge are hard enough. Not the ones rooted in dogma, but the ones rooted in a practical application of what astronomers have learned over the years. Understanding the motion of the moon through the sky is more complicated than it sounds, as I have discovered from trying to sort it out. Knowing how and why the universe is expanding doesn’t change the rules of celestial navigation any more than it changes the stories people tell about the figures in the constellations. The recentness of what we know doesn’t annul the old knowledge; it transfigures it. Suddenly, what we used to know is now part of the story of how we go about knowing things and no longer a description of the universe around us. But go out on a deep summer night and there overhead are all the skies we have ever seen. Lela Moore provided research for this article. 06 aprile Lonely Planet ThornTree Forum
17 marzo Silent Struggle: A New Theory of PregnancyNYT 3.14.2006 By CARL ZIMMER
Correction Appended
Pregnancy can be the most wonderful experience life has to offer. But it can also be dangerous. Around the world, an estimated 529,000 women a year die during pregnancy or childbirth. Ten million suffer injuries, infection or disability. To David Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, these grim statistics raise a profound puzzle about pregnancy. "Pregnancy is absolutely central to reproduction, and yet pregnancy doesn't seem to work very well," he said. "If you think about the heart or the kidney, they're wonderful bits of engineering that work day in and day out for years and years. But pregnancy is associated with all sorts of medical problems. What's the difference?" The difference is that the heart and the kidney belong to a single individual, while pregnancy is a two-person operation. And this operation does not run in perfect harmony. Instead, Dr. Haig argues, a mother and her unborn child engage in an unconscious struggle over the nutrients she will provide it. Dr. Haig's theory has been gaining support in recent years, as scientists examine the various ways pregnancy can go wrong. His theory also explains a baffling feature of developing fetuses: the copies of some genes are shut down, depending on which parent they come from. Dr. Haig has also argued that the same evolutionary conflicts can linger on after birth and even influence the adult brain. New research has offered support to this idea as well. By understanding these hidden struggles, scientists may be able to better understand psychological disorders like depression and autism. As a biologist fresh out of graduate school in the late 1980's, Dr. Haig decided to look at pregnancy from an evolutionary point of view. As his guide, he used the work of Robert Trivers, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University. In the 1970's, Dr. Trivers argued that families create an evolutionary conflict. Natural selection should favor parents who can successfully raise the most offspring. For that strategy to work, they can't put too many resources into any one child. But the child's chances for reproductive success will increase as its care and feeding increase. Theoretically, Dr. Trivers argued, natural selection could favor genes that help children get more resources from their parents than the parents want to give. As Dr. Haig considered the case of pregnancy, it seemed like the perfect arena for this sort of conflict. A child develops in intimate contact with its mother. Its development in the womb is crucial to its long-term health. So it was plausible that nature would favor genes that allowed fetuses to draw more resources from their mothers. A fetus does not sit passively in its mother's womb and wait to be fed. Its placenta aggressively sprouts blood vessels that invade its mother's tissues to extract nutrients. Meanwhile, Dr. Haig argued, natural selection should favor mothers who could restrain these incursions, and manage to have several surviving offspring carrying on their genes. He envisioned pregnancy as a tug of war. Each side pulls hard, and yet a flag tied to the middle of the rope barely moves. "We tend to think of genes as parts of a machine working together," Dr. Haig said. "But in the realm of genetic conflict, the cooperation breaks down." In a 1993 paper, Dr. Haig first predicted that many complications of pregnancy would turn out to be produced by this conflict. One of the most common complications is pre-eclampsia, in which women experience dangerously high blood pressure late in pregnancy. For decades scientists have puzzled over pre-eclampsia, which occurs in about 6 percent of pregnancies. Dr. Haig proposed that pre-eclampsia was just an extreme form of a strategy used by all fetuses. The fetuses somehow raised the blood pressure of their mothers so as to drive more blood into the relatively low-pressure placenta. Dr. Haig suggested that pre-eclampsia would be associated with some substance that fetuses injected into their mothers' bloodstreams. Pre-eclampsia happened when fetuses injected too much of the stuff, perhaps if they were having trouble getting enough nourishment. In the past few years, Ananth Karumanchi of Harvard Medical School and his colleagues have gathered evidence that suggests Dr. Haig was right. They have found that women with pre-eclampsia had unusually high levels of a protein called soluble fms-like tyrosine kinase 1, or sFlt1 for short. Other labs have replicated their results. Dr. Karumanchi's group has done additional work that indicates that this protein interferes with the mother's ability to repair minor damage to her blood vessels. As that damage builds up, so does her blood pressure. And as Dr. Haig predicted, the protein is produced by the fetus, not the mother. "When I first came across David Haig's hypothesis, it was absolutely cool," said Dr. Karumanchi. "And it made me feel like I might be on the right track." Dr. Haig is now collaborating with Dr. Karumanchi and his Harvard Medical School colleagues to understand more about how exactly sFlt1 may cause pre-eclampsia. They describe their research in the latest issue of Current Topics in Developmental Biology. Dr. Haig also made some predictions about the sorts of maternal defenses that have evolved. One of the most intriguing strategies he proposed was for mothers to shut down some of the genes in their own children. This strategy takes advantage of the fact that most of the genes we carry come in pairs. We inherit one copy from our mother and one from our father. In most cases, these pairs of genes behave identically. But in the past 15 years, scientists have identified more than 70 pairs of genes in which the copy from one parent never makes a protein. In some cases, a parent's gene is silenced only in one organ. Scientists do not fully understand this process, known as genomic imprinting. They suspect that it is made possible by chemical handles called methyl groups that are attached to units of DNA. Some handles may turn off genes in sperm and egg cells. The genes then remain shut off after a sperm fertilizes an egg. Only a few of these genes have been carefully studied to understand how they work. But the evidence so far is consistent with Dr. Haig's theory. One of the most striking examples is a gene called insulin growth factor 2 (Igf2). Produced only in fetal cells, it stimulates rapid growth. Normally, only the father's copy is active. To understand the gene's function, scientists disabled the father's copy in the placenta of fetal mice. The mice were born weighing 40 percent below average. Perhaps the mother's copy of Igf2 is silent because turning it off helps slow the growth of a fetus. On the other hand, mice carry another gene called Igf2r that interferes with the growth-spurring activity of Igf2. This may be another maternal defense gene. In the case of Igf2r, it is the father's gene that is silent, perhaps as a way for fathers to speed up the growth of their offspring. If the mother's copy of this second gene is disabled, mouse pups are born 125 percent heavier than average. A number of other imprinted genes speed and slow the growth of fetuses in a similar fashion, providing more support for Dr. Haig's theory. And in recent years, some medical disorders in humans have been tied to these imprinted genes. Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, for example, causes children to grow oversize organs that are prone to developing tumors. Some cases of the disorder have been tied to a mutation that replaces a mother's silent copy of Igf2 with an extra copy of the father's. "Both of the copies come from the father, and you get double the amount of Igf2, " said Dr. Haig. The extra Igf2 appeared to cause a fetus to grow too quickly, leading to the syndrome. Dr. Haig's work is now widely hailed for making sense of imprinted genes. "Molecular biologists had it worked out in exquisite detail, but they had no idea why it existed," said Kyle Summers, a biologist at East Carolina State University. "Haig just comes in and says, 'I know why this is happening,' and explained it." Dr. Haig has recently been exploring his theory's implications for life after birth. "I think it can influence all sorts of social behaviors," he said. Scientists have found that some genes are imprinted in the brain after birth, and in some cases even in adulthood. "Imprinted genes and behavior are the new frontier," said Dr. Lawrence Wilkinson of the University of Cambridge. In a paper to be published in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Dr. Wilkinson and his colleagues argue that the evidence on imprinted brain genes — preliminary as it is — fits with Dr. Haig's theory. They call it "the most robust evolutionary hypothesis for genomic imprinting." One major source of conflict after birth is how much a mother will feed any individual offspring. A baby mammal is more likely to thrive if it can get more milk from its mother. But nursing demands a lot of energy from mothers that could be used for other things, like bearing and nursing more offspring. It turns out that a number of imprinted genes are active in the brain, where they might influence how babies behaved toward their mothers. One strong candidate for that role in mice is a gene known as GnasXI. Normally the mother's copy of the gene is silent. If the father's copy is not working, mouse pups are weak sucklers. They draw so little milk that by 9 days old, they are a quarter of the weight of normal mice. Switching off the father's copy of GnasXI may be putting a brake on the aggressive nursing of their pups. Some genes continue to be imprinted in the brain even in healthy adults. Dr. Haig has proposed that the evolution of these genes has been shaped by the groups in which mammals live. In many mammal species, females tend to stay in the groups where they are born and males leave. As a result, females tend to share more genes with other members of their group than males. A conflict may emerge between maternal and paternal genes over how the members of the group should act. Maternal genes may favor behavior that benefits the group. Paternal genes may favor behavior that benefits the individual. "You have to think about resources in a different way," Dr. Wilkinson said. "Instead of thinking about foodstuffs, you have to think about social resources. Your mom and dad want different things from your behavior." Dr. Wilkinson and his colleagues are beginning to identify genes that may play this role. One, known as Nesp55, is active in mouse brains. The father's copy of the gene is silent. Dr. Wilkinson and his colleagues found that disabling the mother's Nesp55 gene makes mice less likely to explore a new environment. Normally, the mother's copy of Nesp55 may encourage the mice to take more risks on behalf of the group, whether that risk involves looking for food or defending the group. "It's a possibility, but it needs to be proved," said Dr. Wilkinson. Dr. Wilkinson suspects that conflict between imprinted brain genes may add to the risk for mental disorders, from autism to depression. Because one copy of each of these genes is silenced, they may be more vulnerable. "If you ask me, do I think that imprinted genes are likely in the next 10 years to crop up as mechanisms in mental disorders, I'd say yes," he said. Dr. Haig has enjoyed watching his theory mature and inspire other scientists. But he has also had to cope with a fair amount of hate mail. It comes from across the political spectrum, from abortion opponents to feminists who accuse him of trying to force patriarchy into biology. "People seem to think, 'He must have a political agenda,' " Dr. Haig said. "But I'm not talking at all about conscious behaviors. I'm just interested in these mechanisms and why they evolved." Correction: March 16, 2006 An article in Science Times on Tuesday about recent research on pregnancy, suggesting that its dangers can be explained by a tug of war between mother and fetus over nutrients, misstated the name of the university of Kyle Summers, a biologist who praised the work. It is East Carolina University, not East Carolina State.18 dicembre The Restless Children of the Dalai LamaNYT December 18, 2005
By PANKAJ MISHRA
Early one morning in April 1998, a middle-aged Tibetan named Thupten Ngodup poured gasoline over himself in a public toilet in downtown New Delhi and struck a match. Outside, the Indian police were breaking up a hunger strike organized by the Tibetan Youth Congress, the largest pro-independence organization among the approximately 140,000 Tibetans who have lived in exile since the Dalai Lama fled Chinese-ruled Tibet in 1959. The Tibetans had been protesting for more than six weeks against U.N. inaction on Tibet, which China invaded and occupied in 1950, subsequently killing - through execution, torture and starvation - as many as 1.2 million people, according to Tibetans, and destroying tens of thousands of Buddhist monasteries and temples. Ngodup, too, had intended to go on hunger strike; he was scheduled to replace those Tibetans then nearing death. He had told a radio interviewer five days earlier that the Dalai Lama's peaceful approaches to the Chinese regime had "achieved no results" and that the situation was "desperate." He went on to say, "I am giving up my life to bring about peace and fulfillment to my unhappy people." When Indian authorities, apparently wishing to please a visiting Chinese dignitary, decided to end the hunger strike, Ngodup acted quickly. As policemen dragged away Tibetan strikers and beat back protesters, he emerged from the toilet, fully ablaze. Shouting slogans of Tibetan independence, he ran through a stunned crowd. Then, as the fire consumed his body, he brought his hands together in a gesture of prayer. The next day, lying in a hospital with burns over virtually all of his body, Ngodup was visited by the Dalai Lama. The spiritual leader of the Tibetans, the Dalai Lama abjures all violence and considers even hunger strikes and economic sanctions illegitimate means of political protest. He told Ngodup that he should not feel any hatred toward the Chinese. A reverential Ngodup tried to sit up but failed. Later that night, shortly after inquiring about the fate of the hunger strikers, he died. Pictures of Ngodup in flames are ubiquitous in Dharamsala, the town in the Himalayan foothills of northern India that has served as the capital of the Tibetan exile community since 1960. He is a martyr and hero to a new generation of Tibetans born and educated in India - a generation that is beginning to call into question the longstanding Western idea of the Tibetans as devout Buddhists, willing to embrace only the quietest ways of protest and political engagement. They speak of Ngodup as the kind of freedom fighter Tibet urgently needs: someone who acts out of his own feelings and conviction, rejecting the passivity required of him by the Tibetan leadership. No one has taken Ngodup's example more to heart than a young poet and writer named Tenzin Tsundue, the new and most visible face, after the Dalai Lama, of the Tibetan exile community. In January 2002, Tsundue scaled 14 floors of scaffolding attached to a Mumbai five-star hotel; Prime Minister Zhu Rongji of China was inside. As angry Indian policemen threatened to crush him under a service elevator, he tied a 20-foot banner inscribed with the words "Free Tibet: China, Get Out" to the scaffolding. Then, as Chinese officials watched, he unfurled the Tibetan national flag and shouted pro-Tibet slogans before policemen captured him. Tsundue (pronounced SUN-doo) had barely finished fighting the case against him in Mumbai's glacially slow courts - he was let off with a "severe reprimand" - when the new Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, arrived in the southern Indian city of Bangalore in April of this year. The Indian police arrested many potential Tibetan demonstrators pre-emptively. But Tsundue managed to evade them. Standing on the balcony of a 200-foot-high tower at the Indian Institute of Science, just above the building where Wen Jiabao was meeting Indian scientists, Tsundue unfurled a red banner that read "Free Tibet" and threw pamphlets at bystanders, shouting, "Wen Jiabao, you cannot silence us." Tsundue was again arrested and, he says, beaten by the police. "But I have got used to this by now," he told me when I met with him in Dharamsala not long ago. A slightly built man, Tsundue wears a red bandanna over long braids, inviting curious looks. He speaks softly, in long lucid sentences that seem to have been formed and refined in a restless solitude; and from time to time he briefly withdraws into silence. But his writerly, deliberate manner can mislead; he is, above all, an activist with a clear political passion. Like many Tibetans, he grew up demonstrating outside the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi. In 1997, soon after finishing college, he walked across India's remote and inhospitable Ladakh District into Tibet - he didn't think that hard about what he was doing, he told me; he simply wanted to see his homeland. Arrested by the Chinese, he was taken to Lhasa, Tibet's capital, and imprisoned there for three months before being deported to India. In his early 30's, he has already known six different prisons. "I would strongly recommend a spell in prison to anyone," he told me. "It is really essential for your personal growth." Saying this, he laughed, and his friends joined in. We were at the Peace Cafe, a Tibetan hangout situated among the convenience stores, souvenir shops and cybercafes that largely cater to foreign tourists in Dharamsala. Tsundue's cellphone rang often, with news from other activists and reminders of articles to write, demonstrations to organize. He would soon be on his way to Mumbai to hold a news conference on behalf of three nuns who had recently escaped imprisonment and torture in Tibet. At the moment, though, he was focused on his plans to set up a public library and reading room in Dharamsala. Tibetans like himself, he said, needed to read more than books about Buddhism and the other religious texts that were available to them in Dharamsala. They needed to know about the modern world; above all, they needed to know about China. Reading rooms and libraries, he said, are where new political ideas and movements begin. As the Tibetans gathered around Tsundue's table nodded, I couldn't help thinking that this was how Tibet's adversary Mao Zedong began his career. Most of Tsundue's friends and colleagues were born and educated in India and had traveled to Dharamsala from across the country in order to work full time for Tibetan freedom. Others had arrived recently from Tibet after a hard journey over the Himalayas. A true Buddhist is expected to bear with equanimity the prospect of an endless exile, but Tsundue's friends spoke approvingly of violence as a possible means to Tibetan freedom. One talked of the "many Chinese embassies in the world that could be targets," naming possible sites with disturbing precision. Another interjected: "Look at Palestine and Israel. Such small places compared to Tibet, but the world pays them so much attention because of the Intifada, the suicide bombers and Osama bin Laden. What has nonviolence achieved for the Tibetan cause, apart from some converts to Buddhism in the West?" The passionate voices of the Tibetans echoed in the small cafe. But they knew, and it was easy to see, that violence does not come easily to a Buddhist. Walking up a steep mountain path earlier that evening, I saw one of Tsundue's friends stop to pick up an ant and place it gently to one side, out of harm's way. Dharamsala, like the 36 other settlements that the Indian government allotted to Tibetans fleeing Chinese-occupied Tibet, was meant to be a temporary refuge. But four decades after these settlements were established, Tibetans born in India still belong to the category of "stateless people." As permanent refugees, it is not easy for them to get jobs or own property. Tibetans selling woolen clothes and cheap electronic goods are a common sight on the streets of Indian cities. Even in Dharamsala, the Tibetans told me, they live in constant fear of India's often highhanded police. A few days before I arrived in Dharamsala, the police intervened in a dispute between an Indian shopkeeper and Tibetans by frog-marching the Tibetans through the main street. Yet few Tibetans wish to return to what they regard as a country under brutal occupation. According to recent Human Rights Watch reports, which confirm many Tibetan accounts, the Communist regime in Beijing continues to detain without trial, to torture and to execute those it suspects of being separatists or merely sympathizers of the Dalai Lama. More than 2,000 refugees arrive each year in Dharamsala from Chinese-occupied Tibet. Tsundue's own parents left Tibet in 1959 when they were still children, trekking through the Himalayas to India. Hundreds of Tibetans who accompanied them died soon afterward, victims of the severe Indian heat and humidity. Tsundue was born sometime in the mid-70's, when his parents were working as laborers on a high Himalayan road. He knows neither the exact place nor the exact date of his birth. His father died soon after he was born; so did his two elder siblings. Only Tsundue and a younger sister survived the malnutrition and infectious diseases that are common among roadside laborers. Educated in three different Tibetan refugee schools, Tsundue went to college in Chennai, in southern India, and then on to Mumbai. When I first met Tsundue in Mumbai in 1999, he was a graduate student, often spoken of in the city's literary circles as a promising poet, and had the intensity and shyness of a self-taught man. He told me that he admired Albert Camus, but didn't say much else at our first meeting. As I left, he gave me his first collection of poems, "Crossing the Border." They were about his life as a Tibetan exile in India, his sense of a lost homeland and identity, what it meant to belong to a nation that the world did not recognize but to which it always pledged its support. ("Tibetans, the world's sympathy stock," he noted wryly in an early poem. "Serene monks and bubbly traditionalists.") His reputation as a writer and activist has grown in the last few years. An essay of his on Tibetan refugees won a major national award in India in 2001. He has also given renewed chic to a cause long espoused by Richard Gere and other Hollywood stars; the Indian edition of Elle named him among India's 50 most stylish people in 2002, two rungs above the Dalai Lama. The photograph accompanying the article showed Tsundue wearing his red bandanna, which he has vowed not to remove until Tibet is free. The Dalai Lama, Tsundue told me, jokes about it every time they meet, asking, "Don't you feel hot and sweaty on your forehead?" Tsundue is relatively privileged among Tibetans in being able to exchange a few words with the Dalai Lama. It seems easier for a minor Western celebrity than a well-known Tibetan like Tsundue to achieve a private audience with the Dalai Lama. And it is not clear what the Tibetan leadership makes of Tsundue. The Dalai Lama did not respond to my request for an interview, and I wondered if this was because it had been forwarded to his secretary by Tsundue. (Later that same month, Tsundue seemed dismayed when I told him that a German teenager had managed to interview the Dalai Lama.) Tsundue told me that he appreciates the popular support for the Tibetan cause that the Dalai Lama has generated in the West, but that that support does not amount to much if Western governments continue to pursue business deals with the Chinese and sell them weapons. For Tsundue, it is more important to build up a sympathetic constituency within India, the country with which Tibet has long had cultural and political links; his writings in the Indian press reflect this view. He is always busy. Last spring, he helped organize a meeting in the town's central square to commemorate the victims of the massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989. He recently finished work on a joint translation of a long poem by a Tibetan writer facing official disapproval in China. Unlike most activists, he doesn't offer a solution for every problem. Instead, he seems engaged in a long and uncertain quest - and this reflective manner is part of his charisma, what makes him attractive to young Indians and Tibetans. "The biggest question for us," he told me, "is what can we do? How do we find a solution to our dilemma? It is so easy to give up and invest all your faith in the Dalai Lama. We have to do something else. But what is it?" For more than four decades, Tibetans in exile have looked up to the Dalai Lama for release from their predicament. Aware of the expectations placed on him and of the lack of progress on any kind of Tibetan independence, the Dalai Lama has tried to encourage democracy - an elected parliament and government - within the Tibetan exile community. In September 2001, Samdhong Rinpoche, a monk and philosopher, became the first elected head of the Tibetan government in exile, which lays down social and economic policy for the Tibetan community in India. (Dharamsala serves as the unofficial capital.) Recognized by no nation, this government reflects the Dalai Lama's power but also its limits. Repeatedly denounced, ignored or rebuffed by the Chinese regime, the Dalai Lama has rarely looked less likely to lead his people back to an independent state. In 1988, he dropped his longheld demand for an end to the Chinese occupation of Tibet. He and Samdhong Rinpoche now assert that they do not oppose Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. They say they are willing to settle for what they call "genuine autonomy" for Tibet within China, and they pin their hopes for a political breakthrough with China on annual meetings between Tibetan representatives and midlevel Chinese officials. Wishing to appear conciliatory to their interlocutors, Tibetan leaders frown upon anti-Chinese protests by Tibetan activists. But this official position increasingly dismays and divides Tibetans. Although the Tibetan Women's Association supports the Dalai Lama's call for "genuine autonomy," Gu-Chu-Sum, an influential group of former political prisoners, continues to demand independence - in accordance, it says, with the wishes of Tibetans living in Tibet. As Lobsang Yeshi, an official of the Tibetan Youth Congress, the major organization for Tibetan independence, put it, "We are not opposed to the Dalai Lama - his blessings are crucial for us - but we do not believe China and do not want to be part of it." The most vehement critics of the scaled-down demand for autonomy are Tibetan exiles in their 20's and 30's - many of whom, born in India, have never even seen Tibet - and Tsundue has emerged as their most articulate representative. His views, amplified regularly in the Indian press and on the Internet, most vividly reflect the widening gap between Tibetan leaders and the children of Tibetan exiles. In the tradition-bound Tibetan community, where criticism of elders is rare and obedience to them the norm, Tsundue expresses what many people feel when he describes "genuine autonomy" as mere "wishful thinking" on the part of the Tibetan leadership. One evening at the Peace Cafe, he told me that he could not rule out violence as a last resort. "Seeking Buddhahood," he said, "is one thing, and freedom for a country is another. We are fighting for freedom in the world and not freedom from the world." Many young Tibetans increasingly express doubts about the efficacy of monks and philosophers in politics. Buddhism directs individuals to a self-aware and ethical life in the present and encourages a suspicion of social or political utopias. It does not blend easily with modern politics, particularly the demands of mass nationalism: a separate state with an ethnically homogeneous population. Unable to find examples of political activism in their own religious tradition, the Dalai Lama and other senior Buddhist monks have always expressed their admiration for Gandhi. In an interview with me last year, Samdhong Rinpoche (Rinpoche is an honorific given to senior lamas) defended Gandhi's nonviolent politics as best suited to Tibetans. According to Samdhong Rinpoche, the Gandhian political strategy of satyagraha (literally, truth insistence) wasn't aimed so much at achieving large-scale results like national independence as at helping individuals achieve dignity and confidence in their daily encounters with repressive authority. He explained that satyagraha properly began with small, achievable things, at the grass-roots level; it sought large-scale structural change through a profound change in basic human attitudes. Nonviolence, he said, wasn't a tactic, or a means to a predetermined end. As a form of self-control and carefully measured action, it was an end in itself. "Our ultimate goal," Samdhong Rinpoche told me, "is not just political freedom but the preservation of Tibetan culture. What will we gain if we win political freedom but lose what gives value to our lives? It is why we reject the option of violence. For respect for life is an inseparable aspect of the Tibetan culture we are fighting for." Tsundue, however, remained unconvinced when I reported Samdhong Rinpoche's views to him. We were in a small bookshop owned by a friend of his, browsing through the collection of Tibet-related books. Tsundue immediately said that he could not identify Tibetan culture exclusively with Buddhism and that the preference for nonviolent politics could also become an excuse for passivity and inaction. "Our leaders quote Gandhi," Tsundue said. "But Gandhi saw British rule in India as an act of violence and said that resistance to it was a duty. I see the Chinese railway to Lhasa as a similar act of violence. What's wrong with blowing up a few bridges? How can such resistance be termed wrong and immoral?" Many young Tibetans speak with admiration of the Khampa warriors of eastern Tibet, who fought against the invading Chinese Army in 1950 and, in 1959, initiated the bloody revolt against Chinese rule, effectively forcing the Dalai Lama to choose between a subservient status in Tibet and exile in India. An account of the Khampas, published by the acclaimed Tibetan novelist Jamyang Norbu in 1987, inspired many Tibetans of Tsundue's generation to consider more militant solutions to their problem. As Norbu, who now lives in the United States, told a filmmaker producing a documentary for PBS in 1997, "Some people don't want to be enlightened, at least not immediately." Norbu went on to say: "We are ordinary Tibetans. We drink; we eat; we feel passion; we love our wives and kids. If someone sort of messes around with them, even if they're an army, you pick up your rifle." Tibetans, he added, have an "affinity to their place they live in. And they don't want the Chinese there. And his Holiness cannot understand this." This was not just rhetoric. In the early 70's, Norbu was among the young Tibetans who dropped out of school, picked up a rifle and joined the Tibetan guerrillas operating out of Mustang, a piece of Nepalese territory that juts into Tibet. The C.I.A. began financing these guerrillas in 1956 and arranged for more than a hundred of them to be trained in the Colorado Rockies in what was one of the most secret anti-Communist operations of the cold war. In 1958, the C.I.A. first airdropped arms, ammunition, radios and medical supplies into Tibet. Three years later, Tibetan guerrillas based in Mustang ambushed a Chinese military convoy inside Tibet and captured documents that revealed the low capacity and morale of the Chinese military. This turned out to be one of the C.I.A.'s most valuable intelligence hauls during the cold war. American support for the Tibetans, however, was halfhearted at best, designed to undermine Communist China, not to achieve Tibetan independence. It began to peter out by the late 60's and finally dried up altogether in the early 70's, after Kissinger and Nixon befriended Mao. Then in 1994, much to the dismay of many Tibetans, Bill Clinton uncoupled trade agreements with China from the problematic issue of human rights. India also began by helping the Tibetan guerrillas, after a border dispute with China ended in a humiliating military defeat in 1962, but by the early 1970's had withdrawn its support. Abandoned by their sponsors, many Tibetan guerrillas were attacked and killed by the Nepalese Army. Finally, in a taped message in 1974, the Dalai Lama ordered the Mustang guerrillas to give up arms and return to India. Lhasang Tsering, a bookseller in Dharamsala, was one of the Tibetan guerrillas in Mustang. He later headed the Tibetan Youth Congress and even worked for the Tibetan government in exile before resigning in protest against the Dalai Lama's decision to drop the demand for full independence. He told me that Tibet faces a cultural genocide. Han Chinese immigrants, China's largest ethnic group, are pouring into Tibet, threatening to make the Tibetans a minority in their own country - a process likely to speed up when the Chinese finish building the railway line between the Tibetan capital of Lhasa and the Chinese province Qinghai. Tsering, who is in his mid-50's and wears a suave goatee, told me that he still feels bitter about the Dalai Lama's decision to withdraw the guerrillas from Mustang. Like many Tibetans, he is convinced that the freedom struggle for Tibet will turn militant after the Dalai Lama passes away. He reminded me that Tibetans had fought fiercely for their rights even during the exceptionally fearful days of the Cultural Revolution. Armed with swords and spears, a young nun and her followers attacked their local Communist Party headquarters and killed Chinese officials and their Tibetan collaborators before being captured and executed. Tsundue and his friends, who had taken me to see Tsering (SEHR-ing), seemed to revere him and Norbu. And Tsering became expansive in the presence of these admiring young Tibetans. He spoke very fast, with many dramatic emphases, as if he had said similar things to many people. "A few people in exile," he declared, "do not have the mandate to change the goal of Tibetan independence." Dismissing the search for "genuine autonomy" as a waste of time, he added, "I want to go back to Tibet, but not on my knees." But Tsering's activism is now confined to the worldwide network of pro-Tibet organizations and conferences. Like many of his young admirers, Tsering seemed more inclined to talk about than to realize the possibility of armed struggle. He and other Tibetans I spoke to did not wonder if China would respond to a militant freedom struggle in Tibet as severely as it has dealt with restive Muslims in the northwestern province of Xinjiang. Nor did they speculate much about what a free Tibet might look like - it seemed too far in the future. But they were nearly unanimous in asserting that it would have no place for Han Chinese. Hard-line nationalism finds little favor with the old guard. Samdhong Rinpoche has actively distanced himself from an ethnically based nationalism, insisting that it is possible for Tibetans and Chinese to coexist peacefully in a free Tibet. To many young Tibetan exiles, this embrace of the Chinese only makes Tibetan leaders seem politically naïve. In an article last year on a current-affairs Web site run by Tibetan exiles, phayul.com, Jamyang Norbu charged Tibetan leaders with having "an imperfect understanding of the politics of nation-states and the Darwinian reality of our modern world." Oddly, such criticisms often echo Chinese accusations: that Tibet's pre-Communist Buddhist regime failed to modernize the country, and indeed remains fundamentally incapable of doing so. Tibet became a protectorate of China in the late 17th century, retaining cultural and economic autonomy; it did not expel Chinese troops and officials until 1912, when it began to function as a de facto independent state. But according to the Chinese version of Tibet's history, before its "peaceful liberation" in 1951 (when Tibet was required to recognize Chinese sovereignty), Tibet was a benighted place where a few "feudal" and "reactionary" aristocrats together with monks oppressed a majority population of serfs and slaves, mostly by addling their minds with ritual and superstition. This may sound like Communist propaganda, but Chen Kuiyuan, one of the Chinese technocrats to have ruled Tibet in recent years, didn't exaggerate much when he pointed out in a 1997 speech that "when the Dalai ruled Tibet, there was not a single regular school; children of the working people had no right or opportunity to receive an education, and more than 90 percent of the Tibetan people were illiterate." Even Samdhong Rinpoche admits this is true but is quick to add that the Dalai Lama, with his interest in modern science and preference for democracy, is much better placed than Chinese Communists to undertake Tibet's modernization. Not to mention that whatever benefits the Chinese bring in the form of new roads, schools and regular jobs have so far failed to diminish the popularity of the Dalai Lama. Tibetans inside Tibet still express their rejection of Chinese authority through their complete devotion to their exiled spiritual leader. Even as Chinese authorities closely monitor the monasteries, frequently subjecting monks to "patriotic education," monks and nuns continue to form the most visible face of the Tibetan nationalist movement inside Tibet. Over the last two decades, as Chinese authorities began to relax their restrictions on the practice of religion, monasteries and temples were rebuilt, attracting great crowds of pilgrims, and Buddhism again flourished, though China's repressive police and an efficient network of spies have ensured that no Gandhi-style mass movement emerges within Tibet itself. This new flowering of Buddhism greatly pleases Tibetans like Samdhong Rinpoche. Yet Buddhism's revival in Tibet does not make it any more likely that the Dalai Lama will return to his homeland, not least because of Chinese efforts to install someone in his place at the Potala Palace. Over the last decade, Chinese authorities have sought to solidify their occupation of Tibet by imposing their own candidates on the important seats of Tibetan Buddhism. In 1995, Chinese authorities tried to circumvent the Dalai Lama by kidnapping the boy whom the Dalai Lama identified as the 11th Panchen Lama - Panchen Lamas are second only to the Dalai Lamas in Tibet's Buddhist order - and replacing him with their own candidate. In an attempt to forestall the Chinese regime from gaining control over his successor, the Dalai Lama has announced that the next Dalai Lama will be born among the Tibetan community in exile. In a recent interview, he said that he could die happily in India if Tibet's political status did not change in his lifetime. Yet India, which continues to absorb the majority of Tibetan exiles, has drawn closer to China in recent months. Though it is unlikely to grow as harsh as neighboring Nepal, which recently told the Dalai Lama to apply for his Nepalese visa in Beijing, it still limits the political activities of refugees on its soil. The 17th Karmapa, the 20-year-old leader of one of the four major Tibetan sects, who angered China by escaping to India in 1999 and whom many believe will be the most important leader of the Tibetan exile community once the Dalai Lama dies, is a virtual prisoner in his monastery near Dharamsala. The Indian government, which restricts his movements and insists on calling the Dalai Lama a spiritual rather than political leader, may well fear that Tibetan self-assertion in Dharamsala will strain India's increasingly friendly relations with China. It is certain to respond punitively if, unlikely though it seems now, the appeal of Buddhism diminishes among Tibetans and Tsundue and his colleagues move toward organizing a fully militant movement.
When I spoke with Tsundue in early December, he was in the midst of a long journey through Tibetan refugee settlements in the northeastern Himalayas, trying to raise $10,000 for the purchase of a passport that, issued by the Tibetan government in 1947, had ended up with an antique dealer in Nepal. The passport, which carried visas from seven countries, including the U.S., the U.K., France, Italy, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, was valuable proof, Tsundue said, of Tibetan sovereignty. His voice sounded cheerful on the phone. It turned out that he had raised more than $6,000. He also seemed buoyed by events in New Delhi. The previous day a small group of Tibetans led by the president of the Tibetan Youth Congress vaulted the gates of the Chinese Embassy to protest the repressive "patriotic education" campaign recently enacted in Lhasa by Chinese authorities. Tsundue knew all the protesters; pictures of them, accosted by police, appeared in the New Delhi papers. Most of them, he said, were extremely young and well-educated students in New Delhi; they had surprised their own leaders by their energy and boldness. "Having no place to belong to," Tsundue said, "they have attached their emotional identity to the Tibetan problem and are always ready to do anything." He added: "When people ask me, 'Which place do you belong to?' I, too, have started to say: 'I belong to a problem called Tibet. And there are many more of us where I come from.' " Pankaj Mishra is the author of "An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World" and "Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond," to be published next spring. |
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was still in Dharamsala when Tsundue returned from Mumbai. He said that the news conference with the nuns from Tibet had gone well. He had taken the nuns to Mumbai's biggest shopping mall; they enjoyed their first ride on an escalator. He was looking forward to organizing a film festival in Dharamsala. But when I called him from London a few weeks later, he seemed unhappy again. He told me about the fresh round of talks in Switzerland between Chinese officials and representatives of the Tibetan government in exile. He said he thought that the Chinese maintained contact with the Tibetans only in order to gain some measure of diplomatic respectability before the Beijing Olympics in 2008. The Chinese had not budged at all while the Tibetans had further compromised their position. Tibetan leaders, he told me, were still trying to appease China. The Dalai Lama, he said, had gone to the extent of declaring the railway line connecting Tibet to China a sign of progress. |
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