From The Morgue

All The Shah’s Men: An American Coup And The Roots of Middle East Terror, by Stephen Kinzer, Wiley, 2003
I’ve been reading about Iran, and one of the books I read was this account of the 1953 coup that toppled Iran’s democratically elected leader, Mossadegh. New York Times veteran Kinzer dug into the archives to provide a detailed account of the secret actions driving the coup, as well as putting the oil standoff that had led up to it in clear context. (The title is at least slightly misleading – the British had much more responsibility for the coup than the US, even though the work on the ground was done by the CIA. Kinzer’s pitching the book towards those Americans who want to know why America is viewed with hatred and suspicion in the Middle East, hence the downplaying of Britain in some of the copy.)
I knew going in I’d be angry at what I read, and appalled at the level of interference by the US and Britain. I was surprised by just how angry I’d get.
The story goes like this – it’s worth reading, I promise:
* Early 20th century! Great Britain is a colonial power in Iran, extracting its oil via the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, still later British Petroleum a.k.a. BP). The Brit govt owned a majority share of the company – it saw Iran’s oil as essential for its national wellbeing. For all intents and purposes, the British government was extracting the oil directly.
* The company was massively exploiting Iran – its workers were forced to live in appalling conditions for pitiful pay, no Iranians were trained up to work above the menial level, and Iran was given only a minuscule proportion of the oil revenue.
* Negotiations with Britain to strike a better deal over the oil met a complete stone wall. The US, among others, repeatedly advised Britain to make concessions and improve the terms of the deal with Iran. They did not budge. Their stonewalling led to popular Prime Minister Mossadegh’s decision to nationalise the Oil industry.
* Britain tried to wait Iran out. They removed all their personnel from the oilfields and prevented Iran from recruiting trained workers from other countries; they stopped ships from entering and leaving to transport the oil; they generally tried every trick in the book to break Iran’s spirit and force it to allow them back in. Mossadegh did not back down, and refused to negotiate.
* Britain had the Shah, ruler of Iran, on side the whole time but Mossadegh had proved impossible to control. They wanted to organise a coup, but their Embassy staff had been removed from the country. They approached the US to perform the coup, and as soon as Eisenhower gained power this went ahead. The fledgling CIA sent Kermit Roosevelt into Iran to depose Mossadegh.
* The British had established a small army of paid contacts within Iran. Roosevelt accessed this network and threw a hell of a lot of money around. As a result, newspapers condemned Mossadegh, mullahs condemned Mossadegh, gangsters who ran neighbourhoods in south Tehran condemned Mossadegh. Massive demonstrations were held in which enormous numbers of attendees had been paid off.
* There was more to it than this – Kermit was a sophisticated operator, and he knew how to stage events to drive public opinion. He carefully constructed a plan for the final coup, in which his hand-picked military man would succeed Mossadegh. The coup didn’t exactly go off without a hitch, but it ended as Roosevelt wanted, and Mossadegh was arrested. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was recolonised by the British, under more liberal (but still exploitative) terms.
* The Shah gained renewed power after Mossadegh’s fall. His regime became more and more totalitarian until 1979, when popular revolution removed him from office and installed the Ayatollah Khomeini. Mossadegh’s name was invoked frequently during the revolution, but afterwards, to the horror of the democratising forces within Iran, Khomeini removed him from public discourse and put in place the Theocracy that remains in power today.
* Kinzer’s position is also that the US’ role in the 1953 coup was the direct inspiration for the hostage-taking in the US Embassy in Tehran – a situation that set the tone for fractious Iranian-US relations ever after. It’s a reasonable suggestion, I think.
The book was an incredible read. Most eye-opening was the extent to which the British government and CIA could and did undermine democracy in Iran – as soon as your newspapers and Mullahs have their opinions co-opted by foreign interests, you’ve lost the ability to engage in free decision-making.
Most anger-making was reading about Kermit Roosevelt, true believer in the Greater Good, sitting with his friends sipping drinks and waiting for news while hundreds of people die during the coup-struggle he had initiated.
It makes me wonder what the CIA and other such agencies are up to today. Meeting a newspaper editor in an alley with a pre-written story and $1000 cash is a bit too clumsy for todays wired and paranoid Western world, but I don’t doubt the same covert control over news is pursued today. (Of course, overt control of the news agenda continues to be a battleground, but that’s one we at least have some kind of handle on.)
Of course, this was the first major operation by the CIA, and its success led directly to a series of interventions in other foreign countries. In Iran, it all came back to oil; the British government, and then the US government, had ample opportunity to support a strong democracy in the difficuly Middle East, but they chose to destroy that democracy in order to maintain their oil access.
It would be sickening if I didn’t already expect the worst.

One of the cell networks here in NZ is running a long-term promotion: texting is free on weekends to other phones on that network. It’s a genius bit of marketing, but I don’t know how the heck they afford it.
Anyway, it’s given birth to an entirely new phenomenon – new to me at least.
Four times this weekend I received texts from unknown numbers. The content was text-speak for ‘hi, who is this?’. They were all from different numbers at different times of day.
(One of them’s in the title; another read ‘Hae!Wad u up 2 hu dizb??…’, I deleted the other two before I realised this was a phenomenon worthy of note)
So, I figure there are only a few possible explanations:
* my number is written on a wall somewhere with an encouragement to text me
* the cellphone virus we’ve all been dreading is here, and it communicates like a fourteen-year-old girl
* there are people out there who take advantage of free text weekends to randomly text any number they can think of, and see what response they get
It is a bit odd to me that out of nowhere I get four texts from different numbers in the same weekend. That’s a pretty incredible hit rate if it’s people entering numbers pseudo-randomly, which leads me to suspect that the third explanation isn’t the true one.
I didn’t text back to any of them in case they were some weird spider trying to harvest active cellphone numbers or something. I dunno. Also I didn’t care enough.
So, anyone else experience this? Anyone know what it means?
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This, over on the new-look Xenodochion and Matt M’s LJ, is extremely worth a look and a ponder, combining amusing cute kid story with epistemological exercise: Part 1 and Part 2

So I made a final push until the wee hours last night and finished Draft 2 of Ron the Body.
Hurrah. But there’s plenty more work to be done. This just takes me to the next stage…
…I need to get some people to read it and give me some feedback of the brutally honest variety. People who can print their own copies/read off a screen particularly welcome, since I am poor writer bastard and can’t afford to print many. Volunteers are invited to apply to the usual address.
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When I got home at Christmas, I set a goal for myself to get to this stage by the end of March. So I win by, like, two weeks. Yay for me.
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You may now fill my comments section with adulation. Begin.

On Monday went to see Tuwhare with Cal. Man, it was good. Hone Tuwhare is one of NZ’s great poets, also notable as the first Maori writing poetry in English. The show consisted of a bunch of his poems set to music and performed by a whole mixture of different Kiwi musos, linked by a narration by Rawiri Paratene (the grandad in Whale Rider) which talked about Tuwhare’s life, his artistic practice, particular notes about the poems being performed, and potted biographies of the performers.
It was pretty wonderful. It’s hard for me to single out a favourite – but I’ll say I enjoyed Strawpeople doing ‘Covetous’, organizer Charlotte Yates doing ‘Mad’, and Don McGlashan doing ‘Rain’. I was particularly looking forward to Kiwi rap pioneer Te Koopu (Dean Hapeta) performing a politically charged piece from anti-Vietnam days ‘Speak To Me, Brother’, in order to see what the famously prickly Hapeta would be like – I hadn’t seen him on stage since he supported Spearhead in 1995. He came out and lost the crowd more thoroughly than I’ve ever seen a performer lose a crowd, because he read the whole damn thing off a bit of paper he was holding. Granted, it was a long piece, but man, you coulda learned that thing. Disappointing and weird.
The final song was an odd vibe, too, Goldenhorse raising the volume and the tempo to try and rock out a largely middle-aged sit-down crowd. It was a good piece but everyone just sat stone-still (except for one of the women from earlier performers Wai, who was dancing like crazy down by the stage, nice work on that one).
Anyway, the poetry did get a big hearing, and it’s nice for that. Almost shamefully, I’m not familiar with Tuwhare’s work. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by him. Poetry isn’t a huge thing in my life, I’m yet to find the poet or poem that really seizes me the way I’ve been seized by work in other media, but I have an abundant respect for the form and it makes me happy to see this kind of event. So I guess I have to go and read me some Hone Tuwhare now…

Prairie Sunflower Field
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Ella always told me the prairies would blow my mind, which they surely did when I finally made it up to Winnipeg. I tool a bunch of amazing photos of the Prairies but this one was my favourite. Even in the narrow frame you get a sense of the sheer enormity of the sky. It’s an awesomely cool sight.
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Also, and I almost hate to mention this but I am compelled, over on Tall Poppy Jack considers how to best prepare a Slippy Bar…

I’ve been thinking lately about the word ‘do-gooder’. About how we all instantly understand it to be a derogatory term with a bunch of related implications.
It is usually used to refer to particularly naive or impractical attempts by liberals to ‘do good’ (evaluations made by conservatives of course), but it can be and often is applied more generally.
One of the things that bugs me about it is that it implicitly undermines the whole project of attempting to ‘do good’. Such attempts are always misguided – good can only be achieved indirectly by maximising individual freedom. In Lakoff’s account of the morality underlying conservatism (I’m reading Lakoff right now), it actually becomes immoral to attempt to do good.
We have thoroughly internalised a conservative value system. I can’t think of any term that shows our culture has internalised a liberal value system – but there must be one, right? Any suggestions?
One attempt to reclaim the term is here – a Canadian social justice site named DoGooder. It’s kind of charming, but by Lakoff’s analysis such a reclamation will never overcome its status as a shorthand for moral evil on the conservative side.
(And just to partially prove me wrong about all of us understanding its negative connotation, a Canadian local press article celebrating a local man as a ‘do-gooder.)

This past weekend I was up at the new-style Megaroleplaying Weekend.
The old version of this weekend had a bunch of people descending on a lovely small beachside holiday house (known in this part of NZ as a ‘bach’) to play a bunch of roleplaying games, hang out and talk, run around on the beach, and occasionally actually sleep.
The new version had us up at another coastal spot – the homes of Matt/Debz and Sam/Luke. There were about twenty bods, and we did the sunshine thing, the frisbee in the park thing, the barbecue thing, the hang out and talk thing (including a too-short politics chat with idiot/savant) and even the sleep thing. Of course, there was a lot of the game thing.
The games were amazing. I was lucky enough to be roped into Jenni‘s high-school girl clique game I Know, Right which was an absolutely terrifying experience. It lands you in the heart of a five-strong group of best friends, whose internal power politics are inevitably vicious. I started off in the ‘banker’ spot in the clique, knowing stuff and being able to stay in the good books of the Queen Bee by filtering information through to her. A power play later landed me in the coveted Queen Bee position, which I immediately discovered was even more stressful. I was completely out of my depth, and I soon found myself plummeting down to the awful position of ‘target’. I got a huge amount out of this game – I understand the dynamics of girl friendship cliques a lot better as a result. But, man, it’s harsh, harsh stuff. Fellow players were Debz, Giffy, Sam and Matt. Matt’s writeup. Debz’ writeup.
The other big game was ‘Phoenix’, which used the lovely Primetime Adventures system. We together hashed out an imaginery story structure for a TV series, and then played through a couple of episodes. It was really intense stuff, with play focused on two levels – the protagonist character’s experience inside the story, and the story-creation discussion happening around it. I was impressed by the way in which the system encouraged us to keep finding the crucial moment in scene after scene, and it resulted in an incredibly engaging game and story, although one far removed from more traditional roleplaying styles. This was run/managed by hix, and fellow players were Luke, Debz and Svend. An account of it is being developed here.
I also ran some game about crab truckers, which I wrote about on my LJ.
Overall, it was a splendid short weekend, and I look forward to the next one!

The Dharma Punks by ant sang is the second great work of New Zealand comics, after Dylan Horrocks’ Hicksville. It was released in eight parts over 2001-2003 and I finally got hold of the final two parts this week. They were worth waiting for.
Set over one long night in Auckland in 1994, the narrative follows punk Buddhist Chopstick during a plot to spoil the opening of a new fast-food restaurant. As the hours tick down until action time, Chopstick has to cope with the erratic behaviour of his fellow punks, the vicious attentions of some skinheads, a mysterious and beguiling mute woman, and periodic visits by the ghost of Kurt CObain.
It’s a beautifully-realised piece of fiction. Ant’s distinctive style has become well-known in New Zealand over the last couple years thanks to his design work on hit animated series Bro Town. The Dharma Punks features a scrappier, fiercer, thicker line suited to the grim beauty of his subject matter. His compositions are insightful and sometimes breathtaking. It’s just a damn pretty book.
But what lodges in the memory is the deep, heartfelt humanity that fills every page. It’s made with love, and made of love, and the way it all ends left me grinning like a fool.
My highest recommendation. It’s hard to find some issues, but a collected edition is on the way – keep an eye on his site for news.
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I also want to mention Ant’s editorial essay in issue 2. He writes:

Some of the most inspiring things in life are things you have to search for… Zines, mini-comics, weird little DIY websites – they’re often funnier, more heart-felt, more passionate, more genuinely emotional than anything you’re likely to find coming from the mainstream media. When I read a zine like Cindy or Help My Snowman’s Burning! or a comic like Sticks and Stones I feel connected. Alive. Relieved. Do you know what I mean?

I know what he means. That feeling of connectedness – of relief – I get that strongly from stuff at the edge, from local stuff, from things made just to make things that are cool. This is where life gets most vibrant. These things are precious and important and worth celebrating.
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As an aside, comics-journalist Joe Sacco is coming to Wellington on Thursday as part of the Writers and Readers Week. He’ll be appearing with Kiwi comics heroes Dylan Horrocks and Tim Bollinger. I’m sure there are still tickets available, Welly folk, but it is in the afternoon so if you’re not a bum like me you’ll need to bunk of school for it…

A cloudy day in Toronto, with car
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Toronto’s a great city, friendly and easy to get around, although its extensive underground warrens are kind of odd. I like this shot just because it’s also kind of odd. Yay for Toronto.
I took this photo right after I saw one of the Barenaked Ladies in a comic shop. Apparently. I heard employee one excitedly whisper to employee two ‘check it out, that’s so and so from the barenaked ladies!’ and who am I to doubt employee one at a time like that?

Census night was last night, and there’s been lots of interesting comment on that last post, so I figured it was worth returning to this topic. Here, then, is another bunch of thoughts and things. Some of it I’ve though through, some of it I haven’t. Go wild.
Pakeha
So it turns out that on the Maori version of the census form, ‘NZ European’ is translated as ‘Pakeha’. Interesting.
Some people have said that Pakeha ‘grates’. I can accept that. I think it’s largely because the word only turns up in divisive contexts, so its associations will be with confrontational discourse and challenges to identity. Layer on the cultural mythology that it’s an insulting term, and you have a situation where the label does, as a simple point of fact, grate. That doesn’t mean it’s not a useful category label or an appropriate category label. It does mean it’s not an acceptable category label, at least in terms of the census, because you want to use category labels that are as neutral as possible in order to get the most accurate data you can. The term can certainly be rehabilitated so it doesn’t ‘grate’; the question is whether or not Kiwi culture will adopt this task on or not.
Maire said that Pakeha is in current use to denote the broader meaning of ‘non-Maori’ rather than the specific ‘white New Zealander’. This is news to me, and I’d be interested to see an example. I do think common usage of the word is very definitely a specific ‘white New Zealander’ meaning. Cal has mentioned to me at least one instance where a service provider draws a distinction between Pakeha (in the common meaning I understand it) and Tauiwi (which has the broad meaning of ‘not Maori).
My copy of Harry Orsman’s wonderful OXford Dictionary of New Zealand English gives as its primary definition:

A pale-skinned non-Polynesian immigrant or foreigner as distinct from a Maori; thence, a non-Polynesian New Zealand-born New Zealander esp. if pale-skinned. In pl. Europeans as an ethnic category.

Which really doesn’t get us anywhere new, except to note that Tauiwi doesn’t appear at all. Of course, language can move fast, and the dictionary is almost a decade old; I think it’s likely we’re both right, in that the common usage is as I understand it (white NZer) but other, broader meanings are still occasionally used.
I think, while I’m on the subject, that Pakeha is an incredibly useful term, specifically as a designate of the other half of the Treaty of Waitangi’s partnership. I’ll go further, in fact: I believe that if there’s going to be an inclusive New Zealand nationalism that deals with its cultural divisions, then its going to require a Pakeha identity, using that word.
Digging Deeper
A lot of the rhetoric around the ‘write in New Zealander’ campaign has centred around opposition to the simple fact of categorisation and what it means.
From the original email:

…we are proud of who we are and… we want to be recognised as such, not divided into sub-categories and treated as foreigners in our own country

From columnist Frank Haden, the reliable voice of reactionary New Zealand:

We are directed to separate ourselves into mutually exclusive ethnic groups, strengthening divisions that in the national interest should be ignored… There is “New Zealand European”, a brand that does not describe me. It does not describe the others like me who take offence at being so arbitrarily herded into an ideological pen… [Other ethnic categories] are all New Zealanders, but they are asked to identify themselves as aliens, victims of the government’s politically correct obsession with keeping ethnic groups identifiable as mutual strangers.

There’s a lot of meaning that we can unpack out of this. Indulge me…
Firstly, if there are divisions in society, they emerge or are maintained artificially – they are imposed from above, particularly by government.
Secondly, it is moral to remove such divisions in society. Patterned differences are either themselves immoral, or they promote/support/require immoral activity. (‘Moral’ in the large-scale sense of ‘what is right for society’.)
Thirdly, the proper conception of society is a level playing field. To put it a different way, the argument implicitly supports the notion that society should be blind to categories in order to provide the same opportunities to all.
(This is of course a source of deep, passionate political division. The phrase ‘special treatment for Maori’ is a flag for this issue in New Zealand’s political discourse, and it is a well-known political grenade in the U.S. under the moniker ‘affirmative action’.)
Ethnicity as Strategic Identity
I ran into my old Anth prof in Fidels’ yesterday and we chatted over a latte. Not about any of this, but it reminded me of a bunch of stuff from Anth that I take as read now, even though it was quite revelatory to me at the time.
Among these things: the fact that ethnic identity is a strategic concern. We deploy it in different ways in different contexts.
Ethnicity is more or less crucial to us depending on our circumstances, our power, and the way our society conceives of identities to which we could claim membership. It is, to say the least, a problematic concept. I would argue that the ‘write in New Zealander’ thing is in fact a denial of ethnicity – a claim, essentially, that ‘I am not ethnic’. This goes back to the power relations discussed in the previous post.
In my head at least, this swings back around to homeperm’s comment about my misconception of the biological angle – I’m surprised to discover how underplayed it is in public health, considering the increases in genetic science and related improvements in understanding hereditary vulnerability to certain health problems. But I defer to her superior knowledge. 🙂
In any case, she concludes that ethnicity-as-social-construct is of primary use even in something as biologically-oriented as public health. Fair enough. Somehow, I don’t think a broad and diverse ‘New Zealander’ category is going to be very useful though. There’s probably a conclusion or inference to be drawn from this but I can’t see it. Possibly something about the very word ‘ethnicity’ and its fuzzy meaning and, perhaps, its inappropriateness as a category on the census. Hmm.
Sundry Other Bits And Pieces
Jack suggests perceiving ‘New Zealand European’ in the same way as ‘African American’. It’s a smart comment, but I think the word order is crucial here. ‘European New Zealander’ is closer to the mark, and might be a more accepted (hence useful for census) category than ‘New Zealand European’. Worth thinking about anyway.
Kiwi in Zurich points out another suggestion I’ve seen in one or two places – dividing the question up between ‘ancestry’ and ‘identity’. I think that’d be quite effective, actually, and would get better information than one question. However, since ethnic identity by definition relates to ancestry, it’s kinda silly to ask the same question twice, but as Kiwi in Zurich says, “you know how people are when it comes to labels…”
Chuck challenges my comment about the utility of the census being compromised by the ‘New Zealander’ thing. I stand by it. Writing in ‘New Zealander’ dodges the obvious purpose of the question. (It isn’t just white NZers who will have written in ‘New Zealander’, either.)
There’s a bunch of other interesting and salient points by the people I’ve mentioned and by others to which I have nothing to say. I’ll only note that Joey Narcotic is a dangerous man. He has been exploding frogs again, and must be hunted down and mummified immediately in order to preserve the safety of our children. Be warned.