Avuncular American

Hope May Not Be A Plan, But It Sure Beats Fear

You hold the key to love and fear
All in your trembling hand
Just one key unlocks them both
It's there at your command

"Get Together," The Youngbloods, 1967

You can hear it on the great "Forrest Gump" soundtrack, this call for brotherhood that Clear Channel Communications tried to ban after September 11 from its 1,200 radio stations, along with other songs that were "lyrically questionable."

You're probably not going to hear the song at any John McCain - Sarah Palin rallies, where fear is the order of the day.  You know the mood is mean when Senator Arlen Specter, considered a "moderate" Republican, openly touts the Bradley Effect as a McCain secret weapon:

There are a "couple of hidden factors" in this election, said Specter. "The first is that people answer pollsters one way, but in the secrecy of the ballot booth, vote the other way."

As Rebecca Traister says in her "McCain Gets Mean" report from Pennsylvania today in Salon.com, here is Specter "crossing his fingers and hoping for racism."  This is exactly what Europeans fear about Tuesday's election.  I am more concerned about polling place confusion, accidental or planned.

I have been in overdrive the past couple of weeks, helping spread the word on Barack Obama to radio, TV, and press audiences in Brussels.  My wife has, in her words, become an "Obama widow."

Not that Obama needs any help over here: about the only European political parties that are against him are on the racist extreme right.  Today on Belgian TV, socialists and free-marketeers were united in wishing for an Obama victory.  Everyone wants a clean break with the party of George W. Bush.  But in my debate mode, enumerating Obama's and the Democrats' strong points on foreign policy and the economy, I think that I am neglecting the key factor in why his campaign has caught fire. Hope.

"Hope Is Not A Method" is an excellent 1996 "business" book by retired Army Chief of Staff General Gordon Sullivan and Michael Harper.  I fully subscribe to the General's counsel, as would Barack Obama.  But while hope alone will not bring America out of its Hobbsian obsession with fear, it serves as a nice capstone to why the Obama campaign has captured the imagination of America and the world.

I fully expect the McCain - and especially Palin - camp to continue their hammering on the theme of fear, whatever the outcome on Tuesday.  If elected (which I certainly do not wish for), their administration would be a Bush/Cheney fear-fest on steroids.  In opposition, they will feed the right-wing talk radio circuit, now abetted by thousands of internet crazies, busily concocting videos proving that Barack Obama is [fill in the blank for whatever makes people most fearful].  Bill Clinton put up with the crazy fringe for his entire eight years in office.  What he had to endure will probably seem tame compared to the frenzy provoked by the thought of an Obama Administration.

Meanwhile, in the real America that just might elect Barack Obama president, hope will be rekindled.  Hope that America can once again urge countries to respect human rights without fear of ridicule, and without dictators justifying their torture by citing George W. Bush's caveats.  Hope that America's economic well-being will not be jeopardized by Wall Street sharks who take their bonuses and run.  Hope that freedoms won by generations of sacrifice will not be trampled by leaders who divide in order to rule.

Last month in the Washington Post, columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. wrote about the 2008 Presidential campaign in terms of hope and fear.  He reminded us that in 1932, Herbert Hoover tried to "sow fear and panic" about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, just like McCain/Palin are trying to do now with Barack Obama.  If you are wondering how the Depression might have panned out under a re-elected Hoover, check out the McCain Spending Freeze solution.

"You hold the key to love and fear, All in your trembling hand.  Just one key unlocks them both, It's there at your command." The key is a vote for Obama.  A return to Constitutional governance, a 21st century New Green Deal in the wake of a 1929-like meltdown, and an engagement with the world from a vantage point that does not look down the barrel of a gun.  No, he's not the Second Coming.  But he may be the last, best chance in a long while that America has to redeem its good name and to recover its spirit.  No need to be afraid of that.

Two Shores, One Dream: Idir & El Gusto Bridge the Mediterranean

I’m still catching up after weeks in the mountains and on the road, so I’m only now writing about a concert we attended in Lyon on July 6, on our way back from Italy.  Our son treated us to tickets to “Nuit de l’Algérie,” a double bill concert at the city’s open air Roman theater.  And what a treat it was: legendary (it’s overused, but a term that suits) Kabyle (Berber) musician Idir (check out his website - he looks like an Avuncular Algerian), followed by the 40-member chaabi orchestra El Gusto.

The world has just finished paying brief attention to the Mediterranean and its peoples thanks to President Sarkozy’s weekend summit meeting in Paris, but the multicultural crowd in Lyon a week earlier personified a Mediterranean unified with a passion that politicians can only dream of.  On stage and in the audience, Muslim, Jew, Christian, whether Algerian, French, or a stray American – the atmosphere was joyous (El Gusto = “joy,” reflecting the Spanish/Sephardic element in Algeria’s melting pot).

Idir set the stage, and his following is intensely loyal.  Several showed up wrapped in Kabyle and Algerian flags, and it didn’t take long until they were dancing (mostly solo, in the demure folk style of North Africa that has vulgar belly dancing beat by a mile) in the Roman stone aisles.  Idir, who has been a Kabyle Algerian institution for more than thirty years, is a voice for moderation, for inter-religious fraternity, and respect for women.  Indeed, it appeared to us that of the largely Maghrebi-origin audience, women accounted for a hefty majority of Idir’s fans - though very few head scarves were in evidence.

Following the rousing folk-rock-fusion Idir group intro, it was a little odd to shift to the suited and decidedly graying “El Gusto,” which some European writers have nicknamed “the Algerian Buena Vista Social Club.”  Last year Robin Denselow of The Guardian attended an El Gusto concert in Marseille:

Behind the rabbi and the imam was a 42-piece orchestra, composed of Algerian Muslim and Jewish musicians. Some of them had lived together in the country before 1962 - the year of Algerian independence - when some 130,000 Algerian Jews, the vast majority of the community, fled for France, fearing for their future in what was now a Muslim state. It was the end of an era in which Muslim, Jewish, and European musicians had lived and played together in the narrow streets of the Casbah in Algiers, developing a rousing, wildly varied hybrid style - chaabi [literally, "popular"] - that the El Gusto project set out to rediscover.

No rabbi or imam on stage in Lyon, but otherwise an excellent resume of the band’s origins.  Just how "popular" is chaabi?  The concert flyer and website has a picture of three of the musicians practicing in what looks like an Algiers barber shop.

As in “Buena Vista” the Ry Cooder of El Gusto, responsible for bringing these respectable gents together, is a young Irish-Algerian film-maker, Safinez Bousbia.  According to Denselow, Bousbia

was determined to track down surviving musicians from the heyday of chaabi, the 1940s and 50s. Chaabi is a mix of Arabic and north African berber styles, blended with modern French chanson, American boogie and Latin American styles, brought by the American troops stationed in Algeria during the second world war. It's a lively, versatile music suitable for weddings, bars and concert halls alike, and played exclusively by men.

American boogie... that explains the banjos.  I can testify to the influence of American GIs, who landed in Vichy-held Algeria in November 1942: our plumber in Oran, an impressionable boy at the time, years later still remembered chewing bubble gum and repeating '40s pickup lines like “What’s cookin’ chicken?” for the soldiers’ amusement.  For francophone readers, it’s worth watching the video excerpt of Bousbia explaining her first contacts with the elderly musicians, whom she feared tiring out with the first hour and a half long session.  Not to worry: the music went on for close to four hours!  For anglophones, Quidam Productions has a wonderful series of clips from Bousbia's documentary film "El Gusto: The Good Mood."

Actually, we pooped out before the end of the Lyon concert, since the next day was a working day for our son and his girlfriend.  As we climbed down and left the amphitheater, the music followed us as we walked towards the car.  That night in Lyon was a gift, for us of course, but mainly for the young “beur” (French slang for the sons and daughters of Algerian, and also Moroccan and Tunisian, immigrants) fans celebrating these ambassadors of normality from the oft troubled country of their parents or grandparents.  I suspect that the audience, like some of the chaabi old timers, included a certain number of pieds noirs and their descendants, from the community of Europeans who left Algeria in 1962.  Algeria has a way of going to your head, and staying there, as Alistair Horne noted in his everlasting work on the Algerian war of independence, A Savage War of Peace - "l’Algérie, ça monte à la tête."

“Deux Rives, Un Rêve” (Two Shores, One Dream) is the title of Idir’s album that we picked up before the concert.  That’s exactly what was happening last week in Lyon.

3MA - Three Sons of Africa

(photo source: Contre Jour)

As I write this, my newly-acquired "3MA" CD is playing in the background.  Last night we went to their concert in Brussels, and it was pure joy.  This marriage of oud (by Moroccan Driss El Maloumi), kora (Ballake Sissoko, from Mali), and valiha (Rajery, playing the bamboo zither of Madagascar) is "world music" of a natural classicism.  Played at the Flagey auditorium - the acoustically updated and wonderfully art deco original home of RTBF, francophone Belgium's broadcaster - "3MA" was a surefire crowd-pleaser.  And we have some particularly bright cultural diplomats to thank for introducing them outside of Africa.

Each of the three musicians is a "star" in his own right.   Rajery, the wiry Malgache with a golden voice to boot, is a self-taught musician who was trained as an accountant.  Too bad for the green-eye-shade crowd, but lucky for music lovers, Rajery has devoted himself to the valiha.  He started a 23-member orchestra for the instrument, a national festival in its honor, and has founded a music school for street children.  He's made four albums.  Oh yes - and he has only one hand.

Driss El Maloumi, the oud player, has a following of his own, and has collaborated with Catalan ancient music virtuoso Jordi Saval and Hesperion XXI, as well as other international artists from Francoise Atlan to Iran's Keyvan Chemirani.  Driss is the anchor of the trio, and something of a wit and a poet.  He leads an amusing scat piece the group calls "African Political Speeches," which is equally effective as political satire: "plenty of dissonance, and lots of false notes."

Mali's Ballake Sissoko hails from a musical griot family, and his father co-founded the Ensemble Instrumental du Mali.  Sissoko's evocation of his daughter, Kadiatou, is a perfect vehicle for the versatile kora, essentially a massive gourd with 21 strings.

This joyous amalgam of music from three corners of Africa is the fruit of a somewhat chance encounter at the Timitar Festival in Agadir Morocco in 2006.  Three French cultural center directors - in the respective capitals of the three musicians - helped nurture what would come to be called 3MA: Mali, Madagascar, Maroc.  Belgian producer Michel De Bock, of the label Contre-Jour, worries a little about the MA of Maroc not fitting into "the anglo saxon, where it's Morocco...  But once they hear the album or see a concert, they'll be sure to fall for them."

I certainly hope so, though a quick look at 3MA's tour schedule doesn't show any anglophone countries (though they have already played at several venues in anglophone Africa) in the near future.  And as a former diplomat who sometimes dabbled in cultural diplomacy, hats off to the French Cultural Centers of Bamako, Agadir, and Antananarivo for introducing us to this fusion of African music (the Ford Foundation has assisted through "Art Moves Africa").

Odes to Africa on BBC World Service Radio

I'm listening to it now, and I hope you will too.  BBC World Service radio, that lifeline from London to the world, has its "Close Up" program on its website, and you can listen to it on their Radio Player.

On the East African island of Zanzibar, the lyrics of local Taarab songs are used not just for entertainment but to convey pungent messages of longing, rivalry and loss between the members of the audience. This goes back to a time when open expression of personal emotion was taboo in this traditional Islamic society.  Close Up this week explores the course of love in Zanzibar through this vibrant local tradition, in the first of a 3-part series of Songs of the Earth. Local men and women speak frankly about their relationships, from infatuation to disenchantment, from respectful love to outrage, when a wife discovers that her husband wishes to bring another wife into the household.

Here you will hear the lilting English of Zanzibaris who came of age in the days of independence (and fusion with mainland Tanganyika, forming Tanzania) in the sixties.  The Taarab music provides a haunting backdrop.  Just listening to this wonderful little bit of radio should help provide an antidote to the pervasive tendency to portray Africa in the abstract as a continent of misery, only surfacing in the media when a disaster (usually man-made) strikes.

While you're at it, another BBC World Service staple, "From Our Own Correspondent," gives journalists a chance to report on the atmospherics and "backstory" of the places they cover.  This week's is also devoted to Africa, and again provides some gems on little-heard stories.  In "No Guns at Ethiopian Peace Talks," East Africa correspondent Elizabeth Blunt recounts how "the tribes of the South Omo Valley in Ethiopia recently held a gathering to discuss shared concerns and invited their neighbours from the Kenyan and Sudan borders."

In a continent as massive and varied as Africa, there have to be scores of stories that show something other than dying children - and child soldiers - but don't count on soundbite journalism to tell you.  But the BBC is a good place to start seeing Africa in a different light.

Guilty on Arrival: DHS Agent Asks "What's UNESCO?"

In its quest to win hearts and minds in the Arab world, the administration has hired no less than three high powered Undersecretaries of State for Public Diplomacy; Karen Hughes, the latest to declare victory and go home (obviously she hadn't paid attention to this advice from former US diplomat John Brown); her predecessor Margaret Tutwiler, a retread from the George H.W. Bush White House who left in frustration after five months; and Charlotte Beers ("the most powerful woman in advertising"), brought in from Madison Avenue to revamp the US image before it went down the tubes in "Mission Accomplished."

But read this account of the recent US tour of legendary Lebanese composer and musician Marcel Khalife and you'll get an inkling of why all the high-priced PR people in the world cannot help the US deal with the Arab world.  Khalife describes his arrival experience:

At the end of the interview [see below*] with the immigration officer (naturally, this was not the first time; anywhere I landed, I had the same conversation), I had a CD and I gave them a copy and I told him I would like to give you this as a gift so that you’ll know I am just an artist and musician. He was surprised I gave him a CD. I told him at the same time, I'm the UNESCO Artist for Peace. And he said, what does UNESCO mean?  This happened here in New York. I told him this was a UN organization for culture.

The lucky but clueless Immigration officer (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of DHS) had just received an album from the "Bob Dylan of Arab music," (which probably understates his talent) and UNESCO, of course, is the UN's Educational and Scientific Organization.

My point here is not to excoriate some hapless immigration official in a chaotic JFK arrival hall.  No, my point is that Marcel Khalife, on his way to concerts throughout the United States in this time of American travails with the Arab world ("why do they hate us?") -- and in the week before the Annapolis conference -- misses an opportunity to win points through its welcome (or lack thereof) to one of the most influential artists in the secular Arab world.  I stress secular, since Khalife has been attacked by extremists in Bahrain and elsewhere, who once objected to his presentation of an ancient Arab love story.

In other hands, in a different age, the US might have handled this differently.  The US Information Agency, which former Senator Jesse Helms succeeded in dismantling and handing over to the State Department, might have organized a US tour for Khalife.  It would have ensured a smooth arrival in the US, and would have given his American tour prominent coverage on the Arabic service of VOA.  Instead

*Once I come to the airport, you feel a certain difference in treatment, in the negative, not positive sense. Once our names are checked in the computer, the computer reacts unnaturally. They isolate us inside rooms and questions are asked which have to do with our very humanity.  ... the identity that you have become grounds for accusation.

When I was a young vice consul at American embassies, I quickly learned that foreign visa applicants had no Constitutional right to a US tourist visa.  In fact, the burden of proof is on the applicant.  There is an assumption of ineligibility, if not "guilt" per se.   But  Khalife had already been through the visa process, and in fact had been to the US before (I remember hearing him on NPR a couple of years ago).  Does "traveling while Arab" mean that humiliation is de rigueur at every "checkpoint" - even after you've been approved?

I think Khalife has probably left the US by now, and is presumably back in Lebanon.  Maybe the State Department should task its cultural attache in Beirut to organize a little gesture - a dinner invitation? a concert? a travel grant?- to make amends to Marcel Khalife.  It could go a long way.