Saturday's NYT led its Web edition with news from Iran that a group of Shi'ite clerics and scholars had broken with the political leadership and challenged the legitimacy of the elections and of the president. This was, of course, also in direct defiance of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Read the Times story here.

This is an important development. I discussed the deep fissures in Iran's clerical caste in an earlier post.

And yet I can't help but think that the Times, and other leading outlets who also carried the news, are still driven by a narrative of an imminent and radical reshuffling of Iran's Islamic political system if not an outright revolution. At its core, this narrative rests on a deeper discourse of Islam and politics: that the Muslim faith and principles of democracy are inherently at odds. This discourse, then, makes it impossible to consider other outcomes for contemporary Iran that involve neither the continuation of the status quo nor outright overthrow of the Islamic Republic.

Early coverage of the crisis reflected this, as well, when reports of election fraud were eagerly echoed by commentators, politicians, and the media well before we had any real information. We still have little data, although the opposition has now laid out its case in some detail. My own guess -- and it is a guess because that's all we can do at this stage -- is that the vote was close and supporters of Ahmadinejad panicked at the thought of a run-off contest at a time when Moussavi seemed to be gaining support by the day. The result is the current political mess.

Of course, the actual mechanics of the disputed election are not that important, simply because the real fight was never over "free and fair elections" but over who gets to exercise power in an Islamic republic and what an Islamic republic really is. That battle will not be fought out in the streets. Nor will it be settled at the ballot box. As with the latest development, it will center on the Shi'ite clerics and their millions of lay followers. Ultimately, it will require the unfolding of a drama introduced by the 1979 Revolution and still unresolved to this day.

Rather than talk about a wished-for "Green Revolution," the Western media and the politicians would do better to step back, take a breath, and wait to see just what is going on with this "Unfinished Revolution."

For the most part, Obama's instincts seem to be dictating just such a course, and he should listen to his gut and ignore the echo chamber calling for yet more U.S. intervention in Iran's domestic affairs.

Some tidbits from the weekend, spent circulating among the presentations, talks, and 'conversations':

Being Frank Gehry means never having to say you're sorry. Gehry took exception to a challenging question from the audience, and so he dismissed the speaker. More important, he explained his no-holds-barred approach to designing 'iconic' buildings of our time. Seems Disney Hall only got its metal casing after the success of the Guggenheim in Bilbao.

Jason Clay, of WWF: Making one commerical latte at a chain coffee shop requires 200 liters or water.

Grass-fed beef produces a larger carbon footprint than beef raised on corn in feedlots. Transportation represents a tiny share of the carbon cost of food. TESCO found that by creating smaller, local shops to encourage walk-ins, people consumed more total energy to fuel their walk than had they driven by car.

READING FACTS: Adults who read regularly are twice as likely to be fit, to vote, to take part in charity and other civic events than their non-reading counterparts. "Mother-ese," that sing-song tone used to address infants in virtually all cultures promotes language acquisition in the very young.

And, from my own talk, "What the West Doesn't 'Get' About Islam," some unfortunate but perhaps inevitable confusion in the audience between medieval Islamic science and philosophy and "terrorism."

So all those little "apps" that make modern life livable carry a hidden price in data dispersal and data tracking of our tastes, whereabouts, finances, love lives, etc. Who knew? Actually, we all know; most of us just choose to look the other way.

Yale law professor Jack Balkin calls this "information myopia," a disorder characterized by the trade-offs we make as we interact with the virtual world (those user agreements we tick when new programs load) and acerbated by generational change (younger people have different standards of self-interest and self-preservation than their elders).

At the same time, the 'net and its off-shoots impose the "death of amnesia." Nothing is ever thrown away, allowed to die, or is otherwise forgotten. Indiscreet photos on Facebook? They'll live forever. Late-night rants on Myspace? Same thing.

In fact, it costs providers more to purge their data stores, kept in multiple copies on redundant servers worldwide, than it does do archive them forever. Besides, says former Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, there is no one advocating for any such protections.

Of course, collection of data -- point-of-sale, GPS info, credit reports -- is just one part of the new "surveillance society." Far more important is the collation of this data and any subsequent analysis and the production of new information based on those two processes.

I tried to ask a question but we ran out of time: Has collation, or for that matter analysis, really kept pace with advances in collection? I doubt it. This is always the hard part. Anyone can snoop on another but putting it together, connecting the dots as they say, has been notoriously difficult throughout human history. This holds drew well before the so-called Information Revolution.

Remember the Korean War? US intelligence knew the Chinese were stockpiling penicillin. But no one guessed it was a precautionary prelude to war. Oooooops.

This year's festival, already underway, features an array of topics and discussions its organizers hope will trickle down from the elite company here in this mountain resort to the rest of society. They call these "ideas that work."

I just got in a few hours ago but already the lay of this intellectual landscape is emerging. Official info here.

It's a mix of usual suspects (James Baker, the UK ambassador, the NYT's David Brooks and Tom Friedman, Alan Greenspan, etc) and innovative and creative voices we rarely see in the mainstream media or run across in our real or virtual lives. I feel confident I'll fit nicely in that latter category when I speak on Saturday about Islam, Science and the West. More importantly -- why the West just can't "get" Islam.

Concurrent themes include the Middle East; Managing Planet Earth; Arts and Culture; Life in America... So far, I've managed to line up a few interesting talks to attend. Here a few samples:
-- How to Learn and Teach in the Digital Age
-- Your Life in Surveillance America
-- Darwin Among the Machines
-- In Conversation with Frank Gehry
-- Stumbling on Happiness

Let's see if these ideas "work", or merely reverberate in the echo chamber.

One final note: the fest relies on lotsa corporate dollars. You can test drive a new Mercedes hybrid sedan, for example. My old employer, now Thomson Reuters, thoughtfully provided sun screen, 30 factor.

Things in the Islamic Republic of Iran have a lot of moving parts, yet Western pundits and the media, as well as the politicians, can't seem to wait to pronounce on what some have called the Green Revolution. This is absurd. We are witnessing instead a deadly serious struggle within the power elite, chiefly the "political mullahs" and their lay allies. This leaves out whole swathes of the Iran populace, who are so far little more than by-standers.

In this context, it is worth asking why Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei did not address today's Friday prayers in Tehran and instead left it to a hard-line surrogate. I suspect his grip on power is far from certain, although he may still pull through in some fashion. Remember, Khamenei has never been respected by the clerical heavyweights, who see him as little more than a classic pol.

Here are some recent thoughts on the clerical power struggle, care of Juan Cole's "Informed Comment" blog:


Lyons: Khamenei's Past Power Play against the Clerics May Weaken him Now in Confronting the Reformers

Jonathan Lyons writes in a guest op-ed for IC:

As the latest political drama unfolds in Iran, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei may yet come to rue the day, in 1999, that he sought to muzzle one of the nation’s most important constituencies – the handful of most senior clerics who provide spiritual and personal guidance to millions of pious Shi’ites. The attention of the world is rivetted by events in the streets of Tehran, Shiraz, and other urban centers, but much of the real battle is taking place, unseen and unremarked, in the seminaries, popular shrines, teaching circles, and extended clerical households that make up the holy Shi’ite city of Qom.

Here, some of the Shi’ite world’s most senior theologians, the marja-e taqlid, or sources of religious-legal authority for the laity, zealously guard their independence from a state that claims to act in the name of Islam. These grand ayatollahs and their legions of aides collect religious taxes from individual believers worldwide, and then use these funds to run seminaries, carry out good works, oversee global media operations, propagate their views, and provide their networks of followers with religious rulings to guide their daily lives.

Read the rest here.

If Michel Foucault had written about the Delta Blues -- minus the philosophizing, of course -- the result might have looked a lot like Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues.

Wald offers a captivating picture of the men and women who sang the various musical forms commonly grouped under the heading of "Blues." More significantly, he demonstrates how language, the musical and commercial categories, and the very idea of the blues are all products of what Foucault would have called an episteme -- in this case one created by mostly-white, urban folklorists, collectors, and writers.

Musical tastes and repertoires were wide and varied among the black southern musicians associated with the early blues and later with the blues revival of 1960s and 1970s. Many, Wald shows convincingly, were equally if not more at home with styles ranging from ragtime to country, from vaudeville to Broadway show tunes.

Yet all the white record producers, archivists, academics, and collectors wanted to find, record, and categorize was an "authentic" blues that fit their idea of the art form -- one that drew on the undisputed hard times black folk faced in the Mississippi Delta and rested on a base of African song tradition, spirituals, field hollers, and chain-gang chants.

Wald loves the so-called "deep" blues from the 1920s and '30s but he is savvy enough to recognize that the rules of knowledge production about this art form have left us with a very different notion of the blues than that shared by its early practitioners and its original audience.

You can check it at your library, or order a copy here.

Decades ago, Joe McInniss shocked many with his revealing account of how in presidential candidate Richard Nixon was successfully marketed like soap or razor blades by the men on MADison Avenue. His The Selling of the President was an instant sensation -- a dirty, guilty pleasure of commercialism run rampant. It all seemed so deliciously tawdry.

So what are these same Mad Men, or their heirs, up to these days? Judging by the campaign that is now blanketing Washington, today they are selling products like candidates.

In fact, it is hard to tell the new Pepsi billboard from an Obama campaign banner. Obama-esque O's adorn our fair city, calling out messages of "hOpe" and "Optimism". Medium and message have converged into one seamless field of 24/7 salesmanship -- confirmation, if any were needed, of just how hopelessly intermingled our political and marketing discourses have become.

This appeared originally as a Guest Op-ed on Juan Cole's "Informed Comment" blog, on January 26, 2009

With the change of administration in Washington, the time has come to acknowledge the so-called war on terrorism for what it truly is: the latest reminder of the West’s enduring failure to engage in any meaningful way with the world of Islam. For almost 1,000 years, attempts at understanding have been held hostage to a grand Western narrative that shapes what can – and, more importantly, what cannot – be said about Islam and Muslims. This same narrative, an anti-Islam discourse of enduring power, dominates every aspect of the way we think, and write, and speak about Islam. It shapes how we listen to what they say and interpret what it is they do. As such, it exercises a corrosive effect on everything from politics, the history of ideas, and theology to international relations, human rights, and national security policies.

Click here to read the rest, at Juan's blog.

A recent NYT story headlined, "In Madoff Scandal, Jews Feel an Acute Betrayal," prompted a few musing on the persistent notion of Jewish particularism. Only here, neither the Times correspondent and editors, nor the rabbis quoted, got the joke.

Setting aside the broader theological and sociological premises that underpin the entire story, which strike me as dubious at best, the scandal is perhaps most notable for the fact that Bernie Madoff is alleged to have preyed on this very notion of Jewish particularism to lure his victims into the scheme and then to have kept them there in the face of any doubts.

In other words, it was Madoff's knack for creating in his 'clients' -- the overwhelming number of whom, we are told, were Jewish -- the notion that they were in fact special -- 'chosen,' to use the appropriate term of art -- and thus deserved the good fortune that he was bestowing upon them.

This was Madoff's true brilliance, for the scheme itself was incredibly simple in structure even if it was mindbogglingly large in scale and -- dare I say -- in chutzpah.

The storyline of the September 11, 2001, attacks on America refuses to die. The horrific events of that day more than seven years ago have since been packaged and repackaged to shape and justify a series of government policies and extraordinary administrative, judicial, and extra-judicial responses. It was, our leaders told us, a day on which “everything changed” and it set in motion a “war on terrorism” that, we were also told, has no foreseeable end.

The political and intellectual marketing of this neat little package – the fingerprints of Madison Avenue are all over the emergence of the global “9/11” brand – stripped away any real possibility that the events surrounding the attacks might be appropriate topics among the citizenry for discussion, analysis, and thought. Instead, politicians promised to keep us safe; all we had to do was shut up and let them get on with it.

The military and police apparatus eagerly stepped into fill the void in our sense of national well-being and security. This latter phenomenon was underscored recently when Clintonistas now on the Obama transition team admitted they were overwhelmed by the size attained by the national security complex during their eight-year absence from the White House. Yet, the world is no safer today than it was seven years ago – far from it.

Now this depressingly familiar tale has returned to haunt us once again in the Mumbai attacks, immediately framed by the media as “India’s 9/11.” India’s commercial elite, long cocooned by wealth and privilege, is seeking the same bargain: keep us safe at any cost, even at the cost of democratic rights.

Nor is there any sign of reflection or soul-searching on the part of the majority Hindu society toward its (very) large Muslim minority. In this way, India’s 9/11 has followed the narrative already laid down in our own: an open, democratic, freedom-loving nation attacked solely out of hatred for openness, democracy, and freedom. The headline in an op-ed in the NYT sums it up neatly: “They Hate US – and India is Us.”

There are two problems here. First, is India really “Us”? And, if it is, should it follow the same unproductive path that we have trod these last seven years? Clearly, the answer on both scores should be, no.

Incredible as it may seem, when I read the second page of this op-ed on Dec. 9, it featured an advertisement for “Slum Dog Millionaire,” what passes these days for a feel-good film. Celeb film critic Richard Corliss of Time Magazine calls it, “a movie to celebrate,” while his colleague Roger Ebert says, “a triumph.”

But the more astute viewer will note somewhat bitterly that this rags-to-riches plot line of a Muslim tea wallah who strikes it rich on India’s own “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” and gets the girl is propelled by the outrage of Hindu pogroms against poor, disenfranchised Muslim citizens. In fact, just about every answer the hero comes up with on his march to millions is generated by his bitter life experience in an India that doesn’t want him.

I may not be a famous movie critic, but clearly there is no cause for celebration there.