In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran

Christopher de Bellaigue is a British journalist who lives in Tehran (or did at the time he wrote In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs, in the early 2000s) with his Iranian wife and son. He is then, well-positioned to think and write about Iranian culture and society for a western audience, but with an insider's nuance.

What de Bellaigue does best is modern Iran: the traffic; the nuances of buying a car, and why new rarely trumps used; the contradictions. If he had written an entire book on the Iran of today (or 2002, say), the entire work would have been a joy. He writes, as one would expect of an author whose byline has appeared in such stalwarts of the Western press as The Economist and the New Yorker, beautifully, using short, snappy prose to bring emphasis, irony, or humor as needed. That said, a reader can only remember/differentiate so many mullahs, so many generals, so many wounded veterans of the Iran-Iraq war. To say I was bogged down in the politics is an understatement, and quickly I learned to skim passages on the competing ideologies that led to or stemmed from the Revolution.

While Iran's relationship with the world today is largely defined by its standoff with the U.S. (and on which side of that standoff others nations choose to align themselves), de Bellaigue deftly raises the issue of the collective West's long history of meddling in the Middle East (see: Hero), writing, "Two centuries of semi-colonization sometimes seem worse than unambiguous colonization; at least the unambiguously colonized got railways and sewers and unambiguous independence."

The Iran-Iraq war looming as it does over so much and so many in Iran and the larger Middle East, de Bellaigue also plucks at the threads of U.S. involvement, not least the Iran-Contra affair. That U.S. arms - to both sides - increased the firepower and made the bloodletting that much greater is clear, only reinforcing one of the central tenet's from Notes on a Foreign Country: U.S. decisions directly impact the lives of those in other countries on a regular basis, in a way that is difficult for Americans to appreciate. (Although the global experienced with Covid-19 may offer a taste.)

The most telling exchange occurred toward the end of the book, as de Bellaigue is discussing the present and future of Iran with one of the few Iranians he considers a friend, Mr. Zarif. In thinking about the state of the country, Zarif draws a corollary with the state of the Iranian-made Paykan, the butt of more than one joke throughout the book (and country, it seems). Zarif says, "When I get into my Paykan and it lurches and coughs, I think to myself that the men who made it aren't well enough trained or paid, and that they have bad equipment and are badly managed and didn't sleep well last night. ... On the few occasions that I've been in a Mercedes and been astonished by its mechanical perfection, don't you think I've asked myself if the men who built this car are better off?"

Food for thought.

Four stars. 

American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant

 American Ulysses, you're bringing me down.

In fact, after waiting eons to read this book, I'm not going to finish it. Oh, Ronald C. White writes well enough, but he's never met a fact he didn't like and as a result American Ulysses is swollen until any sense of story is lost in the mists of a veritable dissertation. (One example, just one, from a description of weaponry in the Mexican War: "His special weapons this day were a pair of eighteen-pound cannon, heretofore used only for defense because their massive weight made it so difficult to haul them into battle. ...each cannon pulled by six yoked oxen across seven miles of open prairie...they employed canister, a tin can filled with up to twenty-seven lead balls stuffed in sawdust...they possessed a range of up to three hundred yards" (p. 73). By the time I've gotten to the range, I've nearly forgotten how we got there. Or why. And so it goes for many hundreds of pages.)

In addition to being a tome, bloated by excessive adjectives and extraneous facts, American Ulysses is a tad too worshipful for my taste. I'm not suggesting Grant wasn't admirable, but from White's descriptions - and I was deep into the Civil War before I gave up the ghost - it appears Grant can do no wrong. For example, White seems to completely dismiss the idea that Grant drank any more than any other soldier or officer in the Army. Maybe White's right, but given that none other than Sherman felt the need to comment upon his drinking - "Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other" - White's dismissal strikes me as disingenuous at best. (And if White included that telling little quote, he did so after I'd closed the book for the final time.)

I left off reading somewhere in the realm of Vicksburg, and therefore certainly before Grant's presidency. Admittedly, I was mildly curious as to what defenses White would presumably offer for the corruption and cronyism that are generally accepted to have been widespread during Grant's second term, in particular, though not curious enough to tackle the next 400 pages.

I did, however, read the epilogue, and I have to say, given White's hero worship of Grant, it's somewhat surprising that he concludes his work not with his own soaring assessment, but with the words of Theodore Roosevelt who "surveyed the landscape of American history and made his judgment: Mightiest among the mighty dead loom the three great figures of Washington, Lincoln, and Grant," (p. 659). I find this decision all the more intriguing in that White chooses to continue with Roosevelt's second rank, which includes Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Andrew Jackson. The times they were a different then, but that anyone would rank Andrew Jackson so highly must call into question his overall judgment. (I've previously called into question TR's judgment, though, as I take the thoughts of America's greatest imperialist with more than just a grain of salt.)

Most surprising of all, White adds a concluding sentence or two following TR's thoughts that he has seized the opportunity to make Grant's story "accessible to the wider audience he deserves." Maybe he deserves it, maybe not, but the audience that will sit - and sift - through 650+ densely packed pages is not exactly wide. Or at least, I'm not an avid enough reader, non-fiction nerd, or history buff to appreciate it.

The Rent Collector

Ki Lim and Sang Ly live in Cambodia's largest dump, Stung Meanchey, where their daily aspiration is to earn enough for a few bites of pork and vegetables to accompany the nightly rice. Their great dream is for their chronically-ill young son, Nisay, to become healthy. Through an improbable turn of events (more on that in a minute), Sang Ly learns to read from the perpetually drunk and equally bitter - and embittered - old woman, Sopeap, who comes each month demanding rent money for their canvas-walled shack. Known to the tenants as the Rent Collector, Sang Ly susses out one of Sopeap's most closely held secrets, changing the course of both of their lives.

Camron Wright's story is so treacly that had I not been reading for work, I never would have finished. And while the writing itself is not bad, there's simply nothing to recommend it on that basis alone. I felt uneasy as I read, thinking that, compared to a work like Twilight in Djakarta or And the Rain My Drink, it lacks authenticity and voice. Moreover, while I could, at the most basic of levels, understand the author's decision to construct a story around a quest for literacy, the circumstances render this so unlikely as to interfere with the story itself. That is, the best fiction doesn't *feel* like fiction, but Wright's story is so improbable that the reader can never leave the realm of *reading* the story and simply *feel* it.

It wasn't until I came to the acknowledgments, though, that I was able to put my finger on exactly what bothered me throughout. The acknowledgments begin with Wright sincerely thanking "The many great writers of classical literature whose work I've referenced or quoted in The Rent Collector. In a handful of cases...I've modified their original work. There is a reasonable chance that all are horrified, but their work is in the public domain, and, of course, they are dead and I'm not." The arrogance! And then it hits me: this is what has left me so uneasy. The entire book is rotten with it, and now that I've identified my chief gripe, I can't let it go.

(I double down on this assessment when I look up Wright's author bio on Amazon and read "Camron Wright...has a master's degree in Writing and Public Relations from Westminster College. He has owned several successful retail stores in addition to working with his wife in the fashion industry, designing for the McCall Pattern Company in New York. Camron began writing to get out of attending MBA school at the time, and it proved the better decision." Now this has become personal. I'm sure he think he's merely cutesy - ha! these authors are dead; I'm not! - but plugging fashion design in his author bio? Really? And he began writing to "get out of attending MBA school?" This is a point of pride for him? Deep breaths, Sarah, deep breaths.)

Mostly, though, and this very much falls into the category of not-my-business, I'm most bothered that this is the book EMBA students were assigned prior to traveling to Cambodia and Vietnam in 2018. I see no value - historically or culturally, nor of the story itself. Frankly, Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy would have been more appropriate in providing context for students around the choices to be made vis-a-vis trading one type of hard life for another one; if historical context is what the faculty wanted, The Elimination (Cambodia) or The Sorrow of War (Vietnam) would have been far better choices, imHo.

Suffice it to say, I do not recommend this book, nor can I think of any circumstance under which I would assign it. The end.

The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

My last encounter with David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea, left me wanting more of his magical prose, those words that ebb and flow as surely as the tides. I would probably read a treatise on sheep farming if Whyte wrote it; after all, the closing paragraphs of Crossing the Sea - the "loves and affections [that] cannot be held in some limbo inside us...[that] have set off on a voyage from far inside us to find their homes in the clear light of day" (p. 244) - are still ringing in my ears many weeks later. If The Three Marriages does not quite live up to Crossing the Sea, it's only because Whyte set such a high bar.

He begins the book with an anecdote of being at sea prior to an important talk, not in the literal sense, but the figurative one, and search as he might, an appropriate topic would not come. We've all been there in some form or another, though few have the chops to spin it into 300 pages, and certainly not with the lyricism or the imagery that Whyte so consistently offers. Who but Whyte might look at all of mankind and offer the following observation: "By definition, all of us, living at this time are descended from a long line of survivors who lived through the difficulties of history and prehistory; most of whom had to do a great deal of work to keep the wolf, the cold and the neighboring tribe from the door" (p. 23)? I want such thoughts flittering and floating through my mind, please and thank you.

Admittedly, the first two or three score pages are somewhat uneven. Whyte is fonder of his poetry in this work than in Sea, and the inclusion of poetry in the midst of such prose lends the first part of the book an uneven tone. Even when it's not entirely my cup of tea, though, it's difficult to find fault with Whyte: the liberal helping of Dante and Austen, Stevenson and Homer, those I've read and those I've jotted down for future reading, turns The Three Marriages into a book lovers treasure hunt. (I especially loved the collection of "marriage warnings" halfway though, one of which literally caused me to LOL, its truth so bitterly on-point. The truth comes hard and fast in The Three Marriages, but it's possible that only The Nantucket Girl's Song vies with said advice to Fanny in pithiness.)

Not only does Whyte incorporate the works of the likes of Austen and Stevenson, but he uses their life stories to further his own arguments about marriage - to a life's work, as well as to another being. Alone among those with whom I have ever discussed Austen, I do not like her work. More to Whyte's credit, then, that I so enjoyed his incorporation and analysis of her writing into the larger whole.

And when he writes of work, real work, of the work we do when we find we made a certain way and bring into it our best versions of ourselves, there too, does Whyte convey with words the images we might have glimpsed briefly but lacked the linguistic vibrancy to put into real thought. Who, after all, doesn't want to work in the office that is "a magic island of constant busyness where all of [one's] colleagues...mov[e] hyponotically from fax to printer to filing cabinet to meeting, like an elaborate court dance" (p. 115)? And who cannot relate to the reality that "most work is done in the midst of a host of other clamoring, crowding priorities? The great swaying underground carriage of life" (p. 273)?

Whyte certainly is not in need of bonus points, from me or anyone else, but his introduction of Pema Chodron was certainly icing on the cake for me; in some regards, Whyte explains the who and what of Chodron better than she herself does. If I hadn't already read my way through so much of her writing, I would be now. Just as he wove Stevenson and Austen into two of the marriages, so to does Chodron get her turn, through the marriage with the self, as well as that of work. It is in thinking about Chodron that Whyte offers the powerful observation that "freedom comes through a persistent, all-encompassing tenacity" (p. 229).

As I lost myself in the last chapter of The Three Marriages - in which Whyte and a terrified yak herder set out through an honest to goodness quagmire at dark to search for a lost member of a trekking party - I realized that even beyond Whyte's lyricism, his storytelling is so far beyond that of most authors that he really could write a guide to farming that I would want to read now and in the future.

All of that said, my favorite part would still have to be Whyte's observation of work-work: "In building a work life, people who follow rules, written or unwritten, too closely and in an unimaginative way are often suffocated by those same rules and die by them, quite often unnoticed and very often unmourned" (p. 139). Truth.

The Elimination: A Survivor of the Khmer Rouge Confronts His Past and the Commandant of the Killing Fields

In high school, my favorite teacher was a former journalist. It was she, I see now, who first taught me the trick of assigning popular press books in lieu of textbooks. With her, we read and dissected Kaffir Boy, Warriors Don't Cry, The Diary of Zlata Filipovic, The Diary of Anne Frank. War and apartheid and genocide were Lisa Walker's currency and so it is no surprise that her world civilizations course focused on the worst of humanity, from the obvious (Hitler and the Jews; Stalin and the Ukrainians) to the contemporary (Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda; Bosnians and Croats and Serbs in the former Yugoslav states) to Armenia and, yes, the Khmer Rouge. Ms. Walker - unabashedly and unapologetically liberal Ms. Walker - was determined we would learn the ins and outs of worst regimes to have ruled in modern times. 

So, I thought I knew something of Pol Pot and his KR cronies, but it turned out this was only the tip of the iceberg, for I was aware of the genocidal aspect of the regime, but nothing else. What else? The emptying of the cities - all cities; the elimination of all forms of currency, such that barter became the only means of procuring what little goods might be had; changing the name of the country - hell, changing the names of pronouns; shutting down the education system; forbidding marriage by choice/for love and assigning spouses...and then monitoring their sexual relations; instituting a national haircut.  

As Panh writes, "the Khmer Rouge wanted to mold and shape everything: bodies, words, society, landscape" (p. 142). An official slogan of the regime: "Personal feelings are not allowed." They were, in short, not only cruel, but crazy. And then there was the famine. If it wasn't as devastating in raw numbers as the Holodomor, that's only because the actual population of Ukraine was so much larger than that of Cambodia, for ultimately roughly one out of every three Cambodians perished under the heel of the KR.  

Rithy Panh lived all of this. The son of a renowned government minister, his family was evacuated from Phnom Penh and declared new people, set to work - like all Cambodians - digging canals, building dikes, diverting rivers. As Panh notes, "Democratic Kampuchea became a worksite. ... The worksite, it appeared, was in fact a labor camp" (p. 64). And when a population becomes no more than forced labor, those who force the labor no longer view them as human.  

Human right didn't exist. This statement, poignant in its directness, comes directly from Comrade Duch, former commander of Tuol Sleng, or S-21, one of the country's most notorious prisons, a place where torture was the order of the day, and from which only a dozen prisoners left alive. Now, decades later, Duch is himself under interrogation by Panh, the child-turned-laborer-turned-refugee-turned award-winning film director. "Mr. Rithy, the Khmer Rouge were all about elimination. Human rights didn't exist" (p. 73). Another official slogan of the KR: If you don't work hard enough, the Angkar will transform you into fertilizer for the rice fields" (p. 170). This wasn't hyperbole. (The Angkar or "Organization" was how the Communist Party of Kampuchea referred to itself from 1975-77.) 

Panh, whose Elimination, like a film, pans back and forth between his life in Paris, his interviews with Duch, his memories of labor and starvation and fear, conveys the horrors of the time through his concise use of language. For example, in describing the death toll inflicted by the KR - 1.7 million - he notes that this total was reached "without the means of mass extermination," (p. 110), a notable distinction as compared to the ovens of the Germans or the guns of the Hutus.  

It's only fair to ask: how does this happen? While any meaningful explanation is far beyond the scope of this brief summary, Panh provides a clue when he mentions the gap between the cities and the countryside - between the peasants and the professional class. That gap, Panh notes, was immense - and "that injustice was the ground on which the Khmer Rouge prospered" (p. 67). I'll not take the trouble of drawing parallels between the ideologies prospering in certain countries today and the vast and growing gaps - in income, education, wealth, and culture - between segments of society therein. 

Panh reserves some of his harshest words - outside of those for Duch, Pol Pot, and the rest of the KR apparatus - for Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman. In their 1980 book on the situation in Cambodia, After the Cataclysm, they wrote "it became virtually a matter of dogma in the West that the regime was the very incarnation of evil...how the 'nine men at the center' were able to achieve this feat or why they chose to pursue the strange course of 'autogenocide' were questions that were rarely pursued" (quoted by Panh, p. 234).  

Panh's anger and revulsion is understandable, but I believe so too is Chomsky and Herman's bafflement (and that of Alain Badiou, whose work in Le Monde comes in for scorn a page earlier). This idea of 'autogenocide' is so intellectually challenging because throughout history, genocide, though literally meaning "only" the act of killing a race or people, has effectively meant the act of killing an other race or people. The Jews. The Ukrainians. The Armenians. The Tutsis. The Bosnians. In all cases, they were targeted for their religion, their race, their ethnicity: their otherness. The KR killed their own people, though, and did so indiscriminately and without distinction, on a scale that is difficult to imagine, even today. 

As I was finishing The Elimination, Comrade Duch was dying. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53994189 One imagines Panh would agree with the woman quoted by the BBC, "He deserves to serve more prison terms." I'm less certain he would agree with her final words: "But now he has died, I can forgive him."

Just So: Money, Materialism, and the Ineffable, Intelligent Universe

From the time I was quite young, I've harbored this notion that past existences, past experiences, and, let's not mince words, past lives, somehow shaped me. As much as this idea was very much at the core of who I was, I would also look upon it at times as though from afar and wonder: where the hell did I get this idea? More curiously, did anyone else have this same feeling? Intuitively, I knew these were not the kinds of question one might ask of teachers or aunts or even friends, and so I did not, not ever. In a way, then, I can best describe Alan Watts as a relief - for not only do I feel he would understand these questions, but that these notions, which seemed so far removed from the staid midwestern life that surrounded me, were not perhaps as decidedly odd as I had assumed.


And that is how Watts is for me: assurance that I am not losing my mind, but allowing myself to find it. Early on he introduces the idea of the wiggly world and returns to it often. Essentially, it's like this: the universe is comprised of wiggles, which is to say the concave and the convex, the worms and snakes inching through life, the waves of wind through a field of wheat, the spirals of a snail shell. Few straight lines occur organically in nature, and as Watts continued to elaborate on the idea throughout Just So, I realized how much of the tension is my own life has derived from trying to force the squiggly and wiggly to become something straight. Eventually, like the caterpillar grown too large for its cocoon, the wiggles can simply no longer be contained and burst forth. Perhaps they've sprouted wings and colors and bear the name butterfly rather than caterpillar, but the essence remains.


Earlier this summer I read Gavin de Beck's The Gift of Fear, about the power and the value of intuition. Unfortunately, de Beck tells his reader, in most cases we've been taught to reason our intuition away. Watts makes the same argument when he writes "Your brain is capable of finding out, but if you don't trust it, you will fumble along and do silly things, and you have been habituated to not trust your brain," (p. 178). As proof he cites similar circumstances to de Beck: "when you find yourself in crisis and you just spontaneously act with intelligence when there is absolutely no time to go over options and think through various decisions. Your own being steps in and comes to your aid" (p. 180). In my own life, I am reminded of the spring 2001, when I was admitted to the business school at UM, a goal toward which I had worked for, I don't know, 10 years. And yet, as I handed over the acceptance, something deep within me surged forth, in hindsight, a crisis, and I demanded back the acceptance papers and instead submitted the papers that indicated I would decline the offer of admission to one of the top business schools in America, a school from which 22-year-old graduates even 20 years ago could often expect starting salaries in the range of 100K. At the critical moment, though, I knew this was not for me.


And how appropriate that I should remember this incident while reading a book whose subtitle begins Money, Materialism.... because it reminds me that my knowing, that is, the deeply personal intuition lodged among my core beliefs, has correctly calibrated the value - and point - of money all along. As Watts says, it "isn't practical until you spend it and, more importantly, enjoy it."


As with other of Watts's books, his treatment of technology is eerily prescient. All of our wires and cables may not have disappeared, but we are able to untether in ways that much of Watts's early audience would have found unfathomable, even if he was already fathoming it. Certainly it's the case that "everything we'd ever wish to know or learn [is] available on a screen right in front of us" (p. 64). So, too, have our "ordinary telephones disappear[ed] to be replaced by individual devices" (p.85) and if they may be a bit larger than the "size of a pocket watch" one of them is, in fact, a wristwatch. And when Watts posits that "at some point in the future, electronic communication will even take the place of air travel, because...I'll be able to re-create myself in front of my father in England, just as if I were sitting the same room with him" (p. 86), well: Zoom, much? As to his concerns about privacy, I'll say nothing more than 'Amazon Halo.' (Actually, I will say more: the Halo is really, really creepy. But don't take my word for it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/27/amazon-halo-wearable/.)


But, as always, with Watts this is personal. It's personal when he writes of having nothing to fear once you've nothing to lose, and I see myself in my old office divulging to the one friend I had there my plan to quit and then to out our boss for being a total lecher. I remember how I'd worked out the night before I could do it - and then, less than 24 hours later, how I was offered a split position with my current job....which would only seem to support Watts notion that "there's no use in worrying about whether or not this what you're supposed to be doing...as..the most pleasurable things in life almost always happen unexpectedly" (p. 170). Well, that one landed like a ton of bricks, actually.


I can't help but compare it to the idea that if the real troubles in your life are the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday (bonus points for naming the lyric!), so too are the real joys. Enumerating those joys - from the opportunity to return to MSU nearly a decade and a half ago to many of my most rewarding friendships - I am struck again and again by this pattern. This pattern is all the more breathtaking (and I mean breath taking in the literal and original sense of the word) for my recent revelation that I actually don't need - in fact, no longer even want - the proverbial crystal ball. I have experienced too many times too recently the intermingling of positive and negative, the overwhelming gratitude that comes from situations that would appear only to offer hearthache and pain, the unbounded truth that our lives are not always peopled by those we would want in them, but always - always - by the people we need in them.


Often when I read, I find various songs going through my mind. I'd be no child of the 80s if Material Girl hadn't pulsated through my brain at least a couple of times, but really, the song I kept hearing as I read Just So was The Dance. I can hear Garth Brooks's twang: "I'm glad I didn't know | The way it all would end the way it all would go | Our lives are better left to chance I could have missed the pain | But I'd have had to miss the dance."


Fittingly, Watts compares life to dance, argues that life is a form of dancing. I'm a terrible dancer and so I never do, but maybe I should start.