Patron Saint of Muckrakers

“Is that her?” a young woman seated in the middle of the room asks her friend, “I only know her by voice.”

It was her. Amy Goodman, the host of Pacifica Radio’s daily hour-long talk show, Democracy Now! The exclamation point built into the show’s title corresponds with the enthusiasm of its listeners. The audience members still streaming into the room are somewhere between excited and reverent, their attitude making up for the sparse attendance in the lecture hall that is less than half full.

The motley audience includes older couples in head-to-toe beige and young would-be revolutionaries in camouflage pants. Anyone daring to enter the lecture hall in the traditional Manhattan winter uniform of black wool coat and dress pants has made up for it by adorning their jacket with an anti-war or pro-labor button on the lapel.

As the crowd continues filtering in, a dreadlocked young man makes the rounds, walking up and down the aisles talking to people seated at the ends of the rows. He is selling a newspaper with a cover story about the recent anti-war student protests in Washington D.C. “Wait,” says the woman who knows Goodman only by voice, “which protest was that? I think I was at that one.” After a short exchange the two cannot get straight who was at which protest, or if they were in fact at the same one. “I was at the big one,” she insists with raised eyebrows, but this doesn’t clear up the issue. Her friend buys a copy of the paper for $1, looks down at the masthead and says with surprise, “Oh! The paper of the Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States – I didn’t see that!”

“I know,” says her friend, her voice growing icy where their personal politics diverge, “that’s why I didn’t get one.”

“Well I don’t know, I like to see that there is still such a thing as the far left in the United States. I think I can give the Revolutionary Communist Party a dollar. Just don’t say anything if I ever decide to run for office.”

Just as this debate was about to get going, a student takes the stage to welcome Amy Goodman. To enthusiastic applause, she credits Goodman with sparking her interest in journalism.

Goodman approaches the podium. “It’s an honor to be here tonight at the school of the Pulitzers.” She stops for the first of many soulful pauses. Her posture and appearance are unassuming but her speaking voice is mellifluous and punctuated with the specific cadence and rhythms of a person who speaks for a living. Rather than launch into an ode to the fourth estate, Goodman indicts the US media for a laundry list of sins, from the New York Times’ coverage of the aftermath of the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima through the practice of embedding journalists with military units in Iraq. The crowd is enthralled. The chorus of “mmmm hmmms” and “amens” from the back of the room seem more suited for a Southern revival than this Morningside Heights lecture hall, but are delivered without a trace of irony. Say what you will about Goodman’s politics; she’s got charisma.

She’s also got statistics. With the audience tutting their disapproval, she says that in the week leading up the war the four major TV new outlets in American ran interviews with 394 different individuals, only 19 of whom expressed anti-war views. “And this was when the whole country was against the war! It was a mainstream view. Tell me how, if we had state-run media, it would look any different.” A woman in the back ululates appreciatively. “This is not,” (another excellently executed pause) “a mainstream media.” For the rest of the evening everyone – audience members included – will put vocal quotation marks around those words.

Goodman keeps the audience nodding for nearly an hour. How people here many have heard of Maher Arar, she wants to know. A few hands go up. Those without hands raised look around sheepishly, but Goodman assures them that, for a US audience, they are an extremely well-informed group. “About 8% of you,” she observes. “This man was the newsmaker of the year in Canada.” As she tells the story of the Canadian citizen who was arrested at JFK and sent to Syria, where he was tortured for 10 months before being mysteriously returned and cleared of all charges, the students look shocked, the aging hippies jaded, and those who raised their hands just moments before nod with raised eyebrows at their previously unknowing cohorts, as if in confirmation of Goodman’s story. She winds up the tale with the sound-bite of the night: “That’s what they mean when they say extraordinary rendition. It’s White House for kidnapping.”

Goodman’s hands remain still throughout most of her talk; her voice does enough gesticulating without any outside help. She switches tactics, interspersing the heavy charges she brings against the Bush Administration with lighter, funnier reflections on the Texas “oilogarchy.” Her stories cover the current state of the media, but she dives into history as needed to make her points, and displays an extraordinary ability to remember places, dates, and figures. In one such foray into history she gives a brief synopsis of the life of Frederick Douglass, in order to point out that Donald Rumsfeld now lives in the estate formerly owned by the Maryland slave-breaker from whom Douglass escaped, and which is named – really – Mount Misery.

After Goodman’s presentation she takes questions from the audience. A young man in a plaid flannel shirt wants to know what steps he can take to help overthrow the (finger-quoted) mainstream media. Goodman’s instructions – to get news from the precious few sources that aren’t owned by Disney and Viacom – are met with nods and murmurs throughout the room.

As the crowd filters out and the super-reverent line up to get a signed copy of Goodman’s latest book – Static: Oily Politicians, Media Cheerleaders, and the People who Fight Back, the two young woman walk out blissfully. “I’m so glad we came,” says the owner of a brand-new copy of the Revolutionary Communist paper.

“It’s great to have a face to put with the voice,” says her newly initiated companion. “It’s like she has a halo around her.”

The Inheritance of Loss

Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss starts off breathtakingly. It has everything. The motley cast of characters includes a closeted priest, aging Anglophile twins, and pair of young lovers. The action takes place in two well-rendered settings – a Indian tiny village perched on the slope of a Himalayan mountains near the Nepali border, and the underbelly of New York City, a global village inhabited by illegal and semi-legal immigrants from around the world. The tangled plot covers love, politics, abandonment – even disasters on the Russian space station. From the blurb on the back through the first 300 pages, this book is completely engrossing. And then it ends.

But first things first. The book opens with the story of a young orphan growing up in the care of nuns. If this ensemble novel has a main character, it is her – Sai. Sai’s parents died in Russia years ago. When she is expelled from the convent school because she cannot pay, she is sent to live with her ancient grandfather, who even after 350 pages we will know only as “the judge.” The judge lives in a musty, decaying mansion, with only his cook (who we know only as “the cook”) and an Irish setter to keep him company.

Although admittedly the lovely young girl going to live with the creepy old relative thing has been done before, Desai’s imaginative and detail-heavy prose somehow keeps the opening sections from feeling formulaic. The other characters help with this as well. There is a pair of sisters who live together in the mountain village, talking to one another in fake English accents and hoarding marmalade for special occasions. There are young Nepali guerillas with a political agenda, brutal police officers, and Sai’s awkward science tutor, Gian. Sai and Gian inevitably fall in love, which is fine, but the real romance is between Gian and the town’s band of young revolutionaries, whose aims are vaguely socialist and hinge on creating a separate state for the ethnically Nepali population in the region. As Gian (who is very poor) falls under the spell of the Gorkhaland Army, he falls out of love with Sai (whose family is – or was – very rich). Through this chain of events, Desai explores some interesting territory about the effects of colonialism, the realities of class warfare, and what history might mean to two confused and lonely teenagers.

Meanwhile, another central character emerges. This one, Biju, the cook’s young son, is trying to make it in America. We meet a similarly eccentric cast of characters in Biju’s New York: devout Muslims who work side by side with devout Hindus in the restaurant kitchens of devout capitalists. His various encounters get Biju thinking about religion and philosophy. In one particularly memorable passage, a new friendship forces Biju to ask himself if he really hates all Muslims or all Pakistanis, or if it’s supposed to be only Pakistani Muslims, or both, or neither, and why that might be so. Desai handles difficult topics honestly and gracefully, and Biju’s aloneness in America contrasts starkly with the busy, interconnected lives of those he left behind in the village.

Then Biju comes back home; Gian and Sai have a major argument; the judge’s Irish setter is kidnapped. The book ends.

It’s not that every book needs a happy ending. The Inheritance of Loss was never going to end with all the characters entering promising love affairs and the political tension in the region cathartically resolved. An unhappy ending would have been fine, but the book ended with its major plot points totally unresolved. What happens between the Gorkhaland Army and the people of the village? Is Biju glad to be home? Does Gian ultimately choose Sai or the band of revolutionaries? Will the judge ever find his dog? The book simply drops off before these questions are answered, as if Desai had a page limit that she had fulfilled or she had simply gotten bored of her characters and their problems. If it was the latter, it’s a shame; I could have read on until the stories were over.

This Week in Science

Scientists are so great.  Here are some fun facts about things they are studying:

The first ever boob-on-a-foot was recently discovered.  The scientific term for an extra breast is – fantastically enough – a psuedomamma.  Please use that word as often as you can.  Although 1% – 5% of women have an extra nipple somewhere on their body (uhm, really?) very few have extra breasts.  And this lucky young woman is the first person to have a documented pseudomamma of the foot.  Think about that for a second the next time you think you have problems.

A psychology student discovered that rats laugh when tickled.  This article in the NYT about the origins of laughter included the fabulous information about this new finding.  The rat laugh is too high-pitched for us to hear with the naked ear, but still.  The only question that remains is: how do rats react when you start a pillow fight with them?

 Think you know about cheese?  The IDF (International Dairy Federation) has recently released a Call for Presentations for their 2008 summit on the science of cheese.  So if you have any cutting edge research you would like to share with the global dairy community, now is your chance.  IDF is looking for presenters to speak about “cutting edge findings related to cheese ripening,” “structure and functionality of cheese,” etc.  For more information about these exciting event, please visit cheese2008.ch.  Please.