Ntuple Indemnity

I’m as glued to the fallout from the Iranian “election” as anybody else, and if there was one opinion I wanted to hear, it was Marjane Satrapi’s. More than one outlet has sold the present events in Iran as the 1979 revolution reborn, often with a suggestion that it is the long-concealed expression of the way the revolution ought to have turned out had the fundamentalists not steered it off course and filled the power vacuum themselves.

When I read Satrapi’s superb graphic novel Persepolis, I described it as “an act of remembrance for the promise of an Iran that could have been, had the theocratic powers that govern Iran not shoved that promise in a closet, and had the rest of the world not believed them.” Well, the citizenry sure hasn’t forgotten, and I couldn’t be more pleased to see it. It is as if the silenced middle class of educated moderates decided to speak up all at once and say, enough is enough.

For those of you just catching up: Juan Cole summarizes the top pieces of evidence the election was stolen. Christopher Hitchens highlights the blatancy of the fraud when set against the trends in the rest of the Islamic world. Poll analysis superstar Nate Silver and his colleagues at FiveThirtyEight crunch the data and offer their findings in a comprehensive and, thank goodness, levelheaded series of posts, reminding us of the alternative scenarios and the fact that statistics don’t prove a whole lot to the outside observer who fails to account for the reality of the political climate.

Andrew Sullivan has been on top of things from the beginning, as I knew he would be, and if you like your aggregated updates five to ten minutes apart you’ve already been reading him all along.

And now, for a bucket of cold water.

I am deeply unimpressed at the media, by which I mean both the frumious bandersnatch of the “MSM” and independent bloggers, and their coverage of Twitter.

I only signed up for Twitter two weeks ago and was pleasantly surprised to find it useful all of a sudden. Yes, it is newsworthy that it’s our best source of information on the ground when the Iranian government has taken the usual precautionary measures to shut down cell phones, block social networks, restrict bandwidth, arrest and expel journalists, and jam BBC satellites. Yes, it is newsworthy that Twitter shifted its maintenance schedule to accommodate its Iranian users, presumably at the behest of the Obama administration. It is being used to publish eyewitness reports and organize impromptu rallies. And probably the most encouraging thing I’ve seen it do is facilitate the emergence of a mutual understanding between the western and Iranian citizenry: more people know, and the Iranians know they know, that the Iranian people aren’t a rabble of fundie terrorists. (Their state is a different matter entirely.)

But Twitter has taken over the Iranian story to an unconscionable degree. A good proportion of the Twitter traffic about Iran involves people far away from the action feeling important about themselves for using the service, bashing the mainstream media while linking to their stories about Twitter. The peak of involvement among its users was, narcissistically, when Twitter announced its maintenance delay. Sullivan goes so far as to retract his previous mockery of Ashton Kutcher’s pronouncement in that most happily credulous of early-adopter rags, TIME, that “the creation of Twitter […] is as significant and paradigm-shifting as the invention of Morse code, the telephone, radio, television or the personal computer.”

I don’t buy it, and neither should you.

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My next adventure:

I am usually not the sort to aggregate the coverage of world events, but for the remembrance of what happened twenty years ago in Tiananmen Square I will make a special exception. No other event of geopolitical consequence has made a more indelible impression on the family history. Indeed, Tiananmen is probably my earliest memory, however hazy, of living in a world of monumental scope, where the actions of strangers far away crept through the news on the television set and into your very lives. I was four.

There is really no understating the anxiety in Hong Kong at the time: it was so palpable a toddler could feel it. Only five years earlier had Thatcher made the cessation of the colony to the People’s Republic a certainty with a date stamped on it, and there was reasonable cause for worry that the fate of the Tiananmen students would be the fate of Hong Kong as well. I have a theory that this was the final shred of evidence my parents needed to affirm that packing the bags and spending the rest of their adult lives in Canada would be the right move from there. In this household, no name was spoken with as much revulsion as that of Deng Xiaoping. When Deng croaked in the early weeks of 1997, there was more than a little jubilant schadenfreude that he did not live to see the handover.

In case anybody is under any delusions that the China is a repentant modern state unafraid of the history it has made for itself, take one look at the schizophrenia of its media control. They don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

Here is footage of Beijing authorities shutting down BBC reporter James Reynolds with the aid of plainclothesmen carrying umbrellas on a suspiciously sunny day. Reynolds’ account is here, and one only need scroll down to see the shocking comments of Chinese apologists still in denial. (I don’t know if they’re propagandists or civilians, or which of the two would be the more depressing.)

John Simpson, the reporter from the original BBC broadcast of 4 June 1989, has this to say:

There is a noticeable lack of confidence, a nervousness, at the heart of a system which has otherwise been spectacularly successful, industrially, economically and socially. […] It is embarrassing to hear intelligent, highly educated officials who would have sympathised with the students at the time, calling the massacre “the incident”, or even pretending it did not happen.

James Miles, also a BBC correspondent at the time, provides a fascinating account, ascribing the discrepancies in the reporting to the fact that the majority of the killings occurred throughout Beijing and not in the square itself.

The New York Times Lens Blog has a feature on the photographs of the man blocking the tanks. The BBC interviews Jeff Widener, who snapped the shot for the Associated Press.

Meanwhile, 150,000 attended a vigil in Victoria Park—an encouraging sign in the face of reports that Tiananmen is ill-understood by Hong Kong youth. The helplessness of the Chinese government there is splendid to watch, and anyone who celebrated the former colony’s handover as a death blow for the British Empire should bear in mind the good that western liberal ideals and institutions have done for the place.

Charles Burton provides a Canadian perspective here, reminding us that meaningful change in China sure isn’t coming from the state.

Finally, an anecdote. Last year my mother showed me a book she received from old friends in Hong Kong, a large-format photo history of the former British colony. There was a full-page photograph of a protest march that filled a city street. On the front lines, bearing a bold red banner, were my parents and a handful of extended relatives shouting something with a furious look in their eyes. As someone who had the luxury of growing up in a country where real threats to liberty have simply never materialized, it was a rare moment of discovery where I suddenly perceived the historical intrigue concealed in ordinary life.

Book blogging is on hold again, almost as soon as it resumed. Here’s why: a week ago I read a novel that was not only bad, but bad in the most uninteresting and redundant ways. It is a popular novel, and you can probably guess what it is. I had about half of a review written up before I decided to put it on hold and see Pixar’s ninth consecutive work of mad brilliance, Up, which promptly restored my faith in storytelling. I now lack the motivation to go back to spinning invective about said novel, which I have previously done in an identical fashion for a nearly identical book by the same author.

That, and the n-thousand words I dump here each week presently need to be directed to another project. No, it is not this. In the interests of this mysterious project I am rereading a number of wonderful books in scraps.

In other news, I am now on Twitter (as Nicholas_Tam), though I haven’t put it to any use, and by no means will it supplant this space. I will do something unique with it eventually, and remain open to suggestions. To my dismay, NicholasTam was already reserved by my Australian rival, with whom I have conducted a username turf war for years. As I am wont to remark: Winston Churchill never had to put up with this crap.

An announcement of a rather different flavour will follow shortly. I have been sitting on it for weeks, but most of the paperwork is now complete and the relevant parties have been informed.

This week’s selection: The Immortal Game: A History of Chess (2006) by David Shenk.

In brief: The book’s alternate subtitle—”How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science, and the Human Brain”—offers a hint of Shenk’s scope of thought. Full of colourful stories and painstaking research, this thoroughly accessible work probes into the mystery of how chess has endured for 1400 years and why it delights us still. Shenk guides us on a tour through everything from the intrigue of warring nations to the play-by-play thrill of a historic game, and muses as much about how chess has shaped humanity as how humanity has shaped chess. A must-read for hobbyists and serious players alike.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Immortal Game, keep reading below.)

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