Ethnic Conflict in Kenya: M.G. Vassanji's new novel

There's a positive review of M.G. Vassanji's latest novel, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, in the September 18 Guardian. Vassanji is one of the lesser-known Indo-African/Canadian writers, but he has written consistently good novels on unique subjects. Of the books of Vassanji's I've read, my favorite has been No New Land, which is about the life of Indo-African immigrants in Canada.

Go to the actual review for a plot summary of The In-Between World. Briefly, the book is about an Indian merchant who attempts to survive -- and more than survive -- the black/nationalist Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya between 1952 and 1960.

Reviewer Helon Habila's comment on the novel's version of Kenyan history is interesting:

The book is about survival, political and personal. Vikram becomes the middleman, the moneychanger, the fixer, to ensure his place and his family's in the new Kenya. The British, to ensure the survival of their legacy, installed the new leaders - men not necessarily of the best quality, but reliable because of their greed and contempt for the people - as buffers against the rising tide of Marxism/socialism that had overrun neighbouring Tanzania. Sometimes Vassanji's image of the corrupt African politician - lugging a suitcase full of cash - verges on cliché, but his use of real political figures is daring.

Vassanji deliberately blurs the line between victim and victimiser. The new African elite suddenly begin to act more and more like their British predecessors. The Mau Mau freedom fighters who gave up everything to fight the colonialists are now hounded on the streets and arrested for the flimsiest reasons. The same colonial policemen and their African collaborators who tortured the Mau Mau and other blacks during the emergency are still in office as security advisers for the new ruling class.

Postcolonial history is always more complicated than simple accounts allow. There is no authentic Africa or India, untouched by colonial ideas of power; 'free' states are not always so free.

And there are very few people with their hands clean. As much as they were victimized in places like Uganda (when Idi Amin ejected all people of Indian descent in the early 1970s), Indians in east Africa were earlier the beneficiaries of a corrupt colonial system. Vassanji is sensitive to this role; apparently the narrator/ protagonist of the novel, who eventually leaves Kenya, describes himself as "one of Africa's most corrupt men."

Shoutcast radio; Streamripper

It's been awhile since I posted anything related to DJing or dance music. Mainly I've just been focused on teaching and writing, and the music has kind of dropped out a bit.

The one new discovery I made is the live audio streams from Shoutcast. The streams are free, and mostly run in Winamp. The nice thing about it is, it's pretty global (for instance: Thaidisco.net!). Also nice is the fact that all streams are marked according to number of slots available (so you know if the server will be too busy), as well as bitrate. Many stations provide live track info.

Bitrate is important because higher bitrates (about 128 kb -- 128 kilobits per second) sound closer to CD quality. Most Indian streams are in the 32-64 kb range, which is kind of so-so. It's much easier to find western pop dance music streams at higher bit rates.

I doubt that Shoutcast wants to make this public, but it's pretty easy to rip (capture) Shoutcast streams using a utility called Streamripper. Streamripper is a plugin for Winamp that lets you keep anything you're listening to through a Shoutcast stream. It's pretty easy to install; the only things to watch out for are: 1) download the right version of the program (more than a dozen versions are available), and 2) don't forget to set an output directory.

The coolest thing about the Streamripper utility is that it finds track information for you, and automatically saves separate MP3s for you. If you have the hard disk space, you can start ripping, walk away, and come back two hours later with dozens of new, properly labeled MP3s.

Disclaimer on Legality/Ethics. Even though it's probably perfectly legal to copy music this way, it's not really fully ethical to do it instead of buying music from musicians. I encourage people to frequent their local record stores...

In the Indian music category, I've been listening to:

Apna Radio
Punjabi Songs
Bombay Beats (128 kb; very busy)
Mast Radio (128 kb)
Desi Soundz (no track info.)
Tabla.com

Of the four, I've been happiest with the selection on "Punjabi Songs," though only the 128 kb stations are probably seriously worth ripping. But do a search for "Hindi," and try the various stations...

In US/UK dance music, I've been happy with

Bassdrive (128kb; Drum n Bass)
Radio 42 (128 kb; Lounge/Nujazz)
Digitally Imported (96 kb -- wide selection of house, trance, techno, etc.)
Passion 91.8 FM (128 kb; UK Garage, from the UK)
Deep Mix Moscow Radio (128 kb; from Russia)

In Hip hop:

Smooth Beats (128 kb; Souls of Mischief!)

In Reggaeton (the super-trendy merger of Puerto Rican dancehall reggae and American rap):

Reggaeton.net (listen for Tego Calderon -- he's the king of Reggaeton)

And in pop (even English profs. need a little pop in our lives):

Frequence 3 (128 kb; from Paris)

Anyone out there have other suggestions for free/legal things to listen to on the internet? Good MP3 blogs?

Ziauddin Sardar on Pakistan's Hudood, Reforms in Morocco

It seems like just about every day someone publishes an article on how Islam can be reformed, is being reformed, and can never be reformed.

Today's contribution is Ziauddin Sardar, who has a piece in this week's New Statesman. As for whether the substantial claim he makes ("Islam is changing...") is correct or not, I can't say, and I don't think anyone can say. But he does have some informative material on Pakistan's infamous Hudood Ordinance, as well as reforms in Morocco. Sardar summarizes Hudood, something I've never quite understood, with devastating directness:

In Pakistan, however, the mullahs are still predominantly hardline and are locked in a virtual civil war with reformers. The contentious issue here is the Hudood Ordinance, which states the maximum punishments for adultery (stoning), false accusation of adultery (80 lashes of the whip), theft (cutting off the right hand), drinking alcohol (80 lashes) and apostasy (death). The ordinance was imposed on Pakistan in 1979 by the military ruler Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, under pressure from Islamic parties. It makes no distinction between rape and adultery; thus women who are raped often end up being whipped while the rapists are exonerated. Girls who have reached the age of puberty are treated as adults. Worse, women are not allowed to give evidence on their own behalf. Among the high-profile injustices was the case in 1983 of 15-year-old Jehan Mina, raped by an uncle and his son. She was sentenced to ten years in prison and 100 lashes, reduced to three years and 15 lashes in view of her age. In 1985, a blind maidservant, Safia Bibi, was sentenced to a similar punishment. In both cases, the girl's pregnancy was used as proof that the sex act had been committed but the men were acquitted on the benefit of the doubt. Several women have been sentenced to death by stoning, the most recent being Zafran Bibi in Kohat in 2002, although that sentence was quickly overturned on appeal.

It sounds unbelievable, but that's the law in Pakistan. Musharraf, in his six years in office, hasn't done anything to improve it.

Family laws are improving in Morocco, however. Interestingly, Sardar claims they are still calling it Sharia, and justifying every reform with reference to the Quran:

Morocco retained much of the colonial legal system that France left behind, but, in family law, followed what is known locally as the Moudawana - the traditional Islamic rules on marriage, divorce, inheritance, polygamy and child custody. At first, King Mohammed VI had to abandon plans for change because, protesters claimed, he was trying to impose secular law and western culture on Morocco. In spring 2001, however, he set up a commission, which included women and was given the specific task of coming up with fresh legislation based on the principles of Islam. Given enormous impetus by 9/11 and its aftermath, it produced a report that many see as a revolutionary document. The resulting family code establishes that women are equal partners in marriage and family life. It throws out the notion that the husband is head of the family and that women are mere underlings in need of guidance and protection. It raises the minimum age for women's marriage from 15 to 18, the same as for men.

The new Moudawana allows a woman to contract a marriage without the legal approval of a guardian. Verbal divorce has been outlawed: men now require prior authorisation from a court, and women have exactly the same rights. Women can claim alimony and can be granted custody of their children even if they remarry. Husbands and wives must share property acquired during the marriage. The old custom of favouring male heirs in the sharing of inherited land has also been dropped, making it possible for grandchildren on the daughter's side to inherit from their grandfather, just like grandchildren on the son's side. As for polygamy, it has been all but abolished. Men can take second wives only with the full consent of the first wife and only if they can prove, in a court of law, that they can treat them both with absolute justice - an impossible condition.

Every change in the law is justified - chapter and verse - from the Koran, and from the examples and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad.

Obviously, some of these reforms won't go far enough for progressives and feminists based in the west. Moreover, in an ideal, fully secularized world, civil laws would be based on humanist-feminist and liberal principles of justice, rather than anyone's religious scripture.

But that's not the world we live in, yet. What is hopeful here, if I'm reading Sardar correctly, is that the reforms here are fairly uncontroversial, and have widespread support even amongst conservative clerics. I'll be curious to see whether the model can also be adapted elsewhere...

POTA Put Away

BBC Reports that the Indian Parliament is repealing the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), through which many, many people have been killed in police encounters, and scores have been questionably detained.

India has problems with internal terrorism that are much more severe than anything the United States has faced. Vigorous anti-terrorist actions are required; the the state needs the power to maintain its integrity. (And indeed, there is already talk of a new bill to amend the old Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.) But POTA has been used very badly.

Good riddance.

Drezner on Bhagwati on John Kerry

Daniel Drezner has more on outsourcing, Jagdish Bhagwati, and John Kerry. (I may disagree with Drezner on many things relating to politics, but I have to say I find him an interesting blogger.)

This issue is a sticky one for those of us who are of South Asian descent and also democrat-identified. Outsourcing has generated a lot of excitement in India, and led to the creation of a lot of wealth very quickly. People in my own family are currently making pretty good money by Indian standards doing this kind of work (and I'm not talking about call-centers -- real software consulting & real business consulting).

And while its actual economic consequences within India are questionable, especially outside of the English-educated upper-middle class, most U.S.-based Indians (republican or democrat) are for it, even if they are uneasy about the jobs in the U.S. that are quickly getting "BPOed."

Bhagwati fits the pro-outsourcing Indian democrat profile pretty closely. He says he's a committed democrat, but he favors Bush on global trade and outsourcing. He has a new Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal that only *!%$#$* elitist subscribers have access to, but Drezner excerpts three key paragraphs:

How does one forgive him his pronouncements on outsourcing, and his strange silences on the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations? Indeed, Sen. Kerry, whose views and voting record were almost impeccable on trade, has allowed himself to be forced into such muddled and maddening positions on trade policy that, if one were an honest intellectual as against a party hack, one could only describe them as the voodoo economics of our time.

There seem to be three arguments by Sen. Kerry's advisers that have prompted this sorry situation for the Democrats: First, that the Bush trade policy is no better; second, that electoral strategy requires that Sen. Kerry act like a protectionist, while indicating subtly (to those that matter) a likelihood of freer trade in the White House; and third, at odds with the previous argument, that the U.S. does indeed have to turn trade policy around toward some sort of protectionism (and restraints on direct investment abroad) if it is going to assist workers and reward the unions. Each argument is flawed....

In the end, Sen. Kerry cannot totally jilt his constituencies. He will have to claw his way to freer trade, making him a greater hero in a war more bloody than Vietnam. The unions, in particular, are going to insist on their reward. This is forgotten by the many pro-trade policy advisers and op-ed columnists who argue privately that we should not worry -- because Sen. Kerry is a free trader who has merely mounted the protectionist Trojan Horse to get into the White House. The irony of this last position is that it is, in fact, too simplistic. Besides, it suggests that when President Bush does the same thing, he's lying, but that when Sen. Kerry does it, it's strategic behavior! Is it not better, instead, for us to tell Sen. Kerry that his trade policy positions are the pits -- before he digs himself deeper into a pit from which there is no dignified exit?

I think Bhagwati is over-stating the case. Kerry on outsourcing is like Bush on abortion. There's a lot of noise being generated, but most of it is just there to please constituents.

Moreover, all of this name-calling distracts from a more sober consideration of the effects of outsourcing within the Indian economy, as well as its real long-term effects in the U.S.

The Maiden Voyage of the Monsoon

On a forum of Another Subcontinent, I came across this nicely-written memoir by Mahmud Rahman.

While browsing a used bookstore in Berkeley, he came across something very surprising in a book about the maritime life of 'East Pakistan' (i.e., Bangladesh). The coincidence described is almost Ghosh-ian in its crystallization of dramatically different experiences in time and space.

Manmohan Singh coming to NYC, plans to meet Bush, Musharraf

The Prime Minister of India, Manmohan Singh, will be in New York next week (September 21-26). His primary agenda is to address the United Nations General Assembly.

But he is also scheduled to meet President Bush, Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan (!), and, according to some reports, Vladimir Putin as well. (Funny how many old friends you run into in New York)
The PM is also planning to visit his daughter Amrit, who lives in New York and works for the ACLU (see Sepia Mutiny for more on Amrit).

Haroun goes Operatic

Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories will debut as an opera at the New York City Opera in November, Rediff reports.

Hmm, might be worth checking out. The stage adaptation of Midnight's Children was a bit of a fizzle (it played for awhile in London, and then very briefly at Columbia University). Perhaps this will work better. I didn't see the Mid-Kid adaptation, but I recall seeing reviewers in the New York Times and elsewhere complain that it was trying to do too much.

I'm optimistic about the opera Haroun, however, because the story is both smaller and more fantastical. It might be easier to find ways to creatively adapt the story. This one might just sneak up on people...

Gurinder Chadha goes too far

Rediff is reporting that the actual title of the Hindi version of Bride and Prejudice is going to be:

Balle Balle! Amritsar to LA

I'm not joking, and they're not either. Read about it here.

Well, if Gurinder Chadha got away with Football, Shootball, Hai Rabba! she can get away with anything.

Or maybe she's trying too hard.

Adultery Still Legal in Turkey

Always nice when a political party peers over a cliff, sees disaster, and decides not to jump.

Alan Wolfe on Tariq Ramadan; and a petition

Alan Wolfe is a professor at Boston College -- a centrist liberal whose politics might be described as something like "Democrats Wake Up!" Though he has at times been accused of wishy-washiness, I was happy to see him take a stand against the revocation of Tariq Ramadan's visa.

His editorial in the September 10, 2004 Chronicle is currently for subscribers only, but let me offer a couple of key quotes. First, Wolfe makes it clear that he isn't necessarily convinced by Ramadan's political arguments, and sees his approach to Islamic Ijtihad as more complex than simple progressivism. And Wolfe also takes issue with the article on French Jewish intellectuals Ramadan published in Oumma (linked in my previous post on Ramadan). Here is Wolfe on why Ramadan should be admitted despite his own ambivalence over the his (Ramadan's) views:

Ramadan may speak out of both sides of his mouth, but he U.S. government speaks out of only one -- the intolerant side. While Ramadan calls for multiple interpretations of the Koran, the Bush administration acts as if there is only one way to read Ramadan. Confronting Islamic fundamentalism with a Western version of the same thing hardly seems like the appropriate way to deal with a post-September 11 world. By denying Ramadan his visa, we have sent a message to the Muslim world that, for all our talk of bringing freedom there, we fear it here.

And here is Wolfe's summary of Ramadan's perspective on bringing reform to Islam:

Throughout much of its history, Islam has made a distinction between Dar al-Islam, a society in which Muslims are a majority and subject to Islamic law, and Dar al-Harb, the outside world about which Muslims must continuously be wary. Now that so many Muslims live in Europe and North America, it is time for them to recognize that Islam can flourish in the absence of an Islamic majority, Ramadan argues in Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (OUP: 2004). Muslims in the West must engage ijtihad, he says, defining it as a 'constant dynamic of adaptation in response to the time and the context.' While doing so, they should also strive to become full citizens of the countries in which they live, accepting their laws and participating in their political systems.

Ramadan's work defies religious and political labels. Although he has often been described as the Muslim Martin Luther, he never attacks Islam the way Luther attacked the papacy. He believes that many of the problems Westerners associate with Islam--a propensity toward violence, unfair treatment of women--are ethnic, not religious; get rid of the cultural practices associated with tribal and backward societies, and you will find Islam in its pure form. That side of Ramadan's work complicates the notion, frequently heard in the debates surrounding his ideas, that he is a 'moderate' or a 'modernizer.' Read one way, he seems to be a progressive critic of repressive regimes like the one in Saudi Arabia. Read another, he is defending the orthodox idea that there are not many Islams but only one, thereby questioning whether "so called sociological or cultural Muslims," as he characterizes those of a live-and-let-live disposition, are really legitimate believers.

This summary leaves me a little less than fully enthusiastic about Ramadan's ideas. In my view, the urgent need today is for protection against overbearing religious institutions and religio-political authority -- not clarification of what those institutions are.

But are his ideas really the issue in the revocation of his visa? No one really knows. Most people seem to be convinced that it has more to do with his lineage than his radical views.

More pieces by Alan Wolfe

This review of Samuel Huntington's book Who Are We? takes issue with Huntington's anti-immigrant stance. He is convincing in his questioning of Huntington's reliance on the myth of a founding "Anglo-Protestant" culture.

He's also got an interesting piece on the 'free' part of The Chronicle, where he takes issue with left-leaning humanities academia's obsession with the Nazi sympathizing philosopher Carl Schmitt.

And here is Michael Berube's criticism of Wolfe from a piece on his blog; scroll down. (Thanks to Michael for the tip on the piece in The Chronicle.)

After considering it for awhile, I've decided the decision to sign this petition on behalf of Tariq Ramadan.

Laicite to Sikhs: stay home, Monsieurs

Well, after all the speculation and questions (will they really do it? will there be an exception?), it looks like they're not letting them in. Outlook reports that French schools are, under the order of the new ban, ejecting Sikh students.

Oh well, cancel that flight to Paris. I hear Italy is nice, though.

National Anthem Throwdown: Jana Gana Mana vs. Bande Mataram

A really informative piece by Pradip Kumar Datta has just been posted on SACW, on the history of India's national anthem. The current anthem is Rabindranath Tagore's "Jana Gana Mana." (See the entry at Wikipedia for the text and translation of the song)

The Hindu right has been casting aspersions on it recently (Datta cites Sadhvi Rithambara's "hate cassette" as well as websites like www.freeindia.org). The reason: it was composed by Tagore on the occasion of King George V's visit to the Indian National Congress in 1911. Tagore was famously ambivalent about the commission, and wrote the song as he did as an act -- he thought -- of subversion. But I suppose it's also possible to say that the song, written to celebrate the visit of the English king, loses some autonomy through that history. Still, the details are worth pursuing, and the virtue of Datta's article is that he has access to the original coverage of the event in the English-language press of the day:

The confusion about the song was stirred up by the ineptness of the pro-British Anglo-Indian press. Their inefficiency was not surprising (The Sunday Times once ascribed the authorship of Bande Mataram to Tagore and described Jana Gana Mana as a Hindi song!) On this occasion the Anglo-Indian press -- led by The Englishman - almost uniformly reported that a Tagore song had been sung to commemorate George V's visit to India. The reports were based on understandable ignorance since the Anglo-Indian press had neither the linguistic abilities nor the interest to be accurate. Actually, two songs that had been sung that day. The Jana Gana Mana had been followed by a Hindi song composed specially for George V by Rambhuj Chaudhary. There was no real connection between the composition of the Jana Gana Mana and George V, except that the song was sung -- not written - at an event which also felicitated the king. The Anglo-Indian press [luckily for Hindutva enthusiasts and unfortunately for secularists!] heard Indian songs much in the way they looked at foreign faces: they were all the same!

In short, the English press was clueless, but that cluelessness might have actually slowed the adaptation of the song amongst Indian nationalists. Whatever the case, eventually the song would become strongly identified with the nationalist movement. It was even eventually adapted by Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army. You can't get more nationalist than that.

The critics of "Jana Gana Mana" would prefer to see it replaced by "Bande Mataram," also sometimes spelled "Vande Mataram") composed by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, also sometimes spelled as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. "Bande Mataram" (see the song here, with translation by the poet Sri Aurobindo) treats India as a Goddess to be worshipped. It was demoted from official anthem status, Datta says, because orthodox Indian Muslims (probably also Sikhs, Jains, Parsis, and Christians) would have had a hard time worshipping a "Goddess" of any form, even if, in the song, the "Mataram" isn't named as specifically Hindu.

[And if that's sexism, well, it probably is. But keep in mind that woman-as-Goddess isn't always a pro-feminist image -- it depends what kind of Goddess. But I digress.]

Finally, Datta makes a great point about the differences in the image of India in the two anthems:

But there is also an underlying reason that is really responsible for the controversy popping up at regular intervals. The words of Bande Mataram feature India as a homogeneous Hindu nation. Jana Gana Mana evokes the country as composed of a multiplicity of regions and communities united in a prayer to a universal lord. After all, Bande Mataram was composed by a colonial administrator who could only visualize the nation in Hindu terms: religious identity was the only available idiom for conceptualizing the nation then. In contrast, Tagore had seen the riots that broke up the Swadeshi movement and had divined the obvious: religious nationalism easily divided anti-colonial struggles. Jana Gana Mana can be seen as one of the fruits of Tagore's search to find an alternate inclusivist definition for the nation. Incidentally, it was one of the harbingers of a decade that was to see Hindu and Muslim politicians draw together. In short, the two songs embody different ideas, histories and aspirations of the country.

Well said.

Personally, I prefer Mohammed Iqbal's "Sare Jaha se Achcha." I find it easiest to understand (after all, the other two are Bengali songs originally), and easier to sing than either of the others.

But then, I didn't grow up with any of these songs. Rather, the national anthem I grew up singing (badly, without much comprehension), was written by one Francis Scott Key: "O say can you see..."

Fareed Zakaria: The British Raj vs. American Iraq

Though I've always opposed the war in Iraq, I resist describing the U.S. as "imperialist" the way some of my friends and colleagues tend to do. Whether or not the motives for going into Iraq were entirely above-board, there is no question that the U.S. will get out in time. The war may be a pretty awful thing, but it's not quite the same as imperialism in its classical form (and distinctions matter).

However, the U.S. is starting to use policies in Iraq that resemble what the British did in India. Specifically, Fareed Zakaria suggests, they seem to be starting a "Shia stratgy." The U.S. will favor one ethno-religious group, and pit it against the other major group -- essentially divide, flatter, and conquer. If the strategy continues, the winner will be Ayatollah Sistani and the small Shia majority, while the ostensible losers will be the Sunnis. I say "ostensible," because the real loser would be Iraq as a whole. Imperial favoritism in the British system inevitably led to more blood being shed:

In many of its colonies the British would often favor a single group as a quick means of gaining stability. Almost always the results were ruinous—a trail of civil war and bloodshed. If Allawi and the United States make the same mistake, there will be 140,000 American troops in the middle of it all.

The context of this, of course, is the ongoing -- seemingly intractable -- uprising in the Sunni cities of central Iraq. While hurricanes are leading on all the news channels in the U.S., the situation in Iraq is deteriorating again:

The American Army cannot use military superiority to take Sunni cities from the guerrillas because it would mean high civilian casualties and an angry public. The interim Iraqi government may itself not have the necessary credibility to take on such a task. Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is a tough guy, but he is clearly aware of the limits of his legitimacy. . . . Last week Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, Samir Sumaiada'ie, predicted to The Scotsman that unless the United States and Britain added "a considerable amount" of troops to Iraq, the insurgency would grow.

But for all its resilience, the insurgency has not spread across the whole country, nor is it likely to. Its appeal has clear limits. While it has drawn some support from all Iraqis because of its anti-American character, it is essentially a Sunni movement, fueled by the anger of Iraq's once dominant community, who now fear the future. It is not supported by the Shias or the Kurds. (The Shia radical al-Sadr has been careful not to align himself too closely with the insurgency, for fear of losing support among the Shia.) This is what still makes me believe that Iraq is not Vietnam. There, the Viet Cong and their northern sponsors both appealed to a broad nationalism that much of the country shared.

Well, at least Iraq is not another Vietnam. But is it another British India?

Persons of Interest -- New Documentary

From Froomkin, I caught a link to the site for a documentary called Persons of Interest.

The people who were arrested randomly, detained endlessly, and deported unfairly after 9/11 will always necessarily be a smaller story than the people who died in such a horrifying way when the towers were attacked. That's fine -- it's probably how it should be.

But the aftermath-ers are still people, and their suffering is still a story that is worth telling. No one wants to admit that a few hundred Arab and Pakistani men detained for more than a year for no particular reason are part of the story of 9/11. (Two of the Perons of Interest in this film include a guy named Syed Ali, who was arrested on a tip from a former coworker bearing a grudge, as well as Mohammed Irshaid, who was arrested on anonymous vague charges.) It's not the end of the world. After all, these men survived their ordeals, though not without damage done. They remain, in my view, a necessary footnote to the larger tragedy.

Maybe the hysteria of both law enforcement and ordinary Americans was temporary, or maybe it's really true that the climate of fear and suspicion has hardened into permanency. I'm not really sure.

At any rate I'm glad this film has been made; I'll wait to say more until I get a chance to see it.