Author: Josh Philip Ross

“Resolved: The human race will be extinct in our lifetimes.”

That’s the subject of tomorrow night’s debate, hosted by Columbia’s venerable debating society, the Philolexians, at 8:30 in the John Jay Lounge tomorrow night, and it’s a doozy. Let’s hope they all get drunk.

The BBC reports on Nepal’s sham election, in which voters — a few of them, anyway — are going to the polls today in Nepal to vote for candidates — a few of them, anyway — to the parliament and in local elections.

The combination of a Maoist call for a general strike and the withdrawal of more than 600 opposition candidates has reduced voter turnout to a trickle and made the whole exercise meaningless. The opposition parties claim that the election is designed only to reinforce the king’s illegal seizure of power.

The Maoists — perhaps the world’s sanest guerilla rebels — have recently declared that they would be willing to accept the continuation of the monarchy, with some political powers, if that’s what the Nepali people want. But until the violence settles down, and until the king gives up the bulk of political power to the parliament, there’s no way to find out.

Gothamist reports that Barnard College is planning a new building to replace and expand on the hideous Macintosh Hall.

Talking Points Memo points out a nice back and forth debate on whether the protests were orchestrated or spontaneous.

TPMCafe, the companion site to Joshua Micah Marshall’s excellent political blog, Talking Points Memo, has launched a new sub-site called Bolton Watch, which will keep an eye on America’s favorite recess appointee, Ambassador John Bolton, as he bullies his way around the United Nations. This should be interesting.

I don’t usually agree with Christopher Hitchens, but I appreciate his article today on the Muslim cartoon hysteria.

The article, like most Hitchens articles, has some pretty glaring flaws. His declaration that “I refuse to be spoken to in that tone of voice” sounds petulant and ridiculous coming from someone who is nowhere near the burning embassies and deadly protests sparked by the cartoons, and so does his pronouncement that “there can be no negotiation under duress or under the threat of blackmail and assassination.” And I don’t share his extreme vitriol toward religion in general.

But I do think Hitchens is right to condemn the mealy-mouthed (and illiterate) State Department statement, which proclaims that “anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images, as anti-Christian images, or any other religious belief.” I assume the Bush administration did not intend to categorize “any other religious belief” as equivalently unacceptable to anti-Semitic or anti-Christian images.

Beyond that, however, is the reality that anti-Semitic and anti-Christian images are protected under American law, while our foreign policy has consistently overlooked anti-Semitic libels and caricatures in the Muslim press. If the State Department statement is to be taken literally, then the US government is giving tacit support to the publishers of the offending cartoons.

Of course, that’s not what the statement was actually intended to mean. Rather, Hitchens is right to call the State Department to task for taking a cowardly and unnecessary stance in favor of fear, sensorship and religious hysteria.

Last spring, Jenny and I played host to a pair of runaway lovers, James and Tejal (here’s the original post). We watched them struggle — with New York, with their predicament, with each other — and finally retreat, heading their separate ways.

Now, almost a year later, I just received an update on their story from Lem, the guy who originally alerted us to their situation:

As far as I know, James and Tejal fell in love at Columbia College Chicago, because that’s when I first saw them lounging around together on the uncomfortable office furniture in the main lobby of the Center for Documentary, where I was the Technical Coordinator. Tejal was one of my student employees, James studied down the hall in the Animation Department, and I felt a certain responsibility for them. Don’t know why.

They met like any other pair of urban college students: running into each other on the Roosevelt stop of the Red Line, exchanging brief pleasantries, working together on a few video projects, and eventually hooking up. (Their romantic meetings were pretty furtive, since Tejal lived with her parents. That’s probably why they spent so much time in the Doc Center.) This was in 2003.

Tejal called me one winter night in 2005. I hadn’t seen her in well over a year. I stood huddled by my kitchen window, which was the only place I could get reception. Here was the deal: she and James were on the run from her parents, who wanted to marry Tejal off to a nice boy in India who would send home regular portions of his paycheck. Somehow, I was persuaded to allow Tejal and James to crash on my couch for a few days (which turned out to be a few weeks) as they hatched their plans.

Three weeks later, I had developed an ulcer, but what the heck, I got the satisfaction of seeing those two find apartments and jobs together in big, bad New York City. Or so I thought; by the end of the summer of 2005, anger and money troubles (including an ill- advised $1500 dollar shopping spree in SoHo) had torn them apart, and they broke up. James headed to a cushy job at a multimedia company in Chicago, leaving Tejal to flee to her sister’s place in Florida to avoid the wrath of her parents.

They disintegrated as they fled from the city. James blew over $200 getting to Islip Airport and paying for his luggage. While he was fuming and waiting for his delayed flight, Tejal was pulled off her plane and interrogated for being a terrorist because she had a strange name and unlabeled spices in her suitcase. Freaking out, she called James, who tracked her gate down and offered her his second slice of pizza. They ate in silence, waiting to fly in two directions.

Utterly crushed, Tejal ended up working in a Walgreen’s and a Subway in the suburbs of Orlando, running from one shift to the next with the knowledge that roughly half of the money she was making was going back to Chicago to support her parents.

James, in the meantime, had become increasingly angry with his latest animation position, and finally gave notice. He began to consider his fate. He had fled from Chicago to New York, then back to Chicago again. It seemed like all he did was run. It was December, he hadn’t heard from Tejal in four months. He wondered what had happened to her. (She had become completely unreachable because she didn’t have internet access and had lost her cell phone’s battery charger, which she couldn’t afford to replace.)

James decided to fly to Orlando one evening on a round-trip flight after work. His boss tried to dissuade him. Love Doesn’t Conquer All, he said. She’s Just Going To Turn Out Like Her Parents: Old-Fashioned And Closed-Minded. Focus On Your Career, You’re A Brilliant Designer. Haven’t You Heard Of Lavalife Dot Com?

Undeterred, James spent over $900 to fly and stay overnight in Orlando at a shabby motel. He didn’t feel like eating, so he drank bottled water and figured out which Walgreen’s Tejal would be at. When he found a cab, he accidentally stepped into a foot-deep mud puddle. Soaked but determined, he drove out to meet her.

Tejal was working the afternoon shift. She says she wasn’t even sure what was happening for several minutes after James walked in the door.

They drove around the Lakeland residential area during her half hour break. They talked, and then pulled up onto someone’s grass and made out hurriedly before she had to get back to work. Then James flew home.

“I went there to bring her back,” he told me. And he did. When I visited Chicago at the beginning of January, the two of them sat grinning across from me at the Ohio House Diner, like neither of them had ever left. The only difference now: they’ve stopped talking to Tejal’s family altogether, and they’ve squeezed themselves into their first real Chicago apartment.

A fiery passion will take us to strange and necessary places. We get lost and ultimately end up back where we started.

When I saw them a week or two later, Tejal and James said they would give me a ride to the airport. This meant the two of them showing up at the front door of my building in a hired taxi. They blew $40 on cab fare and coffee for me.

I had a blast listening to them tell me about their latest schemes (apparently, pharmacists make pretty decent money). I said goodbye and sat on the plane, hoping no one would mistake me for a terrorist. I’m coming home, I breathed. Chicago is cold this time of year.

Love is a funny thing. I’ve never personally gone through one of those against-all-odds love affairs. I tend to doubt whether stormy, off-and-on relationships, so familiar from the extended TV courtships of Dave and Maddie, Joel and Maggie, Sam and Diane, Sam and Rebecca, Frasier and Lilith, Niles and Daphne, Ross and Rachel, et. al., are actually viable.

On the other hand, would we still believe the stories if they never came true?

So what are they building at the southeast corner of Butler and Bond Streets in Brooklyn, next door to our old apartment? Still no answer, but we thank Curbed for trying. And yeah, we agree that it’s only “Carroll Gardens-ish” over there, not quite Carroll Gardens.

Oh, and I have to wonder, too, whether the landlord who’s investing in, well, whatever it is, will also finally get around to repairing the devastated sidewalks out front, which I called the city about numerous times but never managed to get inspected and ticketed. Not that I’m bitter.

Last fall, I spent some time working on a General Assembly resolution, sponsored by the Republic of Korea, on the topic of public administration and development. The resolution passed on November 30, 2005, becoming Resolution 60/34.

And now, for your reading pleasure, here is the preliminary text (PDF) of the resolution. When the final resolution will be published, I have no idea.

Pink: Stupid Girl (YouTube Video)

I kind of like Pink. “Get the Party Started” was a great little single with a fun video, and it will always be connected in my mind with our year in Korea, when it came out. I also get a kick out of her whole Linda Perry fixation, and out of her whole angry anti-pop pop thing.

Her new video, though, I just can’t get behind. I like the song and its message — that girls should stop trying to be pretty like the starlets they see on TV and instead have intellectual ambitions — but hearing this from Pink is a bit like being told by George W. Bush that America is addicted to oil. You wanna scream, “Yes, and you’ve been selling it!” This is, after all, the woman who played a prostitute alongside Mya, Li’l Kim and Christina Aguilera in the “Lady Marmalade” video. And the current video undermines the whole feminist take by ending with a scantily clad Pink soaping herself up and sliding all over the hood of a red car. Ironically, but that doesn’t mean it won’t do to teenage boys and teenage girls exactly what unironic booty videos do.