Author: Andrew Sullivan

Egypt Erupts Again

More than 100 people were killed and countless injured early this morning when Egyptian security forces opened fire on a pro-Morsi sit-in demonstration in the Nasr City district of Cairo. Mosa’ab Elshamy was on the scene:

His comprehensive report:

I went to Rabaa at 2 am last night after I heard the [pro-Morsi] sit-in might be dispersed. When I got there, the shooting had already started. It was unclear to me who ‘started’ the attack. But the clashes were at the beginning of Tayaran street, 100 metres away from the sit-in. There was a non-stop sound of gunshots.

The dark meant it was suicide to stay there. So I went to Rabaa’s makeshift hospital. Most of the cases I saw where people shot in the leg and chest with live bullets. Hours later, I counted 24 dead bodies at the morgue. I saw at least 3 men who were shot in the head. Some claimed snipers were on October bridge, which would make sense.

After dawn I went to the frontlines. Next to the police there were armed civilians who seemed to be a mix of residents and thugs. I was on Morsi-supporters’ side of the clashes for about 5 hours and honestly saw no arms with them. Pro-Morsis mostly just took cover, threw rocks, fireworks and gas canisters back until they got shot at & carried away. Then repeat.

I didn’t see any military involvement. Except when soldiers at Manasa shot in the air and caused both sides to back away for a while. My conclusion is that this was, undoubtedly, a horrific assault by MOI + ‘civilians’ with tear gas, rubber bullets and live fire.

Elshamy also took a series of harrowing photos, which can be seen here. More tweets on the carnage:

The View From Your Window Contest

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You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts.  Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

The Illusion Delusion

Daniel Fincke urges his fellow atheists to reconsider dogmatic dismissal of “techniques that the religious use to create strong value feelings or feelings of community between people”:

The overly skeptical atheist mistakenly thinks that if she can understand the physiological processes that make an experience happen that somehow that experience is not only demystified as not supernatural, but is even proven to be an “illusion”. So if oxytocin is the chemical that causes me to feel trust then my feeling of trust is an illusion; it’s not really trust but a chemical tricking my brain! If participating in a ritualistic behavior in a group creates a feeling of psychological bond between me and my group then this feeling of closeness is an illusion. If lovers staring into each others’ eyes feel closer, they are tricking themselves into feeling an illusory closeness, etc., etc. …

They think these are irrational ways of creating attachments between people or between people and their ideas. But things can go the other way. Without an emotional oomph various truths are harder for our brains to realize and internalize. Sometimes we need to communicate to our brains through our bodies because they’re bodily. Talking to them through bodily cues and training them through training our bodies to feel and move in different ways is working with the non-dualistic, naturalistic truths that we are our bodies and that our minds are functions of our entirely physical brains. These are truths that atheists should know and embrace better than anyone.

A Poem For Saturday

Monica A. Hand’s “dear Nina”:

I want vengeance
an eye for an eye
a dish served cold
two wrongs
a tale of two cities
contrapasso
ill will
a settling

not with a grain of salt
with a heavy hand

a slow burn
boiling point
a huff and a puff
blow the mother-fucking house down

no cage forestalls
no age forgets
no gene forgives
I cane those who give me
this fury

a hundred lashes
acrimony and dander
needle and tizzy
umbrage
ruckus

(From me and Nina. Copyright © 2012 by Monica C.Hand. Used by kind permission of Alice James Books. Video: Nina Simone sings “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life”:)

What Poetry Can Learn From Pop Music, Ctd

Continuing her arguments about bringing poetry to the public, Tasha Golden takes on the myth that “wanting readers isn’t a noble enough desire for ‘real’ poets—that we should instead write strictly ‘because we must,’ or because ‘the muse has us'”:

[A]s George Orwell has famously illustrated, there are (valid!) motivations for writing that actually require a readership. And if our work is driven to any degree by its potential human impact, as Orwell’s was, it’s irresponsible to eschew the work of reaching out. This was what I wanted us to translate from pop music: Its gritty determination. Its insistence on being heard. Its put-our-stuff-where-folks-will-find-it creativity. Its refusal of insularity.

It’s time for writers to stop feeling shallow or guilty for wanting what only makes sense: to be read. It’s time we stop policing each other’s motives and frowning on self-promotion, and instead empower each other to explore where our poetry can go. Why? Because if readers are required to want and seek poetry in order to find it, we’ll never get beyond each other. If the wider world’s not reading poetry, it’s at least in part because it rarely encounters it. That’s what we can change.

Cool Ad Watch

A big step toward normalizing pot as a positive good:

Fans attending a major NASCAR race this weekend will see a most unlikely video posted on a giant video screen shortly before entering the track: a pro-marijuana legalization ad. Outside the NASCAR Brickyard 400 in Indianapolis, the same track that hosts the famed Indianapolis 500, Marijuana Policy Project, the nation’s largest pro-marijuana legalization advocacy group, has purchased space to air – dozens of times over the weekend – a video that pushes the theme that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol.

It marks the first time a pro-marijuana legalization ad will appear so close to an entrance gate of a major sporting event. The Brickyard 400, in its 20th year, is regarded as one of NASCAR’s biggest races.

Update from a reader:

After the ad ran for several hours on Friday, it was pulled. A spokesman for the company that pulled that ad issued this statement:

“We in no way support marijuana at family events,” the spokesman said. “We didn’t expect this ad to be interpreted the way it did. We don’t want anything to do with it anymore.”

So, a major event with huge alcohol sponsors (Crown Royal & Miller Lite, anyone?), and a sport with a huge culture of alcohol consumption “doesn’t want anything to do” with marijuana. Not even a simple ad that isn’t promoting “marijuana at family events” but simply promoting the idea of an alcohol alternative in general. Wow.

I live in Colorado, so I can see first-hand that the tide is starting to turn, but decades of culture war are going to be tough to crack in some places.

A Literary Living Room

Martin Amis makes an analogy to describe two kinds of authors:

A great part of writing is hoping to make things as nice as possible for the reader — be a good host, have them put their feet up by the fire, pull up a chair, get out a good wine. The writer who loves the reader always feels that; Nabokov would always give you his best chair.

But there have been one or two writers who didn’t give a shit about the reader, like Joyce — partly because he had patronage, he didn’t need the reader to earn a living. And Henry James, who went off the reader in a huge way, which is why those last few novels became impenetrable. If you look at early James, he’s almost middlebrow, then you get The Ambassadors, this incredibly convoluted thing. Joyce and James became bad hosts: If you wandered into their house you wouldn’t be welcomed. You’d stagger around while they were in the kitchen making some vile concoction which might amuse you, but it would taste disgusting and eccentric.

The View From Above

Astronaut Sunita Williams describes how space travel changes your perspective:

When you’re flying in space some of the things down on Earth seem trivial. Things like politics leave your mind. I didn’t feel like I was a person from the United States, I felt like I was lucky enough to be a person from Earth. For me, [most] news wasn’t important but people are important, so when you hear about natural disasters like hurricanes and fires, that makes you miss home and wonder how everybody’s coping. But I would also look back at the planet and think, “Gosh, it’s a pretty little place, everybody’s going for a walk on the beach or something like that, they must be enjoying life down there.”

What’s A Bisexual Anyway? Ctd

Like so many children of the ’90s, James Patrik learned about bisexuality from Friends:

“Sometimes men love women/Sometimes men love men/And then there are bisexuals, though some just say they’re kidding themselves.”

As an impressionable kid, those lyrics [from Phoebe], comedic as they might be, represented the first time television had told me what to think about bisexuals. Whoever these bisexuals were, I was taught, they were foolish and cowardly. Too scared to just come out and admit their obvious gayness.

Growing up, the television and the community sold me a binary world view: gay or straight. There were only two viable options, and I secretly dreaded the eventuality of having to pick one. So I didn’t. I proceeded, undefined, not wanting to belong to either one of these groups. Not out of spite or youthful rebellion, but out of truth. I never really believed I was straight, and I never really believed I was gay.

After years of identifying himself as either one or the other – “I was always ashamed of my dishonesty when I did this, but also relieved at having avoided a potentially complicated conversation” – Patrik came out as bisexual. But he says the stigma remains:

Some likened my sexuality to a light switch, flicked in either direction on a whim. Some have regarded me as foolish and simply afraid of admitting my attraction to men. Some have just called me greedy. … What is it about bisexuality that so confounds? Labels and categories inform so much of how we interact with others. They flavor our expectations of how people will (and should) behave and force us to see otherness where none exists. In a society so bent on ‘outing’ celebrities and public figures, the bisexual man or woman circumvents this game and evades inquiring minds by sitting on the fence and defying categorization.

Read the whole Dish thread on bisexuality here.