Intimate Partner Violence Prevention

So what is intimate partner violence? That was one of the topics discussed in small groups at an all day meeting I went to yesterday. The other tricky question is what is the difference between prevention and intervention? I've been over this territory this year as part of another group of some of the same people who were there yesterday.

Basically, we are talking about domestic violence, plus. Domestic violence would be husband-wife or couples living together, and various combinations of exes. The plus would add to this same sex couples and people who are dating, including those who may not be having sexual relations. So this would include kids who are dating. As I understand this, this plus stuff is intended to increase the types of people who are covered. Violence goes from the obvious physical to verbal and psychological. It includes things like stalking and other controlling kinds of behavior. [WARNING: Don't quote me on any of this. I'm still trying to work it all out in my own mind. You can look up "Intimate Partner Violence Prevention" on google and see what everyone says. Or go to the CDC site and see what they say.

Prevention is a term the CDC is pushing hard. Their intent as I understand it, is to put more money and programs into preventing intimate partner violence before it even begins. The basic strategy is to expose people - younger people mostly - to how to have healthy relationships, particularly relationships that have a romantic or sexual aspect.

So the grant money is not allowed to be spent on intervention. Intervention being actions taken to stop already occuring intimate partner violence. The dilemma comes when you try to separate the two. Some things are obvious. The police coming to arrest a batterer is clearly intervention. Working with the battered spouse to help prevent future incidents as well as doing the same with the batterer tends to be seen, by the CDC, as intervention rather than prevention. They have terms like primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention that tries to make these distinctions. I strongly support the focus on prevention. That is why I'm even involved with this project. For every couple that could turn to violence to resolve their differences but who learn how to resolve those differences in other ways, our community saves a lot of future time and money doing intervention. It also saves a lot of time and money for other family members and friends whose lives are interrupted by such violence. But people who are at the forefront of this issue, almost necessarily are involved with intervention. They have to be doing both. Yes, we want to stop future violence, but if there are battered folks right now, they can't be ignored.

In any case, the emphasis on prevention is wise in the long term. And the debates that the distinctions cause are probably good because they make the participants think about all the implications. What about kids who witness violence at home? Is working with them intervention or prevention, for example. But this is almost a chicken and egg debate and after the discussion, with heightened awareness, the people directly involved need to be given some leeway to make common sense decisions about how the intepret this. Since there seems to be pretty good evidence that many batterers were battered or witnessed battering as children, they are the likeliest to become violent later, and thus the group where prevention would have the biggest long term impact.

We didn't spend a lot of time yesterday discussing this. Most of our time was in small groups determining how we are going to develop a statewide plan to prevent intimate partner violence. Different groups took different aspects of the tasks - getting an inventory of already available resources to document what we already know from existing data about the issue; developing the plan itself; setting up an evaluation protocol; dissemination of the plan and the information in it. I was extremely impressed by the competence and commitment of the 20 or so members of the steering committee. They represent expertise at various levels - from people currently working directly with youth and couples to higher level administrators, planners, and researchers. And while we could have more representation, we did have males as well as females, Hispanics and Alaska Natives as well as whites. And rural as well as urban residents. There was no bickering, even over the definitions. Everyone seemed to understand the inherent problems of defining terms, the importance of working on it, and the need to not worry about resolving all the loose ends. I think this has the potential to be a project that makes a difference in the lives of Alaskans.

American Soldiers Abducted by Group Disguised as Americans

Story of soldiers' slayings revealed slowly
Correspondent's tenacity helped unearth the truth
By RICHARD MAUER
Anchorage Daily News

Published: January 28, 2007
Last Modified: January 28, 2007 at 03:34 AM

BAGHDAD -- I was nearly done eating today when Hussam Ali, our stringer from Karbala, buzzed the gate to our floor and charged into the room.
Hussam is thin like a runner. His cheekbones look sculpted and his skin is darker than olive. He has a thin mustache. And he was excited like any reporter with a big, big story.
Hussam had been up well past 2 a.m., talking on the phone to bureau chief Leila Fadel about the events of a week ago Saturday in his town. That's when four American soldiers, most likely all from Fort Richardson, were abducted and executed, still handcuffed, following a brazen raid on a provincial government compound.
Army officials finally acknowledged the abductions last night in a press release e-mailed to media 11 p.m. Iraq time. Prior to that, the official story made it sound like the soldiers had died in battle, not murdered in, or just outside, the Chevy Suburbans abandoned by the attackers miles from the compound.
But Hussam began discovering the truth earlier this week, having heard from the police in the neighboring town of Hilla, where the Suburbans -- and the slain Americans -- were found. But the U.S. Army refused to confirm or deny the account until The Associated Press sent a report over its wire last night. . . .

At dusk on Saturday, Jan. 20, Hussam was in his house, a few hundred yards from the compound, when he heard a huge explosion. He raced out the door and headed toward the sound of gunfire. Early-arriving pilgrims in the streets were scattering. Hussam thought a mortar had landed in their midst. Then he saw smoke rising from the compound. Was it a car bomb, he wondered?
With snipers on the roofs, he didn't want to get too close to the walls. He took cover beside a police car abandoned in the middle of the street. He was on the opposite site of the compound from the gate. He could see military vehicles burning inside but not the Suburbans roaring off with their captives.
Women and children were racing out of a small door in the wall to his left. They had been visiting their men in jail. Hussam asked what they had seen, but they wouldn't talk to him.
It grew very dark. The power was cut. The gunfire had stopped. Hussam made his way to the gate. The guards were still jumpy and excited. He asked them who the attackers were.
"Americans! It was the Americans!" they shouted.
As surreal as Iraq can be, that still made no sense to Hussam. But the attackers came up in a half-dozen or more Suburbans, just like Americans travel. They had U.S. documents and wore U.S. uniforms. At least one was very light-skinned and spoke in English. {Get the whole Anchorage Daily News story clicking here.]

Think about what this means. Iraqi insurgents or maybe Al-Qaida, or Iranians got US vehicles, or US looking vehicles, dressed in US uniforms, with US papers, breeze past the checkpoint, attack, and kidnap four American soldiers. One of the reasons I thought our invasion of Iraq was a mistake from the beginning was that I knew we were sending young American troops into a culture they knew nothing about, where people speak a language they don't understand. As a former Peace Corps volunteer who lived as the only American in a small Northern Thai provincial capital for a year (a second volunteer showed up the second year) I understand a little bit about living in a foreign culture. And we had enough intensive Thai language training before we left that I could get by in Thai (emphasis on 'get by') when I arrived. That was good because my Thai was better than the English of most of the people I met. I know how totally ignorant I was - despite our language and cultural training - when I arrived. And the more language and culture I learned, the more I realized how much more there was that I would never comprehend.

So our troops were going to be dependent on Arabic speaking interpreters. But how do you know which interpreters are on 'our' side? So we are in a country, where, for the most part, we are dependent on bi-lingual Iraqis for communication. Yes, I know there are some American soldiers trained in Arabic, just like I was trained in Thai. I could get by, but I certainly didn't understand everything they were saying, or the nuances, or even the irony.

And the war is in their home territory. Where they know when things feel abnormal. Where they have relatives and friends. Where they know the shortcuts between the houses, between the towns. Where they had secret hiding places as kids. US soldiers know none of this.

And many of them speak English. Certainly far more Iraqis speak pretty good English than American troops speak even the most basic Arabic. I know about translators, because a person in my town took English lessons from me because she wanted to deal directly with the foreigners building the road in our area when she negotiated with them to lease the dump trucks she owned. The Thai translator the foreigners had was shaking down all the would-be contractors for kickbacks. In the end, she woke me up one morning at 6am insisting I had to come as her translator because her English wasn't good enough yet. And afterward the foreigners offered me the job as translator, because they knew theirs wasn't conveying everything honestly. (I didn't take the job, I had my classes to teach.) And I know about translators because of a research trip to Beijing with my Hong Kong college students. My students quietly told me what was actually being said as opposed to what the translator had conveyed. This wasn't about bribes, but about Chinese ideas of what is appropriate and inappropriate to say. So that my questions sometimes were rephrased, which explained why the answers made little sense sometimes. Also, because direct translations from one language to another are very difficult to make. The translations are literally accurate, but the words in English don't mean what they mean in the original language.

So already, just the problems of going into a different country, without knowing the culture, without having historical links and personal connections, put us in a real disadvantage. In this newsreport, it is the Iraqi reporter who lives in the neighborhood, was there when the kidnapping took place, and could go around and ask the soldiers and others what happened, who got the story. Not the American journalists trapped in the green zone. [after reading the blog I need to correct this, he isn't in the Green Zone, but he has been, so far, trapped in his hotel.] So even the journalists are relying on the word of Iraqis who may well be accurate reporters of what happened, or could even be plants for the opposition. It takes a while to develop the kind of relationship and cultural sensitivity to know the difference.

Aside from my own overseas experience, the film, Battle of Algiers, about the uprising in Algiers that eventually got the French out and gained Algeria's independence, taught me long ago how difficult it is to fight an urban war in a foreign land against a united people. I was glad to see the film was on the must-see list in Washington, DC a couple of years ago. Apparently the right people didn't see it, or if they did, thought like the French, that they knew better. Given our involvement in Iraq and Afganistan, I think all Americans ought to slip down to their video rental store and check it out. Even if they have to read the subtitles.

But all of those comments are just background for the real importance of this story. First, note that in the story "At least one was very light-skinned and spoke in English." There is an assumption that Americans are 'very light skinned." Or that Iraqis are not. Of course, we know that the US military is made up of soldiers of every shade of skin.

Second, whoever conducted this raid, understood the Americans far better than the Americans understand them. They were able to disguise themselves as Americans. These are people every bit as smart as the smartest Americans over there, but they have the advantage of knowing the home culture and language, as well as knowing enough of the American culture and language to pull pretending to be Americans.

This report suggests that up to now soldiers riding in US looking vehicles and wearing US uniforms and carrying US papers and speaking at least some English, have been assumed to be Americans and they pretty much get waved through the checkpoints. If that is true, and this news story is true, then American soldiers are no longer going to be able to trust American soldiers. Not only will they be fighting the 'enemy,' they now have to be very careful of their own troops, who may actually be the enemy.

And given that many of our troops are brown skinned and have accents, what is going to happen to the morale in our troops? Are American soldiers who look like they could be 'them' and don't speak accent-free American English going to be suspect? I would guess that might have been one of the objectives of the raid - to sow doubt among American soldiers about who is actually American.

After I wrote this, I went back to the Anchorage Daily News website and began reading Rich Mauer's blog. I know Rich and talked to him a couple weeks ago because he'd written such a good piece on the FBI investigation of Alaskan politicians. That's when I learned he was headed for Iraq. Reading his blog reinforces all the stuff I've said above about knowing the language and the culture. So far Rich is locked up in a dark hotel room getting news from Iraqi reporters and news wires. You can read his blog yourself. But reporting is different from running a military campaign. We need lots of eyes and ears. As someone who's just been plucked off the streets of Anchorage (he's got good reporting skills, but his experience in Iraq is not much different from most others in Anchorage) he will see and hear things that are different from what more experienced Iraq hands will see. All is new and different and his eye is more like the average Alaskan's, so perhaps his reporting will connect to them more. His blog reports are certainly interesting. In addition to checking out Rich's blog, you might also want to check out the website and blog of Dahr Jamail, another person from Anchorage who has been covering Iraq as an independent reporter for several years now. When wandering around the streets of Bagdad got too dangerous, he pulled out of Iraq, and is now reporting about the mideast more generally.

Bohemian Waxwings and the Mountain Ash Trees

Our living room window faces south, so when the waxwings come to feast on our berries I'm always filming into the light. (The sun is basically on the southern horizon all winter when they come to claim their prizes from the Mountain Ash trees.) And this being the first time I videoed the birds, using my digital camera, I totally forgot about the sound. Luckily, the music on the radio is ok, unfortunately, my wife was talking on the phone. But, for the time being, I'll post it as a way to entice you to find links to better pictures of these beautiful birds. And as a reminder to others who might forget their camera is recording sound as well as video.



These are the second set of tree trimmers maintaining our mountain ash trees.

Spring - A Sneak Preview

Wow, the sun was streaming in the windows this morning. The plows had been pushing all the snow into the middle of the road and were finally loading them into trucks to haul away. The sky was blue. It seemed like it had been a long time. A column in today's paper confirmed it. It has snowed in Anchorage 22 of the last 25 days! So that's why I've given up running for shoveling snow. And why the snow kept getting plowed, but never cleared.






I finally started digging out a parking space because I couldn't park in the street any more without blocking the street. You can see Jan 10, then Jan 12 almost ready. Wednesday a city pickup was blocking our driveway. The lady said, "They're going to plow the street on the 26th, so you have to move the car. But since it's a VW van - and I have one too - I was going to knock on your door instead of leaving a yellow notice on your car." She was very nice and friendly, but that doesn't seem like a very efficient way to notify people.

If my car hadn't been parked there when she came by, I wouldn't have know they were coming today. But since she told me, I parked it in the driveway yesterday, and well before that sun was up and streaming, we heard snow removal equipment. They started at about 7am in the neighborhood, and they were still at it at 3pm.

Here's the street all blocked up since early January. And today after it was all cleared.




But, we have our street back. It really is nice to have a parking place I don't have to carefully squeeze into because of the snow all around. On the other hand, it was starting to get cozy on the street. Now it looks so wide and bare. Not complaining. Especially since it was 42 F (yes, above, it doesn't get that cold here) which means some melting and certainly that will turn to ice when it freezes again. At least up to now, it's stayed below freezing and the worst we had was hard packed snow, not ice. But they've cleared the streets, so that will minimize the mess.

Taylor Branch

One of the best parts of my college education was the almost weekly appearance of prominent speakers at UCLA. For the most part these were well known people - recent Time magazine covers - and being able to see and hear, and in some cases talk to, the human beings behind the mythical characters portrayed on television, magazines, and books when a long way to making me realize that, in fact, famous, even great, people, were first of all just people. Two of the most memorable were Margeret Mead and George Wallace. Sitting on the floor around the famed anthropologist with 20 other students and talking to her was like leaving reality and entering into the magical world of books and media.

Wallace was governor of Alabama. Alabama was seething with demonstrators. Police and marchers were in daily conflict over the contradiction between the US Constitution and the Jim Crow laws of the South. The shocking images of dogs attacking, and police beatings unarmed and peaceful demonstrators were on television every night. Wallace was clearly one of the devil's emissaries. What could he possibly say or do that could change our minds? Obviously, nothing. When I got to the auditorium about an hour early - I knew it would be crowded - the first three or four rows were already filled with Black students. By the time he came to the stage, the room was packed and there was a collective tension and anticipation. I don't remember what he said, but within five minutes of taking the stage, Wallace's humor, charisma, and obvious intelligence had disarmed the audience. We laughed at his jokes and we listened to his words. We didn't agree with his beliefs about segregation, but there was obviously much more to this man than I, and I'm sure most of the audience, was prepared for. And it made it much easier to understand why the people of Alabama had elected him. It had a profound impact on how I evaluated people from then on - particularly those I only knew through the media. It began opening me to see the myths we absorb as we grow up. As any people grow up. I'd bought into all the demonizing of this man. Don't misunderstand me here, I still believe the legally sanctioned segregation was abhorrent. But I learned that human beings were much more complicated than I'd ever imagined.

So I'm pleased to say that in the last few years, the University of Alaska Anchorage has hosted far more prominent speakers on campus. Jared Dimond, Francis Collins, and Alan Lightman all gave very powerful presentations last year. While these aren't speakers of the same national prominence, they are a start. Of course today, campus speaking has become much more of a business rather than an honor and public service, with the most sought after speakers earning tens of thousands of dollars for a presentation. Nevertheless, it is still important for us to see and hear in person, the people we see on the flat screen.

In any case, tonight we heard Taylor Branch speak. He said a number of significant things. What he said about the importance of myth and stories in our culture and how they shape what we think and do goes right to the heart of my last publications. He also told stories of his childhood - how his stories shaped his knowing of the world. The black employee at his father's Dry Cleaners with whom his father had a real friendship, and how Taylor joined the two of them at Atlanta Cracker baseball games. Except that at the stadium, the employee had to sit in the colored section while he and his dad sat in the white section. How shocked he was when his father spoke at the employee's funeral, and cried. And how he somehow knew as a child that this topic of race relationships was not to be discussed. Harold Napolean talks about great silence among Alaska Natives, how the great epidemics that wiped out Alaska Native villages in the late 19th and early 20th Century were also not spoken about. Which was also true about children of holocaust survivors generally not hearing from their parents' stories. I know I never asked about what had happened to my grandparents who never got out of Germany. It was a subject that just wasn't to be raised, and I didn't until I was in my twenties.



He also talked about his battles with the academics at Princeton who discouraged him from doing his policy research summer trying to register black voters in rural Georgia, because real research was done at established institutions. And how turning in his summer diary was also frowned on, but he insisted because Washington policy and what he experienced were two totally different realities. This too resonated with how my experiences as a student in Germany and a teacher in rural Thailand taught me - experientially - what my later graduate programs didn't cover. And how, in his case, one faculty managed to help him get parts of his diary published.

And in terms of substance, he argued that there are three American myths that prevent us from seeing the important and positive legacy of the civil rights movement in the United States. Myth 1 - Race is both 'solved' and 'unsolvable.' Once the laws that specifically blocked access to equality were ended, the other actions, like Affirmative Action were too idealistic and ineffective because these things just can't be solved through government. Myth 2 - Politics failed in the 1960's, it overreached itself. Basically, that Government is bad. Myth 3 - Violence is the strength of the US. The importance and contribution of the non-violence of the civil rights movement is not understood or even seen. It's influence in the rest of the word - the non-violent overthrow of the Soviet Union and other Eastern European nations, for example - is not acknowledged.

I've paraphrased these fairly briefly, and don't do him justice here. Though I'm a firm believer that what he is calling myths and stories and narratives are, in fact, often unconscious and uncritcally believed. And when they are wrong, their basic invisibility and the taboo on challenging them, as was the case of segregation in the South, prevents us from even considering other possibilities. One example he gave was how various Southern politicians argued loudly that the only way integregation could come to the South was through violent imposition and this would never succeed. That integration would destroy the South. Branch argued that, in fact, as soon as the blight of forced legal segregation was ended, the South could join the rest of the nation. Major league sports moved into the South. Southern politicians could be considered for President (Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Bush) of the US, and the economy took off. The energy that had been spent enforcing segregation, and the suppressed potential of Black Southerners, were now available for more positve work.

City Moose

How can something as enormous as a moose become invisible in the middle of town? Well, see if you can find this one lying down in my neighbor's front yard.

Here's the moose just a few minutes before, eating snow. Well, there isn't much open water around.

But even in this enlarged picture it is almost impossible to see the moose unless you know it is there. It's the brown area between the two trees, lying down in the snow. Part is sticking out slightly to the left of the left tree.

Borat and post Borat

I think we were preparing for or gone to India when Borat first opened here. This week it's at the Bear Tooth, our favorite movie theater where you can have dinner while you eat and movies are only $3.

So after all the hype it seemed to me that Borat was Everything is Illuminated plus Candid Camera with no boundaries. It would have been hard to take all the Jew jokes if Cohen weren't Jewish. Making that a running theme, sort of gave him permission to hit on everyone else.


[Hey, I know the pics are fuzzy, but it was dark and I don't like using the flash, and here especially it would have been tacky. Anyway, you get the point of how the Bear Tooth works.]

I got to talk about it afterward at a returned peace corps volunteer party - with people who hadn't seen the film, but had heard about it. In Germany it is illegal to publicly deny the holocaust. For an American, that grates badly against my First Amendment sensitivities. Our ideology is that if your ideas are good, through open discussion they will win out. Suppressing people's thought only drives it underground. I say ideology there because I'm sure the Founding Fathers did little or no empirical study on this and we know that those who can control access to information or to dissemination media can screw up that assumption, at least in the short run. But it seems to me that neo-Nazis are alive and well in Germany despite the prohibition.

Well, Borat made me realize how much we self censor in the US. Given what I see in the movies and on tv it's hard to believe that we self censor at all. But Borat really was over the top - especially in putting down lots of different types of people. And in exposing people who agreed with his racist, sexist, and other prejudiced ranting. (Though someone said they'd seen a tv interview of the car salesman - who told him how fast he needed to drive to kill Gypsies - who said he'd actually questioned his goal of killing gypsies and finally said 30 miles an hour to shut him up after constantly being asked the question. So we don't know what people really said and what was edited. But this wasn't supposed to be a documentary, it's a made up story, so I'll allow him that much.)

The point I'm trying to get to is that it is probably better to have people say this out loud where everyone can hear it, rebut it, etc. than to repress it and send it underground. Especially in the age of Google where anyone can get to anything anyway. The key is that children get the care, attention, and education they need so they don't feel so alienated in the first place, and so their crap detectors are working well.

I know I caught myself a couple of times thinking, "I shouldn't be laughing at this," and I suspect others felt the same. And if this starts a trend of similar movies we're in serious trouble. Actually, I don't think too many people could pull something like this off. Ideally, people who watched the movie started talking about why it was both terrible for him to say all those things and also ok. Life isn't simple.



And at the party I ran into Jack Dalton.. I knew him years ago when he was a student at UAA and a waiter at the Golden Pond restaurant, a Chinese restaurant run by Charlie, who now owns Charlie's Bakery. A long article in the Anchorage Daily News recently focused on how in college he began exploring his birth parents' Alaska Native culture and how he has a flourishing business now as a Story Teller using Alaska Native themes with modern twists. He gets contracts at school districts, museums, and other venues - including private homes - all over the country.

And thanks Sunny, for hosting the party



- it was a State of the Union party and I'd thought I missed it yesterday. But she emailed me today strongly suggesting I show up. I didn't catch the hint. It turned out I'd won the grand prize by guessing how many standing ovations the president got. (That's why it was today, so she could count that as well as use of different words such as democracy, terrorist, math (Sunny teaches math)). Anyway, by her count there were 3.5 standing ovations which I guessed exactly. And the prize is pretty neat - two tickets to the Pamyua concert next Thursday.

[Hey I know these pictures aren't that sharp either, but it was fairly dark, don't like flash, etc. Sunny is the sunny one in the middle. And I figured it was ok to cut off Jack's head since you can see it in the other picture. You probably didn't even think to complain about cutting off his body from that one.]

And the baby is now here

The shower has now resulted in its natural consequence. Saturday, after the ethics forum, I went over to Alaska Regional Hospital to welcome to the world young "I". Regional is like a ghost town. Almost no one around. But I found the mother-baby wing and the birthing room, Mom, Dad, and son. And my wife had gotten there before me.



One room for the mom, an extra bed for the dad, plenty of room for them to spend the time together with the baby. We didn't have that opportunity way back when. I had to leave Joan alone at the hospital. And the baby didn't stay with her all night. The nurse came in for something, the baby was feeding, so she just said, "No problem, I'll be back later." They could have used a small fridge. And the cafeteria wasn't open on the weekend, just a Subway.

Anchorage Folk Festival

So after seeing Babel Friday afternoon and having dinner at the Saigon Pho, I did a little work in the office and then we walked over to the Wendy Williamson Auditorium to catch a bit of the Anchorage Folk Festival. This wonderful show happens for two weekends every January, plus various other shows and workshops during the week. Most of the performers are local, but they also bring up one or two guest groups from Outside. And it is all free. You can see their website by clicking on the title above.
Anyway, we got there in time to hear the Alaska Native Heritage Dancers and the guest group from Hawaii, Ho'Omalie.

There's nothing I can say that can really capture the mood and great music, so I'm adding a short video clip. Alaska Native music and dance - and there are a lot of different language groups that have different traditions and ways of making music and dancing - are not something I was used to when we arrived in Alaska. It was hard to take the first few times I heard it. I really didn't know how to listen to it. But over the years I've grown to appreciate it. No, more than that. It really reaches inside me and touches vital parts of me. I used to think that Hawaiian Natives were luckier because their music is so easy for outsiders to appreciate. But, listening to the Alaska group followed by the Hawaiian group, I found myself saying, "Wow, the Hawiaains have nothing on the Alaskans tonight."

But you can judge for yourselves. I've made a tape with some short snippets of both. (I looked carefully through the program booklet to see if there was anything about not videotaping and could find nothing. Even so, I've kept the clips short like they do on sites that let you sample music before you buy it. I'm hoping that maybe someone might want to hear more of this. Or come to this weekend's part two.



You can see the schedule of events by clicking on the title of this post and going to the Festival website. Another part I haven't mentioned is all the groups hanging around the lobby and hallways jamming. The video starts out with such a group.

Babel and Pho

Wow! Babel caught the feel of each of its locations - Southern California, Northern Mexico, Moroco, and Tokyo. OK, I haven't been to Moroco, but there was something about the camera and the editing that picked up lots of little details that said to me, "This director is seeing the world differently than most American directors." Having spent a fair amount of time in non-Western countries, I recognized these images. (And, of course Alejandro González Iñárritu isn't a United States citizen.) I knew that the film connected these different locations and perhaps the critics who didn't like the film thought the connections were too easy - the American tourists in Moroco, connected to their children left in Southern California in the care of their Mexican nanny. That doesn't spoil anything and I won't reveal the Japanese connection. The more complex, and to me more significant institutional connections were not even touched on. That would be a legitimate critique. But I doubt that was what they didn't like.

Or perhaps they thought the portrayal of the industrial world citizens too negative and the citizens of Moroco and Mexico too positive. While I suspect that some groups of tourists would have reacted better, I know that the impatient Brit on the bus has very real models. And that American tourists as wrought up as Richard (Brad Pitt) are also not uncommon. And I suspect the alienation of the Japanese school girl is also real. And the Morocan police weren't portrayed all that positively and Santiago (Gael García Bernal) certainly made some pretty bad choices. The fact that Pitt's character had no family or friends who could take the kids for a while, seemed a bit hard for me to conceive. While the mobility of Americans pulls many from their connections, it seems a family as well off and established as this family ought to have been able to call on friends or relatives. Perhaps that was the Mexican stereotype of Americans who have abandoned their kids to Mexican caregivers.

It did make the Morocans - the goat herders and the villagers where Pitt and Blanchet awaited help - into human beings. They weren't complete people, but we got past the normal stereotypes we might have had. And the Mexican wedding was something anyone in any culture could understand.


Having the Japanese girl be deaf was an unexpected extra twist, showing her own alienation not only from her Dad (who could sign), but from other Japanese.


But all in all, a film depicting the problems of communications really takes us a step closer to being able to communicate with others. This was a film with a different perspective, one that I recognize as closer to the world I see, than most Hollywood films. For that reason, I applaud it.



We talked about the film afterward over Vietnamese noodles at Pho Saigon restaurant.


I did peruse some of the reviews of the movie. Most were pretty positive and the negative ones were mostly about the gap between what was attempted and what was achieved by the film makers. But this comment on Lisa Schwartzbaum review is what I thought the negative American reviews would look like:

"This is a great movie for elitist and (properly) self-loathing white American liberals. They can sit in their comfy theatre chairs and watch Brad Pitt go through all of his cliche'd UgAm histrionics, contrasted with the Deep Nobility of the 3rd World characters and smile their self-satisfied smiles and say to themselves "How awful THOSE types of Americans behave... no wonder the rest of the world hates us !" Then they can drive home in their Prius or other socially acceptable vehicle, pick up a little Starbuck's on the way ("they DO support the environment, you know"), and revel that their sense of being "emotionally drained" at this experience of High and Culturally Sensitive Art is the stamp of legitimacy on their highly evolved Liberal Sensibilities. Truly, their emotional reaction to this formulaic drivel is proof of their Great Worldliness.
I want my 10 bucks back."