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简昭惠：恶意的善行

 

龙应台在今年的2月5日发表了一篇「路走得宽阔，人显得从容」，题目下边特别署名那是「自首报告」。文章讨论的是把马英九搞得灰头土脸的「首长特支费」。

老实说在这个事件还没有爆发之前，台湾上下包括那些政府官员们没有几个人搞得清楚「特支费」真正的实际用途。不要说特支费，就是阿扁被质疑得总统大位快要坐不下去的「国务机要费」性质也差不多。按照惯例那是首长们的「交际费」，很多政府官员并没有认真去弄清楚。只是按照以往的「惯例」把它当成是一种官员的「私房钱」。直到现在閙得沸沸扬扬了，才得到一种普遍的共识.认为它虽可以自由支配但必须是用於公务的补贴.

阿扁的「国务机要费」被起诉后，据说被发现有一张发票是拿来买钻戒的。

钻戒若是送给太太或者女朋友都属贪汚，但若是拿来「办国民外交」当公关费则有灰色地带可以搞暧昧。中国大陆对台湾外交空间的打压这次帮了阿扁一点小忙。使他可以振振有词地说因为正常的外交管道都走不通嘛，所以只能以暗送秋波的方式搞一点祕密外交陈仓暗渡。检查官大人我阿扁死不足惜，但不能害到x国收了我浪漫小礼物的那位重要的女士。否则以后谁敢和台湾交朋友博感情？

所以我不能说送谁送那里去，死都不能说！一说就会危害到国家的安全！

马英九比较倒楣的地方有很多，不沾锅兼有洁癖的马英九一向很少花什么钱交际应酬，顶多和女性粉丝们照照相握握手，就把他的选民们「电」得头晕眼花、惊叫连连.再者他长得比较英挺，即使十几年的破西装穿在他身上也显得特别有型。他最喜欢以短裤和纯棉小背心的凉快装扮在台北街头晨跑，并且在萤光幕前Show出他渗着汗水光滑的肌肉，所以治装费基本上很省。其他官员很少有特别费的问题，套一句台湾的俚语「鲜食都不够，那还有得剩来晒乾（当乾货储存）」。喜欢参加婚丧喜庆和民众博感情或出席有漂亮美眉在座一起商讨国事饭局的官员们特支费根本不够用，那还可能有余款可以存到私人户头去？

首长特支费中有一半须要有发票和收据，马英九很老实地把没用的那一半汇到自己的薪资所得中去并且据实以报（税），另一半不需收据的那一半据说有许多张发票是用来买太太的内裤卫生棉，还有养一只不知那里捡来名叫「马小九」的流浪狗。马英九用首长特支费来支付马小九的健康检查及医疗费用，金额达79700元。这…。很难瞎掰成是「做为公务用途」的吧？

阿扁和马英九每天忙得不得了，这些费用的用途和支出大概都交给祕书或助理去处理。如果问说台湾人对马英九的特支费事件有什么看法。我想大部份人都不会认为他是「贪汚」，只是从这件事里发现马英九对危机处理的能力似乎有点后知后觉.他对自己的廉洁自信过度，事情一发生，他根本没当回事，也没去搞清楚状况才会出现前言不对后语，供词翻来覆去的窘状。

套一句前总统李登辉说的：「憨憨怎么当总统」？（儍不啷铛亳无谋略怎么当总统）。

农历年这几天我写了一封电子邮件去向龙应台拜年，我问她：「前阵子读到你的「自首报告」想必又掀起后续正反两面的论战」？

她回了我一封信，我把她的回信重点原文摘录如下：「台湾的事，大概只能「放下」一点，原来民主的过程需要那么长，那么纠结.你说得不错，「自首」使我在几个电视台上听说被骂了整整48小时.也是预料之中的。我也不见得认为马英九一定比苏贞昌或谢长廷是更好的总统，国民党的老朽文化尤其令人反感厌恶，但特别费的事情，还是认为应该讲清楚。原则和我不捐100元是一样的。明知文章会被简化为「挺马」，还是甘冒大不韪选择写了，写了也就放下了。结果随便吧。希望你开心一点.如果有机会去香港，来找我吧。」

对我这种既非蓝也不绿但有点常识关心政治的台湾人民而言，几年前，军购拉法叶案郭立恆贪污了8亿台币。一个武获室的上校就能吃掉国家那么多钱，以陈水扁或马英九的职位若有心贪污自然不会小儿科的区区一千多万.所以问题不在贪不贪污，而是在遇事的处理态度和能力。陈水扁的解释检查官陈瑞仁不相信，我们也觉得办外交要花钱没错啦，可是SOGO礼券啦、钻戒啦、到处收集发票的行径也着实十分诡异。

马英九上电视的说明有三个版本，而这三个版本不可能同时成立；如果马英九在第一时间「自首」，当有多好。

最终的答案大概是「人性」，歴史的客观事实总是牵扯出太多的人性。总统及市长碰到危机怎么都如此处理？国家在他们手中真有些危险咧。

龙应台在她的「自首报告」中说：「谁在乎马英九」？但准备於2008年竞逐总统的马英九和泛蓝阵营会不在乎？任期只剩一年多的阿扁已没有选票的压力了，民进党对阿扁的未来是不会太在乎的。

泛蓝阵营当初挖到SOGO礼券和总统的国务机要费疑云时，见猎心喜，挖挖挖挖出一堆令人眼花撩乱叹为观止的现象，媒体名嘴毒舌八卦穷追不舍倾囊而出，绿营那甘嚥下这口鸟气？当然会到鸟蛋里寻找骨头，这一寻更不得了，马英九将特支费直接就汇入私人帐户罪証可说更加确凿，检查官几乎没有不起诉的空间.这件事的始作俑者爆料英雄邱毅先生大概会猛搥心肝仰天长啸：「捺变按捏」（怎么变成这样？……。虽然，英雄仍是吾人本色，但事态演成今日局面乃是吾人始料未及）。

那些花48小时骂龙应台的人不知道现在倒底有没有真正搞清楚弄明白这两种「费」是什么「碗糕」（一种众说纷纭、无法归类的台湾小吃）？

不管国务机要费或特支费两件事如何公说公有理婆说婆有理。经歴这些吵吵闹闹的八卦剧情倒也使市井小民们都长了不少思维，感受到一个公平完善清晰明白制度的建立是多么重要。 政党尽管是出於私心恶斗、名嘴毒舌争出锋头，各路媒体嗜报八卦，这些勾心斗角权谋巧智不也尽皆呈露摊现人前。这一场「恶意的善行」谱写了台湾民主进程的踉跄脚步，不管是蓝是绿还是彩色，我总觉得「透明」是一种最美的颜色。

 

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《财经》遭遇"文字狱"

 

闻听今年第五期《财经》杂志突然被”召回”，心里难免一惊，不能再”揣着明白装糊涂”下去了。

讨论《物权法》，不仅仅是全国近三千人大代表有资格讨论的，还是普通公民你我他都可以讨论的。既然《财经》杂志是为你我他等普通公民办的，不专是为三千人大代表办的，那么，它当然就可以公开讨论这个话题，为什么却在中途惨遭阉割呢？

难道现在还是”道路以目”的文字狱时代吗？

仅仅因为有几页谈论《物权法》内容的文章，甚至涉及了法学权威江平等人的言论，就是整本杂志突然被”叫停”的原因？这个国家，在党舆论之外，还有没有不同意见，还允不允许发表不同意见？

不知从何时起，我们就对舆论一统”怪现象”见怪不怪了：私有财产神圣不可侵犯入宪，不可谈；多党制，不可谈；新闻自由和新闻法，不可谈；党的总书记差额选举，不可谈；黄菊病情，不可谈；五十年前的”反右”、四十前的”文革”、三十年前的”四人帮”、二十年前的”学生运动”，统统不可谈；……那么多的不可谈，现在又多了一条，就是《物权法》在获得全国人大”高票”通过前，同样是”不可谈”.不但不可谈，而且也不能多问几个”为什么”.于是，报纸杂志等喉舌，开始揣着明白装糊涂了，不谈就不谈。而偶尔有意外的”黑马”如《财经》，一旦谈了就被”召回”，损失惨重，把原刊有《物权法奠基》等文章拿下，然后再造假，新包装一册新《财经》，以满足掌管”文字狱”大权者的阴暗心理——反正读者被蒙在鼓里，揣着糊涂的人真糊涂，揣着明白的人装糊涂。

虽然《财经》杂志的掌门人胡舒立被称为”最危险的女人”，虽然《财经》已经成功转型为市场化的传媒，可其背后那”看不见但实实在在的一只手”异常厉害，它硬硬地把已经印刷、出版并发行到二级市场的杂志给一一”回收”，”一个字也不能流传出去”，等他们把敏感文章撤下后，再拼回去，似乎一点痕迹也不留。但”要想人不知，除非己莫为”，3月5日出版的刊物，3月9日还没有到二级市场，不但不能自圆其说，而且掩耳盗铃更让天下人笑话。

既然《财经》杂志是市场化运作，就应该有责任把这一切内幕一一公开，只有透明化，才能保护自己的未来。否则，没有透明，当然也就没有《财经》的未来。

我们若有道德的勇气，便不会害怕将真相说出来。我们若真正公平作判断，便不用害怕人家表达不同的看法。前者是对《财经》人员尤其是决策人胡舒立女士、王波明先生说的，后者是对国家宣传主管决策高层说的——现在已经不是人人自危的”文革”时代了。一个国家的权威，应该是为国家利益和民众利益着想的。当决策者听到与自己不同意见的当时，应该先倾听，不可以粗暴阻止，更不可以”文字狱”待之。如果一个掌权者动辄对提出不同看法和不同意见的人恶言相加，甚至动武，被关进监牢，这样做，只能说明自己理亏，在历史上更站不住脚。

对任何一件事情，人各有不同的想法，是很正常的事情。我们相信真理越辩越明，只要是真理，便不能被推倒。同样，真话也是这样，只有建设一个人人有责任说真话、反对说假话的社会，才是一个良性的互动的社会，又是一个健康、正常的现代化社会。没有民主就没有现代化，这是胡锦涛说的，总不能说是一套，做又是一套吧。

难道我们这个时代，有太多的真话在堆积吗？难道我们这个社会，有太多的不同意见在公开辩论吗？

似乎这些都”还”没有看到，只有《财经》杂志稍微一露头就被生生地”按”下去的事实发生。这样的情景，令人想起前不久漫画家丁聪先生的一幅漫画《老虎被关进笼子》（原载《读书》杂志），其大意是：在动物园，Y先生向华南虎训话：”山林梦就不要再做啦。深山开发啦，老林砍伐啦。放你回山，死路一条，能关在这里，算你有福气，你别不知好歹！”这里的华南虎，类似于说真话的《财经》杂志，尚有几丝野气，可惜被关进了宣传部治理下的”动物园”，于是被训话，”新闻梦就不要再做啦。《物权法》通过啦，《新闻法》没门啦。放你自由，死路一条，能关进这里，算你有福气，别不知好歹！”俨然，在一个新闻不自由的一元化制度下，类似《财经》这样被体制捆绑的”华南虎”，要删便删，要关便关，要打便打，要死不能活，只赖官府一声令下。

这便是《财经》杂志的悲哀，更是新闻不自由国度全体新闻人的悲哀。

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严家祺：赵紫阳的八十一篇遗言

 

读《赵紫阳软禁中的谈话》，我的心情是悲痛又悲哀，敬佩加钦佩。

我为赵紫阳十六年软禁而悲痛

宗凤鸣是赵紫阳的老战友、老同事、老朋友，他比赵紫阳小三个月，曾担任过北京航空学院党委书记。在赵紫阳软禁期间，他以气功师名义去赵紫阳家，从一九九一年到二○○四年，前后达上百次之多。宗凤鸣这本书，记述了赵紫阳八十一篇近百次谈话，也记述了赵紫阳在软禁中的心境、心态和生活。

赵紫阳晚年的心境是痛苦的。他说他曾给江泽民写过一封信，指出限制他的自由是违反党章、违反宪法的。江泽民未作答覆。赵紫阳说他没有想到会被软禁。在软禁中，赵紫阳的心态是高度自由的，他回顾历史，谈邓小平、谈胡耀邦、谈乔石、万里、李鹏、胡锦涛、温家宝无拘无束，怎样想就怎想说，赵紫阳晚年已摆脱了旧的意识形态的束缚。自由的思考中国的前途。然而，赵紫阳生活处境不好。在他去前五个月，赵紫阳肺部纤维化痛变已加剧，在这样的情况下，他还没有人身自由，没有会客、访友、外出的自由。当时，李锐写信给胡锦涛、江泽民，要求解除他的软禁状态。二○○四年年底，宗凤鸣以“气功师”身份最后一次会见了赵紫阳，他见到赵紫阳夫人梁伯琪双目失明，生活不能自理，刚说过的话很快就会忘记。在赵紫阳家的庭院里，白天不见人影，地上到处是秋风扫落的枯叶。宗凤鸣还记述道：“此情此景，使我顿感凄凉”。赵紫阳夫妇晚年已是如此境况，还不能获准与近在咫尺的老战友相见。读到这里，我为中国人民永远的好总理、为一位遭受自己的党长达十六年软禁的总书记赵紫阳而悲痛。

我为胡温六四不讲正义而悲哀

宗凤鸣这本书，难能可贵的是，没有因为胡温身居高位，而在出版时删去赵紫阳对胡温的评价，这是宗凤鸣作为谈话记述者对历史的忠诚。

在赵紫阳去世前与宗凤鸣最后一次谈话中，赵紫阳在谈到胡锦涛时说：“他是在我们党正统意识形态所谓‘驯服工具’教育出来的一个青年干部”，“从他上任后，首先去西柏坡，后又去延安，还去毛主席家乡。这表明自己要继承毛主席这个传统，从这次毛主席一百一十年寿辰纪念文章作了大力赞扬也可说明。在这种正统的意识形态支配下，不可能有什么新的理念，使自己有什么使命感、历史责任感来改变中国的政治局面。同时，他也没有这个魄力，也没有这个力量来改变。”赵紫阳又说：“但胡锦涛本身是好人”，“温家宝的改革意识要好些，温是在改革开放潮流下发展起来的，但该人谨小慎微，要在尊重党的一把手这一传统下工作，看来，在改革上也不会有大的作为”。

当年胡耀邦平反冤假错案那么豪气万丈、赵紫阳推动经济改革那么雷厉风行，然而，胡温掌权后却瞻前顾后、谨小慎微。温家宝信誓旦旦“苟利国家生死以，岂因祸福避趋之”，却对他多年老上级赵紫阳的去世一言不发，连私下向赵家的关心与问候都没有。这使人联想起陈毅去世的情况。当年毛泽东原本不想参加陈毅追悼会，临到追悼会举行前，毛泽东突然觉得不去不行，急急忙忙在睡衣外加了一件大衣，赶到八宝山追悼会场。毛泽东是按自己心里的想法行动的，而温家宝竟能若无其事，不闻不问。对“六四”受益者江泽民，赵紫阳不存在希望。对与“六四”屠杀无关的胡温，赵紫阳在去世前两个月，也已感到失望。

胡耀邦赵紫阳是有使命感和历史责任心的人。一个国家领导人，如果没有使命感、历史责任心，就不会有内心的充分自由，这个国家的积弊就难改变。胡温把“集体领导”视作“民主”，九个常委共同开车“这怎么能有作为呢？”宗凤鸣的书中提到邓小平不喜欢开“常委会”，在于“常委会”体制是“多头马车体制”。问题是，邓小平的是不受限制的权力，而民主政治下的最高权力，不是受“集体领导”限制，而是受宪法、代表机构和任期的限制。想当年邓胡赵在毛泽东去世后转手改变中国，看一看世界各国领导人那种自由自在、无拘无束说话的神情，我真为胡温在赵紫阳和六四问题上没有内心自由、不主持正义、无所作为而悲哀。

敬佩赵紫阳的使命感和历史责任心

宗凤鸣这本记述也是一九八九年天安门事件最重要的历史见证，这是赵紫阳本人在天安门事件中的谈话和想法的完整记录。在这本书中，赵紫阳谈到他一九八九年五月十六日会见戈尔巴乔夫前后的情况，谈到五月十七日在邓小平家召开政治局常委会发生争论的情况，也谈到乔石、杨尚昆在军管问题上态度是如何改变的。赵紫阳说：“在会上谈到要实行军管”。“在这最后关头，如我赞成军管，总书记还可以当下去，我反对军管就要下台。是继续当总书记，对学生采取强硬方针，还是下台，我选择了后者”。

赵紫阳与宗凤鸣谈中国革命史、谈维新变法、谈到孙中山、毛泽东，谈中国现代化的目标。宗凤鸣说赵紫阳是“一个有历史责任感的人，有自己政治抱负”。在谈及六四问题时，有人认为赵紫阳不该提出同邓小平相左的意见，赵对此明确地说：“作为总书记，我必须有自己的态度，这是历史责任所在，我不愿在历史上欠一笔帐”。

我总认为，一个人要违背自己真实的想法，按某种“外部需要”去说话、去做事，这样的人生是没有意义的。就是在专制制度下，许多平民百姓都不愿违心讲话，违心做事，而作为这个制度下的高官，要按自己内心想法去说话、去做事，确实非常不容易。宗凤鸣说：赵紫阳在六四问题上的态度，在中国共产党历史上“是没有先例的”。“我理解他是要对历史负责，是以历史赋于自己的使命为己任的”。读《赵紫阳软禁中谈话》这本书，使我更为敬佩赵紫阳的伟大人格、敬佩他对中国进步的崇高使命感和强烈的历史责任心。

钦佩宗凤鸣有情有义申张正义

宗凤鸣不仅怀有强烈的正义感，而且是一位有情有义的人。《赵紫阳软禁中的谈话》不仅披露了赵紫阳晚年的思想、心态和生活状况，而且包含着宗凤鸣对正义的热爱和对几十年老战友的深情厚义。

特别值得一提的是，宗凤鸣在自序中以极明确的态度表达了他对六四的看法。宗凤鸣说他“反对出兵镇压，对赵紫阳在学运期间提出的解决问题的主张是无比赞同的”。“人民军队镇压人民，开进几十万大军，用坦克、机枪来对付手无寸铁的学生，这是中外历史上前所未有的，这是历史大悲剧”。

宗凤鸣现在身在中国大陆，他的声音那么大，他为赵紫阳申张正义的呼声已传遍全世界，而且反过来又通过广播和电脑网络传向中国。中国有几千年历史的专制制度那么凶猛，即使被赵紫阳称为“好人”的胡温不会去主动伤害宗凤鸣，我担心的是，当极左势力要用暗箭伤害宗凤鸣时，胡温的“不作为”有可能给宗凤鸣带来损伤。近几年来，这种“不作为”已造成许多践踏人权的事件。如果不能用宪法和法律保障公民的权利和自由，如果人对人都不讲情义，如果面对冤屈不寻求正义，我相信，和谐社会就不能建立起来。

二○○七年二月二十六日写于纽约

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A 19th-Century Turn

A 19th-Century Turn

By GEOFFREY WOLFF

Published: March 11, 2007

It perhaps strikes anyone who has read an ambitious historical novel  and certainly strikes anyone who has had the audacity to try to write one  that the enterprise represents the triumph of hope over experience, a suspension of hard-won, armoring caution, a Peter-Pannish faith in … well, faith. How daunting it must be to get it right: facts and artifacts, syntax and slang, costumes and customs, fads and prices, conventional wisdoms and bright ideas. And if such a novel were to aspire to be a bulging monster, teeming with extravagantly vivid characters going about their coincidentally intersecting lives with amplified voices, wearing garish clothes, committing melodramatic vices, loving (and hating) with the fervor of characters from a comic opera, then such fiction would seem perfectly ill-suited to a writer and observer known heretofore as the wised-up, sardonic, founding co-editor of the late Spy magazine. As a columnist (for New York magazine) and a radio commentator, Kurt Andersen should react to the emotions described by gee whiz like a fox to a bunny wabbit.

Andersens previous novel  Turn of the Century (1999)  is, like Heyday, lengthy and episodic, but it owes its flensing spirit to the examples of Tom Wolfes Bonfire of the Vanities and The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope It keeps a sharp eye focused on hypocrisy, self-interest, preening, sharp practice and overreaching.

Heyday, by contrast, cries huzzh for over-the-top ambition. It’s a band-concert of a novel, a parade in honor of overreaching. Set in 1848 — that hugely eventful year in Europe, the pre-Civil War United States, Mexico and the California gold fields — it never quits exclaiming, Gosh! How about that! Who’d a thunk it? It’s a mighty busy and messy story, jumping among the urban settings of Gotham, Paris, London, Chicago and San Francisco; evil is afoot and brutality the quotidian, but “Heyday” is also a sweet book, with a tropism toward redemption and happy endings.

The protagonist, connected to every subordinate character by sometimes flimsy networks of chance, is Benjamin Knowles, younger son of a newly rich Lancashire mill owner and entrepreneur. During his visit to a friend in Paris during the 1848 uprising that brought down the July Monarchy, the friend is believed to have been killed, and Benjamin is inadvertently an accomplice to the death of a militiaman. A principal weapon used during the mortal mayhem is the beak of a stuffed penguin, which suggests why at least one advance review of “Heyday” has described the novel as a “parody” of Victorian melodrama.

It is in fact an homage to Dickens, Dumas and Hugo, reviving as a central plot device the relentless quest of Inspector Javert, in “Les Miserables,” for the hide of Jean Valjean. Benjamin is hunted throughout “Heyday” by the elder brother of the slain militiaman, Drumont, a Corsican rumored to be the bastard son of Napoleon by his prostitute mother. Prostitution — in New York and San Francisco — provides a wealth of material and moral calculus for Andersen’s characters, the most successful of whom is Polly Lucking, a social-climbing nascent feminist, part-time unsuccessful actress and part-time wildly successful hooker in a New York brothel.

Benjamin, fleeing from Paris to England, and from England sailing to New York to seek adventure and fortune in the New World — looking for a “permanent place to live in a more suitably … American way. Whatever that meant” — meets Polly (unprofessionally) and falls in love. This brings him together with Polly’s brother, Duff, a survivor of the Mexican War suffering so acutely from post-traumatic stress disorder that he is not only a firefighter but a firebug, not only a sentimental idealist but a murderer. None of this, believe me, is played for laughs, although New York’s 19th-century brutality and coarseness approach comedy in their grotesqueness. (A noteworthy passage regards a fellow firefighter, Fatty Freeborn, a bully and rapist, who eats for dinner the sheep he has loved to death during the cocktail hour. Ameliorating this bestiality are two episodes detailing the attempted rescue of “imperiled pets” — a puppy bobbing downstream in one scene, a kitty trapped in a burning whorehouse in the other.)

Benjamin also falls in with Timothy Skaggs, friend to Duff and Polly, a Dartmouth dropout and black-sheep son of a New Hampshire mayor, an alcoholic daguerreotype photographer and journalist, a friend of Walt Whitman, who roams New York on the lookout for all that is novel and unexpected. This gives Andersen, seeing omnisciently through the eyes of his principal characters, opportunity to observe what’s astir, what has just been invented, what is in and what out. I was once asked by a grade-school kid whether toilet paper had been invented when I was a little boy; in much the same spirit of wonder, Andersen — generally through Benjamin or Timothy Skaggs —is besotted with the products of research masking as observation. Thus, when Skaggs was a boy “friction matches did not exist. … Photography was a fantasy. There were no one-penny newspapers, no private shops selling meats and fruits, no baseball, and precious few theaters or foreigners.”

Andersen is so keen to observe the wonders of his world that his characters seem able to see as clearly at night as at noon, and if his novel’s back is broken by the weight of its minutiae, its flow dammed by the debris of its detail, there is something moving, a stirring spirit, in the energy of its amazement. Like her author, Polly Lucking is agog at what’s on display at a New York department store; “she did enjoy looking at gold.”

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Thomas Hart Shelby

Gold, and the early days of the California gold rush, dominate the final third or so of “Heyday” (a terrific title, with its multiple exclamatory suggestions dominated by an exhortation). Polly and Benjamin, Duff and Timothy — leading a wagon train of trailing characters, including the avenging hound Drumont — find their misadventuresome ways to the golden rivers of Northern California. There the four cobble together a kind of commune, and pan laboriously for just enough precious grit and pebbles to keep them at it.

“Heyday” tries also to be a novel of ideas, gamely providing mouthpieces to test theories of political unrest, economy and evolution, free will versus security. Darwin walks on as a character, and Engels enjoys the enthusiasm of Benjamin. Manifest Destiny is deplored, the notion of the Noble Savage mocked and embraced. Again and again Duff specifies that “destruction and creation are the cycle of life.” Andersen declared in a recent interview that our “elective” invasion of Iraq was on his mind as he invoked our earlier war against Mexico, and that the “commune stuff” in his novel “reminded me of the late ’60s.”

But “Heyday” roars awake, unexpectedly, while Polly and Benjamin drudge wordlessly together on the river, panning “with their labor of 20 minutes” a “decent week’s wage” back in the world. “There were still fortunes to be made in California. But now luck had become occasional and scarce, like luck in most places at most times.” Now their output, pretty impressive despite the absurdly inflated cost of living, was in decline. “Yet Ben had Polly, thank heavens. Hadn’t he? She was all that he required. Wasn’t she?”

In the end, the answer to both questions will be yes, in thunder. The dead shall be raised, the evildoers vanquished. But those questions will resonate, to Andersen’s credit.

Geoffrey Wolff, a novelist and biographer, is the Berthold Leibinger fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

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Annals of Poetry

Annals of Poetry

By DAVID ORR

Published: March 11, 2007

The history of American poetry, like the history of America itself, is a story of ingenuity, sacrifice, hard work and sticking it to people when they least expect it. Whether it’s Ezra Pound dismissing his benefactor Amy Lowell as a “hippopoetess” or Yvor Winters accusing his friend Hart Crane of possessing flaws akin to a “public catastrophe,” you can count on the occasional bushwhacking in the land of what Horace called “the touchy tribe.”

The most recent such assault — and the most surprising in years — took the form of a 6,500-word article in The New Yorker last month by the poet Dana Goodyear, who is also a New Yorker editor. Goodyear’s subject was the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation, which received an unexpected (to put it mildly) bequest of roughly $200 million from Ruth Lilly in 2001. The article focuses on the Poetry Foundation’s president, John Barr, but Goodyear also takes on Poetry magazine, its founder Harriet Monroe, the Poetry Foundation Web site, legal proceedings relating to Lilly’s bequest, Ruth Lilly herself, the various objects collected by Ruth Lilly’s father (toy soldiers, gold coins), the price of real estate in Chicago and the stuff rich people wear at parties (a “crisp white shirt” or “coral lipstick,” apparently). It is a very long article.

It is also a slick production whose craftsmanship any critic would respect. Goodyear wants to portray the Poetry Foundation as a culturally conservative, slightly tacky enterprise led by a dilettantish, ex-Wall Street fat cat — “what people these days call a ‘businessman-poet’ ” — who’s itching to sell poems the way Frito-Lay sells Cool Ranch Doritos (and no, not by making them deeeeeelicious). So she fills her piece with references to advertising, buying and selling, and ostentatious wealth — John Barr has “a 25-acre estate in Greenwich,” the charity’s Web site has a budget of “more than a million dollars.” And she quotes many poets making critical remarks about Those People and All That Money (the poet J. D. McClatchy says the Foundation has an “aura of mediocrity”). Many readers might figure that Goodyear has done a fine thing by exposing this bunch of crisp-white-shirt-wearing yahoos.

The instinct wouldn’t necessarily be misplaced. After all, the Poetry Foundation does have big money, and some of Barr’s observations (regarding, say, the alleged careerism in M.F.A. programs) deserve a thoughtful response. But that response already has been made — for months now — on blogs, in print and in the letters section of Poetry magazine itself. (In the interest of disclosure, I’ve reviewed for Poetry.) As a result, Goodyear’s article has a strangely punitive cast — for example, only one poet, Billy Collins, is quoted saying anything remotely positive about the Poetry Foundation’s many enterprises. That’s funny, since those enterprises are hardly uniform. Indeed, many of the article’s critical voices have appeared in Poetry themselves (McLatchy shows up in the February issue); these writers presumably are making judgments about specific aspects of the foundation, not wholesale denunciations. Yet Goodyear doesn’t clarify. On the contrary, she leaves things blurry — at best. In an especially confusing decision, she includes a cutting remark by the writer Joel Brouwer about the marketing of poetry, and claims the comment was “an obvious … reference” to the Poetry Foundation. But Brouwer, as he confirmed by e-mail, wasn’t talking about the foundation at all. Which makes sense, of course, since Brouwer is a regular contributor to Poetry, a detail Goodyear’s readers wouldn’t know.

Similarly, the article treats a range of sometimes contradictory anxieties as if they were a unified critique. Goodyear quotes “the director of a nonprofit literary group” complaining that the foundation is trying to “take credit for things that are already going on.” By this, the director means that the foundation’s efforts to popularize poetry are only continuing a process begun by the Academy of American Poets (responsible for National Poetry Month) and the Poetry Society of America (responsible for poems on the subway). It’s a reasonable point. But then Goodyear shifts to a series of comments from poets who are upset about the very popularizing the director is describing. In combination, the criticisms become incoherent. You can complain the foundation is late to the party, or you can argue that the party itself is a mistake — but you can’t do both at the same time.

More than anything, though, it’s curious that in an article that purports to deal with the future of American poetry, Goodyear says nothing about actual poems. But maybe that’s to be expected — after all, about a decade ago, The New Yorker essentially stopped covering contemporary poetry. Granted, you’ll see the occasional collection in the magazine’s Briefly Noted section, but you’d have to go back to the mid-’90s to find a full-scale review of a poet under the age of 70. And since the turn of the century, the magazine has limited its review coverage to poets who are, so to speak, dead — with one exception, Richard Wilbur, whose “Collected Poems” the magazine assessed in 2004. Wilbur is 86.

Indeed, The New Yorker now treats poetry almost exactly as Goodyear suggests the Poetry Foundation does — as a brand-enhancing commodity. Rather than actual discussions of poetry as an art, The New Yorker offers “profiles” of poets, which are distinguishable from profiles of, say, United States senators only in that the poets’ stories potentially include more references to bongs. That’s not to knock the authors of those profiles — often they’re a pleasure to read. They just have nothing to do with poetry.

And then there’s the question of the poems the magazine chooses to run. Granted, picking poems for a national publication is nearly impossible, and The New Yorker’s poetry editor, Alice Quinn, probably does it as well as anyone could. (Quinn is also liked personally, and rightly so, by many poets.) But there are two ways in which The New Yorker’s poem selection indicates the tension between reinforcing the “literariness” of the magazine’s brand and actually saying something interesting about poetry. First, The New Yorker tends to run bad poems by excellent poets. This occurs in part because the magazine has to take Big Names, but many Big Names don’t work in ways that are palatable to The New Yorker’s vast audience (in addition, many well-known poets don’t write what’s known in the poetry world as “the New Yorker poem” — basically an epiphany-centered lyric heavy on words like “water” and “light”). As a result, you get fine writers trying on a style that doesn’t suit them. The Irish poet Michael Longley writes powerful, earthy yet cerebral lines, but you wouldn’t know it from his New Yorker poem “For My Grandson”: “Did you hear the wind in the fluffy chimney?” Yes, the fluffy chimney.

The second issue with The New Yorker’s poem selection is trickier. This is what you might call the home job: the magazines widely noted fondness for the work of its own staffers and social associates. The most notorious examples were the three poems The New Yorker published by the Manhattan doyenne Brooke Astor in 1996-7 (one more than Robert Creeley managed in his whole life). Some representative lines: I learned to take the good and bad / And smile whenever I felt sad. Even more questionable, however, is the magazines preference for its own junior employees. In 2002, for instance, the poet who appeared most frequently in the magazine was the assistant to David Remnick, the editor  that assistants name, coincidentally, was Dana Goodyear. In fact, since 2000, Goodyear (who is 30) has appeared in the New Yorker more than Czeslaw Milosz, Jorie Graham, Derek Walcott, Wislawa Szymborska, Kay Ryan and every living American poet laureate except for W. S. Merwin. Shes already equaled Sylvia Plaths total.

The problem with behavior like this is not that it violates some sacred duty of fairness (The New Yorker is a business, not a charity for whiny poets). The problem, to borrow a quotation from Goodyears article, is that this kind of thing signals a lack of ambition and seriousness that may ultimately be fatal. Poets may get frustrated with the Poetry Foundation; they may complain; they may disagree with certain projects. But the Poetry Foundation, however misguided or impolitic, hasnt given up on poetry. The question is: Has The New Yorker?

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He only made it look easy

He only made it look easy
Robert Frost’s notebooks were the poet’s private laboratory.

By Meghan O’Rourke

The Notebooks of Robert FrostEdited by Robert Faggen
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press: 848 pp.,$39.95

Robert Frost liked to compose his poems in an overstuffed blue chair that had no arms because, he told the Paris Review in 1960, it left him “the room he needed.” This sentiment may seem curious to those who know Frost best as an uptight alternative to the radical modern experimentations of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. While they were introducing the world to the innovations of free verse, the Yankee farmer-poet was composing rhyming, iambic poems about boys climbing trees; of free verse, he sniffed that he would “as soon play tennis with the net down.” Frost was a man whose work relied largely on what one critic called “self-restriction” and whose poems could appear, at first glance, to deliver up predigested bits of folksy wisdom, as in “The Road Not Taken”: “I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.”

But the need for “room” hints at what was always lurking behind the popular Frost  a more complex artist with a darker view than his presence on high school syllabi might lead you to expect. This Frost, whose early champion was the poet and critic Randall Jarrell, writes tragic philosophical poems (like “Neither Out Far Nor in Deep” and “Out, Out  “). His best work relies on reticence and canny evasions: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” The two Frosts  the wholesome sage and the recalcitrant skeptic  are usually discussed as if they were different people, or as if the latter Frost were the real Frost and the first merely the crude misreading of a sentimental American public. But the reality is more complicated, as “The Notebooks of Robert Frost,” expertly edited by Robert Faggen, drives home.

Featuring some 800 pages of musings, drafts, detritus, epigrams and ruminations, “The Notebooks of Robert Frost” underscores how entwined the two Frosts truly were. The author was a set of inconsistencies: a Romantic bent on critiquing Romanticism; a pragmatist and quasi-Social Darwinist who wasn’t quite convinced of his own views. As Faggen points out in an insightful introduction, Frost returns again and again to the feeling that life “can consist of the inconsistent.” Like Thomas Hardy before him, he was skeptical of the tidy categories and labels society tended to supply. He describes the public as “hasty judges.” He spoke of wishing to be viewed as “the exception I like to think I am in everything.”

This resistance to categorization may derive in part from his biography. It wasn’t until he was 38 that he published his first book of poems. Before then, he lived in obscurity with his high school sweetheart, Elinor, raising chickens and teaching in schools outside of Boston. He had seen his father die young from drink; two of his own children died when they were young. (Another son later killed himself, and a daughter was institutionalized.) His rural life was far from bucolic, in part because he persisted in writing poems rather than taking farming seriously.

What, then, can be gleaned from Frost’s notebooks? Will the “real” man be found, as he cannot be in his poems? The notebooks were written over more than six decades, and Faggen has published them essentially unchanged. As a result, the book can be hard going, since it includes what amount to grocery lists (“Milk … Butter … Potatoes”) and private jottings (“Rubbering in Oaxaca”). But patient readers will discover plenty of the pith of which Frost was capable. Cumulatively, the fragments are alost poignant; they underscore the privacy of the human mind and remind us of the labor that goes into the apparent transparency of Frost’s poetry. And while we don’t learn much about his actual mode of composition  there are few drafts here  the notebooks do supply a great deal of what Faggen calls “insight into the … ideas that became poems.” Two preoccupations stand out. First, there is the poet’s obsession with epigram and aphorism, which at its most condensed brings to mind Pascal’s “Pensées.” “Politics is an honest effort to misunderstand one another,” Frost writes. “Progress is like walking on a rolling barrel.” And: “To be quite free one must be free to refuse.”

Second is Frost’s extensively developed theory about what he called “sentence-sounds.” In his view, poetry was less the craft of images  of vision  than the craft of sentences. We know this from his letters and essays, but it’s explored in fascinating fits and starts here. Although poets certainly talk a great deal about aural effects, Frost meant something more complicated: the quality of intonation in song. In one notebook, he writes, “The sentence … almost seems the soul of a certain set of words.” In another, he elaborates: “The essential sentence” is a “tone of voice” that “belongs” to man as songs belong to a bird. What Frost is trying to get at has to do with the way people talk. As he explains to an imaginary listener, you can say “no” in a variety of tones; how, then, does a poem convey the specific tone it means? Frost’s answer has to do with the relation between syntax and phrasing and the poem’s meter (which is a way of encouraging the ear to hear certain stresses).

This preoccupation with sentence-sounds reflects Frost’s distaste for adornment and poetical language. Unlike many of the poets writing in popular magazines at the time, he eschewed pretty thoughts of transcendence for their own sake. He was trying to capture the American language as it was actually used  “words that have been mouthed like a common tin cup”  rather than lose himself in a romanticized vision of “aeries” and “widening gyres.” Faggen calls Frost’s notebooks a “laboratory” and so they seem. What they capture is a figure bent on examining above all how to say things he considers true. “I have made a life study of what I can say,” Frost writes. For “all we have learned is clouded with a doubt.” If his lodestars are pragmatism and reticence, his notebooks reveal how hard-won these qualities were  how Frost struggled to combat his vanity and the scorn he sometimes felt for others. “Every human being must learn to carry his own craziness [and] confusion and not bother his friends about it. He will have clarifications but they will be momentary {flashes} like this  little shapes like poems vortex smoke rings.” In Frost’s poems, there is an overwhelming sense of emotions and events held in check  this is a poet who admires forms shaped by constraint. (Reading “The Notebooks,” it is tempting to see this as Frost’s clever way of restraining his own ego.) In his small poem “Pertinax,” he writes, “Let chaos storm! / Let cloud shapes swarm! / I wait for form.” Complicating this outlook is that he also hated prescriptive interpretations; he felt that need for “room.” His most beloved poems rest on ambiguities that only look like conclusions, as in the end to “The Road Not Taken” or “For Once, Then, Something,” about a man looking into a well:

One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple

Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,

Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?

Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

“Something” is perceived  but what? What is its nature What is the outlook of the speaker? It is impossible to know, and it’s in this rejection of the grand gesture that Frost’s homely appeal lies. It is a distinctly American point of view, inherited from William James (and even from Emerson). And we detect in these notebooks how Frost wrestled profoundly with his pragmatism, holding ongoing conversations with himself.

The reader turning to “The Notebooks of Robert Frost” for clarifications and conclusiveness will not find them. In the end, Frost was never a systematic thinker. Even his epigrams and aphorisms are parts standing for a whole, not a whole built out of parts. One intuits the same fragmentary isolation in the poems, the unwillingness to reveal the poet’s own stance. In this sense, he was always in search of “the room he needed.” But perhaps he never knew, or wanted us to know, exactly what he needed it for.

Meghan O’Rourke is the literary editor of Slate and a poetry editor at the Paris Review. Her first book of poems, “Halflife,” will be published this spring.

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She's No Fundamentalist What people get wrong about Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

She’s No FundamentalistWhat people get wrong about
Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

By Christopher Hitchens

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's best seller Infidel.

W.H. Auden, whose centenary fell late last month, had an extraordinary capacity to summon despairbut in such a way as to simultaneously inspire resistance to fatalism. His most beloved poem is probably September 1, 1939, in which he sees Europe toppling into a chasm of darkness. Reflecting on how this catastrophe for civilization had come about, he wrote:

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analyzed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

“The enlightenment driven away & ” This very strong and bitter line came back to me when I saw the hostile, sneaky reviews that have been dogging the success of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s best seller Infidel, which describes the escape of a young Somali woman from sexual chattelhood to a new life in Holland and then (after the slaying of her friend Theo van Gogh) to a fresh exile in the United States. Two of our leading intellectual commentators, Timothy Garton Ash (in the New York Review of Books) and Ian Buruma, described Hirsi Ali, or those who defend her, as “Enlightenment fundamentalist[s].” In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, Buruma made a further borrowing from the language of tyranny and intolerance and described her view as an “absolutist” one.

Now, I know both Garton Ash and Buruma, and I remember what fun they used to have, in the days of the Cold War, with people who proposed a spurious “moral equivalence” between the Soviet and American sides. Much of this critique involved attention to language. Buruma was very mordant about those German leftists who referred to the “consumer terrorism” of the federal republic. You can fill in your own preferred example here; the most egregious were (and, come to think of it, still are) those who would survey the U.S. prison system and compare it to the Gulag.

In her book, Ayaan Hirsi Ali says the following: “I left the world of faith, of genital cutting and forced marriage for the world of reason and sexual emancipation. After making this voyage I know that one of these two worlds is simply better than the other. Not for its gaudy gadgetry, but for its fundamental values.” This is a fairly representative quotation. She has her criticisms of the West, but she prefers it to a society where women are subordinate, censorship is pervasive, and violence s officially preached against unbelievers. As an African victim of, and escapee from, this system, she feels she has acquired the right to say so. What is “fundamentalist” about that?

The Feb. 26 edition of Newsweek takes up where Garton Ash and Buruma leave off and says, in an article by Lorraine Ali, that, “It’s ironic that this would-be ‘infidel’ often sounds as single-minded and reactionary as the zealots she’s worked so hard to oppose.” I would challenge the author to give her definition of irony and also to produce a single statement from Hirsi Ali that would come close to materializing that claim. Accompanying the article is a typically superficial Newsweek Q&A sidebar, which is almost unbelievably headed: “A Bombthrower’s Life.” The subject of this absurd headline is a woman who has been threatened with horrific violence, by Muslims varying from moderate to extreme, ever since she was a little girl. She has more recently had to see a Dutch friend butchered in the street, been told that she is next, and now has to live with bodyguards in Washington, D.C. She has never used or advocated violence. Yet to whom does Newsweek refer as the “Bombthrower”? It’s always the same with these bogus equivalences: They start by pretending loftily to find no difference between aggressor and victim, and they end up by saying that it’s the victim of violence who is “really” inciting it.

Garton Ash and Buruma would once have made short work of any apologist who accused the critics of the U.S.S.R. or the People’s Republic of China of “heating up the Cold War” if they made any points about human rights. Why, then, do they grant an exception to Islam, which is simultaneously the ideology of insurgent violence and of certain inflexible dictatorships? Is it because Islam is a “faith”? Or is it because it is the faithin Europe at leastof some ethnic minorities? In neither case would any special protection from criticism be justified. Faith makes huge claims, including huge claims to temporal authority over the citizen, which therefore cannot be exempt from scrutiny. And within these “minorities,” there are other minorities who want to escape from the control of their ghetto leaders. (This was also the position of the Dutch Jews in the time of Spinoza.) This is a very complex question, which will require a lot of ingenuity in its handling. The pathetic oversimplification, which describes skepticism, agnosticism, and atheism as equally “fundamentalist,” is of no help here. And notice what happens when Newsweek takes up the cry: The enemy of fundamentalism is defined as someone on the fringe while, before you have had time to notice the sleight of hand, the aggrieved, self-pitying Muslim has become the uncontested tenant of the middle ground.

Let me give another example of linguistic slippage. In ACLU circles, we often refer to ourselves as “First Amendment absolutists.” By this we mean, ironically enough, that we prefer to interpret the words of the Founders, if you insist, literally. The literal meaning in this case seems (to us) to be that Congress cannot inhibit any speech or establish any state religion. This means that we defend all expressions of opinion including those that revolt us, and that we say that nobody can be forced to practice, or forced to foreswear, any faith. I suppose I would say that this is an inflexible principle, or even a dogma, ith me. But who dares to say that’s the same as the belief that criticism of religion should be censored or the belief that faith should be imposed? To flirt with this equivalence is to give in to the demagogues and to hear, underneath their yells of triumph, the dismal moan of the trahison des clercs and “the enlightenment driven away.” Perhaps, though, if I said that my principles were a matter of unalterable divine revelation and that I was prepared to use random violence in order to get “respect” for them, I could hope for a more sympathetic audience from some of our intellectuals.

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A Day with Saigon's Last Public Letter Writer

A Day with Saigon’s Last Public Letter Writer

By Fiona Ehlers

A polyglot public letter writer in Ho Chi Minh City bridges different worlds — connecting people across the planet with his fountain pen. His profession may be dying, but in his 60 years on the job, he has created many marriages.

Letter writer Duong Van Ngo: "Love usually wanes between the continents."

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Fiona Ehlers / DER SPIEGEL

Letter writer Duong Van Ngo: “Love usually wanes between the continents.”

The main post office in Ho Chi Minh City is close to the Saigon River in the quieter part of town, where skyscrapers don’t yet jut into the clouds and where no mopeds buzz over the streets like swarms of hornets.

It lies across from Notre Dame cathredral and is housed in an old colonial building from 1886. It looks like the old market halls of Paris, painted apricot, with electrical fans humming between ornamental pillars and spots of sunlight falling through a window in the roof. It’s a timeless place — the most beautiful post office in all of Asia.

Duong Van Ngo, a wiry 77-year-old man, parks his bicycle in the shadow of the sycamore trees, whose trunks are painted white as if they were wearing gaiters. He greets the post card vendors and shuffles through the archway with the station clock. It’s eight o’clock on a muggy February morning, the start of his workday.

Ngo sits down at the end of a long wooden table underneath a mural of Ho Chi Minh. He produces two dictionaries and a directory of French postal codes from his briefcase. Then he slips a red armband over his left sleeve to make sure he’s recognized immediately. He sets up his sign: “Information and Writing Assistance.”

The first person to come to his stand is a man from the Mekong Delta. He’s got a letter with him, addressed to a businessman from Europe. He’s his chauffeur, and he’s been driving him to business meals and meetings for a year. He asks in writing if the man can get him health insurance and asks for a $200 advance. Ngo translates the letter into English. “Dear Sir,” he writes with his fountain pen, “might I politely request, sincerely yours.” Or would it better to say “affectionately”? No, that’s too intimate. The man hands him a bill. Ngo slips it between the pages of his dictionary without ever looking at it.

Ngo is a mediator between worlds — a professional letter writer of the sort that used to exist in the old days. He chooses each word carefully, formulates cautiously, polishes the style of the letter. He knows how important words are and what harm they can do. Ngo doesn’t just translate. He bridges the distance between people, advises and comforts them, discreetly and with perfect attention to form.

Ngo has worked at the post office since he was 17. He says he never missed a day of work, not even during the wars. He speaks the languages of the former occupiers fluently to this day. He learned French in school and English from American soldiers.

The second person to come to his stand is a young woman with red lipstick, long gloves and a little hat to shield her from the sun. She hands Ngo her Nokia mobile phone and shows him some text messages. They’re written in French and sound romantic. Ngo translates spontaneously: “When I come and visit you, you’ll show me Vietnam and teach me your language, I can hardly wait.” The woman smiles with embarrassment. She met the Frenchman via a contact Web site on the Internet. Tomorrow she’ll come back and compose an answer with help from Ngo.

The women at the service counters call him the man who writes love letters. He’s set up many a marriage, they say, and he’s a poet. Well, says Ngo, “maybe two or three marriages. Love usually wanes between the continents, what with two languages, two cultures — you know. It’s not so easy.”

Ngo has heard thousands of such stories, some beautiful and others tragic. He searched for the children of US soldiers and relatives of Vietnamese citizens who escaped as boat people after the war. He’s witnessed much suffering. He’s not giving any details. His customers pay him for his silence.

Sometimes Ngo receives mail himself. The thank you letters arrive from all over the world and they are addressed to “Letter Writer, Main Post Office, Saigon.” Ngo never receives e-mails. He hates computers and mobile phones, too. “Words that come from a machine have no soul,” he says, adding that people who use such machines have lost all politeness and sense of proper style. During his lunch break, Ngo walks along the street where Vietnamese who live abroad sit in cafes wearing large sun glasses. They’ve arrived for the New Year’s celebrations. They order latte macchiatos as sprinkler systems spray cool water vapor on their faces. Ngo orders noodle soup at a food stall.

Japanese tourists arrive in the afternoon and photograph him as if he were a fossil in a museum. The ladies at the post office counters staple the pages of faxes together and chat. In the middle of it all, new customers wait to be helped at Ngo’s desk. They hand him their address books, as well as parcels for their relatives overseas. “Vitogo,” says a woman who works in the market and wears a rice straw hat. “The street is called Victor Hugo,” he says and rolls his eyes briefly, “like the famous writer.” He writes the address on the shipping ticket.

Would Ho Chi Minh up there on the mural have liked what he does — “connecting people” via his fountain pen? Ngo smiles. Politics, he says, is outside his province. He says he used to be observed by the police because he was suspected of betraying secrets to enemies of the state. Thankfully, that’s over, he says. Today, Ngo adds, Vietnam has gone global and the world has become a complex and unpredictable place. This also means that there is greater demand for his work these days than there used to be.

Ngo is now the last letter writer in the city formerly known as Saigon. The penultimate one, his colleaue Lieng, died 10 months ago and was not replaced. Ngo thinks the world could use more people like Lieng and himself.

Alas, he says, “It just doesn’t want to pay the money for us any longer.”

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A Chinese Scholar Reckons With His Past

A Chinese Scholar Reckons With His Past

By SARAH CARR

Shanghai

January 27, 1971: “If we dedicate all our lives to the socialist revolution, letting the Communist Party and the People decide how we can make the most of our time, our futures are sure to be affluent. Thinking of this, how can I possibly feel blue?”

Jingbei Hu winces now when he reads that, recognizing how that “socialist revolution” led to the murder of countless scholars and the shuttering of many schools. Still, he is determined to share the words he wrote in his diary with anyone willing to read them. Now an economics professor at Tongji University here, his goal is to show how the Communist government bent his will during the Cultural Revolution, more than 35 years ago.

“If we don’t work on this problem, on understanding how this brainwashing occurred, we will have another Cultural Revolution,” Mr. Hu says while eating dinner in a student restaurant at Tongji. He is a wiry man who finishes every scrap of the oversized portions then eats the leftover pizza on others’ plates.

Through a fellowship, Mr. Hu spent January and February at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution doing research for a Chinese-language book that will examine the impact of Communist ideology on Chinese children. In the long term, he hopes, his research will help pave the way for greater tolerance and freedom in China.

But in the meantime, Mr. Hu has put online the diaries he kept as a teenager during the Cultural Revolution  diaries that he now compares to those kept by Hitler Youth members in Nazi Germany. And he is on a personal mission to understand how, as a young man of 18, he was so absolutely convinced that Mao Zedong was a hero worth putting all his faith into.

January 28, 1971: “Our great leader Chairman Mao is the greatest contemporary Marxist Leninist, the greatest mentor of the Proletariat, the greatest leader of people in the world, the greatest general of the Union Army of Peasants and Workers, the greatest captain of the revolutionary ship, the reddest sun in our hearts.”

During the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from about 1966 to 1976, Mao organized the youth of the country into squads of Red Guards and urged them to attack intellectuals and “bourgeois things.”

The Chinese education system fell into chaos during the latter years of Mao’s rule. In 1968, Mr. Hu, like millions of other young Chinese of the era, was sent to a commune in the countryside of Jiangsu, a province in central China, where he worked and lived as a peasant. He was 15 and had finished only half a year of middle school. Now he spent his time lugging manure, fertilizing cabbage, and writing in his diary about the benefits of such physical labor, both to himself and to the country.

February 2, 1972: “My brother, my sister, and I were sent to the pasturing areas, farms and villages, separately in 1968 as part of the ‘Urban Youth Going to the Countryside’ movement. My father was sent down to a village in Pudong, Shanghai. We split for the Revolution. Even though we miss each other much, and our parents miss the three of us very much, … we need to guide them through this, making them realize that the welfare of the Revolution outweighs personal benefits … .”

Mr. Hu lived in the rural area for nearly 10 years. But writing in his diaries kept his intellect alive. Sometimes he would structure the entries like short, analytical essays. H sought out copies of old textbooks to teach himself math, physics, and chemistry.

Many Chinese teenagers during the Cultural Revolution were similarly motivated, notes Merle Goldman, an associate of the John K. Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University. “A lot of people from that era were, literally, self-taught,” she says. “It has a lot to do with Confucian values of hard work and education.”

By 1978 the Cultural Revolution had ended and Mao had died. Mr. Hu, 25, was given the chance to take university entrance exams. Despite not having been inside a classroom for more than a decade, he passed easily.

He went to Nanjing University and studied economics. He traveled, even living in Germany for several years. There he found the people to be much more open about discussing the Nazi era than the Chinese were about discussing the Cultural Revolution. Gradually Mr. Hu became an intellectual who had little in common with the boy who had so earnestly labored and kept diaries extolling the benefits of the Revolution. He never repudiated that boy and his diaries  he simply grew up and moved on.

Last summer, though, Mr. Hu was traveling through a mountainous area of Hunan province when, in a dim room of a peasant household made darker by smoke, a small girl told him that she used the kitchen table to study and write.

Memories of his own years living in the countryside and writing at a table in a hovel rushed back to him. He reread his diaries and tried to get them published, but failed because of official restrictions on what can be published about the Cultural Revolution. He has put part of the diaries online and hopes to post the remainder soon.

At Stanford he had access to books and materials about the Cultural Revolution that are not available in China. His plan is to write his book for the young people of China. They are the ones who have time to change if they learn to ask questions, he says: “In Chinese schools, the conventional wisdom is that people shouldn’t ask, they should simply take. Many, many students can’t think for themselves. That’s a huge problem.”

February 7, 1972: “The article ‘Study Hard, Try to Change Your Perspectives’ in the Red Flag magazine … inspired me a lot and helped me sort out some confusion. From now on, I will try to bring my studies to another level, and will pay extra attention to the five philosophical works of Chairman Mao.”

At Stanford this winter, Mr. Hu spent most of his time reading and thinking. He is compiling lists of ways the Communist government has been able to inculcate its young people  from his own youth, during the Cultural Revolution, to the present day. No. 1: Propaganda. No. 2: Media. No. 3: Education.

“From the first day of school,” he says, “we were taught that we should be students for the Communist Party.”

The children of China today have more opportunity than the young people of his own era, Mr. Hu says. The schools are open and a booming economy provides college graduates with more career possibilities. The Shanghai of skyscrapers, international visitors, and luxury restaurants and shops is like no place in the China he grew up in.

But while the buildings expand, the space for discussing politically sensitive topics is, if anything, contracting.

“It’s very hard to get a public discussion going about the Cultural Revolution and what happened,” says Boston’s Ms. Goldman. “It will change when they get a leadership that will face up to what happened, but the present leadership has no desire to face up to that.”

Ordinary people, too, lack interest in analyzing their history, she says. “The Chinese have been so deprived for so long of economic well-being. … Political issues are of secondary importance right now.”

Mr. Hu, though, says that at some point he stopped worrying about how the Chinese can become rich. Instead he has become preoccupied with how they can become good. As he did 35 years ago, he looks to his diaries for the answers  but now with a far different end in sight.

January 29, 1972: “A single spark can start a prairie fire” (the title of one of Mao’s essays).

Many Chinese people mistakenly believe that they can detach themselves from the past, Mr. Hu says. So he’s putting his own past front and center, hoping that someday, reading the words of his diary will elicit a collective wince, questioning, and, finally, a reckoning.

Sarah Carr reported from China for five weeks this fall through an International Reporting Project fellowship.

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李剑虹因看望郑恩宠被抓四个小时后释放

 

　

【2007年3月10日狱委讯】自由亚洲电台记者方媛采访报道/据本台了解，星期四中午十二点多，上海维权作家小乔应郑恩宠妻子蒋美丽之邀前往蒋美丽的姐姐家看望近期住在那里的郑恩宠，当她走到门前时，被几名男女警察强行拖到警车里，并把她拉往附近的梅园派出所，当时在屋里休息的郑恩宠听到了小乔的怒骂声走到窗前看到了一切，郑恩宠在下午7点对本台表示：12；40分的时候，我躺在沙发上睡午觉，突然看到外面有一个女的在喊叫，我就站起来，看到了一个女的拽着小乔，后来车上又下来三个男的把她往车上送，小乔连喊三声“流氓绑架”。

正在记者与郑恩宠作访问时，下午五点钟被警察释放的小乔来到了蒋美丽姐姐家，她向本台叙述了她在派出所里的情况，她说;一定是警方偷听了她与蒋美丽的电话，得知她要来看望郑恩宠，她说：我中午过来一趟，十二点多被他们截了，他们五点多送我回家，然后我等到天黑下来看看好像没人，我就又跑过来了。

记者：在派出所里他们有没有盘问你？

小乔：没有给我问话，我很气愤问他们：你们凭什么这样做？有什么法律依据？他们也答不上来，后来就把我扔到局子里，中间几个人都出去了，把我扔到一个房间，后来进来两个国保的女警陪着我，然后到差不多五点的时候就放我回家了，叮嘱我晚上不要出去。

除此之外，上海访民的情况也不乐观，据本台了解，富商周正毅违规拆除的上海静安区东八块的访民李彩娣，魏勤，何月珍等十几人不仅被东八块的警方关押在一个招待所里，还对他们拳打脚踢，致使他们身上都有不同程度的伤痛，访民何月珍星期四向本台表示：她是六号被截访人员从北京截回的，然后就关押在这里，她说：我在给家里人打电话，她冲上来就把我的手机扔掉，然后冲上来就打我，其中一个人把手伸到我眼睛里面去，眼睛也充血，又是拳头打又是脚踢，把我的手差点儿扭断，现在我的手一个粗一个细，腿上也有很大的一块青。

另一名访民魏勤表示，她没有去北京，但是二月二十八号就被警察抓来，剩下她十四岁的儿子一个人在家，她说：强制剥夺我的监护权把我抓进来了，我儿子现在由政府管，我说不用他们管，自己管，他们不允许。他们不许我们外出，我们要求外出走动，改善伙食，要求他们他们就打我们，我的眼睛被他们打，身上被他们踢。

访民李彩娣呼吁：我们被非法软禁，我说你们是党员吗？这样做是违反党纪国法的，我说你们有人性吗？我生病你们最起码的买药给我，最起码的人道有没有，他们请的都是社会上的流氓，那些打手。

此外，据访民朱东辉表示：三名访民陆英，鲁俊及陆建兴三人上个礼拜被截访人员从北京截回后一起炒家一起被当局以泄露国家机密罪刑事拘留，起因是警方从他们的电脑里查出了上海政府去年十月份的一份500名访民的黑名单。朱东辉说：同时抄家，同时刑事拘留，罪名说是非法获取国家机密，就是关于网上的监控名单。