Preview: Cloud Dance Festival @ Pleasance
Kinisi Dance Company
Trouble and Desire marks the return of Cloud Dance Festival for another year of new contemporary choreography and we can’t wait to see how will they follow their excellent end of year ‘best of’ showcase last December.
Slanjayvah Danza are back “by popular demand” with their beautiful duet “Blind Passion – Live Cut” and the exquisite Mavin Khoo appears on Saturday and Sunday with a new duet based on Romeo and Juliet. We can’t wait to see Rambert dancers, Jonathan Goddard and Gemma Nixon’s ‘Ladies and Gentlemen: how bored are you?’ as we anticipate being not bored at all by these fabulous performers.
Pleasance Islington is the venue for 26-28 March with 3 eclectic mixed bills of 19 dance companies, a smattering of dancers off those reality telly shows and others from around the world – including a rare trip to town for Welsh rep company, Ffin Dance – over one performance pick and mix of a weekend.
More info at www.cloud-dance-festival.org.uk Tickets £12.
Why we can’t stop overeating
Our favourite foods are making us fat, yet we can’t resist, because eating them is changing our minds as well as bodies
For years I wondered why I was fat. I lost weight, gained it back, and lost it again – over and over and over. I owned suits in every size. As a former commissioner of the FDA (the US Food and Drug Administration), surely I should have the answer to my problems. Yet food held remarkable sway over my behaviour.
The latest science seemed to suggest being overweight was my destiny. I was fat because my body’s “thermostat” was set high. If I lost weight, my body would try to get it back, slowing down my metabolism till I returned to my predetermined set point.
But this theory didn’t explain why so many people, in the US and UK in particular, were getting significantly fatter. For thousands of years, human body weight had stayed remarkably stable. Millions of calories passed through our bodies, yet with rare exceptions our weight neither rose nor fell. A perfect biological system seemed to be at work. Then, in the 80s, something changed.
Three decades ago, fewer than one Briton in 10 was obese. One in four is today. It is projected that by 2050, Britain could be a “mainly obese society”. Similar, and even more pronounced, changes were taking place in the US, where researchers found that not only were Americans entering their adult years at a significantly higher weight but, while on average everyone was getting heavier, the heaviest people were gaining disproportionately more weight than others. The spread between those at the upper end of the weight curve and those at the lower end was widening. Overweight people were becoming more overweight.
What had happened to add so many millions of pounds to so many millions of people? Certainly food had become more readily available, with larger portion sizes, more chain restaurants and a culture that promotes out-of-home eating. But having food available doesn’t mean we have to eat it. What has been driving us to overeat?
It is certainly not a want born of fear of food shortages. Nor is it a want rooted in hunger or the love of exceptional food. We know, too, that overeating is not the sole province of those who are overweight. Even people who remain slim often feel embattled by their drive for food. It takes serious restraint to resist an almost overpowering urge to eat. Yet many, including doctors and healthcare professionals, still think that weight gainers merely lack willpower, or perhaps self-esteem. Few have recognised the distinctive pattern of overeating that has become widespread in the population. No one has seen loss of control as its most defining characteristic.
“Higher sugar, fat and salt make you want to eat more.” I had read this in scientific literature, and heard it in conversations with neuroscientists and psychologists. But here was a leading food designer, a Henry Ford of mass-produced food, revealing how his industry operates. To protect his business, he did not want to be identified, but he was remarkably candid, explaining how the food industry creates dishes to hit what he called the “three points of the compass”.
Sugar, fat and salt make a food compelling. They stimulate neurons, cells that trigger the brain’s reward system and release dopamine, a chemical that motivates our behaviour and makes us want to eat more. Many of us have what’s called a “bliss point”, at which we get the greatest pleasure from sugar, fat or salt. Combined in the right way, they make a product indulgent, high in “hedonic value”.
During the past two decades, there has been an explosion in our ability to access and afford what scientists call highly “palatable” foods. By palatability, they don’t just mean it tastes good: they are referring primarily to its capacity to stimulate the appetite. Restaurants sit at the epicentre of this explosion, along with an ever-expanding range of dishes that hit these three compass points. Sugar, fat and salt are either loaded into a core ingredient (such as meat, vegetables, potato or bread), layered on top of it, or both. Deep-fried tortilla chips are an example of loading – the fat is contained in the chip itself. When it is smothered in cheese, sour cream and sauce, that’s layering.
It is not just that fast food chains serve food with more fat, sugar and salt, or that intensive processing virtually eliminates our need to chew before swallowing, or that snacks are now available at any time. It is the combination of all that, and more.
Take Kentucky Fried Chicken. My source called it “a premier example” of putting more fat on our plate. KFC’s approach to battering its food results in “an optimised fat pick-up system”. With its flour, salt, MSG, maltodextrin, sugar, corn syrup and spice, the fried coating imparts flavour that touches on all three points of the compass while giving the consumer the perception of a bargain – a big plate of food at a good price.
Initially, KFC meals were built around a whole chicken, with a pick-up surface that contained “an enormous amount of breading, crispiness and brownness on the surface. That makes the chicken look like more and gives it this wonderful oily flavour.” Over time, the company began to realise there was less meat in a chicken nugget compared with a whole chicken, and a greater percentage of fried batter. But the real breakthrough was popcorn chicken. “The smaller the piece of meat, the greater the percentage of fat pick-up,” said the food designer. “Now, we have lots of pieces of a cheaper part of the chicken.” The product has been “optimised on every dimension”, with the fat, sugar and salt combining with the perception of good value virtually to guarantee consumer appeal.
He walked me through some offerings at other popular food chains. Burger King’s Whopper touched on the three points of the compass – then was altered for further effect. In its first, stripped-down form, the burger was explosively rich in fat, sugar and salt. Then the chain began adding more beef, extra cheese or a layer of bacon. McDonald’s broke new ground in another way – by making food available on a whim. “The great growth has been the snacking occasion. You get hungry, you want something, your mind pushes off the reality of what you ought to eat, and you end up picking up a hamburger and a giant soda or french fries.”
Next they introduced a high-fat, high-salt morning meal. “They took what they learned from the core lunch and dinner menu, and applied it to breakfast. The sausage McMuffin and the egg McMuffin are stand-ins for the hamburger. In effect, you are eating a morning hamburger.”
This kind of food disappears down our throats so quickly after the first bite that it readily overrides the body’s signals that should tell us, “I’m full.” The food designer offered coleslaw as an example. When its ingredients are chopped roughly, it requires time and energy to chew. But when cabbage and carrots are softened in a high-fat dressing, coleslaw ceases to be “something with a lot of innate ability to satisfy”.
This isn’t to say that the food industry wants us to stop chewing altogether. It knows we want to eat a doughnut, not drink it. “The key is to create foods with just enough chew – but not too much. When you’re eating these things, you’ve had 500, 600, 800, 900 calories before you know it.” Foods that slip down don’t leave us with a sense of being well fed. In making food disappear so swiftly, fat and sugar only leave us wanting more.
According to food consultant Gail Vance Civille, of management consultants Sensory Spectrum, fat is crucial to this process of lubrication, ensuring that a product melts in the mouth. In the past, she says, Americans typically chewed food up to 25 times before it was swallowed; now the average American chews 10 times. “If I have fat in there, I just chew it up and whoosh! Away it goes,” she says. “You have a ‘quick getaway’, a quick melt.”
The Snickers bar, Civille says, is “extraordinarily well engineered”. Unlike many products whose nuts become annoyingly lodged between your teeth, the genius of Snickers is that as we chew, the sugar dissolves, the fat melts and the caramel picks up the peanut pieces, so the entire candy is carried out of the mouth at the same time. “You’re not getting a build-up of stuff in your mouth.”
Kettle chips are another success story. Made of sugar-rich russet potatoes, they have a slightly bitter background note and brown irregularly, which gives them a complex flavour. High levels of fat generate easy mouth-melt, and surface variations add a level of interest beyond that found in mass-produced chips. Heightened complexity is the key to modern food design.
Not so many decades ago, a single flavour of ice-cream was a special treat. Our options ran to vanilla, chocolate and strawberry – and when we could buy all three in a single carton, we saw that as a great innovation. Now ice-cream has countless flavours and varieties; it comes mixed with M&M’s or topped with caramel sauce.
When layers of complexity are built into food, the effect becomes more powerful. Sweetness alone does not account for the full impact of a fizzy drink – its temperature and tingle, resulting from the stimulation of the trigeminal nerve by carbonation and acid, are essential contributors as well.
“The complexity of the stimulus increases its association to a reward,” says Gaetano Di Chiara, an expert in neuroscience and pharmacology at the University of Cagliari in Italy. Elements of that complexity include tastes that are familiar and well liked, especially if not always readily available, and the learning associated with having had a pleasurable experience with the same food in the past.
Take a bowl of M&M’s. If I’ve eaten them in the past, I’m stimulated by the sight of them, because I know they’ll be rewarding. I eat one, and experience that reward. The visual cue gains power and stimulates the urge we call “wanting”. The more potent and complex foods become, the greater the rewards they may offer. The excitement in the brain increases our desire for further stimulation.
In theory there’s a limit to how much stimulation rewarding foods can generate. We are supposed to habituate – to neuroadapt. When Di Chiara gave animals a cheesy snack called Fonzies, the levels of dopamine in their brains increased. Over time, habituation set in, dopamine levels fell and the food lost its capacity to activate their behaviour.
But if the stimulus is powerful enough, novel enough or administered intermittently enough, the brain may not curb its dopamine response. Desire remains high. We see this with cocaine use, which does not result in habituation. Hyperpalatable foods alter the landscape of the brain in much the same way.
I asked Di Chiara to study what happens after an animal is repeatedly exposed to a high-sugar, high-fat chocolate drink. When he’d completed his experiment, he sent me an email with “Important results!!!!” in the subject line. He had shown that dopamine response did not diminish over time with the chocolate drink. There was no habituation.
Novelty also impedes habituation, and intermittency is another driver. Give an animal enough sugar-laden food, withdraw it for the right amount of time, then provide it again in sufficient quantities, and dopamine levels may not diminish.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about the relationship between the dopamine-driven motivational system and our behaviour in the presence of rewarding foods. But we do know that foods high in sugar, fat and salt are altering the biological circuitry of our brains. We have scientific techniques that demonstrate how these foods – and the cues associated with them – change the connections between the neural circuits and their response patterns.
Rewarding foods are rewiring our brains. As they do, we become more sensitive to the cues that lead us to anticipate the reward. In that circularity lies a trap: we can no longer control our responses to highly palatable foods because our brains have been changed by the foods we eat.
I wanted to know how much the industry understood about how the food we eat affects us; about what I have termed “conditioned hypereating” – “conditioned” because it becomes an automatic response to widely available food, “hyper” because the eating is excessive and hard to control. I turned to Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics.
“Does the industry know that what it feeds us gets us to eat more?” I asked.
“The industry has jacked up what works for it,” Stiglitz said. “The learning is evolutionary.” Practical experience has been its guide – it does not need lab rats when it can try out its ideas on humans. Its decision-makers do not have to analyse human brain circuitry to discover what sells.
A venture capitalist who knows the business intimately cited Starbucks as a company that has recognised and responded brilliantly to a cultural need. The caffeine and sugar in the coffee, with their energising effects, are certainly part of the equation, but the chain also offers something much more primal. “It’s about warm milk and a bottle,” he says. “One of my colleagues said, ‘If I could put a nipple on it, I’d be a multimillionaire’.”
But it was thinking creatively about how to attract more consumers that led Starbucks to the Frappuccino, the venture capitalist told me. Although its stores were crowded early in the day, by afternoon “they were so empty you could roll a bowling ball through them”. The creation of a rich, sweet and comforting milkshake-like concoction utterly transformed the business. A Starbucks Strawberries & Crème Frappuccino comes with whipped cream and 18 teaspoons of sugar: all in all, this “drink” contains more calories than a personal-size pepperoni pizza, and more sweetness than six scoops of ice-cream. By encouraging us to consider any occasion for food an opportunity for pleasure and reward, the industry invites us to indulge a lot more often.
Starbucks learned a basic lesson: make enticing food easily and constantly available, keep it novel, and people will keep coming back for more. With food available in almost any setting, “the number of cues, the number of opportunities” to eat have increased, while the barriers to consumption have fallen, says David Mela, senior scientist of weight management at the Unilever Health Institute. “The environmental stimulus has changed.”
Of course, when food is offered to us, we’re not obliged to eat it. When it’s on the menu, we don’t have to order it. But this takes more than willpower. As an individual, you can practise eating the food you want in a controlled way. As a society, we can identify the forces that drive overeating and find ways to diminish their power. That’s what happened with the tobacco industry: attitudes to smoking shifted. Similar changes could be brought about in our attitudes to food – by making it mandatory for restaurants to list calorie counts on their menus; by clear labelling on food products; by monitoring food marketing. But until then few of us are immune to the ubiquitous presence of food, the incessant marketing and the cultural assumption that it’s acceptable to eat anywhere, at any time.
Call it the “taco chip challenge” – the challenge of controlled eating in the face of constant food availability. “Forty years ago, you might face the social equivalent of that taco chip challenge once a month. Now you face it every single day,” Mela said. “Every single day and every single place you go, those foods are there, those foods are cheap, those foods are readily available for you to engage in. There is constant, constant opportunity.”
How to take back control
Plan when and what you will eat There should be no room for deviation; the idea is to inhibit mindless eating and eliminate your mental tug-of-war. Once you’ve set new patterns, you can become more flexible.
Practise portion control Eat half your usual meal; see how you feel one and two hours later. A just-right meal will keep away hunger for four hours.
List the foods and situations you can’t control Cut out those foods; limit exposure to those situations. If offered something you overeat, push it away.
Talk down your urges Learn responses to involuntary thoughts: eating that will only satisfy me temporarily; eating this will make me feel trapped; I’ll be happier and weigh less if I don’t eat this.
Rehearse making the right choices Before entering a restaurant, imagine chosing a dinner that’s part of your eating plan. Think of this as a game against a powerful opponent. You won’t win every encounter, but with practice you can get a lot better.
• This is an edited extract from The End Of Overeating: Taking Control Of Our Insatiable Appetite, by David A Kessler, published by Penguin on 1 April at £9.99. To order a copy with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop.
Nick Clegg calls for 10% bank tax
Lib Dem leader condemns bankers as ‘Scargills in pinstripes’ and says electorate, not him, will decide who is next PM
Nick Clegg is to call for a 10% tax on bank profits to fund a £2bn job creation programme to rescue victims of the recession.
In a Guardian interview, the Liberal Democrat leader condemned bankers for behaving like ”Arthur Scargill in pinstripes”, and vowed his party would be “a radicalising, rather than moderating force” in the event of a hung parliament so long as the majority party was committed to bring the deficit under control.
On the eve of his party’s pre-election spring conference, he insisted he will consult his party fully before joining a coalition or supporting a Queen’s speech tabled by a minority government.
Clegg insisted it is not for him, but for the electorate to decide whether David Cameron or Gordon Brown becomes prime minister. However, he also attacked Brown in contemptuous terms: “It’s very difficult to invest much hope or faith in a man who could not even maintain relations with his own colleagues”.
He said Brown was not a credible figure to rebuild the economy. “This is the man who wrought the damage, he should not be the person to do the repair work”.
Brown’s late conversion to electoral reform was “hardly a hallelujah moment”. He added: “There is no point anyone clinging to power when it’s obvious the British people don’t want you … they’d prefer someone else.
“That’s where constitutional nicety bumps up against political reality. It’s not for me to decide. We give the electorate the cards, they deal them”.
Clegg said he remained, on balance, “a huge critic” of Margaret Thatcher, but admitted Britain needs to rediscover the zeal she showed when she tackled the unions.
The banks, he said, have now become Britain’s great contemporary vested interest. He said: “Bankers are Scargill in pin stripes. Scargill’s stated aim was to challenge who runs the country. The bankers have behaved in the same arrogant way … to benefit only themselves …
“The banks have basically been given untrammelled support by both Labour and Conservative governments to do exactly what they like, and take massive risks with our livelihoods and savings.
“They have been holding a gun to the economy. A progressive liberal like myself is not going to be squeamish about blowing the whistle on a vested interest.”
In the only tax rise proposed by his party, he now backs a 10% tax on bank profits, a break up of the banks’ investment and retail arms, and finally a requirement on banks owned by the taxpayers – RBS and Lloyds – to be required to behave in the public interest on issues such as take-overs of UK firms.
He also proposes tighter requirements on banks to lend. “What I hear from the Conservatives is … ‘we’ve got to wait for the rest of the world’. I really don’t think the Tories get how much we’re skating on thin ice as an economy.
“If we don’t take on this vested interest ourselves, now, unilaterally, immediately, we’re asking for trouble. The liabilities of British banks are now four and a half times the size of the British economy. We are like a large version of Iceland. We are not sheltered in any way”.
In his interview Clegg also:
• dismisses Tory plans to open new schools and rejects profit-making firms opening new schools. “I keep reading that we and the Tories have identical policies on schools but it’s complete rubbish.”
• insists he will not ringfence the NHS from cuts. He said: “We need to make significant savings to safeguard the GP surgery or A&E or the maternity ward”.
• promises “to slash the headcount of the Department of Children”.
He tried to defuse the issue of whether he would back Cameron or Brown in a hung parliament saying: “I think these constitutional niceties will be swept aside if it’s obvious that there’s one party that enjoys a mandate, if not an actual majority. I don’t think there will be a photo finish.”
The Accidental Hero
He walks the streets of Stuttgart dressed in an indistinct plaid shirt and a pair of denims, which are further obscured by the long black winter coat men of all stripes hide themselves in against the cold. He would have entirely blended in the urban landscape as just another pedestrian were it not for the silvery hair that set him almost aglow, framing his deeply-tanned skin and dark mustache, giving him the appearance of someone more respectable than the rest. The impression is further accentuated by the way he walks so attentively beside the woman at his arm, his wife of 40 years whom he treats like a bride of four days. Nothing else distinguishes this nearly unknown German who seems like an existential speck in the routine life of this old city—the very same man who is a towering, yet unknown figure in the history of Iran’s democratic movement.
His name is Bruno Jost. He readily admits that his life changed on September 18, 1992. And his wife, Angela, is quick to add that so did hers, and that of their two children. She tells this for my benefit, who, living on the distant American continent, might not be aware of the tsunami that day brought to their lives: The day her husband was assigned as the federal prosecutor to investigate the killings of four Iranian Kurds at a Berlin restaurant called Mykonos. In turn, I tell her that because neither she nor her husband ran from that tsunami, the lives of a whole generation of Iranians have forever changed. They grin doubtfully at me, thinking my statement another hyperbole by a sentimental Iranian. But I make my case:
Dozens of Iranian exiles had already been assassinated—in Washington, DC, Rome, London, Paris, Geneva, and Vienna. Though the trail of the killers always led to the doorstep of the Iranian embassies around the world, no other prosecutor had ever dared, or possessed enough evidence to, name Tehran as the mastermind behind those operations. In November 1996, after a four-year investigation, Bruno Jost presented his final statement to Berlin’s High Court, the Kammergericht, to become the first prosecutor to go beyond the incidental underlings in his custody and name their chief commander, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Tehran was not alone in its rage over the fearless prosecutor, against whom many fatwas were issued by a medley of mullahs throughout the country. Bonn was also seething at the uncompromising lawyer to whom several senior officials referred as the “fucking prosecutor who is wrecking everything with Iran over a few dead bodies!”
These were the pre-9/11 days when the West thought itself impervious to the violence that Islamic radicals were waging against their own—in this case, Tehran was against its political opposition, as well as artists, writers, and intellectuals. Helmut Kohl’s administration did everything it could to make the case disappear. Oddly, the most fundamental lessons of WWII were lost on the very leadership that had more reason to commit them to memory than the rest—first, they assassinated the Iranian exiles on European soil and the Western politicians did not say anything, because they were not Iranians, until they came for the World Trade Center, and the London subway, and Madrid trains…
I doubt Bruno Jost had Bishop Niemoller’s warning in mind when he drafted his final statement from which some of his superiors asked that he strike the name of Iran’s Supreme Leader. (Jost only said that he would happily drop the name, but as the text would not be his any longer, he refused to be the one presenting it to the court). He was simply doing his job, he still insists, exercising the law just as he was taught, within the boundaries of what some argue to be the best and most independent judicial system in the world. Indeed much of the credit for that historic trial and judgment does go to the German justice system in which neither prosecutors, nor judges, are political appointees or beholden to politicians for professional advancement. Thus, they were able to consider the case on the merits of the facts before them, and ultimately implicate Tehran.
The trial that, to Tehran’s relief, finally ended in 1997, was only the beginning for the intelligentsia living inside the country. Thinkers and journalists, among them Akbar Ganji, began to investigate the unsolved murders of several prominent figures within Iran and they, too, began to name the clerical leadership as the culprit behind those crimes. Once the sanctity of the clerics was thrown into question, once the taboo was shattered, a whole new generation dared to question what they never had, albeit only few may know the origin of their transformation, or the unassuming man behind it—Bruno Jost.
New research reveals possible alternative to the little blue pills
From Dr.Gaier
- Tuesday, 09 February 2010
In Sibiria the tree, which grows to 80 metres and lives for 100 odd years, is referred to as the Queen of the Taiga, because its nuts provide the men there with tremendous health and sexual vitality
This week in preparation for Valentine’s Day, Harley Street’s world leading naturopathic physician Harald Gaier unveils new findings into what could be the world’s best kept secret…a natural remedy that works the kind of magic only previously experienced with certain well known pills, but without their unpleasant side effects.
Hoping to bring that loving feeling back to Britain, Harald Gaier, who has been the Director of Medical Research at two major clinics in London, reveals that the pine nuts of the Siberian Cedar, Pinus sibirica, contain oil that provides potency to men as he encourages us all to turn to natural remedies rather than pharmaceutical drugs if we need help in the bedroom department.
Research* shows Pinus sibirica delivers a super-abundance of valuable nutrients to the human body. Available as either a soft-gel or in the actual oil, it is known to overcome the impotence associated with diabetes mellitus, in most instances, and it provides noticeable vigour and strength to the ordinary man.
In Sibiria the tree, which grows to 80 metres and lives for 100 odd years, is referred to as the Queen of the Taiga, because its nuts provide the men there with tremendous health and sexual vitality.
Harald Gaier, who has also spent six years serving on the Research Committee of the Prince of Wales’ Foundation for Integrated Health as a naturopathic physician is currently spearheading a campaign to raise awareness of the benefits of natural treatments and with over four decades of clinical experience, he uses natural remedies to cure everything from hangovers to prostate cancer, cold sores to thrush.
Dr Gaier said: “Statistics show us that the use of Viagra is huge in the UK and I want to alert people to the dangers of using such drugs regularly. Now there’s an alternative, why would people suffer the headaches and stomach cramps, when they can get the same results without them. My colleagues in Germany who have tested this tell me “It’s better than Viagra”.
He added: “There is a natural remedy for most medical problems and my mission is to try and highlight some of the alternatives so people have a choice”.
The product is expected to be freely available from a mail-order supplier in the next three weeks or so. More information will be available www.drgaier.com and he will also tweet the latest findings at www.twitter.com/DrGaier. To discuss any medical concerns you can also book an appointment on 07917662042.
ENDS
Notes to editor:
- For more information on Pinus sibirica go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Pine
- References* (E S Averina, G Seewald, R H Müller, L D Radnæva & D V Popov; Nanostructured Lipid Carriers (NLC) on the basis of Siberian pine (Pinus sibirica) Seed Oil, Pharmazie, January 2010, 65(1): 25-31, electronic ISSN: 0031-7144; and V M Dembitsky; Astonishing Diversity of Natural Surfectants: 5 Biologically Active Glycosides of Aromatic Metabolites, Lipids, September 2005, 40(9): 869-900).
- The nut oil contains the following trace elements: copper, magnesium, manganese, silica, potassium, phosphorus, calcium, molybdenum, iodine, tin, zinc, iron, silver, cobalt, sodium, glucose, dextrin, pentosans, albumin, globulin, glutelins and prolamins.
- It delivers these vitamins: thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, vitamin E and vitamin F (i.e. the essential fatty linoleic [LA] and alpha-linoleic [LNA] acids).
- It also carries the following amino acids: tryptophan, leucine, isoleucine, valine, lysine, methionine, histidine, proline, cerine, glycine, alanine, glutamic acids, asparafine, cystine, cysteine, arginine and tyrosine.
- These nuts are highly prized by men in Sibiria
For more information contact:
Rebecca Campbell
Chocolate PR
rebecca@pmhq.co.uk
01132459132This press release was distributed via Response Source, a service from Daryl Willcox Publishing, on behalf of Chocolate PR. For more information visit http://www.dwpub.com/pressreleasewires
ChiRunning Core Strengthening Series Part III
chilivinginchttp://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/chilivingincSportsThe, Butt, WalkChiRunning Core Strengthening Series Part III
Duration : 0:1:43
The Persistence of Memory
On the eve of the 31st anniversary of the 1979 revolution, Tehran is facing the Marxian destiny: History has repeated itself in Iran, indeed with a farcical twist, and the clerics aren’t the ones laughing.
For 30 years, February had always arrived, ringing in the 10-day commemorative period the authorities call the “Decade of Fajr,” meaning “dawning,” or as ordinary Iranians secretly dubbed from the start, the Decade of Zajr, meaning “torture.” Every year, a Christmas-like effort went into decorating the cities—hanging Ayatollah Khomeini banners from street lamps, plastering the walls with bygone slogans, playing the old reels of the 1978 uprising with the relentless frequency of canned holiday music in American malls. To live in Tehran in early February untouched by the Fajr spectacle was as impossible as it is to live in Athens unaware of the Acropolis. Marches were on. In schools and universities across the country, math, physics, chemistry, even medicine, yielded to history, albeit that of a single year, as students and government employees were rounded up to attend the celebrations—which, in a theocracy, never amounts to much more than demonstrations.
The further the nation got from 1979, the greater grew the hyperbole of the official narratives—the evil of Uncle Sam and its bastard child, Israel, the bloody appetite of the former Shah for power, the wisdom of Ayatollah Khomeini—who was soon elevated to an imam, the valor of people struggling against monarchy.
For 30 years, Milan Kundera’s elegant formulation had been upended in Iran. Those in power insisted on remembering the past; ordinary men and women insisted on forgetting it. To remember was “revolutionary.” Not to remember was not simply counter-revolutionary, it was even blasphemous. But as this particular kind of blasphemy was hard to define or detect and, thus, did not come with prison time, people readily exercised it. The tension was so palpable that even foreign reporters—clueless to language and cultural subtexts—sensed it. Report after report appeared in the English-language press about the youth’s disregard for the old totems, and their penchant for all things western, as they understood western to be—like going blonde, wearing Nikes, being sexually promiscuous, and saving money for plastic surgery. This generation that clandestinely swung its hips to the cool tunes of American pop would not be caught chanting a passé like Allahu akbar.
Since denying an enemy can only provoke but not defeat him, Iran’s memory game was bound to come to an end.
In the aftermath of the June presidential elections, the national dementia lifted. What was buried in the collective consciousness took hold of young and old. Everyone suddenly remembered. They climbed to the rooftops and chanted Allahu akbar just as they had in the weeks before the fall of the Shah. They took to the streets by the millions, and the image of their throngs uncannily resembled its precursor. They remembered how to build barricades, mix a Molotov cocktail, kiss the cheek of a riot policeman to pacify him, or set a tire on fire to neutralize tear gas. The regime finally got its wish. The nation proved to have been an assiduous student of history all along—and of all the detailed instructions it now regrets having passed on.
Stripping the clerical throne of its crown jewels by appropriating the revolutionary icons and symbolism is the second smartest move Iran’s Green Movement ever made. The first was to choose to conduct itself peacefully.
Could three decades prove to be a charm for Iran? It very well could. Whatever the next few months bring, Tehran certainly is bracing itself for February. Had they already built the nuclear bomb, and were it possible to wipe a month off the calendar the way Ahmadinejad wishes to wipe Israel off the map, February 2010 would have been the regime’s first target. In the meantime, the promotion of forgetting is a governmental priority. Last week, the broadcast and distribution of several images from 1978 was declared banned: http://www.ayandenews.com/news/17413/.
The Green Movement, however, has already vowed to fight the ban by remembering.
Israel’s Security: Survival or Continuity?
It could have been the 14-hour plane ride to Tel Aviv, or the 20-minute wait in the Customs queue leading to glass cubicle #24, but I did not like the dour look of the woman inside it.
I’m not the conference-going kind, but I’ve come to Israel for the 2010 Herzliya Conference. As expected, Iran is on the agenda. I accepted the invitation, hoping to learn why the Israeli and the Jewish position on Iran has been so disappointingly reductive, and detrimentally without nuance. In countless Jewish communities throughout the United States, I’ve spoken in places where posters of “No Nuclear Iran” were tacked to the walls around me. The American Jewish community, following Israel’s lead, has not articulated more than the hollow phrase about Iran. The phrase that should have simply been a beginning is, sadly, the end, too. What a complex, multi-layered, sophisticated issue such as Iran deserves is a position that matches it in complexity. Instead, Israel has been stuck in a shouting match with Ahmadinejad. Be it through the threat of developing nuclear missiles or his forays into the traditionally Marxist realms—of anti-imperialism and support of the cause of the down-trodden Palestinian—it’s been Ahmadinejad who has determined both the subject of the international debate and its perimeters.
In the meantime, Iran has been a microcosm of all the things that Jewish intellectuals have championed throughout history—among them, a robust women’s movement for equal rights, which at the moment is the greatest engine of the current Green Movement that has swept across Iran. Yet, a historic upheaval, the first of its kind in all of the Middle East, has not moved Israel to fine-tune its message on Iran. Major changes and attitude shifts have occurred in Iran, the kinds that Israel, prior to the advent of the nuclear problem, would have considered biblically great. But nemeses, like lovers, have eyes only for each other. And so Israel can’t see beyond Ahmadinejad.
If there’s a place in the Middle East where the Palestinian issue, as represented by Hamas and Hezbollah, has been steadily losing support among the nation, that place is Iran. In numerous polls taken during the last war between Israel and Lebanon, Iranians were the only people in the region who expressed the least interest in the subject. For them, the war had ceased to be a common Islamic cause, a precursor to successful peace talks, but a war just like many others around the world. It’s been harder and harder for the regime to round up the usual droves of demonstrators for the annual Quds Day rally. (Quds, Tehran’s name for Jerusalem, is Iran’s national holiday to defy Israel). This year, the rally made the regime regret having invented the day at all. The opposition circulated a poster with a caption that read: It’s a sin to light the mosque when your own house is dark. The proverb was an allusion to the funding Iran funnels to Hamas and Hezbollah despite all the needs at home.
But neither Israel nor the American Jewish community has ever articulated a position on Iran that acknowledges the shifting of opinion in Iran, historically an ally and potentially an ally once more. Security, albeit rightly as I will discuss in future pieces, has so crowded the Israeli vision, that she can no longer see the forest. Only a few trees.
When my turn came to stand at cubicle #24, I handed the agent all the security vouchers the organizers had e-mailed, along with my American passport. But my country of birth being Iran, I might as well be a Somali in most airports. She shoved the papers under her elbow and told me to wait. In all, it took me two further unpleasant encounters with a uniformed, poorly-shaven man (the kind to whom I either have a congenital aversion or one that I developed early on as a budding teenager in post-revolutionary Iran), followed by a two-hour wait in a shabby room with a hospital-style television hanging off the ceiling, until I was allowed to enter the country. I doubt Benjamin Netanyahu will be extending an invitation to me to have a beer with him and the woman in cubicle #24 on the prime ministerial lawn. Besides, I hate beer. But as I’m finally walking away, I can’t help but reflect on the title of the conference: Israel’s Security in Balance. It is clear that Israel’s struggle for security, as well as ours here in America, may end up saving our respective nations from the terrorists, but, for their sheer stultifying dismissal of a fast-changing universe, they may end up suffocating us, just the same.