The Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)

Posted by Juan Cole

https://www.juancole.com/2025/10/silently-fitzgeralds-rubaiyat.html

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Stanza 21 of the first edition of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám continues with the theme of the shortness of life and the finality of death, but introduces new emotions, of grief for lost loved ones and nostalgia for the past. These poignant lines have sometimes made me cry. We get maudlin as we get old.

XXI

Lo! some we loved, the loveliest and best
That Time and Fate of all their Vintage prest,
    Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to Rest.

It is based, according to A. J. Arberry, on no. 189 in the Calcutta manuscript, which is close to the quatrain given at this site.

یاران موافق همه از دست شدند
در پای اجل یکان‌ یکان پست شدند
بودند تنک شراب در مجلس عمر
دوری دو ز ما پیشترک مست شدند

My literal blank verse rendering of it goes like this:

All faithful friends have softly slipped away:
The foot of fate has crushed them one by one.
    They drank but sparingly at life’s gala;
An hour or two before us, they fell drunk.

By “they fell drunk” the poet here means that they died. FitzGerald stayed fairly close to the original.

—-
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The theme of mourning loved ones who have passed on is often addressed in classical Persian poetry.

These lines are attributed to Hafez of Shiraz (free verse):

I drink up, again and again, to the memory of the one who is gone
For there’s no cure in this world for night wounds.
It’s too bad, crazed heart, that your tipsy tumult
is only you being drunk in this world’s funeral home.

ه یاد کسی که رفتی، می‌دهم جام به جام
که نیست در این روزگار، دارویی بر زخم شام
دریغا ای دل دیوانه کاین مستانه شوری
به ماتم خانه گیتی تو را سرمستی است

Elihu Vedder illustration for the Rubaiyat. Public Domain.

And here is a flowery meditation on death and grief from Vahshi Bafqi, d. 1583, a poet of the Safavid era:

I had a memory of a lush garden
Tulips of good times bloomed, and roses of joy blossomed
But autumn seized that bower full of bright petals.
The tulips are crushed and the roses only thorns.
The fall has cast its shadow on that flower bed.
When will the nightingale again bring us hope of spring,
since its cage is cramped and its wings are broken?
With what optimism would it remember the rose trellis?
Even if the whole face of the earth bloomed, what hope could I have?
When the friend is gone, what do I have to do with flower beds?

خاطری داشتم القصه چو خرم باغی
لاله عیش شکفته گل شادی بر بار
آه کان باغ پر از لاله و گل یافت خزان
لاله‌ها شد همه داغ دل و گلها همه خار
برسیده‌ست در این باغ خزانی هیهات
کی دگر بلبل ما را بود امید بهار
بلبلی کش قفس تنگ و پروبال شکست
به چه امید دگر یاد کند از گلزار
گر همه روی زمین شد گل و گلزار چه حظ
یار چون نیست مرا با گل و گلزار چه کار

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For more commentaries on FitzGerald’s translations of the Rubáiyát, see

FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: Commentary by Juan Cole with Original Persian

https://www.juancole.com/2025/10/silently-fitzgeralds-rubaiyat.html

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Posted by Scott Corey

https://www.juancole.com/2025/10/autocratic-cooperation-russia.html

https://www.juancole.com/?p=227507

Berkeley, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Today, and particularly in the Middle East, concepts like national interest, class, and geopolitics are fading compared to analysis of political intent, frequently accompanied by accusations of heinous motives (terrorism, genocide). It may be useful to supplement these views with a more cold-eyed analysis of intent, focused on the success and failure of cooperation between new model autocrats in Russia, the US, and Israel.

Post-Cold War, market ideologues had great success in dismantling the limits on economic oligarchies, sparking popular discontent on a global scale.  Vladimir Putin found a semi-stable solution that is attractive to aspiring autocrats. In varying degrees, emulation of his model can now be found in countries as disparate as Belarus, Venezuela, Turkey, India, China, the US, Israel, Nicaragua, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary, governing perhaps half the world population.

The model relies on control of the media, engineered elections, dominance of the elite through centralized patronage and severe penalties, and nurturing minor threats into sustainable “existential” enemies. Alongside this emulation, Russia promotes its model abroad using its intelligence services and by weaponizing refugees to besiege its opponents, always aiming to build cooperation among like-thinking regimes under Moscow’s leadership. Whatever its fate in the long run, right now hope that a fraternity of autocrats would be mutually beneficial seems only partially fulfilled.

Cooperation seems to work in the case of budding US autocracy, and helps explain otherwise erratic foreign policy moves. Donald Trump’s favors to Mr. Putin are easy to list.  His unreasonable hostility to China drives that country closer to Russia. He attempted to starve Ukraine of weapons in his first administration and again in his second.  The first order of business in his second term was to slash US foreign aid, diplomacy, and cultural exchange, effectively crushing American capacity to build good will and gather human intelligence throughout the world – an enormous gift to its competitors.

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Mr. Putin’s favors to Mr. Trump are also well known but, until recently, of indeterminate weight. There is ample evidence that Russian assets provided by Putin allies saved Mr. Trump from personal bankruptcy decades ago. The Cambridge Analytica and other campaign scandals opened a window into how extensively Moscow involved itself in American politics, with decided emphasis on advantages to Mr. Trump. However, it was hard to measure the influence achieved by the Kremlin until Mr. Trump attempted to free himself from it.

Last July, Mr. Trump simultaneously restarted (and then expanded) weapons delivery to Ukraine, and tried to close further inquiry into the Epstein scandal. Success would have meant defying Mr. Putin and, at the same time, decoupling his own popularity from the QAnon/Epstein phenomenon he has exploited but never seemed to control.

For about a week, the latter goal seemed achievable. Using the most readily available measure of digital attention, Google Trends, the administration’s minimalist announcements on the Epstein matter produced a short-lived increase in public attention peaking at 50 on a scale of 100, quickly dropping to zero despite heavy criticism from Mr. Trump’s most prominent loyalists.  In the first week of July, the memo attempting to close the matter drove attention only to 40, suggesting that interest was diminishing.  However, when the new weapons for Ukraine were announced the following week, the index showed Epstein searches hit the index maximum of 100, and have remained just under 10 since then.

While there is no certainty that the new magnitude of strife within the US right wing is due to Moscow posting bots, there is no mistaking the speed and vigor with which Mr. Trump resumed action to weaken the US and drive nations closer to Russia. Tariff levels for India hit 50%, pushing Prime Minister Modi into an embrace of Mr. Putin so strong that it included sudden warmth toward China, previously a major opponent.  US destruction of a Venezuelan boat shoved South America farther away.  As the world watched the North Korean dictator visit with those of Russia and China, Mr. Trump arrested hundreds of South Koreans in the state of Georgia.  Topping that, he cut military aid to Baltic NATO countries.  And, with humiliating symbolism, Mr. Trump had to stand by while Mr. Putin, speaking on American soil, reminded him that Alaska (implicitly, like Ukraine) had once belonged to Russia.

Although the US is behaving like a Russian satellite country, the Middle East shows that emulation does not guarantee cooperation.  Turkey is deeply into the path of Moscow model autocracy, but it also supported rebel forces fighting Russian backed Syria.  Those Turkish sponsored forces won their fight, evicting Russia and Iran.  For Turkey, geopolitical considerations took precedence over regime companionship.

In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu has a long, strong friendship with Mr. Putin, overtly tempered by strategic alliance with the US.  However, Mr. Netanyahu judges that his own political survival (and avoidance of jail time) requires war that causes increasing damage to Russian allies (bombed in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Gaza), and to US influence (in particular, bombing Qatar).  In the Israeli case, the imperatives of autocratic practice overruled autocratic cooperation.

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This is not to say that cooperation cannot succeed within the region’s complexity.  In 2019, Mr. Trump succeeded in rescuing Mr. Putin’s agenda in the Middle East. Iraq had exploded with massive opposition to Iranian influence.  The Iranian embassy in Baghdad was burned, Iraqi clerics and militias weighed in with protesters, and demonstrators sacrificed their lives day after day for weeks.  Mr. Trump saved Moscow’s position in the region by bombing an Iranian general inside Iraq, instantly shifting Iraqi anger from East to West, exactly as observers at the time had warned in advance.

President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump pose for a photo with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Mrs. Sara Netanyahu Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2020, at the West Wing Lobby Entrance of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian). Public Domain. Via Picryl.

Seen from the perspective of autocratic cooperation, US bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities in June of this year makes sense as an attempt to repeat that sort of maneuver, this time to rescue Mr. Netanyahu – for his sake but also for the sake of both Moscow and Washington.  Claiming that Iranian nuclear capacity had been totally destroyed (and suppressing any hint that damage was less than total), Mr. Trump immediately appealed to Israel to drop the legal charges against Mr. Netanyahu, saying it was up to the US to rescue him.  If Israeli gratitude had overwhelmed their insistence upon justice and democracy, the Prime Minister would no longer have needed so much bloodshed to perpetuate his control.

Recent events show that even Mr. Netanyahu can be budged.  Mr. Trump’s vanity and Mr. Putin’s stop loss imperative aligned to curb their brother autocrat and his antagonists in the Russia-Iran-Hamas chain of proxies.

Again, autocratic cooperation is an additional framework for analysis, not a replacement for other theories.  New model autocracy is neither a secret nor a grand conspiracy, but a political agenda spreading unevenly and with problematic success.  Its dynamics need to be understood, not least by those who oppose it.

https://www.juancole.com/2025/10/autocratic-cooperation-russia.html

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Posted by Tomdispatch

https://www.juancole.com/2025/10/matter-death-trump.html

https://www.juancole.com/?p=227499

( Tomdispatch.com ) – The Senate Finance Committee hearing with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was explosive. The Secretary of Health and Human Services was accused of “reckless disregard for science and the truth,” and senators from both parties were openly hostile as they questioned him extensively on his vaccine policies, as well as the firing of scientific advisory board members and agency heads and their replacement with ideologically driven anti-vaccine supporters. During that more than three-hour session, he was called a charlatan and a liar, and he returned the insults.

The distrust of his honesty and integrity was palpable. The public health community already mistrusted his views on vaccines and the role of science. There was, however, some modest hope that he would at least follow through on his views on the environmental causes of chronic disease and the food industry’s disastrous impact on obesity and diabetes, as well as other diseases. Sadly, that’s been anything but the case and there’s quite a history behind that reality.

A Long History of Public Health Disasters

In focusing on the environmental causes of disease, Kennedy was building on a public health tradition that saw disease, suffering, and death as, at least in part, a function of the worlds we’ve constructed for ourselves and others over time. Historically, some instances of unnecessary suffering are glaringly obvious. Take, for instance, the exploitation and often premature death of Africans enslaved and transported to the New World under conditions so inhumane that approximately 10% to 20% of them perished during what came to be known as the Middle Passage. And don’t forget the suffering and early deaths of so many who survived and were consigned by Whites to forced labor in the American South, where the average life expectancy of a newborn slave child was less than 22 years, or about half that of a White infant of the same era.

Or, to take another example, in her famous 1906-1907 study Work-Accidents and the Law, Crystal Eastman, the feminist co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union and a social reformer, wrote of 526 men who were killed in accidents in the steel mills of Pittsburgh and another 509 who suffered serious injuries in — yes! — a single year, arguing that many of those accidents would have been preventable had work conditions been different. As she grimly reported:

“Seven men lost a leg, sixteen men were hopelessly crippled in one or both legs, one lost a foot, two lost half a foot, five lost an arm, three lost a hand, ten lost two or more fingers, two were left with crippled left arms, three with crippled right arms, and two with two useless arms. Eleven lost an eye, and three others had the sight of both eyes damaged. Two men have crippled backs, two received internal injuries, one is partially paralyzed, one feebleminded, and two are stricken with the weakness of old age while still in their prime.”

Some aspects of the inevitable — fatal disease or other devastating genetic and biological conditions — are clearly affected by how societies care for their members. Historically, race, social class, geographic location, gender, age, and immigrant status have all been shown to have a tremendous impact on access to medical care and the quality of that care. The social and economic arrangements Americans created have shaped patterns of disease prevalence, distribution, and recovery over the course of our history.

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Most obviously, a system dependent on slavery produced untold suffering and death among those most exploited; a commercial economy involving trade between various regions of the country and the world often lent a significant hand to the transmission of diseases from mosquitoes, rats, and other sources of infection. The development of cities with large immigrant populations gave landlords the opportunity to profit from renting airless tenements without adequate sewerage or pure water, producing epidemics of tuberculosis and cholera, among other diseases of poverty. Similarly, the disfiguring accidents and diseases caused by toxic chemicals were often a reflection of the rampant expansion of a laissez-faire industrial system that put profits above human life. And the Trump administration’s decision to promote the use of coal and ignore the impact of a fossil-fuel-based economy on the climate and on health is perhaps the most glaring example today of the urge to maintain a world that is (all too literally) killing us.

Smallpox in the eighteenth century, along with typhoid, typhus, yellow fever, and cholera epidemics, and a plague of childhood diseases in the nineteenth century, were all exacerbated by the squalid conditions in which people lived. The industrial revolution created conditions for the development of epidemics of silicosis, lead poisoning, and asbestosis. In more recent decades, agricultural workers in the vineyards of California and elsewhere were regularly showered with pesticides while harvesting the food that agricultural companies packaged and sold to the nation. In that process, millions of people have suffered diseases and deaths that could have been avoided.

Recently, our collective environmental practices have contributed disproportionately to global warming and so to extreme droughts, ever more severe hurricanes, and rising sea levels that threaten to flood entire nations, and we’re sure you won’t be surprised to learn that such events can, in turn, result in compromised resistance to disease. Endocrine disruptors like bisphenyl A, PCBs, and dioxins manufactured in the twentieth century turned out to cause a variety of cancers, birth defects, and other developmental disorders. Meanwhile, hundreds of chemicals manufactured in recent decades have undoubtedly led to increased deaths, diseases, and neurological damage globally. And, of course, count on one thing: issues like these won’t be seriously addressed by Robert Kennedy Jr., despite his occasional claims that he will.

The Poor and People of Color Bear the Biggest Burden of Social Neglect

The Covid-19 pandemic provided us with an example of how unequal the effects of disease regularly are. Over the course of the pandemic’s first few years, Covid killed more than one out of every 300 Americans. However, the burden of those deaths was distributed anything but evenly through the population. Those in a weakened state and without access to decent health care were the most likely to become ill and die. Although “the greatest number of deaths [were] among non-Hispanic white people… the rate of Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths [was] higher among people of color.”

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, compared to Whites, “American Indians and Alaskan Natives were 3.1 times more likely to be hospitalized, Black or African Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be hospitalized and 1.7 times more likely to die, and Hispanic or Latino persons are 1.5 times more likely to get Covid and 2.3 times more likely to be hospitalized” In stark graphs, the Poor People’s Campaign documented that “people living in poorer counties died at nearly two times the rate of people who lived in richer counties.” During the early phase of the epidemic, from December 2021 through February 2022, counties with the lowest median income “had a death rate nearly three times higher… compared to those with the highest median incomes,” a difference that can’t simply be explained by disparities in vaccination rates.

And where will our latest Secretary of Health and Human Services be if something like that happens on his watch? While he may call on companies to voluntarily remove food colorings, we should expect that, in a crisis, he’ll ultimately tell Americans to change their behavior and not eat cereals with food colorings.   

But don’t even count on that since such products are deemed necessary to maintain the profits of a food manufacturing and distribution system largely controlled by a few giant agricultural businesses. Real reform of such a system would undoubtedly benefit the health of Americans. However, in the absence of a strong social movement, the entrenched interests that have promoted such industrial food production will undoubtedly prove to be virtually immune to serious restructuring or change. Indeed, as nutritionist and public health advocate Marion Nestle has written, there is now little resistance to the continuing unchecked growth of the agricultural sector and few challenges to the rights of Campbell’s, McDonald’s, Monsanto, Perdue, Smithfield Foods, and others to conduct their businesses in ways that may indeed threaten the health of tens of millions of Americans.

Of course, there is also real truth to the story of progress toward better health. The average life span of a White boy born in 1900 in a large American city was only 46.3 years, and of a Black boy, only 33 years. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, however, the average life expectancy for Americans was close to 78 years, although the gap between Black and White remains. Similarly, this country has reduced the number of deaths that used to plague both children and women giving birth, while largely controlling cholera and other water-borne diseases through the introduction of relatively safe water supply and sewerage systems. The last 150 years, writes demographer Richard Easterlin, have seen the “average life span” more than double globally from 20 to 40 years at the turn of the last century to between 60 and 80 years today. And yet Secretary of Health Kennedy seems to be ready to jettison perhaps the single most important technology responsible for rising life spans: vaccines! Rather than mandating that children receive vaccines before entering school, Kennedy said the decisions should be left to the state and to parents. Despite efforts to backtrack on his long anti-vax history, in interviews on CNN and elsewhere, he has insisted that “there are no vaccines that are safe and effective.”

While national and international mortality statistics tell an important story, they often hide wide variations in the health and wellbeing of those who make up such figures. A closer look at the life spans of industrial workers, women, Native Americans, Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites reveals vast differences in disease experience. The persistence of disparities in health and longevity among them may, in truth, be the most enduring health reality of American society. Although new discoveries in medical science, impressive technological interventions, and modest policy initiatives have improved American health, narrowing the gaps described above, those disparities have persisted for more than four centuries. 

Who you are, where you live, what you do, and what you earn have always been the key factors determining your lifespan and your health, rather than the technological changes in medical treatment that have become available. The narrative of ever more improvement that’s been the bread and butter of so much of public health’s self-congratulatory history needs to be modified to acknowledge the millions of years lost through the (too) early deaths of Blacks, Native Americans, and poor and working-class Whites since the colonial era.      

In the nineteenth century, the incidence of classic infectious and communicable diseases, including cholera, smallpox, tuberculosis, and typhoid, was at least in part the product of specific decisions, including the way landlords profited by jamming people into tenements and leaving them with outdoor plumbing and a polluted water supply. In short, suffering wasn’t just the inevitable byproduct of urbanization and industrialization, but of a dominant ideology that reinforced a laissez-faire economic system with profit (for the few) as its main goal.

Why, you might wonder, did so few question the logic of crowding so many together when there was nearly unlimited space in which to live in a still sparsely populated nation? Who determined that some people’s health could be sacrificed for the wealth of others, even though there were often no objective reasons why conditions could not have been better?

Who Should Live and Who Should Die?

In effect, leaders then made social and political decisions about who should live and who should die, as they will again in the Trump era. Unfortunately, it’s all too rare to think of diseases not as an inevitable byproduct of a particular exposure or an inevitable outgrowth of modernization or industrialization, but as the byproduct of decisions made by individuals, groups, and societies. In different eras, different conditions have been created that diseased, maimed, or killed people all too unequally.

Isn’t it time, in the era of Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy Jr., when, for instance, the administration’s devastation of the U.S. Agency for International Development might, according to the medical journal The Lancet, lead to 14 million more deaths globally, to broaden the definition of what causes disease and death in the United States (and elsewhere)? Isn’t it time not just to focus on viruses and events in nature, but on the structure of an American society in which the rich are growing ever richer and income inequality is on the rise, a world in which corporations, government, and institutions make decisions that profoundly affect people’s health? Consciously or not, the decisions the dominant groups in a society make determine who lives and who dies, who flourishes and who prospers.

Some disease-related tragedies are unavoidable, but all too many are not. There was no need for children to die in such large numbers from infections in the crowded slums of the nineteenth century, nor for workers to suffer so extensively from chronic diseases and disabilities in the factories of the early twentieth century. Nor is it necessary in the modern era to pollute the environment with synthetic plastics that lead to epidemics of cancer, heart disease, or stroke.  Worse yet, it’s anything but necessary, as Donald Trump is determined to do, to continue to pollute the global environment through the endless overuse of fossil fuels, ensuring that this world will someday become so warm that it may no longer support human life across significant swaths of the globe.  How we construct society, in other words, significantly determines the ways different groups live — and die.

An understanding of how Americans have built their past should give us the power to shape the future. Companies do not have to continue to introduce synthetic hormones, pesticides, or other materials into the milk American children drink, the wheat in the cereals millions of Americans eat, or the meat that is a staple of our diet. Even simple regulatory changes could have a positive impact on how we, our children, and our grandchildren will live and die. Many positive changes, though never achieved without a struggle, aren’t particularly revolutionary or even massively disruptive of existing social relationships. Europeans, for example, have decided to require chemical companies simply to test their products for safety before being introduced into the stream of commerce. 

We as a people should not have to watch helplessly as the earth’s ecosystem is devastated through habitat destruction, resource depletion, and global warming. We should be able to learn from the horrible global accidents of the recent past. Chernobyl in Ukraine, and Fukushima in Japan are perhaps the most well-known “dead zones” our species has produced through inattention to the risks we humans create — in those cases, of course, with nuclear power. But we can learn from other, less well-known communities where human decisions have resulted in untold health consequences.  Take, for instance, the way polychlorinated biphenyls polluted the community around the factory in Anniston, Alabama, where they were first produced in the 1930s, or how the town of Times Beach, Missouri, had to be literally abandoned because of the way that now-banned Polychlorinated Biphenyls, or PCBs, were spread on its roads. A host of polluted landfills across this country and around the world are now Superfund sites in need of massive investment to detoxify.

Simply put, the message we can learn from the past is that we need not continue to build worlds that kill us but can, collectively, make more life-affirming decisions. In the age of Donald Trump, who is now seeking to end women’s use of Tylenol, and Robert Kennedy Jr, we have entered a world of medical quackery. As Senator Maria Cantwell exclaimed, “Sir, you’re a charlatan. That’s what you are.”

Copyright 2025 Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner

Via Tomdispatch.com

https://www.juancole.com/2025/10/matter-death-trump.html

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