East meets West, and PMH meets Das Racist

The purveyors of post-ironic South Asian swag  at Pardon My Hindi have re-launched with a new store, a new site, and are celebrating with a new T-Shirt in collaboration with the perpetually-touring Brooklyn rap group Das Racist.

How Jay-Z became the black Warren Buffett

Street-cred authenticity and mass-market success are natural antagonists in the corporate world, and very few hip-hop artists could survive wholesale embrace by white suburban adolescents and keep their image intact. But then again, very few hip-hop artists are Jay-Z.

That's the hook to my review of Zack Greenburg's Empire State of Mind, a book about Jay-Z's business philosophy. 

Hyperlocal parenting

I'd love to listen in on the conversations this leads to in the park between the parents of Banjo, Tarragon, and Brystin:

Ai weiwei: Who is afraid of the Chinese government?

My column in this week’s Maclean’s magazine (no link yet) is nominally about the contrast between the impotence of shock art in the West versus its all-too-threatening status in China. But mostly it was an excuse to get on the record some facts about the what is, effectively, the kidnapping and detention of the artist Ai Weiwei by the Chinese government.

The government has put forth a  list of reasons for his arrest, including pornography (for this picture), plagiarism, and according to this story in the Guardian today, tax evasion. No one takes these claims seriously; it’s fairly obvious Ai is being persecuted for marrying his art with social activism (especially leading investigations into corruption and a cover-up surrounding the Sichuan earthquake).

Ai’s arrest has raised a great deal of alarm in parts of the West. Among the people or organizations that have expressed public concern and requested his release: The US ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, US state department spokesman Mark Toner, UK foreign secretary William Hague, the EU delegation to China, German foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, and French foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero. In addition, Anish Kapoor and Salman Rushdie have expressed their solidarity with Ai.

On April 18^th, a group of about 100 members of the Toronto art community took part in the 1001 Chairs demonstration outside the Chinese consulate, and called on the “Prime Minister and our Minister of Foreign Affairs to express concern over the treatment of Ai Weiwei”. To no avail:Among those who have said nothing in public: Canada’s ambassador to China David Mulroney, Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, departed DFAIT minister Lawrence Cannon, new DFAIT minister John Baird, and Heritage Minister James Moore. Brock professor of political science Charles Burton has posted a few items on his blog about the Ai Weiwei case.

After 43 days without any contact, Ai’s wife was allowed to visit him for 20 minutes on Monday. Her account of his condition does not sound great. As Burton and others have pointed out, this is not an isolated case: a disturbing number of people have disappeared in China since the Tunisian-inspired “Jasmine” revolution  began a few months ago. Also, Hong Kong street artists who have been stenciling in support of Ai have similarly been arrested.

(Props to Marina Galperina of Animal New York for keeping tabs on this).



When it comes to travel, everything is authentic

Mike Sowden has a thoughtful post about travel, authenticity, and modernity:

So is authenticity the opposite of modernity?

No – it can’t be. We know travel is a form of escapism, but where can we escape to? A perceived goal of authentic travel is, in the words of Pam Mandel, “the perfect interaction with the culture we’re visiting”. But whatever remote corner of the world greets our feet, it’s the first decade of the 21^st Century. Wherever we go, it’s all modern.

Maybe that sounds crazy. What about the honest-feeling traditions we encounter around the world – the old ways of doing things that we fall so in love with at first sight? Yep, they’re modern too…and the fact you’re seeing them at work means they’re successfully modern. Putting aside the enormously tricky ethical issues for a second – if you’re watching ‘traditional culture’ reenacted in front of you, it’s an invention. It might be largely accurate, it might be 99% fiction, but it’s redesigned for now.

Along the way, he tries to get to a plausible account of authenticity that avoids status-seeking, avoids being caught up in the fetishization of the poor, or the underdeveloped, or the anti-modern, but which also tries to avoid the feeling of compromise or betrayal that goes along with the whole paying-for-authenticity angle. Here's his working definition:

an authentic experience is one that can’t be dictated to us... A moral, ethical choice to do something in such a way that satisfies our core sense of what is good and right.

This is a good try at salvaging the idea of authenticity as a useful goal (for travel, anyway), but I'm not sure it will work. To begin with, I think that searching for an "authentic experience that can't be dictated us" is just another brilliant marketing plan. Even when it is not, I worry that what seems like a "moral, ethical choice" is to0 shot through with class biases and our aesthetics of taste and distaste. At its heart, this strikes me as simply a restatement of the very problem that motivates the entire authenticity hoax in the first place. To the extent to which it doesn't do so, it turns every decision we make into an authentic one, which has a distinctly Buddhist charm to it, at the cost of making the use of the term pointless.

Authentic Rugs

Via Richard Nelson, from the upscale Cherry Creek neighbourhood of Denver.

The money is back on Wall Street, and so is the status anxiety

Substance or style were clearly irrelevant this week. Size and name recognition were enough. -- "In Contemporary Art Sales, Big is Better and Famous is Best". The New York Times, May 13 2011.

Can there be any clearer sign that it is business as usual on Wall Street than the return of preposterous prices for idiotic art? At the end of 2008, as the depths of the credit crisis were starting to become apparent, Sotheby’s of London auctioned off 223 works by the former bad boy of British art, Damien Hirst. When the gavel finally fell on the last lot, Hirst was $200 million to the good, a record haul for an auction devoted to a single artist.

At the time, it seemed like the last great flareup of a bull-market in art that that was fueled by the same real-estate bubble that was juicing bonuses on Wall Street. Over the past decade, the Mei Moses All Art index (a sort of TSX for art investments) had outperformed bonds and bills, and in the first half of 2008 it gained a solid 7.4 per cent even as the S&P 500 was enduring double-digit declines. But given that the art market typically lags about six months to a year behind the stock market, it would only be a matter of time before art saw the same sort of declines as equities.

Sorry, where were we? Right, last week in New York:

Estimates had been set at a super maximum. The first three top prices were paid by bidders battling against the reserve. Rarely was the speculative character of the market more blatant.

And later:

Bidders scrambled to buy everything and anything. A set of three cibachrome prints mounted on board and executed by Janine Antonini in 1994 opened the proceedings. The banality of the photographic images from an edition of 10 that were offered under the title “Mom and Dad” did not seem promising. Yet the set sold for $182,500.

Back when people were still paying a king's ransom for second-rate Hirsts, Robert Hughes wrote a wonderfully sour article for the Guardian calling Hirst a "pirate" and blamed him for almost single-handedly creating the cult of artist-as-celebrity, and feeding the “irrational faith in a continuous rise in prices.”

We can see now that Hirst himself had almost nothing to do with it. As usual in these sorts of cases, the key is not remember to blame the buyer, not the seller. Blame the john, not the prostitute. In his 2008 book about contemporary art, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, York University business professor Don Thompson observes that “there is almost nothing you can buy for $12 million that will generate as much status and recognition as a branded work of contemporary art.” As he says, some people think a Lamborghini is vulgar, and lots of people can afford yachts. But put a Damien Hirst dot painting on your wall, and the reaction is, “Wow, isn’t that a Hirst?”

The point is, Hirst was not selling art, he was selling a cure for rich people with more money than taste. But while everyone may have moved on from rotting sheep in formaldehyde, the money is back, and so, quite obviously, is the status anxiety.

Authenticity-seeking and counter-signalling: the case of the cavemen hunters

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Justin Scheck reports on the latest in stone-age lifestylism: hunters who have eschewed high-powered rifles and composite compound bows in favour of weapons made with prehistoric materials and techniques. These include handmade bows, flint-tipped arrows, rudimentary spears, and 19^th century muskets.  They use these to kill deer and wild boar, along with alligators and feral pigs.

At first glance, this sounds like something straight out of Williambsurg, yet another click in the ratchet of urban cavemanism that briefly flourished last year in New York’s restaurants, fitness gyms, and yoga studios. If it was the height of authenticity last year to butcher your own pig and make your own moose jerky, the ante has most definitely been raised.

But we shouldn’t be too quick to lump Scheck’s paleo-hunters in with the hipster Groks and Urrgs wandering the stone-age wastelands of Brooklyn trying to one-down each other in their rejection of the comforts and privileges of civilization. There’s probably something to that: as Scheck quotes Ted Fry, the owner of Raptor Archery in Hood River, Oregon, more people now want to hunt with "a piece of handcrafted artwork that's functional." (I wonder if anything of them are making use of artisanal axes?)

But I think the overwhelming motivation is something that’s a bit more subtle, and a bit more tolerable to boot:

Prehistoric hunts are back partly because technology has made hunting a bit of a yawner, say some of the sport's aficionados. The proliferation of gear like high-powered sniper rifles and "compound bows"—which use carbon fiber, metal wire and a set of pulleys to fling an arrow almost as fast as a bullet—took much of the sport out of hunting, they say.

This motive -- to get back to a form of sport hunting where skill and technique are what matters, not how high-tech the equipment -- is pretty neat. Too many sports are being ruined because new gear makes it possible for weekend amateurs to hit professional quality shots. Tennis has been ruined by space-age power racquets with enormous sweet spots, while Polara recently announced a golf ball that won’t slice. Both of these are illegal for use by pros, but they have the effect of evening out skill levels amongst amateurs.

The ethics of this sort of equipment (along with composite bows and high-powered hunting rifles are fascinating – perhaps Wayne over at This Sporting Life will weigh in – but what I find interesting is the implicit status move here: the real hunters use primitive tools -- the fancy bows and guns are for weekend wannabes. 

While this has many overt (and implicit) affinities with the authenticity-seekers at whom I like to poke fun, what’s really going on here is a form of counter-signalling: “the behaviour where agents with the highest level of a given property invest less into proving it than individuals with a medium level of the same property.” (Here's a good Tyler Cowen post on the phenomenon).

Counter-signalling is extremely widespread, and is in many ways the most delightful form of status-seeking. Paul Fussell’s book Class has some great anecdotes about how at the extremes of wealth in America, it is hard to tell the homeless men from the robber barons – both dress like complete bums. My own favourite example was from a few years ago, when I spent two weeks paddling down a raging mountain river in the Northwest territories. While all of the paying customers on the trip were kitted out in the latest high-tech paddling gear, my guide – a laconic 19-year old university student – went the entire trip without changing out of a ratty old pair of cargo shorts and a torn rugby shirt.

There is a great deal over overlap between authenticity-seeking and counter-signalling, but they are very different forms of status display. One is essentially a way of signaling one’s underlying politics, while the other is about signaling one underlying skill or competence.

The great Authenticity Hoax paperback giveaway

Hey! The Authenticity Hoax came out in paperback this week in the USA and Canada. They are identical, except that the USA edition has a fancy new subtitle. It's also my birthday. So to celebrate, I'm giving away five copies of the book: Two in Canada, two in the USA, and one to someone from a third country.

How to win?

Well, you might have noticed that things have been a bit quiet on this blog. Partly it's because we just had a federal election here in Canada, and I spent a great deal of blogging and writing energy on politics, most of which ended up on my blog at Maclean's magazine. I also started an Authenticity Hoax tumblr, which has become a repository for a lot of the pics, quotes, links, and other miscellany. It's probably a bad idea to split the readers' attention like this, but I thought I'd try it out.

At any rate, the upshot is that I haven't been doing much of the long-form stuff I want to do here. So here's where you, the dear and the gentle, come in. Send me an idea for something I should blog about -- a link, a picture, a book, a band. If I use it, you get a copy of my book. Easy peasy.

So let's have it. What's got your authenticity hoaxed?

email: jandrewpotter@gmail.com

twitter: @jandrewpotter

Why Greg Mortenson is more like Ronald Reagan than James Frey

NB: I started this post the day after the CBC doc about Greg Mortenson aired, put it aside, and took too long to get back to it. I don't think anything here is novel at this point, but I think it's worth getting on the record.

***

The Beach Boys didn’t know how to surf. James Frey didn’t spend three months in jail. Ronald Reagan never served as a photographer in a U.S. Army unit assigned to film Nazi death camps. Greg Mortenson never got lost climbing down K2, never stumbled into a village in Pakistan where he was nursed back to health, and never spent eight days as a prisoner of the Taliban.

Mortenson, as some of you may know, is the author of the massive-selling memoir Three Cups of Tea and the head of the non-profit Central Asian Institute (CAI), which raises funds to build schools in remote villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan. His writing and his work has been lauded by some of the most important people in
the Pentagon, and he has advised the US military on their campaigns in central Asia. His work is widely credited with influencing the switch from counter-terrorism to counter-insurgency in fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Or should we say, discredited. In a report that aired last month, CBS's 60 Minutes made three damning allegations. First, that many of the more compelling aspects of Mortenson’s story (and how he came to build schools in Pakistan) are fabricated. Second, that he has seriously mis-managed the finances of the CAI, treating it – by at least one account – as his own personal ATM. Third, a great deal of the work the CAI claims to have done is itself fictitious, that many of the schools Mortenson claims to have built are “ghost schools” that have no teachers, no supplies, and no students.

If you haven’t seen the 60 Minutes piece, you can stream it online. But that piece is itself largely a restatement of the arguments advanced by John Krakauer in this extended essay, where he completely demolishes the myth of Greg Mortenson, of CAI, and the whole notion of fighting terrorism through the soft-power device of school-building. I won’t go through the evidence Krakauer marshals, you should read it for yourself. Instead, the question we should ask is to what extent should we allow Greg Mortenson’s lies about his organization’s founding myths to colour our judgments about his arguments and the work he is doing?

Go back to The Beach Boys, James Frey, and Ronald Reagan. All three of these fibbers are, to varying degrees, committing crimes against authenticity. That is, they involve false or misleading statements about a person’s past or background that are designed to underwrite, or legitimize, their pretension to some sort of artistic, emotional, or political high-ground. Yet the degree of criminality varies. In the case of the Beach Boys, the fact that they posed for album covers holding boards they couldn’t ride was basically harmless. For James Frey, at least some of the ways in which he played loose with the truth were arguably forgivable, insofar as it served a broader story of redemption.

With Reagan, though, it formed part of a much grander pattern of mendaciousness (about his past, and about facts in the world) that was used to justify and gain support for his political agenda. For example, he frequently told a version of a story about a "Chicago welfare queen" who used multiple names and addresses to bilk the government out of $150 000. The problem is that while the story was total bunk, it helped underwrite Reagan’s small-government anti-welfarist agenda.

Where on this continuum should we put Mortenson?

On the one hand, there are critics such as Bing West, who in his book The Wrong War blames Mortenson’s influence on senior military personnel for helping turn the mission in Afghanistan into “a gigantic Peace Corps”. Toward the other end of the spectrum is Andrew Exum, who in a short piece for the Daily Beast warned against “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”:

To the degree that Mortenson’s writings have convinced officers and soldiers to be patient and listen to the people they aim to protect, I applaud the words of the author—whether they turn out to be fact or fiction. But let’s not pretend men who spent the best years of their youth in places like Anbar province and the Arghandab River Valley would not have learned these lessons anyway, and let’s not throw these lessons out if Mortenson proves to be an unreliable narrator.

Writing for PBS, Joshua Foust makes a similar point:

Sadly, Mortenson’s good work is going to be overshadowed — possibly destroyed — by this scandal (albeit one that looks like it was largely of his own making). And the losers, besides wide-eyed Americans who’ve lost an unassailable hero, will ultimately be the people his schools were helping.

While I don’t agree with Bing that Mortenson single-handedly turned the USMC into a group of tea-sipping pansies, I’m less convinced by Exum and Foust. Why? Because their argument rests on two shaky premises. The explicit premise is that Mortenson’s CAI actually is helping a lot of people, and that his book and work teaches lessons that are relevant to mission in Afghanistan, regardless of whether he made stuff up, and regardless of whether he is a bad manager.

These sort of excuses fall on the Beach Boys/James Frey end of the spectrum. Mortenson’s made up stories about losing his way on K2 and getting captured by Taliban are, on this telling, no different than the Beach Boys pretending to be surf bums – a bit of harmless fibbing in the name of building a valuable brand. Or perhaps they are fabrications that actually do good, by helping build a compelling narrative that has inspired thousands, even millions, of other people.

But the implicit assumption here is that there are no additional harms apart from the lies, and that they actually served a greater good. And there’s not a lot of evidence for that claim. Even if we set aside the mismanagement of CAI and the alleged looting of its coffers,  there’s not a lot of evidence that he has done much good. 

First: Of all of these schools he is supposed to have built, a lot of them either don’t exist, are empty, are unstaffed, are being used as storage sheds, were unwanted in the first place… you name it.

 Second: Of the schools he has built, most are in parts of Pakistan that have no Taliban influence. Which means that any of the lessons that he supposedly learned, and which were adopted by the US military, are completely irrelevant to counterinsurgency.

Third: I’ll let Terry Glavin make the third point:

He's brought shame and disgrace to every Afghan and Pakistani associated with the Central Asia Institute. He betrayed tens of thousands of American schoolkids who contributed to the institute's so-called Pennies for Peace program. He's told outrageous and slanderous lies about the people of Baltistan - which is not a savage Taliban hotbed at all, but one of the most peaceful and welcoming corners of Pakistan - and about Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor, which is not a "front line in the war on terror" but a place that bears more resemblance to Shangri-la than to Kandahar. On and on and on.

This last point is the key one, so I’ll repeat it: By slandering his hosts, by telling the world that he was kidnapped and held hostage when, in fact, he was treated as an honoured guest, Mortenson did something unforgivable: he played off every awful stereotype Westerners already have about the people of the region to elevate himself to the status of some sort of magical white man, the condescendingly noble imperialist come to forgive and to rescue.

Greg Mortenson is no prophet of counterinsurgency, and he's no friend of central Asia.

Annals of Paranoia: Plastic surgery and hamburgers edition

I have long believed that instead of invading, bombing, and otherwise hounding the world's dictators out of office, they should all be simply offered their own talk shows on TV. Alternatively, I would suggest putting a bunch of them in a beach house in Malibu and filming a few seasons of "I'm a dictator, get me out of here!"

I mean, seriously:

Gadhafi wanted an immediate operation, but Ribeiro needed a surgical team and the procedure was scheduled for January 1995. It began at 2 a.m. in Gadhafi’s bunker, which “had two fully equipped and very modern operating rooms, a gym and a swimming pool,” Ribeiro said.

 

“He insisted on local anesthesia saying he wanted to remain alert,” the doctor added. “He was a very calm patient.”
Sao Paulo-based plastic surgeon Dr. Fabio Naccache confirmed to the AP that he was part of the team and performed a hair transplant on the Libyan leader. About halfway through, Gadhafi said he was hungry.

 

“Hamburgers were brought in for all and surgery was interrupted for several minutes while we ate,” the surgeon said.

Afghan Chain Letters

Probably inevitable, but this kinda breaks my heart:

KABUL (PAN): Mobile phone users in the Afghan capital have started receiving text messages warning them that if they do not send on the names of Allah to several other people, they will endure a lifetime of misfortune.

While most people in Kabul do not want to insult their religion, they say they cannot afford to send messages out to so many people.

Massoud, a resident of Qala-i-Wakil, said he had received four such text messages during the past month. Two days ago, he received an SMS which said: "TheBeneficent, the Merciful, the Eternal, the Majestic, the Powerful, and the all Inclusive. Allah is everywhere! Send this to nine people; you will hear good news tomorrow. If you don’t send it, you will be unfortunate for nine years."

Massoud said he usually sent on the messages as asked, but one night he was asked to send the SMS to another 24 people, but ran out of credit after he sent 19 messages. Because I was afraid of being sinful, I used my other mobile to send it to another five people.

I wrote a somewhat more positive story about love and mobile messaging in Afghanistan for a recent issue of Canadian Busisness:

In a society where marriages are mostly arranged, young lovers gift one another with free airtime. As the study quotes Ahmed, a 24–year–old day labourer, "The mobile phone makes love marriages possible."

Liberalism, Revolution, and Dr. Zhivago

From my latest column for Maclean's:

There’s a great scene at the beginning of Doctor Zhivago when the Bolsheviks are marching through town in peaceful protest, singing songs of freedom and brotherhood while the aristocrats dance and drink in a ballroom that overlooks the street. The party goes uncomfortably quiet as the singing builds in volume, until Mr. Komarovsky, the high-born villain of the story, cracks a joke: “But will they still sing in tune after the revolution?” Everyone laughs, the band starts back up, and the party resumes.

It is increasingly obvious that the outcome of the popular uprisings hopscotching their way across the Middle East will be far messier and uncertain than the fall of Communism two decades ago. While virtually all of the former Soviet Bloc states in Eastern Europe quickly reverted to some form of liberal democracy, none of the countries in the Middle East has any comparable tradition to fall back on. That is why, when it comes to the ongoing turmoil in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and elsewhere, the worry is not that the protesters won’t manage to sing in tune once they’ve got rid of the strongmen, dictators and corrupt monarchs, it is that they will...



The "rape" of yoga and the problem of invented traditions

While the Tea Party continues to press its advantage in yet another round of the interminable American culture wars, a far more interesting cultural battleground is brewing in the Indian community over the question: who owns yoga?

Over the past year or so, a number of Hindu groups in America, in particular the Hindu American Foundation, have been working to remind westerners that that yoga isn't just about stretching and stretch pants, that it is instead part of an unbroken Hindu religious tradition that stretches back 5000 years. The fight has been brewing for a while, but it came to more general attention last November when the New York Times published a piece about the fight entitled "take back yoga". What is striking about that piece is that the Hindu groups seem conflicted, and unable to decide whether what they find objectionable is that their ancient tradition has been commercialized, or that they're not getting a big enough slice of the pie.

This is, of course, a classic dilemma of authenticity. But it isn’t necessarily a contradiction – there’s nothing inherently wrong with insisting that if a culture is going to be sold at a profit, the people who invented that culture should share in the wealth. But it gets a bit more complicated when what is being laid claim to is an invented tradition. In the classic definition from Eric Hobsbawm, an invented tradition is "a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past."

The point of an invented tradition is that it is not about the past, it is about the present. For Hobsbawm, many traditions are invented by national elites to justify the existence and importance of their respective nation states – such as the whole-cloth invention of the Turkish nation by Ataturk. A recent example was the use of the Loya Jirga to cement Hamid Karzai as the legitimate president of Afghanistan, by (falsely) implying that this is how Afghan rulers had been chosen for centuries.

But sometimes the point of an invented tradition is about laying a claim of cultural identity, intellectual primacy, economic ownership, and even of the moral high ground. The fight over who owns yoga involves all of these. And if a recent article by Meera Nanda for Open Magazine is correct, yoga – as understood by all the players in this fight – is an invented tradition.

I won’t try to summarize the entire article – you should really just pause here and go read it for yourself before I continue – but here is the money claim: The HAF argument - that all yoga, especially its physical or hatha yoga component, is rooted in the Hindu way of life that goes all the way back to the Vedic sages and yogis – is false. Instead,

what HAF calls the “rape of yoga”, referring to the separation of asanas from their spiritual underpinning, did not start in the supposedly decadent West; it began, in fact, in the akharas and gymnasiums of 19th and 20th century India run by Indian nationalists seeking to counter Western images of effete Indians. It is in this nationalistic phase that hatha yoga took on many elements of Western gymnastics and body-building, which show up in the world-renowned Iyengar and Ashtanga Vinyasa schools of yoga. Far from honestly acknowledging the Western contributions to modern yoga, we Indians simply brand all yoga as ‘Vedic,’ a smug claim that has no intellectual integrity.   

The argument then is that 21^st century yoga not an integral part of an ancient and pristine cultural and spiritual tradition. Instead, it is a mongrel, a thoroughly modern and cosmopolitan practice upon which Hinduism “has no special claims.” If this is true, then it causes a few problems for the “take back yoga” movement. Most obviously, it undercuts any claims that there is a “yoga” that was stolen or appropriated from Hindus and which is there to be reclaimed. It also undercuts any possible financial claims that might be made, and puts a crimp in the mat of any lawsuits over yoga postures and intellectual property rights.

But it also causes problems for westerners. After all, a great deal of the appeal of yoga to North Americans, apart from how great they look in Lululemon clothes, has been precisely that it is an integral part of an ancient, pristine, and highly exotic cultural tradition. After all, there are plenty of more explicitly “western” practices that offer pretty much the same physical benefits as yoga – Pilates being the prime example – but which have not had nearly the cultural and economic impact. As Meera Nanda puts it,

Thus, doing namastes, intoning ‘om’ and chanting Sanskrit mantras have become a part of the experience of doing yoga in America. Many yoga studios use Indian classical or kirtan music, incense, signs of ‘om’ and other paraphernalia of the Subcontinent to create a suitably spiritual ambience.

More than any other factor, yoga owes its success in North America to the fact that it serves the needs of hip, young, urban, white, people whose lives lack nothing except a sense of authenticity. Unable to find it in their own seemingly deprived traditions, these authenticity seekers do what they’ve always done – look for it in the exotic, the ancient, the un-marketed.

There is an excellent film called "Yoga, Inc.", which addresses the question of whether "yoga can survive big business with its karma intact". I suspect the answer to that is “yes”. The bigger question is whether yoga can surive the revelation that its karma owes more to turn-of-the-20^th-century Danish gymnasts than to ancient forest-dwelling Brahmin sages.

Afghan Chicken War!

A common knock against open immigration policies and official multiculturalism is that many immigrant groups bring the the fights and social schisms from their homelands to their adopted countries. While it isn't unheard of, I've always thought the threat was overstated. That, until I heard about the Afghan Chicken Wars that are raging throughout New York City, from a beautifully-handled story by Dan Bilefsky. 

Abdul Haye, "the self-styled Colonel Sanders of New York’s Afghan community", claims that he owns the rights to the "Kennedy Fried Chicken" brand, which has spawned hundreds of knockoff restaurants, none of which pay him royalties or franchise rights. A few points worth noting: First, Kennedy Fried Chicken is itself a dubious take on Kentucky Fried Chicken. Second, it isn't clear that Haye himself owns the rights to the brand, since he appears to have "borrowed" it from the original Kennedy Fried Chicken restaurant, which was opened in Flatbush in 1972 by one Zia Taeb. Mr. Haye didn't open his restaurant until 1994.

But what's great about this story is how typically Afghan the reactions from his competitors are. Afghans are famously combative, independent, and anti-hierarchical. No sooner does someone achieve a position of authority in his community than everyone else tries to pull him down. And so:

“We won’t pay a penny,” huffed Nour Abdullah, the manager of Kennedy Fried Chicken on Junction Boulevard in Corona, Queens, which seems indistinguishable from Mr. Haye’s except for the fried shrimp balls and gyros on the menu. “I can rename the shop Munir Fried Chicken after my son or even New Kennedy Fried Chicken. Then let’s see what he’s going to do.”

Even Mr. Taeb thinks Mr. Haye is out of luck. “He won’t win because I know my people, and Afghans will never pay him,” he said. “I will go after him.”

The story ends with a fantastic kicker, with Mr. Haye slouched resignedly over a plate of lamb chops:  “You know, Afghans don’t even like eating fried chicken.”