Some other Times articles...
Jan. 15th, 2006 01:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
On nostalgia for Bensonhurst
Bensonhurst on His Mind
By ROBERT GANGI
HOME for me is the Upper West Side of Manhattan - it has been for nearly 40 years - but more and more lately my thoughts take me to my earlier home, the old world of Brooklyn, especially that loud, gaudy Italian-American enclave, Bensonhurst.
Perhaps the pull of memory and the yearning to return to my roots have grown stronger as I've gotten older. Whatever the reason, I want to walk those streets to see again, if only in my mind's eye, the pizza palaces and candy stores with red, white and green signs hawking Sicilian slices and egg creams. I want to stand again on barely sunlit corners and flirt with the girls with showy hairdos, tight pants and heels, popping Chiclets like tiny firecrackers - sadly, a lost art.
I want to wisecrack with the boys with their short sleeves rolled up, shiny hair and loud voices, moving and chattering with nervous energy, more Travolta than John. I want to drive down the busy, narrow streets, squeezing past small delivery trucks parked in front of markets and restaurants, while I watch middle-aged women lugging shopping bags, and expressionless old men sitting on little porches listening to the ballgame on the radio. I want to walk to church on Sunday morning, the unlikely quiet on the streets, the absence of humans and honking cars, the only sign of life the aroma of pasta sauces - gravy, we called it - drifting out of kitchen windows of small brick houses.
What else do I miss?
The dinners at my Sicilian grandmother's house on Thursday nights and Sunday afternoons and Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, dinners that were not meals so much as athletic events, championship matches featuring round after round of hot and sweet and thick and juicy food: pasta, eggplant, chicken, potatoes, sausages, meatballs, then more pasta with layers of ricotta and mozzarella - pasta as dessert and more delicious, too. "You know, Robbie," my older brother Freddie said helpfully as I headed off to college, "other people don't eat like we do."
The men, a group that included my father (a less noisy participant because years of multiple sclerosis had weakened his body), his five brothers, and several close friends and cousins, predominated at these events, and even strong women like my mother were relegated mainly to kitchen and cleanup duty.
Many of the men had memorable nicknames, an exotic practice that added a bit of theater to their lives, but one that, regrettably, the younger generation did not carry on. There was Tiny, who weighed 400 pounds, and Husky, who was skinny as a rail. Minx the Enforcer was always called by his full nickname, no shortened version, and we kids never asked how he earned it, although we did hear that he once squeezed some poor guy's head so tightly that it permanently changed shape, and the victim was known thereafter as cucuzz, Sicilian slang for squash.
Everyone called my Uncle Ernesto Whiney. When I asked my old man about it, he explained that when he was 9, he had a friend named Whiney who moved off the block. My father missed this boy so much, he started calling his 7-year-old brother Whiney, and it stuck. My father had no idea why the kid who left was called Whiney.
My favorite of the nicknames was Johnny Once. I never met the man, but I heard about him from my father, and finally asked him about his nickname's origins. Because he came around only once in a while, my father explained.
Arguments were the main method of discourse at these family gatherings, often fierce, sometimes intelligent, sometimes silly, or all three. Who could beat whom in a fistfight, Sinatra or Crosby? Who was a better ballplayer, Joe D. or Johnny Mize? Hard to recall who in the group would be sufficiently unthinking to back either Crosby or Mize in matchups against the two reigning Italian-American stars of the time.
The debates often centered on cars, like the Lincoln Continental versus the Cadillac Eldorado. "You couldn't give me a Cadillac" was the kind of comment often heard, usually emphasized by a loud table thump. We kids, huddled on the sidelines, would exchange looks, and then one of us would mutter something like, "Well, for free, I might be willing to take it off your hands."
Stories abounded. How one uncle chauffeured the gangster Johnny Bathbeach around the city but refused to testify when Tom Dewey's prosecutors subpoenaed him. How all my uncles, able-bodied and decidedly nonpacifists, managed to avoid the draft during World War II. How - this was a big laugh-getter - my uncle Whiney worked as a watchman on the docks for over 20 years and never caught anyone stealing. How during the Depression my uncles had no jobs, no money and no worries either, maybe drove a hack at night and earned a couple of bucks, and during the day hung out at the beach and harmonized the old songs. It was apparently on one such day that my father first met my mother.
MY old man liked to tell the tale of his early liberation from anti-Semitism, his community's dishonorable sin. When he was a kid in a Lower East Side schoolyard, he made sneak attacks for weeks on an older Jewish boy who finally caught hold of him and demanded an explanation. "Because you're Jewish!" my father spat back. When the boy pointed out that Jesus was a Jew, my old man was dumbfounded, his budding bigotry routed.
The men were compelling, complex figures, sometimes intimidating, often welcoming, with lives touched by grandeur - their style, their good looks, and their generally generous natures - but limited by the circumscribed boundaries of their small world. At times they bullied the people around them - "Sopranos"-type behavior is not unfamiliar to me - but for the most part they were not simple or boorish. Their conduct was marked by grace notes, primarily involving the ways they gave to and protected their loved ones.
Bensonhurst today is changing, has changed. Italians are moving out as other ethnic groups move in. There have even been reported sightings of the dreaded young urban professionals. Certainly nearly all my people have left, either by choice or by death. Only the isolated cousin or two remain, but only because they have been immobilized by a sad descent into alcohol or drugs.
The last time I met a relative in this unfortunate state was at my mother's wake in 1994. The relative flitted in and out of Danny George's, the Bensonhurst funeral parlor my family always used, his scared eyes and shaking body giving him no peace. Louise, my mother's good friend, was also there, surprised me by saying that she felt great sorrow at realizing that we would probably never see each other again.
I understand now - Louise was ahead of me - that old Bensonhurst is lost to me, part of an irretrievable past. I cannot return to it, not even once in a while.
On Trolleys in Brooklyn. Can we get some over here in Staten Island as well, please?
A Desire Named Streetcar
By JENNIFER BLEYER
ARTHUR MELNICK shifted gears on his boxy white Nissan, skirted past Fulton Ferry Landing and described his vision for the future of Brooklyn.
"Look at this!" he said, pointing at the nearly desolate ribbon of Furman Street. Traffic on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway screamed overhead, and the old docks and industrial buildings along the East River showed no hint of the expanded Brooklyn Bridge Park, which is expected to be developed there.
The park is one of a crowded field of forthcoming Brooklyn developments, and like some of them, it would not be well served by public transportation. (The nearest subway station, at Clark Street, is half a mile from parts of the future park site.) Mr. Melnick, a ruddy 60-year-old from Midwood, thinks it is the ideal place to realize his dream.
"This whole area," he declared, "would be perfect for trolleys."
Ah, trolleys! In 1930, 1,800 of them crisscrossed Brooklyn, traveling on a 300-mile latticework of steel track. But as city residents moved to the suburbs after World War II, the trolley infrastructure grew increasingly rundown, and tracks were pulled up and sold as scrap. New York cast itself as a progressive city, and trolleys were thought of as old-fashioned. Buses had become cheaper to run, and private automobiles more common.
The borough's last trolley made its lonesome way down McDonald Avenue in 1956. Like the Dodgers at Ebbets Field and Steeplechase Park in Coney Island, trolleys were interred in Brooklyn's wistful collective memory.
If Mr. Melnick has his wish, they may be revived. In 2002, he formed the nonprofit Brooklyn City Streetcar Company, and he has spent the last three years meeting quietly with community leaders and city officials as a one-man advocate for trolley lines in Brooklyn.
"If you look at the literature, trolleys fit a lot of bills," he said, ticking off the positive attributes of the electric streetcar. They are pollution free and traffic calming, he noted. In addition, "they lend a nostalgic ambience to the neighborhood."
Carefully maneuvering his Nissan, Mr. Melnick turned onto the foot of Montague Street. "I've always had an interest in old transportation," he said with a sigh. "I like history. I like old."
Pulling over to the curb, he ruffled through a sheaf of diagrams of proposed trolley routes; one would link Borough Hall to Dumbo; another would traverse the length of the future Brooklyn Bridge Park from Fulton Ferry to Atlantic Avenue; a third would circulate through Coney Island.
Since Brooklyn is already roaring with controversy over new developments, including a planned Ikea and a Fairway in Red Hook and the Atlantic Yards project downtown, Mr. Melnick is not surprised that his campaign has gotten little attention. But he is hopeful. He is not the only person, he insisted, whose pulse quickens when he imagines streetcars once again dinging through Brooklyn.
At some meetings, he said, "just say, 'Trolley,' and you immediately get a standing ovation."
STARRY-EYED fantasies of trolley rebirth in Brooklyn are not new.
In 1982, an electrical engineer named Bob Diamond founded an organization called the Brooklyn Historic Railway Association to create a trolley line to connect Red Hook and downtown Brooklyn. Over the next 20 years, the group alternately sputtered and cruised ahead, amassing a devoted crew of volunteers - Mr. Melnick among them - significant community interest and more than $200,000 in federal funding. In 1999, Mr. Diamond ran his renovated trolleys along a few hundred feet of track the group had built on the Red Hook waterfront.
But Brooklyn Historic Railway died in 2002 when the city's Department of Transportation withdrew its support, citing financial problems. Greg Castillo, the Historic Railway's construction manager, said he had not heard from Mr. Diamond in years.
Now, the hulking, mint-green steel carcasses of Mr. Diamond's sleek trolley cars, which were first developed for Brooklyn in 1936, sit abandoned and weather-beaten off the end of Van Brunt Street in Red Hook. Eleven other trolleys he had stored in the Brooklyn Navy Yard were hauled away by a salvage company last spring.
Mr. Melnick, a former social studies teacher in Brooklyn, was Mr. Diamond's spokesman during that final year. When he saw that the Brooklyn Historic Railway ship was sinking, he jumped off to create Brooklyn City Streetcar, believing that the trolley concept was, as he put it, "too good to give up."
Mentions of trolleys had started to surface among public officials. In 2001, Congresswoman Nydia M. Velázquez secured $1 million in federal money to study the issue of access to Brooklyn Bridge Park, and Deborah Wetzel, a vice president of the Empire State Development Corporation, the agency overseeing the park, said trolleys would be considered as part of this study, which will begin this spring.
Congresswoman Velázquez obtained another $300,000 last year to study the feasibility of trolley and light-rail service to Red Hook, an idea supported by Robert W. Walsh, the city's commissioner of Small Business Services. With Ikea, Fairway, residential developments and a cruise ship terminal coming to Red Hook, Commissioner Walsh said, "when this whole issue came up about trolleys, it made sense."
And trolleys have been mentioned in other contexts. Sandy Balboza, president of the Atlantic Avenue Betterment Association, has called for a trolley loop in Downtown Brooklyn that would travel along Atlantic Avenue, making it easier to reach the growing number of businesses on that street.
And Roy Sloane, former president of the Cobble Hill Association, supports the idea of a trolley running along Atlantic Avenue to Pier 6, where it would connect with ferry service to Manhattan. "It's the only really innovative transportation idea that's been discussed for Downtown Brooklyn in the last 10 or 15 years," Mr. Sloane said.
Still, day in and day out, "not a lot of people besides Mr. Melnick are making the case for trolleys in Brooklyn," said Kenneth Adams, president of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce.
Mr. Adams looks somewhat skeptically upon trolleys, noting among their drawbacks the cost and engineering challenges of installing fixed rails on the streets. But, he said, "the intent is to see the most practical and efficient transportation solution that's lasting and durable. In the end, if that is a trolley system, then that should be pursued. May the best proposal win."
Mr. Melnick, for his part, took his cause to a recent meeting of the Coney Island Development Corporation, held in the gym of a church off Mermaid Avenue, and he received a warm response. Marty Levine, a member of the development corporation, agreed that trolleys might be right for Coney Island. City Councilman Domenic M. Recchia Jr., who represents the area, said he envisioned trolleys sailing up and down Surf Avenue, making stops at the aquarium, the Cyclone and Nathan's Famous.
Mr. Melnick's face brightened at their words. "Every so often," he said, "it's like, what did I get myself into? But if it works, it'll all be worthwhile."
On Mayan writing
Symbols on the Wall Push Maya Writing Back by Years
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
A vertical column of 10 glyphic words, uncovered last year in ruins in Guatemala, is unreadable even by the most expert scholars, but they know what it means - that Maya writing is older than they once thought.
Archaeologists reported last week that the script sample, discovered at San Bartolo, in northeastern Guatemala, is clear evidence that the Maya were writing more than 2,300 years ago. This is a few centuries earlier than previous well-dated Maya writing and 600 years before the civilization's classic period, when a decipherable writing system became widespread.
Scholars of Maya culture and other pre-Columbian societies said the discovery deepened the chronology of literacy's origins in the Americas. But they were not sure whether it brought them any closer to learning exactly when, where and how early American cultures first put words into graphic form.
"This early Maya writing," the discovery team concluded in the current issue of the journal Science, "implies that a developed Maya writing system was in use centuries earlier than previously thought, approximating a time when we see the earliest scripts elsewhere in Mesoamerica."
William A. Saturno, the team leader who is a Maya archaeologist at the University of New Hampshire and Harvard, said the study of the origins of writing in Mesoamerica, the ancient region of Mexico and parts of Central America, was now "likely to get more complicated in the near future as more early texts come to light."
Joyce Marcus, a professor at the University of Michigan and an authority on Mesoamerican cultures, said the Maya discovery "is terrific and does constitute some of the earliest Maya writing."
"Every piece of early writing enriches our knowledge of the ancient Maya," Dr. Marcus said.
As matters stand, the Zapotec, who lived around Oaxaca, Mexico, appear to have led the way to literacy, at least by 400 B.C., perhaps as early as 600 B.C. Clear evidence for Maya writing has been more recent.
A few scholars contend that the Olmec, living along the Gulf of Mexico near Veracruz, developed a script even earlier.
Some of the confusion stems from differing definitions of writing, whether a few symbols strung together suffice or fuller texts are required.
But it is generally agreed that the primal writing by contemporary groups in Mesoamerica was one of just four scripts - Sumerian, Egyptian and Chinese are the others - to be invented independent of outside influences.
What may be the earliest Maya words turned up in the same ruins where the same archaeologists reported last month finding a richly colored mural depicting the culture's mythology of creation and kingship. The mural is one of the earliest examples of Maya art, dated about 100 B.C.
Boris Beltrán, an archaeologist at the University of San Carlos in Guatemala, was exploring deeper in the ruins of a pyramid, down several layers of debris and time below the mural chamber. There he came on the Maya glyphs painted in black on white plaster.
A scribe apparently drew the characters along a subtle pinkish-orange stripe as a guideline.
Radiocarbon analysis of charcoal associated with the inscription dated the written words to as early as 300 B.C. The column, Dr. Saturno said, was presumably part of a text associated with a nearby work of art that included a painted image of the maize god.
The style of the painting was distinct from later Maya art, and the glyphs were more archaic and abstract than later Maya writing.
This has been frustrating for David Stuart, a professor of Mesoamerican art and writing at the University of Texas, a member of the discovery team.
Dr. Stuart said the glyphs had distinctive Maya characteristics and were "the earliest firmly dated Maya writing." But he and others were able to decipher just one symbol, the one meaning "ruler" or "lord" or possibly anyone of noble status.
"It's the same script," Dr. Stuart said. "But it was written several centuries before the full Maya script that we can read. It makes it tough. I don't think we will be able to read this anytime soon."
The exact meaning of the other nine glyphs will probably remain obscure, he said, until additional and longer texts are found from the same time in Maya history. Then there may be enough specimens, he continued, to compare with later decipherable glyphs and "make some tentative connections with things we are familiar with."
The discovery at San Bartolo is expected to inspire archaeologists to search for other examples of Mesoamerican writing from this period or earlier. Previous ideas about the relationships of Olmec, Zapotec and Maya writing are giving way to new thinking.
"Now it is looking like a lot of Mesoamerican cultures came up with writing at about the same period," Dr. Stuart said. "They all were in contact with each other, building cities, trading, telling their history and ideology through script and art."
Dr. Marcus cited recent excavations that produced monuments with Zapotec writing as early as 600 B.C., and even though the Mesoamerican cultures were in frequent contact with one another, she pointed out the individuality of their writing systems.
"What is of great interest," she said, "is that Zapotec writing is distinctive and Maya writing is distinctive, and each has its own genesis."
Reflections on pilgrimage
Pilgrims at Heart
By EBRAHIM MOOSA
Durham, N.C.
AS the pilgrims in Mecca complete the annual ritual of pilgrimage today, Muslims across the globe will begin the Id al-Adha, the three-day Feast of Sacrifice, in solidarity with them.
For Muslims seeking to make sense of the annual pilgrimage, a question arises: is the hajj only an elaborate ritual?
Hajj literally means, "to continuously strive to reach one's goal." The rite of visiting the sacred sites need be completed only once in a lifetime, but its meaning ought to be enduring. Yet, no pilgrim can claim strictly to imitate the Prophet Muhammad in this ritual. Such despotic literalness would only invest the observance with fraudulence. Is the imagination not at the heart of pilgrimage?
Centuries ago, the Arabic literary figure and philosopher, Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi, who died in 1023, mused about what the pilgrimage might have meant for those who could not make it to Mecca. Sadly, we can now only mourn the lost text of Tawhidi, but there is more than a hint in his title: "Undertaking the Mental Pilgrimage When the Physical Pilgrimage Is Impossible."
Exile, sacrifice and atonement underscore the commandment of pilgrimage in Muslim religious life. The faithful re-enact the pilgrimage rituals in imitation of their spiritual forbears. They relive exile by treading in the footsteps of Abraham. But the hajj also recalls the temporary exile of Adam and Eve, who wandered the earth after their expulsion from paradise. According to Muslim tradition, Adam and Eve reconciled with God in the desert of Arabia. The spot where they met each other again and atoned - an obligatory destination for pilgrims - is called Arafat, from the Arabic word 'arafa, "to know."
The theme of knowing and imagining the divine is embroidered through the trials of Abraham and his family. After Abraham's first child, Ishmael, was born to his slave wife Hagar, he was confronted by the jealousy of his other wife, Sarah, who was then childless. God upgraded this domestic squabble into a legacy issue for the Patriarch and his admirers. But he ordered the dutiful Abraham to banish Hagar and Ishmael to Arabia.
Years later, Muslim tradition holds, Abraham reconciled with Hagar and Ishmael. But more trials awaited. This time Abraham had to do the unthinkable: sacrifice his son. Mainstream Muslim tradition believes that the son in question was Ishmael, while a minority view holds that it was Isaac, Sarah's son. But after a miraculous substitution of Ishmael (or Isaac) by a ram, Abraham's reputation was sealed as the "friend of God."
To express their loathing of evil, the pilgrims will participate in that ancient drama of Abraham and Ishmael. They will first stone three pillars, each symbolizing Satan's failed attempts to mislead Abraham's family. Then, in a place called Mina, meaning "desires," each pilgrim will sacrifice an animal. With this act they seek to replace their destructive desires with productive ones. Away from Mecca, non-pilgrims with means will also slaughter animals as a show of hospitality to friends, family and the indigent. Pilgrimage embodies exile by requiring seekers to suspend customary routine, enter new environments and live by new rhythms and rituals. For a limited time, pilgrims experience the transitions and dislocations exiles perpetually undergo. As a performance, the pilgrimage links people to a past shared by several Abrahamic traditions, just as, by bringing together Muslims from a great multiplicity of cultures, it celebrates the diversity of our common humanity. Pilgrims return home enriched by this cosmopolitan outlook, but with a new appreciation for their own origins.
In the 1980's, the Iranian revolution inspired some attempts to use the hajj as a platform to express Muslim grievances. But such efforts ended in 1987, when Iranian pilgrims clashed with Saudi authorities, resulting in carnage and mayhem.
The more subtle political significance of the hajj, however, persists in the realm of the spiritual imagination. To play on the words of the poet Federico García Lorca: the imagination hovers above ritual, the way fragrance hovers over a flower.
Pilgrimage ought to fire the imagination and celebrate transitions, creativity and innovation. And imagination is a weapon, one that tyrants and autocrats fear. If we find it in short supply in the corridors of power, that does not mean that the rest of us should be deprived of its constructive possibilities as well.
A prolific 13th century mystic, Ibn Arabi, wrote that pilgrims were mistaken if they believed that swarming like moths around the cube-like stone centerpiece, the Kaaba in the Holy Mosque, was the loftiest act of venerating God. Rather, noted Ibn Arabi, it was the human heart that deserved the highest sanctity. For neither the offerings made, nor the hardships endured, reaches the divine. Instead it is the compass of the heart that counts.
The heart symbolizes the inviolability of human dignity. But the supreme gift, Ibn Arabi artfully explains, is the imagination radiating from the heart. The fulcrum of the pilgrimage is also the essence of life: a caring heart fired by the imagination.
For instance, after paying homage to the two women Eve and Hagar in the rites of pilgrimage, how can some Muslims still violate the rights and dignity of women in the name of Islam? Is this not a contradiction? If the pilgrimage is done not by rote but with imagination, honor killings become unthinkably loathsome, a curse to be condemned like the Satan just stoned.
The truth of the imagination pertains today, not just for Tawhidi and Ibn Arabi, but also for all their contemporary successors who still believe the imagination to be the healing balm for our deeply troubled world.
"A Protest, a Spy Program, and a Campus in an Uproar
A Protest, a Spy Program and a Campus in an Uproar
By SARAH KERSHAW
SANTA CRUZ, Calif. - The protest was carefully orchestrated, planned for weeks by Students Against War during Friday evening meetings in a small classroom on the University of California campus here.
So when the military recruiters arrived for the job fair, held in an old dining hall last April 5 - a now fateful day for a scandalized university - the students had their two-way radios in position, their cyclists checking the traffic as hundreds of demonstrators marched up the hilly roads of this campus on the Central Coast and a dozen moles stationed inside the building, reporting by cellphone to the growing crowd outside.
"Racist, sexist, antigay," the demonstrators recalled shouting. "Hey, recruiters, go away!"
Things got messy. As the building filled, students storming in were blocked from entering. The recruiters left, some finding that the tires of their vehicles had been slashed. The protesters then occupied the recruiters' table and, in what witnesses described as a minor melee, an intern from the campus career center was injured.
Fast forward: The students had left campus for their winter vacation in mid-December when a report by MSNBC said the April protest had appeared on what the network said was a database from a Pentagon surveillance program. The protest was listed as a "credible threat" - to what is not clear to people around here - and was the only campus action among scores of other antimilitary demonstrations to receive the designation.
Over the winter break, Josh Sonnenfeld, 20, a member of Students Against War, or SAW, put out the alert. "Urgent: Pentagon's been spying on SAW, and thousands of other groups," said his e-mail message to the 50 or so students in the group.
Several members spent the rest of their break in a swirl of strategy sessions by telephone and e-mail, and in interviews with the news media. Since classes began on Jan. 5, they have stepped up their effort to figure out whether they are being spied on and if so, why.
Students in the group said they were not entirely surprised to learn that the federal government might be spying on them.
"On the one hand, I was surprised that we made the list because generally we don't get the recognition we deserve," Mr. Sonnenfeld said. "On the other hand, it doesn't surprise me because our own university has been spying on us since our group was founded. This nation has a history of spying on political dissenters."
The April protest, at the sunny campus long known for surfing, mountain biking and leftist political activity, drew about 300 of the university's 15,000 students, organizers said. (Students surmise that, these days, they are out-agitating their famed anti-establishment peers at the University of California, Berkeley, campus, 65 miles northwest of here.)
"This is the war at home," said Jennifer Low, 20, a member of the antiwar group. "So many of us were so discouraged and demoralized by the war, a lot of us said this is the way we can stop it."
A Department of Defense spokesman said that while the Pentagon maintained a database of potential threats to military installations, military personnel and national security, he could not confirm that the information released by MSNBC was from the database. The spokesman, who said he was not authorized to be quoted by name, said he could not answer questions about whether the government was or had been spying on Santa Cruz students.
California lawmakers have demanded an explanation from the government. Representative Sam Farr, a Democrat whose district includes Santa Cruz, was one of several who sent letters to the Bush administration. "This is a joke," Mr. Farr said in an interview. "There is a protest du jour at Santa Cruz."
"Santa Cruz is not a terrorist town," he added. "It's an activist town. It's essentially Berkeley on the coast."
The university's chancellor, Denice D. Denton, said, "We would like to know how this information was gathered and understand better what's going on here."
"Is this something that happens under the guise of the new Patriot Act?" Ms. Denton asked.
As to the students' insistence that the university is monitoring their activities, Ms. Denton said that she had checked with campus police and other university offices and that "there is absolutely no spying going on."
The antiwar group is working closely with the California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which plans to file a public records request with the federal government on the students' behalf, A.C.L.U. officials said.
Meanwhile, members of the campus's College Republicans, strongly critical of the protesters' tactics last April, are rolling their eyes at all the hubbub.
"I think it's worth looking into, but right now I think they are overblowing it," said Chris Rauer, internal vice president of the College Republicans. "I think people are taking their anger over the war out on this."
The Defense Department has issued a statement saying that in October the Pentagon began a review of its database to ensure that the reporting system complied with federal laws and to identify information that might have been improperly entered. All department personnel involved in gathering intelligence were receiving "refresher" training on the laws and policies, the statement said.
With this happening in academia, there has been a good deal of philosophical contemplation and debate over the socioeconomic and political dynamics underlying the uproar.
"I had multiple reactions," said Faye J. Crosby, a professor of social psychology and chairwoman of the Academic Senate.
"One reaction was, 'Gosh, I wonder if we're doing something right?' " Professor Crosby said. "Another reaction was it's a waste of taxpayer money. What are we a threat to?"
"The real sadness," she added, "is the breakdown in discourse of the marketplace of ideas."
On efforts to save Tulane engineering
Tulane's Engineering Students Strive to Save Their School
By SUSAN SAULNY
NEW ORLEANS, Jan. 12 - In the early 1900's, the Sewerage and Water Board here hired a young student from Tulane University's School of Engineering to help deal with flooding and drainage, the city's most vexing problems.
The student, Albert Baldwin Wood, designed a pumping system that not only drained areas that routinely flooded but also allowed the city to grow into a modern metropolis on what had been its swampy hinterlands. Four months ago, his pumps, some more than 90 years old, continued to churn water out of the city even as Hurricane Katrina knocked newer models out of service.
Given that legacy, engineering students at Tulane say, they are finding it hard to accept that the university, the city's premier academic institution, has chosen to eliminate majors in civil, environmental and electrical engineering, among others, as part of its own post-hurricane recovery plan.
They have reacted fiercely, undertaking a campaign on campus sidewalks, on the Internet, with elected officials and in the news media. Their rallying cry, as posted on trees in the University District, is, "These majors are needed in New Orleans now more than ever in order to help rebuild the city."
And messages written in chalk on the campus's sidewalks read, "We survived Katrina but not the administration," even as a banner in one of the main engineering buildings reads, "Welcome Tulane Engineering Students: Tomorrow's Leaders!"
"We came back expecting to go headfirst into working with the city and the state to fix the levees, the transportation system and the power grid," said David O'Reilly, a first-year doctoral candidate in civil engineering. "There has not been an opportunity like this in our generation to rebuild an American city on this magnitude."
Instead, Mr. O'Reilly is likely to be leaving his native New Orleans by the end of the semester to find a research program in another city.
The School of Engineering is not the only part of the university to undergo changes in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which left floodwater over two-thirds of the campus and caused up to $250 million in property damage and more than $90 million in operational losses.
Tulane also did away with its traditional undergraduate college system, Newcomb College for women and Tulane College for men, replacing it with one Undergraduate College. It eliminated its graduate school as an administrative entity, and an array of intercollegiate sports teams, as well as 230 full-time faculty members and 243 members of its staff, who were laid off. Those cuts included a sharp hit to the medical school faculty, which was reduced by 180 positions, to 345.
But the students at the engineering school are among the most vocal, because they are losing six majors. Only two majors - biomedical and chemical engineering - will survive as part of a new School of Science and Engineering.
Engineering students in the programs that are being eliminated will be allowed to graduate in their majors if they can complete their studies by next year. Still, some students feel jilted.
"No one saw this coming; no one expected it," said Justin Mikowski, a computer engineering major from Tampa, Fla., who is a leading force in the campaign to change the university's mind. "We all thought engineering would be expanded with all the rebuilding that has to happen."
Scott S. Cowen, the university's president, who announced the changes on Dec. 8, defends the decision as thoughtful, necessary and final.
"I wish Katrina had never happened, and I wouldn't have to do any of these things - I'm sympathetic," Dr. Cowen said. "I admire their compassion and their enthusiasm to keep this going," he said of the students, "but the board has already made its decisions, and they have been implemented. They will not be reversed."
Still, Dr. Cowen met with engineering alumni as recently as last week, and many last-ditch efforts to change his mind continue.
"New Orleans, as a city, owes its very life to the products of Tulane engineering and will not be able to rebuild without a strong engineering pool of knowledge at its base," said David A. Kanger, the president of the Society of Tulane Engineers.
Others, like a former dean of the School of Engineering, William C. Van Buskirk, said Dr. Cowen had hurt the school's reputation and its students in claiming that the relatively small engineering school had not gained national prominence and that it was unlikely to do so without a significant investment of resources.
Tulane has 900 undergraduate and graduate students in engineering.
"I think he really couched it wrong when he said these programs aren't strong enough to compete," Dr. Van Buskirk said. "It's just nonsense."
He noted that Tulane's legacy did not end with Albert Wood and his pumps. A more recent graduate, David Filo, a co-founder of the Internet giant Yahoo, holds a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from Tulane. And by other standards of success, the school also fared well, Dr. Van Buskirk said.
"It's more than a hundred years of tradition gone, and it's heartbreaking," he said.
Robert S. Boh, the president of Boh Brothers Construction, one of the most significant local businesses in the reconstruction effort, and a member of the School of Engineering's advisory board, said, "Tulane in engineering circles had a pretty good reputation to begin with, and seemed to be improving in every category that's important, so the timing of this is curious, really."
Despite his position on the advisory board, Mr. Boh said he had not been consulted about the recovery plan.
Students said they were left to wonder how to market themselves to other universities and employers when their own university found its programs lacking. "Our efforts are falling on deaf ears," said Will Clarkson, a computer engineering major from Canton, Ohio.
Dr. Cowen said Tulane was offering $2,000 in assistance to freshmen who would like to visit other campuses in the hope of transferring.
And Tulane will have a prominent role in the rebuilding effort, he said. The changes were intended in part to produce new areas of specialization for Tulane, including a partnership on urban issues with two of the city's historically black universities, Xavier and Dillard.
Xavier and Dillard, along with the other well-known colleges in the city, the University of New Orleans and Loyola University, all suffered damage and have streamlined their operations for the spring semester. But, unlike Tulane, none have cut majors or sports, even though their endowments are smaller than that of Tulane.
On that point, Dr. Cowen said Tulane had taken the lead in making unpopular but realistic and tough decisions.
"Hope is not a method," he said.
On the female ancestors of the Ashkenazi
New Light on Origins of Ashkenazi in Europe
By NICHOLAS WADE
A new look at the DNA of the Ashkenazi Jewish population has thrown light on its still mysterious origins.
Until now, it had been widely assumed by geneticists that the Ashkenazi communities of Northern and Central Europe were founded by men who came from the Middle East, perhaps as traders, and by the women from each local population whom they took as wives and converted to Judaism.
But the new study, published online this week in The American Journal of Human Genetics, suggests that the men and their wives migrated to Europe together.
The researchers, Doron Behar and Karl Skorecki of the Technion and Ramban Medical Center in Haifa, and colleagues elsewhere, report that just four women, who may have lived 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, are the ancestors of 40 percent of Ashkenazis alive today. The Technion team's analysis was based on mitochondrial DNA, a genetic element that is separate from the genes held in the cell's nucleus and that is inherited only through the female line. Because of mutations - the switch of one DNA unit for another - that build up on the mitochondrial DNA, people can be assigned to branches that are defined by which mutations they carry.
In the case of the Ashkenazi population, the researchers found that many branches coalesced to single trees, and so were able to identify the four female ancestors.
Looking at other populations, the Technion team found that some people in Egypt, Arabia and the Levant also carried the set of mutations that defines one of the four women. They argue that all four probably lived originally in the Middle East.
A study by Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona showed five years ago that the men in many Jewish communities around the world bore Y chromosomes that were Middle Eastern in origin. This finding is widely accepted by geneticists, but there is less consensus about the women's origins.
David Goldstein, now of Duke University, reported in 2002 that the mitochondrial DNA of women in Jewish communities around the world did not seem to be Middle Eastern, and indeed each community had its own genetic pattern. But in some cases the mitochondrial DNA was closely related to that of the host community.
Dr. Goldstein and his colleagues suggested that the genesis of each Jewish community, including the Ashkenazis, was that Jewish men had arrived from the Middle East, taken wives from the host population and converted them to Judaism, after which there was no further intermarriage with non-Jews.
The Technion team suggests a different origin for the Ashkenazi community: if the women too are Middle Eastern in origin, they would presumably have accompanied their husbands. At least the Ashkenazi Jewish community might have been formed by families migrating together.
Dr. Hammer said the new study "moves us forward in trying to understand Jewish population history." His own recent research, he said, suggests that the Ashkenazi population expanded through a series of bottlenecks - events that squeeze a population down to small numbers - perhaps as it migrated from the Middle East after the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70 to Italy, reaching the Rhine Valley in the 10th century.
But Dr. Goldstein said the new report did not alter his previous conclusion. The mitochondrial DNA's of a small, isolated population tend to change rapidly as some lineages fall extinct and others become more common, a process known as genetic drift. In his view, the Technion team has confirmed that genetic drift has played a major role in shaping Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA. But the linkage with Middle Eastern populations is not statistically significant, he said.
Because of genetic drift, Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA's have developed their own pattern, which makes it very hard to tell their source. This differs from the patrilineal case, Dr. Goldstein said, where there is no question of a Middle Eastern origin.
On rebuilding New Orleans
Hard Decisions for New Orleans
It would be nice to believe that New Orleans could be made whole, exactly as it was before Hurricane Katrina devastated it. But that kind of wishful thinking, apparently prevalent among some New Orleanians and encouraged by some city leaders, will only stymie the reconstruction process. The nation cannot rebuild everywhere in New Orleans, nor should it.
The city's rebuilding commission took an important step this week when it recommended that only the areas that could muster sufficient population should be rebuilt. Not surprisingly, that announcement drew the ire of residents of some neighborhoods where generations have lived on the same plots of land. While that is an ideal that should be protected wherever possible, it cannot define the rebuilding process.
The lowest-lying, hardest-hit areas, like parts of New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward and Lakeview, are also the most vulnerable to future hurricanes and flooding. Some of the blocks farthest below sea level should be turned into parks to allow better drainage, as recommended by the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit research group - even though that will be difficult to say to the residents of those areas.
Even with a commitment from Washington to build optimal protection against the fiercest Category 5 storms - which hasn't happened yet - the work would take years to complete. Residents should not be encouraged to gamble with their insurance checks for political or emotional reasons.
It is not a coincidence that many of those hard-hit, low-lying areas have had poor and predominantly African-American residents. That injustice needs to be corrected, not recreated. Whether owners or renters, the people from less-protected areas should be compensated so they have enough money to live somewhere else in town. The answer is not to thrust people back into harm's way, especially when it's unclear how much hurricane protection the city will really have in the coming years.
Rosy predictions do not help the city's most vulnerable displaced residents. The city government has to be straight with its constituents. For the foreseeable future, New Orleans will be a smaller city with a smaller population and a smaller tax base. If local leaders proffer unrealistic solutions, they will only strengthen the hand of those opposed to a real rebuilding commitment for New Orleans.
President Bush sounded out of touch as usual this week when he called the still-ravaged city "a heck of a place to bring your family." Rather than conjuring up memories of Michael Brown, the erstwhile head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Mr. Bush could better spend his time increasing the pressure on Congress to act on some version of Representative Richard Baker's federal buyout legislation. Lawmakers in Washington should take up the bill.
Bensonhurst on His Mind
By ROBERT GANGI
HOME for me is the Upper West Side of Manhattan - it has been for nearly 40 years - but more and more lately my thoughts take me to my earlier home, the old world of Brooklyn, especially that loud, gaudy Italian-American enclave, Bensonhurst.
Perhaps the pull of memory and the yearning to return to my roots have grown stronger as I've gotten older. Whatever the reason, I want to walk those streets to see again, if only in my mind's eye, the pizza palaces and candy stores with red, white and green signs hawking Sicilian slices and egg creams. I want to stand again on barely sunlit corners and flirt with the girls with showy hairdos, tight pants and heels, popping Chiclets like tiny firecrackers - sadly, a lost art.
I want to wisecrack with the boys with their short sleeves rolled up, shiny hair and loud voices, moving and chattering with nervous energy, more Travolta than John. I want to drive down the busy, narrow streets, squeezing past small delivery trucks parked in front of markets and restaurants, while I watch middle-aged women lugging shopping bags, and expressionless old men sitting on little porches listening to the ballgame on the radio. I want to walk to church on Sunday morning, the unlikely quiet on the streets, the absence of humans and honking cars, the only sign of life the aroma of pasta sauces - gravy, we called it - drifting out of kitchen windows of small brick houses.
What else do I miss?
The dinners at my Sicilian grandmother's house on Thursday nights and Sunday afternoons and Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, dinners that were not meals so much as athletic events, championship matches featuring round after round of hot and sweet and thick and juicy food: pasta, eggplant, chicken, potatoes, sausages, meatballs, then more pasta with layers of ricotta and mozzarella - pasta as dessert and more delicious, too. "You know, Robbie," my older brother Freddie said helpfully as I headed off to college, "other people don't eat like we do."
The men, a group that included my father (a less noisy participant because years of multiple sclerosis had weakened his body), his five brothers, and several close friends and cousins, predominated at these events, and even strong women like my mother were relegated mainly to kitchen and cleanup duty.
Many of the men had memorable nicknames, an exotic practice that added a bit of theater to their lives, but one that, regrettably, the younger generation did not carry on. There was Tiny, who weighed 400 pounds, and Husky, who was skinny as a rail. Minx the Enforcer was always called by his full nickname, no shortened version, and we kids never asked how he earned it, although we did hear that he once squeezed some poor guy's head so tightly that it permanently changed shape, and the victim was known thereafter as cucuzz, Sicilian slang for squash.
Everyone called my Uncle Ernesto Whiney. When I asked my old man about it, he explained that when he was 9, he had a friend named Whiney who moved off the block. My father missed this boy so much, he started calling his 7-year-old brother Whiney, and it stuck. My father had no idea why the kid who left was called Whiney.
My favorite of the nicknames was Johnny Once. I never met the man, but I heard about him from my father, and finally asked him about his nickname's origins. Because he came around only once in a while, my father explained.
Arguments were the main method of discourse at these family gatherings, often fierce, sometimes intelligent, sometimes silly, or all three. Who could beat whom in a fistfight, Sinatra or Crosby? Who was a better ballplayer, Joe D. or Johnny Mize? Hard to recall who in the group would be sufficiently unthinking to back either Crosby or Mize in matchups against the two reigning Italian-American stars of the time.
The debates often centered on cars, like the Lincoln Continental versus the Cadillac Eldorado. "You couldn't give me a Cadillac" was the kind of comment often heard, usually emphasized by a loud table thump. We kids, huddled on the sidelines, would exchange looks, and then one of us would mutter something like, "Well, for free, I might be willing to take it off your hands."
Stories abounded. How one uncle chauffeured the gangster Johnny Bathbeach around the city but refused to testify when Tom Dewey's prosecutors subpoenaed him. How all my uncles, able-bodied and decidedly nonpacifists, managed to avoid the draft during World War II. How - this was a big laugh-getter - my uncle Whiney worked as a watchman on the docks for over 20 years and never caught anyone stealing. How during the Depression my uncles had no jobs, no money and no worries either, maybe drove a hack at night and earned a couple of bucks, and during the day hung out at the beach and harmonized the old songs. It was apparently on one such day that my father first met my mother.
MY old man liked to tell the tale of his early liberation from anti-Semitism, his community's dishonorable sin. When he was a kid in a Lower East Side schoolyard, he made sneak attacks for weeks on an older Jewish boy who finally caught hold of him and demanded an explanation. "Because you're Jewish!" my father spat back. When the boy pointed out that Jesus was a Jew, my old man was dumbfounded, his budding bigotry routed.
The men were compelling, complex figures, sometimes intimidating, often welcoming, with lives touched by grandeur - their style, their good looks, and their generally generous natures - but limited by the circumscribed boundaries of their small world. At times they bullied the people around them - "Sopranos"-type behavior is not unfamiliar to me - but for the most part they were not simple or boorish. Their conduct was marked by grace notes, primarily involving the ways they gave to and protected their loved ones.
Bensonhurst today is changing, has changed. Italians are moving out as other ethnic groups move in. There have even been reported sightings of the dreaded young urban professionals. Certainly nearly all my people have left, either by choice or by death. Only the isolated cousin or two remain, but only because they have been immobilized by a sad descent into alcohol or drugs.
The last time I met a relative in this unfortunate state was at my mother's wake in 1994. The relative flitted in and out of Danny George's, the Bensonhurst funeral parlor my family always used, his scared eyes and shaking body giving him no peace. Louise, my mother's good friend, was also there, surprised me by saying that she felt great sorrow at realizing that we would probably never see each other again.
I understand now - Louise was ahead of me - that old Bensonhurst is lost to me, part of an irretrievable past. I cannot return to it, not even once in a while.
On Trolleys in Brooklyn. Can we get some over here in Staten Island as well, please?
A Desire Named Streetcar
By JENNIFER BLEYER
ARTHUR MELNICK shifted gears on his boxy white Nissan, skirted past Fulton Ferry Landing and described his vision for the future of Brooklyn.
"Look at this!" he said, pointing at the nearly desolate ribbon of Furman Street. Traffic on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway screamed overhead, and the old docks and industrial buildings along the East River showed no hint of the expanded Brooklyn Bridge Park, which is expected to be developed there.
The park is one of a crowded field of forthcoming Brooklyn developments, and like some of them, it would not be well served by public transportation. (The nearest subway station, at Clark Street, is half a mile from parts of the future park site.) Mr. Melnick, a ruddy 60-year-old from Midwood, thinks it is the ideal place to realize his dream.
"This whole area," he declared, "would be perfect for trolleys."
Ah, trolleys! In 1930, 1,800 of them crisscrossed Brooklyn, traveling on a 300-mile latticework of steel track. But as city residents moved to the suburbs after World War II, the trolley infrastructure grew increasingly rundown, and tracks were pulled up and sold as scrap. New York cast itself as a progressive city, and trolleys were thought of as old-fashioned. Buses had become cheaper to run, and private automobiles more common.
The borough's last trolley made its lonesome way down McDonald Avenue in 1956. Like the Dodgers at Ebbets Field and Steeplechase Park in Coney Island, trolleys were interred in Brooklyn's wistful collective memory.
If Mr. Melnick has his wish, they may be revived. In 2002, he formed the nonprofit Brooklyn City Streetcar Company, and he has spent the last three years meeting quietly with community leaders and city officials as a one-man advocate for trolley lines in Brooklyn.
"If you look at the literature, trolleys fit a lot of bills," he said, ticking off the positive attributes of the electric streetcar. They are pollution free and traffic calming, he noted. In addition, "they lend a nostalgic ambience to the neighborhood."
Carefully maneuvering his Nissan, Mr. Melnick turned onto the foot of Montague Street. "I've always had an interest in old transportation," he said with a sigh. "I like history. I like old."
Pulling over to the curb, he ruffled through a sheaf of diagrams of proposed trolley routes; one would link Borough Hall to Dumbo; another would traverse the length of the future Brooklyn Bridge Park from Fulton Ferry to Atlantic Avenue; a third would circulate through Coney Island.
Since Brooklyn is already roaring with controversy over new developments, including a planned Ikea and a Fairway in Red Hook and the Atlantic Yards project downtown, Mr. Melnick is not surprised that his campaign has gotten little attention. But he is hopeful. He is not the only person, he insisted, whose pulse quickens when he imagines streetcars once again dinging through Brooklyn.
At some meetings, he said, "just say, 'Trolley,' and you immediately get a standing ovation."
STARRY-EYED fantasies of trolley rebirth in Brooklyn are not new.
In 1982, an electrical engineer named Bob Diamond founded an organization called the Brooklyn Historic Railway Association to create a trolley line to connect Red Hook and downtown Brooklyn. Over the next 20 years, the group alternately sputtered and cruised ahead, amassing a devoted crew of volunteers - Mr. Melnick among them - significant community interest and more than $200,000 in federal funding. In 1999, Mr. Diamond ran his renovated trolleys along a few hundred feet of track the group had built on the Red Hook waterfront.
But Brooklyn Historic Railway died in 2002 when the city's Department of Transportation withdrew its support, citing financial problems. Greg Castillo, the Historic Railway's construction manager, said he had not heard from Mr. Diamond in years.
Now, the hulking, mint-green steel carcasses of Mr. Diamond's sleek trolley cars, which were first developed for Brooklyn in 1936, sit abandoned and weather-beaten off the end of Van Brunt Street in Red Hook. Eleven other trolleys he had stored in the Brooklyn Navy Yard were hauled away by a salvage company last spring.
Mr. Melnick, a former social studies teacher in Brooklyn, was Mr. Diamond's spokesman during that final year. When he saw that the Brooklyn Historic Railway ship was sinking, he jumped off to create Brooklyn City Streetcar, believing that the trolley concept was, as he put it, "too good to give up."
Mentions of trolleys had started to surface among public officials. In 2001, Congresswoman Nydia M. Velázquez secured $1 million in federal money to study the issue of access to Brooklyn Bridge Park, and Deborah Wetzel, a vice president of the Empire State Development Corporation, the agency overseeing the park, said trolleys would be considered as part of this study, which will begin this spring.
Congresswoman Velázquez obtained another $300,000 last year to study the feasibility of trolley and light-rail service to Red Hook, an idea supported by Robert W. Walsh, the city's commissioner of Small Business Services. With Ikea, Fairway, residential developments and a cruise ship terminal coming to Red Hook, Commissioner Walsh said, "when this whole issue came up about trolleys, it made sense."
And trolleys have been mentioned in other contexts. Sandy Balboza, president of the Atlantic Avenue Betterment Association, has called for a trolley loop in Downtown Brooklyn that would travel along Atlantic Avenue, making it easier to reach the growing number of businesses on that street.
And Roy Sloane, former president of the Cobble Hill Association, supports the idea of a trolley running along Atlantic Avenue to Pier 6, where it would connect with ferry service to Manhattan. "It's the only really innovative transportation idea that's been discussed for Downtown Brooklyn in the last 10 or 15 years," Mr. Sloane said.
Still, day in and day out, "not a lot of people besides Mr. Melnick are making the case for trolleys in Brooklyn," said Kenneth Adams, president of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce.
Mr. Adams looks somewhat skeptically upon trolleys, noting among their drawbacks the cost and engineering challenges of installing fixed rails on the streets. But, he said, "the intent is to see the most practical and efficient transportation solution that's lasting and durable. In the end, if that is a trolley system, then that should be pursued. May the best proposal win."
Mr. Melnick, for his part, took his cause to a recent meeting of the Coney Island Development Corporation, held in the gym of a church off Mermaid Avenue, and he received a warm response. Marty Levine, a member of the development corporation, agreed that trolleys might be right for Coney Island. City Councilman Domenic M. Recchia Jr., who represents the area, said he envisioned trolleys sailing up and down Surf Avenue, making stops at the aquarium, the Cyclone and Nathan's Famous.
Mr. Melnick's face brightened at their words. "Every so often," he said, "it's like, what did I get myself into? But if it works, it'll all be worthwhile."
On Mayan writing
Symbols on the Wall Push Maya Writing Back by Years
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
A vertical column of 10 glyphic words, uncovered last year in ruins in Guatemala, is unreadable even by the most expert scholars, but they know what it means - that Maya writing is older than they once thought.
Archaeologists reported last week that the script sample, discovered at San Bartolo, in northeastern Guatemala, is clear evidence that the Maya were writing more than 2,300 years ago. This is a few centuries earlier than previous well-dated Maya writing and 600 years before the civilization's classic period, when a decipherable writing system became widespread.
Scholars of Maya culture and other pre-Columbian societies said the discovery deepened the chronology of literacy's origins in the Americas. But they were not sure whether it brought them any closer to learning exactly when, where and how early American cultures first put words into graphic form.
"This early Maya writing," the discovery team concluded in the current issue of the journal Science, "implies that a developed Maya writing system was in use centuries earlier than previously thought, approximating a time when we see the earliest scripts elsewhere in Mesoamerica."
William A. Saturno, the team leader who is a Maya archaeologist at the University of New Hampshire and Harvard, said the study of the origins of writing in Mesoamerica, the ancient region of Mexico and parts of Central America, was now "likely to get more complicated in the near future as more early texts come to light."
Joyce Marcus, a professor at the University of Michigan and an authority on Mesoamerican cultures, said the Maya discovery "is terrific and does constitute some of the earliest Maya writing."
"Every piece of early writing enriches our knowledge of the ancient Maya," Dr. Marcus said.
As matters stand, the Zapotec, who lived around Oaxaca, Mexico, appear to have led the way to literacy, at least by 400 B.C., perhaps as early as 600 B.C. Clear evidence for Maya writing has been more recent.
A few scholars contend that the Olmec, living along the Gulf of Mexico near Veracruz, developed a script even earlier.
Some of the confusion stems from differing definitions of writing, whether a few symbols strung together suffice or fuller texts are required.
But it is generally agreed that the primal writing by contemporary groups in Mesoamerica was one of just four scripts - Sumerian, Egyptian and Chinese are the others - to be invented independent of outside influences.
What may be the earliest Maya words turned up in the same ruins where the same archaeologists reported last month finding a richly colored mural depicting the culture's mythology of creation and kingship. The mural is one of the earliest examples of Maya art, dated about 100 B.C.
Boris Beltrán, an archaeologist at the University of San Carlos in Guatemala, was exploring deeper in the ruins of a pyramid, down several layers of debris and time below the mural chamber. There he came on the Maya glyphs painted in black on white plaster.
A scribe apparently drew the characters along a subtle pinkish-orange stripe as a guideline.
Radiocarbon analysis of charcoal associated with the inscription dated the written words to as early as 300 B.C. The column, Dr. Saturno said, was presumably part of a text associated with a nearby work of art that included a painted image of the maize god.
The style of the painting was distinct from later Maya art, and the glyphs were more archaic and abstract than later Maya writing.
This has been frustrating for David Stuart, a professor of Mesoamerican art and writing at the University of Texas, a member of the discovery team.
Dr. Stuart said the glyphs had distinctive Maya characteristics and were "the earliest firmly dated Maya writing." But he and others were able to decipher just one symbol, the one meaning "ruler" or "lord" or possibly anyone of noble status.
"It's the same script," Dr. Stuart said. "But it was written several centuries before the full Maya script that we can read. It makes it tough. I don't think we will be able to read this anytime soon."
The exact meaning of the other nine glyphs will probably remain obscure, he said, until additional and longer texts are found from the same time in Maya history. Then there may be enough specimens, he continued, to compare with later decipherable glyphs and "make some tentative connections with things we are familiar with."
The discovery at San Bartolo is expected to inspire archaeologists to search for other examples of Mesoamerican writing from this period or earlier. Previous ideas about the relationships of Olmec, Zapotec and Maya writing are giving way to new thinking.
"Now it is looking like a lot of Mesoamerican cultures came up with writing at about the same period," Dr. Stuart said. "They all were in contact with each other, building cities, trading, telling their history and ideology through script and art."
Dr. Marcus cited recent excavations that produced monuments with Zapotec writing as early as 600 B.C., and even though the Mesoamerican cultures were in frequent contact with one another, she pointed out the individuality of their writing systems.
"What is of great interest," she said, "is that Zapotec writing is distinctive and Maya writing is distinctive, and each has its own genesis."
Reflections on pilgrimage
Pilgrims at Heart
By EBRAHIM MOOSA
Durham, N.C.
AS the pilgrims in Mecca complete the annual ritual of pilgrimage today, Muslims across the globe will begin the Id al-Adha, the three-day Feast of Sacrifice, in solidarity with them.
For Muslims seeking to make sense of the annual pilgrimage, a question arises: is the hajj only an elaborate ritual?
Hajj literally means, "to continuously strive to reach one's goal." The rite of visiting the sacred sites need be completed only once in a lifetime, but its meaning ought to be enduring. Yet, no pilgrim can claim strictly to imitate the Prophet Muhammad in this ritual. Such despotic literalness would only invest the observance with fraudulence. Is the imagination not at the heart of pilgrimage?
Centuries ago, the Arabic literary figure and philosopher, Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi, who died in 1023, mused about what the pilgrimage might have meant for those who could not make it to Mecca. Sadly, we can now only mourn the lost text of Tawhidi, but there is more than a hint in his title: "Undertaking the Mental Pilgrimage When the Physical Pilgrimage Is Impossible."
Exile, sacrifice and atonement underscore the commandment of pilgrimage in Muslim religious life. The faithful re-enact the pilgrimage rituals in imitation of their spiritual forbears. They relive exile by treading in the footsteps of Abraham. But the hajj also recalls the temporary exile of Adam and Eve, who wandered the earth after their expulsion from paradise. According to Muslim tradition, Adam and Eve reconciled with God in the desert of Arabia. The spot where they met each other again and atoned - an obligatory destination for pilgrims - is called Arafat, from the Arabic word 'arafa, "to know."
The theme of knowing and imagining the divine is embroidered through the trials of Abraham and his family. After Abraham's first child, Ishmael, was born to his slave wife Hagar, he was confronted by the jealousy of his other wife, Sarah, who was then childless. God upgraded this domestic squabble into a legacy issue for the Patriarch and his admirers. But he ordered the dutiful Abraham to banish Hagar and Ishmael to Arabia.
Years later, Muslim tradition holds, Abraham reconciled with Hagar and Ishmael. But more trials awaited. This time Abraham had to do the unthinkable: sacrifice his son. Mainstream Muslim tradition believes that the son in question was Ishmael, while a minority view holds that it was Isaac, Sarah's son. But after a miraculous substitution of Ishmael (or Isaac) by a ram, Abraham's reputation was sealed as the "friend of God."
To express their loathing of evil, the pilgrims will participate in that ancient drama of Abraham and Ishmael. They will first stone three pillars, each symbolizing Satan's failed attempts to mislead Abraham's family. Then, in a place called Mina, meaning "desires," each pilgrim will sacrifice an animal. With this act they seek to replace their destructive desires with productive ones. Away from Mecca, non-pilgrims with means will also slaughter animals as a show of hospitality to friends, family and the indigent. Pilgrimage embodies exile by requiring seekers to suspend customary routine, enter new environments and live by new rhythms and rituals. For a limited time, pilgrims experience the transitions and dislocations exiles perpetually undergo. As a performance, the pilgrimage links people to a past shared by several Abrahamic traditions, just as, by bringing together Muslims from a great multiplicity of cultures, it celebrates the diversity of our common humanity. Pilgrims return home enriched by this cosmopolitan outlook, but with a new appreciation for their own origins.
In the 1980's, the Iranian revolution inspired some attempts to use the hajj as a platform to express Muslim grievances. But such efforts ended in 1987, when Iranian pilgrims clashed with Saudi authorities, resulting in carnage and mayhem.
The more subtle political significance of the hajj, however, persists in the realm of the spiritual imagination. To play on the words of the poet Federico García Lorca: the imagination hovers above ritual, the way fragrance hovers over a flower.
Pilgrimage ought to fire the imagination and celebrate transitions, creativity and innovation. And imagination is a weapon, one that tyrants and autocrats fear. If we find it in short supply in the corridors of power, that does not mean that the rest of us should be deprived of its constructive possibilities as well.
A prolific 13th century mystic, Ibn Arabi, wrote that pilgrims were mistaken if they believed that swarming like moths around the cube-like stone centerpiece, the Kaaba in the Holy Mosque, was the loftiest act of venerating God. Rather, noted Ibn Arabi, it was the human heart that deserved the highest sanctity. For neither the offerings made, nor the hardships endured, reaches the divine. Instead it is the compass of the heart that counts.
The heart symbolizes the inviolability of human dignity. But the supreme gift, Ibn Arabi artfully explains, is the imagination radiating from the heart. The fulcrum of the pilgrimage is also the essence of life: a caring heart fired by the imagination.
For instance, after paying homage to the two women Eve and Hagar in the rites of pilgrimage, how can some Muslims still violate the rights and dignity of women in the name of Islam? Is this not a contradiction? If the pilgrimage is done not by rote but with imagination, honor killings become unthinkably loathsome, a curse to be condemned like the Satan just stoned.
The truth of the imagination pertains today, not just for Tawhidi and Ibn Arabi, but also for all their contemporary successors who still believe the imagination to be the healing balm for our deeply troubled world.
"A Protest, a Spy Program, and a Campus in an Uproar
A Protest, a Spy Program and a Campus in an Uproar
By SARAH KERSHAW
SANTA CRUZ, Calif. - The protest was carefully orchestrated, planned for weeks by Students Against War during Friday evening meetings in a small classroom on the University of California campus here.
So when the military recruiters arrived for the job fair, held in an old dining hall last April 5 - a now fateful day for a scandalized university - the students had their two-way radios in position, their cyclists checking the traffic as hundreds of demonstrators marched up the hilly roads of this campus on the Central Coast and a dozen moles stationed inside the building, reporting by cellphone to the growing crowd outside.
"Racist, sexist, antigay," the demonstrators recalled shouting. "Hey, recruiters, go away!"
Things got messy. As the building filled, students storming in were blocked from entering. The recruiters left, some finding that the tires of their vehicles had been slashed. The protesters then occupied the recruiters' table and, in what witnesses described as a minor melee, an intern from the campus career center was injured.
Fast forward: The students had left campus for their winter vacation in mid-December when a report by MSNBC said the April protest had appeared on what the network said was a database from a Pentagon surveillance program. The protest was listed as a "credible threat" - to what is not clear to people around here - and was the only campus action among scores of other antimilitary demonstrations to receive the designation.
Over the winter break, Josh Sonnenfeld, 20, a member of Students Against War, or SAW, put out the alert. "Urgent: Pentagon's been spying on SAW, and thousands of other groups," said his e-mail message to the 50 or so students in the group.
Several members spent the rest of their break in a swirl of strategy sessions by telephone and e-mail, and in interviews with the news media. Since classes began on Jan. 5, they have stepped up their effort to figure out whether they are being spied on and if so, why.
Students in the group said they were not entirely surprised to learn that the federal government might be spying on them.
"On the one hand, I was surprised that we made the list because generally we don't get the recognition we deserve," Mr. Sonnenfeld said. "On the other hand, it doesn't surprise me because our own university has been spying on us since our group was founded. This nation has a history of spying on political dissenters."
The April protest, at the sunny campus long known for surfing, mountain biking and leftist political activity, drew about 300 of the university's 15,000 students, organizers said. (Students surmise that, these days, they are out-agitating their famed anti-establishment peers at the University of California, Berkeley, campus, 65 miles northwest of here.)
"This is the war at home," said Jennifer Low, 20, a member of the antiwar group. "So many of us were so discouraged and demoralized by the war, a lot of us said this is the way we can stop it."
A Department of Defense spokesman said that while the Pentagon maintained a database of potential threats to military installations, military personnel and national security, he could not confirm that the information released by MSNBC was from the database. The spokesman, who said he was not authorized to be quoted by name, said he could not answer questions about whether the government was or had been spying on Santa Cruz students.
California lawmakers have demanded an explanation from the government. Representative Sam Farr, a Democrat whose district includes Santa Cruz, was one of several who sent letters to the Bush administration. "This is a joke," Mr. Farr said in an interview. "There is a protest du jour at Santa Cruz."
"Santa Cruz is not a terrorist town," he added. "It's an activist town. It's essentially Berkeley on the coast."
The university's chancellor, Denice D. Denton, said, "We would like to know how this information was gathered and understand better what's going on here."
"Is this something that happens under the guise of the new Patriot Act?" Ms. Denton asked.
As to the students' insistence that the university is monitoring their activities, Ms. Denton said that she had checked with campus police and other university offices and that "there is absolutely no spying going on."
The antiwar group is working closely with the California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which plans to file a public records request with the federal government on the students' behalf, A.C.L.U. officials said.
Meanwhile, members of the campus's College Republicans, strongly critical of the protesters' tactics last April, are rolling their eyes at all the hubbub.
"I think it's worth looking into, but right now I think they are overblowing it," said Chris Rauer, internal vice president of the College Republicans. "I think people are taking their anger over the war out on this."
The Defense Department has issued a statement saying that in October the Pentagon began a review of its database to ensure that the reporting system complied with federal laws and to identify information that might have been improperly entered. All department personnel involved in gathering intelligence were receiving "refresher" training on the laws and policies, the statement said.
With this happening in academia, there has been a good deal of philosophical contemplation and debate over the socioeconomic and political dynamics underlying the uproar.
"I had multiple reactions," said Faye J. Crosby, a professor of social psychology and chairwoman of the Academic Senate.
"One reaction was, 'Gosh, I wonder if we're doing something right?' " Professor Crosby said. "Another reaction was it's a waste of taxpayer money. What are we a threat to?"
"The real sadness," she added, "is the breakdown in discourse of the marketplace of ideas."
On efforts to save Tulane engineering
Tulane's Engineering Students Strive to Save Their School
By SUSAN SAULNY
NEW ORLEANS, Jan. 12 - In the early 1900's, the Sewerage and Water Board here hired a young student from Tulane University's School of Engineering to help deal with flooding and drainage, the city's most vexing problems.
The student, Albert Baldwin Wood, designed a pumping system that not only drained areas that routinely flooded but also allowed the city to grow into a modern metropolis on what had been its swampy hinterlands. Four months ago, his pumps, some more than 90 years old, continued to churn water out of the city even as Hurricane Katrina knocked newer models out of service.
Given that legacy, engineering students at Tulane say, they are finding it hard to accept that the university, the city's premier academic institution, has chosen to eliminate majors in civil, environmental and electrical engineering, among others, as part of its own post-hurricane recovery plan.
They have reacted fiercely, undertaking a campaign on campus sidewalks, on the Internet, with elected officials and in the news media. Their rallying cry, as posted on trees in the University District, is, "These majors are needed in New Orleans now more than ever in order to help rebuild the city."
And messages written in chalk on the campus's sidewalks read, "We survived Katrina but not the administration," even as a banner in one of the main engineering buildings reads, "Welcome Tulane Engineering Students: Tomorrow's Leaders!"
"We came back expecting to go headfirst into working with the city and the state to fix the levees, the transportation system and the power grid," said David O'Reilly, a first-year doctoral candidate in civil engineering. "There has not been an opportunity like this in our generation to rebuild an American city on this magnitude."
Instead, Mr. O'Reilly is likely to be leaving his native New Orleans by the end of the semester to find a research program in another city.
The School of Engineering is not the only part of the university to undergo changes in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which left floodwater over two-thirds of the campus and caused up to $250 million in property damage and more than $90 million in operational losses.
Tulane also did away with its traditional undergraduate college system, Newcomb College for women and Tulane College for men, replacing it with one Undergraduate College. It eliminated its graduate school as an administrative entity, and an array of intercollegiate sports teams, as well as 230 full-time faculty members and 243 members of its staff, who were laid off. Those cuts included a sharp hit to the medical school faculty, which was reduced by 180 positions, to 345.
But the students at the engineering school are among the most vocal, because they are losing six majors. Only two majors - biomedical and chemical engineering - will survive as part of a new School of Science and Engineering.
Engineering students in the programs that are being eliminated will be allowed to graduate in their majors if they can complete their studies by next year. Still, some students feel jilted.
"No one saw this coming; no one expected it," said Justin Mikowski, a computer engineering major from Tampa, Fla., who is a leading force in the campaign to change the university's mind. "We all thought engineering would be expanded with all the rebuilding that has to happen."
Scott S. Cowen, the university's president, who announced the changes on Dec. 8, defends the decision as thoughtful, necessary and final.
"I wish Katrina had never happened, and I wouldn't have to do any of these things - I'm sympathetic," Dr. Cowen said. "I admire their compassion and their enthusiasm to keep this going," he said of the students, "but the board has already made its decisions, and they have been implemented. They will not be reversed."
Still, Dr. Cowen met with engineering alumni as recently as last week, and many last-ditch efforts to change his mind continue.
"New Orleans, as a city, owes its very life to the products of Tulane engineering and will not be able to rebuild without a strong engineering pool of knowledge at its base," said David A. Kanger, the president of the Society of Tulane Engineers.
Others, like a former dean of the School of Engineering, William C. Van Buskirk, said Dr. Cowen had hurt the school's reputation and its students in claiming that the relatively small engineering school had not gained national prominence and that it was unlikely to do so without a significant investment of resources.
Tulane has 900 undergraduate and graduate students in engineering.
"I think he really couched it wrong when he said these programs aren't strong enough to compete," Dr. Van Buskirk said. "It's just nonsense."
He noted that Tulane's legacy did not end with Albert Wood and his pumps. A more recent graduate, David Filo, a co-founder of the Internet giant Yahoo, holds a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from Tulane. And by other standards of success, the school also fared well, Dr. Van Buskirk said.
"It's more than a hundred years of tradition gone, and it's heartbreaking," he said.
Robert S. Boh, the president of Boh Brothers Construction, one of the most significant local businesses in the reconstruction effort, and a member of the School of Engineering's advisory board, said, "Tulane in engineering circles had a pretty good reputation to begin with, and seemed to be improving in every category that's important, so the timing of this is curious, really."
Despite his position on the advisory board, Mr. Boh said he had not been consulted about the recovery plan.
Students said they were left to wonder how to market themselves to other universities and employers when their own university found its programs lacking. "Our efforts are falling on deaf ears," said Will Clarkson, a computer engineering major from Canton, Ohio.
Dr. Cowen said Tulane was offering $2,000 in assistance to freshmen who would like to visit other campuses in the hope of transferring.
And Tulane will have a prominent role in the rebuilding effort, he said. The changes were intended in part to produce new areas of specialization for Tulane, including a partnership on urban issues with two of the city's historically black universities, Xavier and Dillard.
Xavier and Dillard, along with the other well-known colleges in the city, the University of New Orleans and Loyola University, all suffered damage and have streamlined their operations for the spring semester. But, unlike Tulane, none have cut majors or sports, even though their endowments are smaller than that of Tulane.
On that point, Dr. Cowen said Tulane had taken the lead in making unpopular but realistic and tough decisions.
"Hope is not a method," he said.
On the female ancestors of the Ashkenazi
New Light on Origins of Ashkenazi in Europe
By NICHOLAS WADE
A new look at the DNA of the Ashkenazi Jewish population has thrown light on its still mysterious origins.
Until now, it had been widely assumed by geneticists that the Ashkenazi communities of Northern and Central Europe were founded by men who came from the Middle East, perhaps as traders, and by the women from each local population whom they took as wives and converted to Judaism.
But the new study, published online this week in The American Journal of Human Genetics, suggests that the men and their wives migrated to Europe together.
The researchers, Doron Behar and Karl Skorecki of the Technion and Ramban Medical Center in Haifa, and colleagues elsewhere, report that just four women, who may have lived 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, are the ancestors of 40 percent of Ashkenazis alive today. The Technion team's analysis was based on mitochondrial DNA, a genetic element that is separate from the genes held in the cell's nucleus and that is inherited only through the female line. Because of mutations - the switch of one DNA unit for another - that build up on the mitochondrial DNA, people can be assigned to branches that are defined by which mutations they carry.
In the case of the Ashkenazi population, the researchers found that many branches coalesced to single trees, and so were able to identify the four female ancestors.
Looking at other populations, the Technion team found that some people in Egypt, Arabia and the Levant also carried the set of mutations that defines one of the four women. They argue that all four probably lived originally in the Middle East.
A study by Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona showed five years ago that the men in many Jewish communities around the world bore Y chromosomes that were Middle Eastern in origin. This finding is widely accepted by geneticists, but there is less consensus about the women's origins.
David Goldstein, now of Duke University, reported in 2002 that the mitochondrial DNA of women in Jewish communities around the world did not seem to be Middle Eastern, and indeed each community had its own genetic pattern. But in some cases the mitochondrial DNA was closely related to that of the host community.
Dr. Goldstein and his colleagues suggested that the genesis of each Jewish community, including the Ashkenazis, was that Jewish men had arrived from the Middle East, taken wives from the host population and converted them to Judaism, after which there was no further intermarriage with non-Jews.
The Technion team suggests a different origin for the Ashkenazi community: if the women too are Middle Eastern in origin, they would presumably have accompanied their husbands. At least the Ashkenazi Jewish community might have been formed by families migrating together.
Dr. Hammer said the new study "moves us forward in trying to understand Jewish population history." His own recent research, he said, suggests that the Ashkenazi population expanded through a series of bottlenecks - events that squeeze a population down to small numbers - perhaps as it migrated from the Middle East after the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70 to Italy, reaching the Rhine Valley in the 10th century.
But Dr. Goldstein said the new report did not alter his previous conclusion. The mitochondrial DNA's of a small, isolated population tend to change rapidly as some lineages fall extinct and others become more common, a process known as genetic drift. In his view, the Technion team has confirmed that genetic drift has played a major role in shaping Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA. But the linkage with Middle Eastern populations is not statistically significant, he said.
Because of genetic drift, Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA's have developed their own pattern, which makes it very hard to tell their source. This differs from the patrilineal case, Dr. Goldstein said, where there is no question of a Middle Eastern origin.
On rebuilding New Orleans
Hard Decisions for New Orleans
It would be nice to believe that New Orleans could be made whole, exactly as it was before Hurricane Katrina devastated it. But that kind of wishful thinking, apparently prevalent among some New Orleanians and encouraged by some city leaders, will only stymie the reconstruction process. The nation cannot rebuild everywhere in New Orleans, nor should it.
The city's rebuilding commission took an important step this week when it recommended that only the areas that could muster sufficient population should be rebuilt. Not surprisingly, that announcement drew the ire of residents of some neighborhoods where generations have lived on the same plots of land. While that is an ideal that should be protected wherever possible, it cannot define the rebuilding process.
The lowest-lying, hardest-hit areas, like parts of New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward and Lakeview, are also the most vulnerable to future hurricanes and flooding. Some of the blocks farthest below sea level should be turned into parks to allow better drainage, as recommended by the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit research group - even though that will be difficult to say to the residents of those areas.
Even with a commitment from Washington to build optimal protection against the fiercest Category 5 storms - which hasn't happened yet - the work would take years to complete. Residents should not be encouraged to gamble with their insurance checks for political or emotional reasons.
It is not a coincidence that many of those hard-hit, low-lying areas have had poor and predominantly African-American residents. That injustice needs to be corrected, not recreated. Whether owners or renters, the people from less-protected areas should be compensated so they have enough money to live somewhere else in town. The answer is not to thrust people back into harm's way, especially when it's unclear how much hurricane protection the city will really have in the coming years.
Rosy predictions do not help the city's most vulnerable displaced residents. The city government has to be straight with its constituents. For the foreseeable future, New Orleans will be a smaller city with a smaller population and a smaller tax base. If local leaders proffer unrealistic solutions, they will only strengthen the hand of those opposed to a real rebuilding commitment for New Orleans.
President Bush sounded out of touch as usual this week when he called the still-ravaged city "a heck of a place to bring your family." Rather than conjuring up memories of Michael Brown, the erstwhile head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Mr. Bush could better spend his time increasing the pressure on Congress to act on some version of Representative Richard Baker's federal buyout legislation. Lawmakers in Washington should take up the bill.
