Salon.com > Jeanne Carstensen

Iran? The U.S. should mind its own business

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:24:00 +0000

"A friend once told me that I was the only person he knew who was both 100 percent American and 100 percent Iranian," writes Hooman Majd in his book on Iranian culture, "The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran."

The consummate insider and outsider, Majd served as the English-language translator for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's now infamous 2006 speech at the United Nations, and also wrote about the experience for the New York Observer.

The son of an Iranian diplomat under the shah, and grandson of a powerful ayatollah, Majd grew up mainly in the United States where he worked for many years in the entertainment industry before launching his career as a journalist and author. Although openly linked with the reformists -- he wore green Iranian slippers on Bill Maher's program last week and has also translated for former President Mohammed Khatami (to whom he is related by marriage) -- Majd's views on Iran are distinguished by their nuance and fierce independence. Indeed, in his status as a sophisticated global citizen and Iranian American sympathetic to the core ideals of the Islamic Republic, he embodies the paradox of contemporary Iran that is the subject of his book.

Why churches fear gay marriage

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:55:00 +0000

For author Richard Rodriguez, no one is talking about the real issues behind Proposition 8.

While conservative churches are busy trying to whip up another round of culture wars over same-sex marriage, Rodriguez says the real reason for their panic lies elsewhere: the breakdown of the traditional heterosexual family and the shifting role of women in society and the church itself. As the American family fractures and the majority of women choose to live without men, churches are losing their grip on power and scapegoating gays and lesbians for their failures.

Rodriguez, who is Mexican-American, gay and a practicing Catholic, refuses to let any single part of himself define the whole. Born in San Francisco in 1944 and raised by his Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrant parents to embrace mainstream American culture and the English language, he went on to study literature and religion at Stanford and Columbia. His first book, "The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez," explores his journey from working-class immigrant to a fully assimilated intellectual -- angering many Latinos with his view that English fluency is essential. "Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father," which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1993, continued his investigation into how family, culture, religion, race, sexuality and other strands of his life all contribute to the whole, a complex "brownness" of contradictions and ironies. "Brown: The Last Discovery of America" completes the trilogy -- but not his insatiable intellectual curiosity, which he is now shining on monotheism.

Bill O’Reilly is very afraid of San Francisco

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:30:00 +0000

Here in San Francisco, the lines to buy pot at our many neighborhood cannabis clubs are even longer than the lines to vote for socialist Barack Obama were on Nov. 4.

Homeless people, high on drugs, freely roam the streets, escorted by police officers who know everyone by first name and distribute special Cracker Jacks with actual crack as the prize.

If you think I'm kidding, then you haven't seen this segment from Bill O'Reilly's show, which was first spotted by the Huffington Post. Yes, people, Bill wants his viewers to know what Obama is going to do to the country. He's going to destroy "traditional America" and turn it into "secular progressive America" -- just like San Francisco, the capital of drugs, homeless, hippies and degenerates of all shapes and sizes.

A big gay Mormon wedding

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 10:30:00 +0000

"Love each other, be selfless, negotiate," George E. Redd III said to his son Jay on his wedding day recently. Gazing at his 36-year-old son standing next to his beloved, in the Swedenborgian Church in San Francisco, Redd III quoted Paul, Ringo, John and George: "All you need is love, love is all you need."

It was hanky time inside the chapel, a cozy wooden Arts and Crafts building that could have been airlifted in from a village in Scandinavia, or perhaps the Shire. There's nothing like the father blessing the son at a wedding, with Irish folk musicians strumming in the background, to get the tear ducts flowing. Especially when the son's gorgeous spouse is another man.

A few weeks after the wedding, Jay, a movie director based in Los Angeles and San Francisco, told me that his father's Beatles reference had taken him totally by surprise. "When Dad said, 'And to quote the great Western philosophers,' I thought for sure he was going to read from Scripture," Jay said. But to his great relief, the advice his father doled out came from John Lennon and not John the Baptist. After all the pain Jay had endured, wondering whether his devout Mormon father would even attend his wedding, those Liverpool lyrics were music to his ears.

MIA at convention: Anti-Bush swag

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:15:00 +0000

DENVER -- OK, the smirker in chief is not totally absent.

But besides the Bush Legacy Tour Bus, a traveling museum of George W.'s failed policies, the pickings are surprisingly thin.

Among all the Barack Obama T-shirts, hats, buttons, mugs, key rings and teddy bears for sale from vendors on every street corner, I found only a few anti-Bush souvenirs -- all buttons, all pretty ho-hum.

There's a dumb-looking Bush with the words "Good Riddance," McCain and "McSame," and Bush, Cheney and Rummy dressed as the Three Stooges. Snore.

Don't get me wrong. I am a sucker for a lot of the Obama-wear and will pack my bags with a selection of fabulous T-shirts and other memorabilia. And there's some great Hillary Clinton swag, too.

Denver cop convention

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:21:00 +0000

Photo by Jeanne Carstensen

Officer Wells of the Aurora Police Department outside the Colorado Convention Center in Denver.

Cops are everywhere on the streets of Denver, many of them decked out in intense riot gear. Outside the Colorado Convention Center, where delegates stream in and out all day for caucuses and other meetings, police are stationed every 100 feet or so.

"We're not turtled up for any direct confrontation," Officer Wells of the Aurora Police Department tells me when I ask him about the heavy duty equipment dangling from his body, including what looks to me like a machine gun. "This is soft gear," he explains with a chuckle, pointing to the orange handle of his weapon. In the world of law enforcement, the color orange signifies "less than lethal." Maybe, but I wouldn't want to find myself on the other end of that gun, which is loaded with round projectiles of pepper spray that Officer Wells says are used to "disable people." When he saw my concerned expression he clarified what he meant, "you know, it stops their actions."

Voyage to the top of the trees

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 11:19:00 +0000

Flying around the planet via Google Earth, it's easy to despair that there is nothing left for humans to discover. Having mapped every inch of the planet with satellites, we can type in London or Darfur or Redwoods National Park and see pigeons circling above Trafalgar Square, a tent city spreading out across the desert, or the green expanse of the forest canopy. This ability to instantly possess images of almost any place on any continent, to zoom in on a certain tree or building (hello, Dick Cheney!), then zoom out as if piloting a plane, can make the world feel like an entirely known quantity, bereft of mystery.

Then comes Richard Preston's thrilling, wondrous book "The Wild Trees." Trees -- the most familiar and beloved of all plants -- turn out to be as unexplored by science as Tibet was by the West before Alexandra David-Néel dressed as a man and sneaked over the Himalayas into the forbidden kingdom. The tree of life may be the archetypal symbol of the human experience, but we don't know as much as we thought about the life of the tree -- especially that of the redwood, the tallest species of tree on the planet. Higher than the W Hotel in downtown San Francisco, redwoods can grow to be 370 feet tall, and until very recently nobody thought, or dared, to climb them.

Snuggling with anacondas

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 12:15:00 +0000

Jesus Rivas loves the green anaconda. The object of his affection is the biggest snake on earth, which regularly dines on 7-foot caimans (Spanish alligators). Rivas loves them so much that he walks barefoot through the swamps of Venezuela, his native country, until his toes touch one of the serpents lounging in the mud, at which point he wrestles them into submission. Perhaps for obvious reasons, field studies of the anaconda were virtually nonexistent before Rivas began pursuing his herpetological passion in the late '80s. Since then, he has captured more than 900 anacondas in the wild and carefully studied their life cycle -- including the previously undocumented "breeding aggregations," the balls of small male snakes that struggle to impregnate a giant female. Rivas has made several TV documentaries about his charismatic study animal, including "The Land of the Anacondas" with National Geographic. He's now an assistant professor at Somerset Community College in Kentucky.

Salon spoke to Rivas by phone about how it feels to snuggle with an anaconda, what to do when a large female tries to wrap you in an "evil loop," and the challenges of actually taking snakes on a plane.