ABCDE
OUTLOOK
sunday, april 11, 2010
INSIDE
The Confederacy vs. dried plums
A sampling of monthly
appreciations. B2
BOOK WORLD, B6-8
Is heaven Jewish? A journey through the history of the afterlife — as we see it from here. B6
Our cups of tea How a Scot passed as Chinese and stole the world’s second-favorite drink. B7 An ode to Baltimore Jonathan Yardley on H.L. Mencken’s essays about his city and himself. B8
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BOOK REVIEW
A nearly true tale by our man in Iran
by David Ignatius
H
RICKY CARIOTI/THE WASHINGTON POST
The crowd grooves as go-go band Suttle Thoughts plays a set at Zanzibar in Southwest. The music, a grittier form of funk, was created in the Washington area.
Go-go music is the sound of the District. But is it welcome here anymore?
by Natalie Hopkinson
t was just another gig at a D.C. area nightclub, one of sev- eral shows the band Suttle Thoughts plays each week, drawing hundreds of young professionals in their 20s and 30s — a self-proclaimed “grown and sexy” crowd. But a club manager stopped the band at the door when he noticed one of the musicians bringing in a set of conga drums, bandleader Chi Ali told me. If you are in or near the District and you see a young black bandleader trailed by a horn section, guitars, keyboards, cow bells and congas, that can only mean one thing: They play go-go music, the area’s unique style of funk. And if you run a club, having a go- go band perform can be complicated. On the upside, the place is going to be packed, and you will rake it in at the bar. On the down- side, the crowds can get volatile, drawing extra police scrutiny. On that day early this year, the club manager didn’t want to
Missing a beat
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go-go continued on B5
Natalie Hopkinson, a culture and media critic for TheRoot.com, is author of the forthcoming “Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City.”
David Ignatius is a columnist and associate editor for The Washington Post. His new novel about Iran, “The Increment,” is out in paperback this month.
Europe and Latin America lost between a third and half of their value; interna- tional trade declined by a whopping 12 percent; and the size of the global econ- omy contracted for the first time in dec- ades.
When economists and Wall Street
types toss around the term “systemic risk,” that’s pretty much what they’re talking about. The particular risks that
Starving the beasts of Wall Street
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by Matthew Richardson and Nouriel Roubini
etween the fall of 2008 and the winter of 2009, the world’s economy and financial mar- kets fell off a cliff. Stock mar- kets in the United States, Asia,
led to the crisis — i.e., big institutions with too much leverage, too little cap- ital and too many implicit and explicit government guarantees — were not im- possible to anticipate. (In fact, some of us warned about the financial pandem- ic that was to come.) Now, the question is: How do we keep this all from hap- pening again? To create a truly safe financial system,
we have to focus on two goals. First, we have to drive a stake through the heart of the “too big to fail” mantra that only fattens our financial beasts. Second, we should stop focusing on the problems of individual banks and look at the broad- er risk that the largest and most com- plex financial institutions pose. We can accomplish both goals by
banks continued on B3
Matthew Richardson and Nouriel Roubini are professors at New York University’s Stern School of Business and contributors to the forthcoming book “Regulating Wall Street: The New Architecture of Global Finance.”
charging such institutions an annual fee, or tax, or surcharge, or levy, or whatever the politicians need to call it. The current reform proposals in Con- gress call for something like this, but they don’t go nearly far enough. The amount of the fee would vary according to each bank or financial firm and would include two key elements: an in- surance premium based on whichever of the institution’s debts carry a real or implied government guarantee (akin to the FDIC system already in place), and a fee that reflects the institution’s contri- bution to a potential large-scale, sys- temic crisis. All large and interconnected firms
ow true does a “true story” have to be? This question im- mediately confronts a reader of “A Time to Betray,” by the pseudonymous Reza Kahlili.
The book opens with this encompass- ing disclaimer: “This is the true story of my life as a CIA agent in the Revolution- ary Guards of Iran; however, every effort has been made to protect my identity (Reza Kahlili is not my real name), my family, and my associates. To do so, it was necessary to change all the names (ex- cept for officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran) and alter certain events, chronology, cir- cumstances, and places.”
A TIME TO BETRAY The Astonishing Double Life of a CIA Agent Inside the Revolutionary Guards of Iran
By Reza Kahlili Threshold. 340 pp. $26
If we cannot de- pend precisely on the who, what, where or when in a nonfiction mem- oir, then what do we have? You don’t need to be a pro- fessional skeptic to wonder if the basic claim of the book — that the author was a CIA mole inside Iran’s fearsome Guard — is accurate.
So I did some checking. And I am happy to re- port that the au-
bother. So he told the band to get its things and go. This is what it has come to: one of the city’s only true indig- enous art forms — the one generations of Washingtonians have grooved to — unceremoniously cast away. Not only is go-go being shut out from clubs that could still support it, the retail stores that nurtured the music are fading away. Cities change all the time, but this is about more than mourn- ing what’s gone. As go-go shifts to the margins in the District, we are losing something bigger. Go-go may be invisible to much of white Washington, but it’s as much a part of the city as the pillars and monuments of its federal face. On any given day, in any num- ber of clubs, parks, community centers, schools and back yards throughout the region, you can find up to a dozen young musi- cians on a stage, playing before ecstatic, sweaty crowds. Go-go is Washington. The music never made a real national
thor did indeed have a secret relation- ship with the CIA. That’s a relief, because the story he tells — of the Iranian revolu- tion and how he came to despise it — is genuinely powerful. It offers a vivid first- person narrative of how the zealots of the Islamic republic created what has be- come a nightmare for the Iranian people. By the author’s account, the cruelty and intolerance didn’t begin with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They have been unfolding for three decades. Since the bona fides of “Kahlili” are crucial to the credibility of this story, let me share some detective work: Three for- mer CIA officers who ran Iranian opera- tions in the ’80s and should have been knowledgeable said they had never heard of such a significant penetration of the Guard during this period. Maybe the case was super-restricted; maybe it was seen as relatively low-level. I can’t say. A current U.S. government official,
spy continued on B4
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DC MD VA B
myths about China’s
economy. B3
Missile envy:
When it comes to nukes, we’re still in the Cold War. B4
by David E. Hoffman
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