On Religion: A Black Cultural Tradition and Its Unlikely Keepers

“Een muh time ob dyin’,” Mr. Dougherty began, “Uh don wan nobody fuh moan.” These were the words, in Gullah dialect, to a spiritual about the wish to die easily and to be taken into heaven by Jesus. Mr. Dougherty’s mother had first heard the song as a teenager in the 1930s, and she requested it for her own funeral six decades later.

Now, on this evening in June 2011, the financial adviser and social worker and music professor and Navy officer, and the other half-dozen people joining in harmony from their chairs, were engaging in a profound act of cultural conservation. In a city built on the slave trade, in the state where the Civil War started, these white men and women were the curators of an African-American religious and musical treasure.

They all belonged to a group called the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals, as had many of their parents and grandparents. Since its founding in 1922, the society’s members have collected, recorded, transcribed and performed black praise songs that almost certainly would have otherwise been lost — lost to the resort development of the barrier islands where Gullah culture thrived, lost to the amplified up-tempo sounds of urban gospel music that overwhelmed rural, a capella forms.

“It’s poetry and it’s faith,” Mr. Dougherty, 54, said of the Gullah spirituals. “And it’s poetry about faith.”

Back at the genesis of the society, though, no premise could have been more radical than for a white person to consider Gullah spirituals worthy of protection and emulation. These were the songs, after all, of the descendants of rice-plantation slaves, so isolated that their language maintained elements of Krio from West Africa.

Long before it was recognized as a unique hybrid, suitable for scholarly inquiry, Gullah folk life was routinely ridiculed, even by some big-city blacks, as merely primitive. Gullah songs reached the affluent white children of Charleston through the cries of street vendors, the lullabies of black nannies.

That kind of casual sharing of culture, amid the overarching climate of segregation, attested to a black aphorism: “In the North the white man will let you get high but not close, and in the South the white man will let you get close but not high.”

So several dozen well-born whites — members of Episcopal, Lutheran and Reform Jewish congregations, more than a few the descendants of slaveholders — set about visiting Gullah churches in Charleston and the nearby Sea Islands. In 1931, the society published a book with music and lyrics to 49 spirituals, and later in the decade began recording black congregations on aluminum discs. That trove of material came to the attention of the legendary folklorist John A. Lomax, who tried to have the discs donated to the Library of Congress.

“There was a thread of respect that runs through the origins of the society,” said John Horlbeck, 56, a former Navy officer whose father was also a society member. “There was no attempt to claim the high ground as whites. They were witnesses to something and were concerned it would be lost.”

Inevitably, though, even the best-intentioned efforts raised issues of what would later be termed cultural appropriation and white-skin privilege. While the Gullah Christians remained in poverty and obscurity, the society’s members performed those spirituals during the 1930s at the White House and Harvard. One society member, the author DuBose Heyward, introduced George Gershwin to Gullah music while the composer was adapting Heyward’s novel “Porgy” into the opera “Porgy and Bess.”

As decades passed, and civil rights legislation, Interstate highways and Hilton Head resorts altered the seclusion and segregation of Charleston, the younger members of the society clung to their unlikely birthright for two reasons. First, those songs had become part of their own heritage — so much so that Mr. Dougherty proposed to his future wife not with a ring but with a paper loop bearing the title of the spiritual “Come En Go Wid Me.” And second, these whites viewed themselves as custodians of something sacred and irreducibly black.

“The greatest success we can have is in some way to have saved the music and given it back to black people,” said Edward Hart, 45, a music professor at the College of Charleston and a second-generation member of the society. “It’s their music.”

That process accelerated in the early 1980s when an elderly member of the society revealed to Mr. Dougherty a box containing the aluminum discs recorded in the 1930s. Evidently, they had never been sent to the Library of Congress then. So Mr. Dougherty did so right away — only to find out that the metal had become so oxidized over the years that the recordings were almost inaudible.

But as word of the discs passed among the society’s 50 members, one of them gave Mr. Dougherty a set of reel-to-reel tapes, apparently made from the discs in the 1960s. Those recordings, in turn, were released in 2004 on separate CD’s of the original field recordings and the society’s performances. (They are available through Edisto Bookstore in South Carolina and the Preservation Society of Charleston.) Three years later, the society published an updated and expanded version of its 1931 volume of Gullah spirituals.

As the society’s current members sang in and around Charleston, they also caught the ear of black listeners like Alphonso Brown, the organist and choir master of the Mt. Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church. Now 66, he grew up with the Gullah spirituals as part of Sunday worship and prayer meetings.

“I was angry with myself for not doing it before they did,” Mr. Brown said this week. “And they did such a great job of it. They inspired me to start doing those songs again in my church.”

View the original article here

Old Soviet Nuclear Site in Asia Has Unlikely Sentinel: The U.S.

。

The United States Defense Department has paid for aerial drones to spot intruders, and for motion detectors that signal when a person, or a horse or a car, crosses into restricted territory. The classified project aims to keep terrorists away from what the Soviets left behind in patches of earth and a warren of tunnels that they used for atomic testing: among other things, plutonium and highly enriched uranium that Western scientists fear could be used to build an improvised nuclear device.

Protecting this material has meant teasing out nuclear secrets that have been kept for decades. Russia is warily sharing archival material about Soviet-era tests, and the United States is paying to remove or secure weapons-grade material. Kazakhstan is providing the labor, but because it is not a nuclear power, its officials are forbidden from learning exactly what it is that they are guarding.

“People ask me, are we doing the right thing, closing access to the tunnels?” said Kairat K. Kadyrzhanov, general director of Kazakhstan’s National Nuclear Center, which manages the test site. “And I say I do not know what is there, and I do not have the right to know.”

The edge of the Semipalatinsk Test Site is a two-hour drive from the nearest large city, across an expanse of dun-colored, featureless steppe.

In 1948, racing to break the American monopoly on nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union selected this stretch of land to test their own. Local villagers knew only that the earth quaked, making china shudder on the shelf; years later, charts showed radioactive plumes that settled over population centers.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, 20,000 to 30,000 troops withdrew from their positions, leaving 500 Kazakh soldiers to guard the site, Mr. Kadyrzhanov said.

Ever since then, the test site — or, specifically, the fissile material and fission products left there — has been a concern for the United States. The project has continued behind a curtain of secrecy, with a few exceptions; in 2003 Kazakh officials told a reporter for Science magazine about “Operation Groundhog,” in which plutonium-contaminated earth was paved with a two-meter-thick slab of steel-reinforced concrete to protect it from terrorists who might cart it away to use in a dirty bomb.

Officials from the Defense Department and the State Department would not comment. But cables published by WikiLeaks last year describe an urgent push to “prevent nuclear residue material from falling into terrorists’ hands,” as a top defense official put it in 2009. One describes it as “the most critical” of all the American-financed projects to secure nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union.

After above-ground testing was banned, the Soviets detonated 295 devices in 181 tunnels under the Degelen Mountains, according to a study published last year by Kazakhstan’s Institute for Radiation Security and Ecology. Each explosion consumed between 1 and 30 percent of the device’s fissile material, leaving the remaining fuel mixed with debris and melted rock underground, according to the study.

President Obama’s inauguration marked a “radical change of attitude” toward security at the site, and American officials demanded a fivefold acceleration in the work, Mr. Kadyrzhanov said. Meanwhile, Russia, which for years refused to share Soviet documents about the site, has been more forthcoming, he said.

“The danger that Russia is keeping something from us has been diminished,” he said.

With the Soviet collapse, poverty and disorder lapped at the edges of the Semipalatinsk Test Site, still littered with radioactive hazards.

Activity ended so abruptly that a nuclear device lowered into one tunnel in preparation for a test sat unexploded until 1995, when technicians managed to destroy it without creating a nuclear reaction, according to the National Nuclear Center.

View the original article here

Fundamentally: Tech Stocks May Become an Unlikely Haven

THE stock market has been fighting an army of economic worries — including slowing economic growth and corporate earnings, a weakening dollar and what until last week were surging oil prices.

For the most part, investors have been so focused on the excellent performance of individual companies that they’ve been willing to overlook these threats. But with first-quarter earnings season nearing an end, “the market will refocus from the micro- to the macroeconomic picture,” says Jeffrey N. Kleintop, chief market strategist at LPL Financial. And once that happens, he contends, the view won’t be as rosy.

If economic head winds strengthen — a distinct possibility — some strategists say the market could shift in meaningful ways. For starters, stocks could suffer their first major pullback or correction since last spring, when fears over Europe’s fiscal crisis dominated the news. At the same time, technology stocks, which have been laggards this year, could become a favored sector if they benefit from some of the same forces that trouble other parts of the market.

Right now, the broad market’s performance is “approaching too-good-to-be-true status,” said Brian G. Belski, chief investment strategist at Oppenheimer. Historically, equity prices tend to move in anticipation of corporate earnings growth, which tends to recover before the broad economy does, Mr. Belski said. “Well, in the last two years, we’ve seen the market double and a huge rebound in profits,” he said. “Yet it remains to be seen if the economy will follow through and deliver on its part.”

Last month, the Commerce Department reported that gross domestic product grew at a slower-than-anticipated annual rate of 1.8 percent in the first quarter, down from 3.1 percent at the end of 2010.

David C. Wright, managing director of Sierra Investment Management, said he was particularly worried that high food and fuel costs were making it hard for consumers to spend much on anything else. He said he was also concerned that despite economic worries, stocks are more expensive than they’ve been in years, leaving little room for error. Based on 10-year average earnings, the stock market’s price-to-earnings ratio is currently more than 23, versus the long-term average of 16. The last time the ratio was this high was in late 2007, at the start of the last bear market.

By contrast, tech stocks are significantly less frothy than they’ve been in years. Historically, shares of technology companies have traded at about a 30 percent premium to the broad market, based on their P/E ratios. That’s because tech companies have traditionally enjoyed faster earnings growth than other types of businesses. Today, however, technology’s P/E is on par with that of the overall Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index.

Yet tech is still exhibiting solid earnings growth. I.B.M., Apple and Intel were among several tech giants that have recently reported better-than-expected first-quarter profits. Intel’s results — which included a 25 percent jump in revenue — were particularly embraced by Wall Street, as they were viewed as a sign that demand for hardware like PCs may be stronger than anticipated.

Over all, tech sector earnings are on track to climb 25 percent in the first quarter, while revenue is expected to jump 15 percent, according to Thomson Reuters. By comparison, profits for the S.& P. 500 are expected to grow 18 percent, while sales predicted to climb 9 percent.

Earnings aren’t the only area where some tech businesses are financially healthier than the typical S.& P. 500 company, said Robert E. Turner, chief investment officer at Turner Investment Partners, a money management firm in Berwyn, Pa. For one thing, big tech companies are sitting on billions of dollars in cash, which they are starting to use to raise dividends and make acquisitions. Recently, Texas Instruments announced plans to buy a rival, National Semiconductor, for $6.5 billion — representing more than a 70 percent premium to what the stock had been trading for.

Despite a surprising uptick in operating expenses recently reported by Google, tech companies in general are doing a better job of keeping their costs under control. In fact, according to Deutsche Bank, tech is one of only three market categories where expenses as a percentage of sales have been falling over the past five years. (The others are health care and consumer staples.)

Even if energy prices resume their rise, analysts note that technology companies aren’t likely to be hurt as much as other parts of the market because oil isn’t as large a component of expenses as it is in sectors like the industrials or transportation.

At the same time, tech spending could actually benefit if oil prices rise, because other companies and consumers are likely to look for ways to improve productivity and lower expenses. That may mean a jump in investment in technology.

Mr. Turner noted that the two biggest drivers of tech growth these days are mobile computing and — despite the recent outage at Amazon’s data centers — so-called cloud computing, where companies offload costly computer applications and data storage to servers run by third parties like Amazon and Microsoft.

Both mobile technology and cloud computing “are all about improving efficiency and cost savings,” Mr. Turner said.

Yet some of the companies that stand to benefit from this trend, like Microsoft, Intel and Cisco Systems, are trading at P/E ratios of 10 or less, based on projected earnings.

“I have a bit of trouble understanding why they’re so cheap,” he said.

Paul J. Lim is a senior editor at Money magazine. E-mail: fund@nytimes.com.

View the original article here