Globalclashes

Traveling with a Nigerian passport

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in the Financial Times on the difficulties of Traveling with a Nigerian passport and getting an American visa:

I have many stories of travel on my own Nigerian passport. The immigration official in Copenhagen was convinced I was a prostitute, for example, because there had been a recent influx of Nigerian sex workers into Denmark and I was travelling alone on a Nigerian passport. I have learned to laugh at these stories, and to use them as dinner party anecdotes. Of the people who will potentially interview me at embassies and airports, I always hope that they haven’t fought with their lover that morning, that they don’t have a headache or a bad back or PMS, and that they have never received one of those poorly-spelled bank advance e-mails from a Nigerian pretending to be a government official because in my experience these, even more than whether I have the proper documents, will determine my luck.
Years ago, my mother, who had visited the US in the past, was inexplicably refused an American visa to attend my sister’s wedding; it was not at all likely that the mother of the bride would become a dependant of the American state as she had a good, long-term university job in Nigeria and her daughter worked as a physician in America. Her mouth still tightens whenever she looks at photographs from the wedding.
It is no doubt a difficult job to have to deal with so many visa applicants, some of whom must be obnoxious, but that a person can, by doing their job so poorly, cause the kind of aching sadness that has great emotional significance in people’s lives requires a greater sense of responsibility in some visa interviewers.
In the endless American public debates on how to handle illegal immigration, much has been made – and rightly so – about how important it is for immigrants to apply the right way and “get in line.” Perhaps immigration reform should also involve looking at the realities of that line, and should ensure that visa issues to people from countries on the economic periphery of the world are not based on the caprices of the visa officer but instead follow clear rules. Talk about one way to bolster America’s soft power.

Child-like culture

hummh:

As Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher represented a child’s vision of strong political leadership (‘the smack of firm government’), Michael Jackson perfectly embodied a child’s eye view of sophistication.

Total trust in power

Sugary excerpt of the day:

Even now, defenders of Obama's preventive detention policy (i.e., indefinitely imprisoning people with no charges) insist that this is necessary because those in Guantanamo are "too dangerous to release" and we cannot convict them in a real court.  What's their basis for believing that people who have been convicted of absolutely nothing are nonetheless "too dangerous to release"?  The Government -- our trusted leaders -- claim it's true, so it must be. 

Change, bling, and fitness to lead

The Guardian Editorial on Berlusconi, Bling, Italy, and the G8 Summit:

Mr Berlusconi is the symptom but not necessarily the entire cause of his country's drift. Italians are not scandalised by him. They are dismayed about being criticised in the foreign press as a result of his antics, but they are not calling for the man himself to go.
Other European countries have coped with charismatic populists. France had a heavy dose of Nicolas Sarkozy in his bling phase, until the French said "ça suffit" and the president changed tack. But that is not happening in an Italy which secretly admires the agility of its leaders in escaping from the tightest of political corners. Until Italians start demanding serious standards from their leaders, the country is perhaps not the best venue for serious world summits.

I'm not buying it and I'm puzzled that all that the Guardian finds wrong with Berlusconi is his bling and clownesque behavior when his different times as the prime minister of Italy has shown that they are just a side show designed to distract attention away from his politics and policies. It is ridiculous to focus on Berlusconi the clown because such a distraction enables him to flirt shamelessly with Neo-Fascism groups and to concentrate his power while entertaining Italy and the world.

Minor n'important quoi

I like Jennifer Hudson, which surprises me because I have stopped liking RnB. She has something, which makes her universally likable and she isn't over the top. I watched her performance on the MJ thing ( I don't know how to call it, but I don't want to disrespect it either) yesterday and it was just right.

Illiberalism and the ban of the Burka

For some reason I can't seem to stop quoting Norm Geras or even to disagree with him so I will stop trying especially when he is expressing perfectly my sentiments on France, and its potential ban of the Burqa:

(...) Banning the burka itself is an indirect way of getting rid of such coercion, and the cost to individual freedom, the freedom of those who wear the burka by choice, is a price that must be paid - by them. OK. Then say that - but acknowledging the illiberal nature of the measure, illiberalism for the greater good so to speak. And, even saying it, one must first produce the evidence that amongst women wearing the burka the proportions are as they need to be, between those forced or pressured and those who wear it by choice. If these proportions aren't heavily weighted in the direction of establishing that there is coercion at work, then Oliver and others of his view have no case.
Another question that I'll just mention in passing. Does the law need to intervene in this matter at all? Why may it not be dealt with by the influence of education, social criticism and the like? Many in Western societies find it an obstruction to interacting with people if their faces are hidden. There is nothing to stop those who feel this way from expressing their preference as and when appropriate.

Second-hand grief

I agree with Roy MacGregor on this:

They have written scholarly books and journals on the outpouring of grief that followed the assassination of John Lennon and the accidental death of Princess Diana in that Paris automobile accident.
Both may pale, however, depending on what happens today in Los Angeles, where Michael Jackson, who could find no rest on earth, will be said to have finally found peace. In truth, it will be nothing of the kind – his brothers already spatting over whether to involve religion in the hockey-rink memorial and police concerned that the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of fans who find themselves without “tickets” to the funeral will attempt to storm the Staples Center.
No one fully comprehends what it is that makes certain people more upset about the death of a celebrity they have never met than they might be over the passing of a grandparent. Some experts have speculated that this faux mourning, or long-distance mourning, whatever it might be called, is actually the mourner mourning some aspect of themselves.
(...)The truly incredible thing about long-distance mourning is that it seems, somehow, to make people feel good about themselves rather than badly for themselves, as in the case of a death of someone truly in the family.
It’s an easy, and largely harmless, emotional hit – you see a far smaller version of it around baggage carousels in large airports, where voyeurs will openly stare at a teary reunion, simply imagining what such joy or sorrow must feel like.
And, of course, there is always the chance that you or your handwritten note or even your bouquet of flowers will appear on television – thereby proving you were a legitimate part of the event.

The real clowns

Stanley Fish has a great article on the resignations of Mark Sanford and of Sarah Palin and the way Journalists are covering them. It is a must-read because it shows that it is impossible to cover the circus without becoming a part of it. As I said last fall, I like Sarah Palin just as I like Obama and Sarkozy for that matter (I was never able to hate Bush because I believe that he wasn't the issue, that his politics were), after all, how can you not like people who work so hard at being liked and who believe that they have a destiny. However, the fact that I like Palin isn't enough for me to ever vote for her, for them because politics isn't about liking or hating the politicians, it isn't about the personal, it is about the beef not the  syrupy fluff, which is what the media seems to think that it is. It is sad that in era when seriousness is needed, the world is dominated by the politics of me where politicians believe that being liked, beloved, venerated is everything. To come back to Palin, it was sad for me to see how easy it became/is for people, women especially to hate her/ despise her as if she didn't have the right to exist, as if she is an abomination, as if the only possible way to fight her ideology is to smack her down as manly guys mount a bitch in heat to remind her that she was only created for one thing, to be taken and to be bred.

Change you can believe in

Aah, chassez le naturel:

Sarkozy said he would no longer reply sarcastically to the newspaper editor who provoked him at a press conference, “not only because of my respect for the person in question, but because of my concept of my function . . . When one is president of the republic, one is never right to be aggressive. I think of it constantly.”
The old Sarkozy was determined to impose a “rupture” in French mentalities and habits. The new Sarkozy says: “I must take account of criticism, of difficulties and failings, try to do better. I want to carry out reforms by seeking broad acceptance, by developing discussion. I’m listening. I’m learning. Perhaps I’m making progress.”
(... )Commentators are unanimous in attributing the new, improved image to Carla Bruni Sarkozy. Le Nouvel Observateur did not ask Sarkozy about Bruni’s influence, perhaps because Denis Olivennes, the director of the magazine and an ex-boyfriend of the first lady, was one of two journalists who conducted the interview.
In an interview last year, Bruni told this correspondent that her husband “is not very aggressive. He’s impulsive”. She is a great believer in correcting character flaws through psychoanalysis. Thanks to Bruni, Sarkozy has reportedly abandoned the worst of French pop culture to read Borges and watch film classics by Kubrick, Chaplin and Capra. He has invited Woody Allen and Michel Houellebecq to the Élysée Palace.

I'm counting the seconds until this change lasts and I can't wait to hear Obama say that he has grown or rather evolved for after all he does't have any reason to sing the I have change pitiful tune for now America and the world love him while they are weary of my Sarko.

On vengeance and justice

I find Norm Geras's following point on vengeance and justice thought-provoking:

(...) justice is not exhausted by the aim of retribution, by its punitive purpose. It must pay attention to the possible rehabilitation of the wrongdoer. Furthermore retribution, and therefore the retributive element within remedial justice, is not the same as revenge. The desiderata of proportionality and, where appropriate, mitigation mean that just punishment may not be excessive, where revenge sometimes is excessive. It 'may' not be, in the sense both that it isn't justified if it's disproportionate and so must not be, and that in certain circumstances it is permitted to be less severe even than what would be proportionate and so could well be.

Last week, I wrote that I thought that the Madoff's sentence wasn't punitive. What I meant wasn't that he should have received more time in jail, but rather that the condemnation didn't punish his crime in the sense that it was inadequate and that it didn't serve any purpose other than to shatter the few years that he has on earth. The American system of justice is so obsessed with the idea of retribution that it focuses rarely on doing the right thing or rather on incorporating other ideas such as remedial and reformative justice in its sentencing on the people found guilty. I don't think that that Madoff spending the rest of his life in justice accomplishes anything moreover, I think it jut shows that America doesn't know how to deal with his crime and encourages that the idea that white collar crimes are crimes that can pay.

Kouchner, the Anglo-Saxon problem, and international politics

Christophe Caldwell reviews Pierre Péan's book on Bernard Kouchner, France's "Foreign Minister" Le Monde selon K:

Throughout the book, nothing is cast in a more nefarious light than the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ aspect of Kouchner’s ideology. Péan quotes an old friend of Kouchner’s saying: ‘He often says he wishes he were born American.’ He places Kouchner’s Rwanda diplomacy in the context of post-Cold War ‘operations of Anglo-Saxon reconquest’. He faults Kouchner and John Garang, the leader of the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement, for undermining a joint Franco-Sudanese strategy to counter ‘Anglo-Saxon expansionism in the region’ in the early 1990s. He sees a ‘total convergence of Kouchner’s actions in the Balkans with those of the Americans’.
The ‘Anglo-Saxon’ problem has less to do with capitalism than with foreign policy, although Péan does make a connection between the two. He approvingly quotes Humanité’s description of the American world order as ‘the right of the rich and powerful to set themselves up as international policemen’. But he believes the main US (or Anglo-Saxon) goal is ‘to fragment those territories and nation-states still standing, to chop up their spheres of influence and retribalise their populations’, in order to remove rivals to its hegemony. The American empire, for him, is like the Empire in Star Wars: any member of a local population who thinks its influence a good thing for his country is a fool, a coward or a traitor.
But there is a very different way of looking at the role Kouchner has played in the spread of US hegemony. Very few of the people described in their own countries as ‘lackeys’ and ‘poodles’ of the US new world order appear that way to Americans. (This includes Tony Blair.) Like it or not, Kouchner’s co-operation with the US has not meant knuckling under to US military might, but rather borrowing it for European purposes, which are often idealistic ones. Consider the interviews Kouchner gave this spring about France’s reintegration into Nato. Full membership, he told Le Figaro, allows France to get in on the planning stage of the kinds of operation – Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan – that it would join anyway. Furthermore, it would let Europeans ‘more easily conduct foreign operations without the agreement or the participation of the Americans’.
(...)As Paul Berman put it a few years ago: ‘If Kouchner was doing a good thing by sailing the seas of East Asia in a rented ship with six doctors . . . why stop there?’ Putting human rights first leads to a much more intimate military engagement with the world’s danger zones than most citizens of democracies would think prudent. It also leads to a depoliticisation of military operations in the first place. Although it is not always easy to tell what the French mean when they use the word ‘neoconservatism’, Péan is quite right to say that neoconservatism is merely Kouchnerism taken to its logical conclusions.

I have to admit that I'm puzzled and disappointed by Kouchner. As Common, a good rapper, would say I used to love him but now I don't dislike him or even disrespect the choices that he has made, I questioned because it forces me to rethink this idea that I had that he understood nuance and principles and believed that there are things that politicians cannot threat on even for power or rather especially for power. I didn't like Pierre Péan's book because his tone implied that Kouchner was an unsavory character and that his contradictions made him vile. I think the picture is more complex. I wish that it was but it is. I think that Kouchner is in an epitome of the fact that it is difficult in politics to be faithful especially if fidelity and  loyalty aren't rewarded. What strikes about the views of Kouchner and Paul Berman (sometimes Bernard-Henri Lévy) is that they make every single decision on the international scenes a moral one, which often separates the world between good and evil without acknowledging shades of gray. I think that an obsession with goodness more often than not leads to catastrophes after all, the road to hell is...

Quality of life

I had a great Fourth of July Weekend ! It reminded me how important it is to turn off my laptop sometimes and to relax. Sometimes less is more.

Wanton up!

I'm taking the long weekend off. I'm just going to be a physical being. I will eat, drink a lot of wine (a lot of Chablis), read some French and spanish poetry, watch a few movies, and enjoy all the pleasures of the flesh imaginable and even unimaginable. See you Monday if I don't die if I don't die of pleasure!

Attention grabber

Ah, ah, ah, and ah:

Say what you like about Nicolas Sarkozy, he certainly knows how to capture your attention.  At a meeting in the Elysée Palace last week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it appears that the French president recommended in no uncertain terms that Avigdor Lieberman, the hardline foreign minister, should be dropped from the Israeli cabinet and replaced with Tzipi Livni, the less abrasive opposition leader.

The sky has fallen

I'm dealing with a lot of crappy thing, excuse my French. So I will blog irregularly for a while. I mean hell when you starts getting dirt on your shoulders, it just invites more problems.

Punitive sentences

Bernie Madoff is getting over 100 years in jail. Somehow, this sentence just feels shallows to me . It isn't punitive. It doesn't even serve as deterrent for all the crooks out there. After all, if you can steal billions of dollars, live the life of a super-rich most of your life and then just spend your old age in jail, why wouldn't want to be Madoff and try to f**k, beat the system?

Quilibet audendi potestas

I'm daring to take some time off this week-end. I'm braindead...

Too much

I believe that in our time the hardest thing to find is balance. Everybody is talking about Michael Jackson and the media is, of course, one more time, overdoing it, because it's the only thing that it knows how to do in these cases. The saddest thing  is that you realize very quickly that the show is about something else and that the deceased has been depersonified, objectified and that the feelings expressed by individuals who are, often too exhibistionistic or too manipulative (which doesn't mean necessarily that they are insincere) , are about the ones expressing them not the person who died. Tragedies don't have to become spectacles.

Love, weddings, marriage and other catastrophes

I agree with Jessa Crispin on this:

Marriage has freaked me out since I received a proposal at the age of 21 from a nice young man who didn’t see why I needed to work. My mouth said, “Umm, I need to think about it;” my brain said, “Run.” Ever since that event, I have fled all the men who prefer to set up a house, packing my bags the second he starts hinting about rings. It’s a difficult position to take in a culture so marriage obsessed. Let me rephrase that: Wedding obsessed. Engagement ring obsessed. Proposing on top of the Empire State Building obsessed. The crushing need to find that man, get that ring, and pick a date permeates movies, books, television, and the commercials. Even in that horrible Sex and the City movie, after one attempt at a wedding goes awry, our heroic couple reunites to wonder why they needed to get married in the first place. Couldn’t they just be together? The sentiment only lasts a moment, and then they’re off to the altar again.
And a wedding is the assumed goal of any love story. You can be one of those crazy couples together for 10 years, but when you fall in love, those around you immediately start asking when you’ll get married. Yet never has marriage seemed less appealing. Divorce is not only probable, but expected, to the point that the cynical phrase “starter marriage” has entered our vocabulary. The great love stories of our time are tabloid wedding photos of celebrities, everything airbrushed and shiny and choreographed to the last second. The same tabloids will stop at nothing to find cracks in the marriage only a few issues later, and will shame and pity a divorced or single woman until that rock is on her finger. It’s love as business arrangement, as item on a checklist, as social conformity.

I can see things clearly now

Now that Jonathan Chait has figured Obama out (hat tip: Norm Geras), everything makes sense. I get it just like those cavemen in the Geico commercials do:

Obama began his presidency by elaborately courting the opposition party. Republicans in Congress believed that, by flamboyantly withholding cooperation, they could deny Obama his stated goal of bipartisan harmony and thus render him a failure. Instead, they wound up handing Obama the alternative victory of appearing to be the reasonable party. Polls showed that the public, by overwhelming margins, believed that Obama was trying to work with Republicans and that Republicans were not reciprocating.
Likewise, by defusing the complaint among Islamists that the United States disrespects their religion, Obama can more easily force the Iranian leadership to negotiate on the terms of its stated goals. This is actually "a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers," as American Prospect editor Mark Schmitt wrote in 2007. "One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in," Schmitt explained, "treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem."
This apparent paradox is one reason Obama's political identity has eluded easy definition. On the one hand, you have a disciple of the radical community organizer Saul Alinsky turned ruthless Chicago politician. On the other hand, there is the conciliatory post-partisan idealist. The mistake here is in thinking of these two notions as opposing poles. In reality it's all the same thing. Obama's defining political trait is the belief that conciliatory rhetoric is a ruthless strategy.