The Republic of Dissent

There isn't such a thing as a racist nation

Bradley Burston confesses his biases and his suspicions against Germany in Haaretz. He admits that although that his feelings against Germany aren’t rational, he can’t help, but wonder whether there is something intrinsic within that country, which leads to racism and to genocide:

I have had the true pleasure of getting to know many Germans who have visited and worked here in Israel. I found them to be lovely people, people of humor and intellect and sensitivity, of ethics and good-heartedness. They're no different from anyone else.
Yet, somewhere very deep inside, I still blame their country for what happened to my people. And if I blame their country, I blame them too.
The perceptive will note that in trying not to forget, I have managed not to forgive. Moreover, I don't believe that I am alone in this.
All those years ago, when I was learning to drive, there were adults who insisted that they would never buy a German car, never use a German camera, never fly Lufthansa. "The Volkswagen was Hitler's baby," they would tell me. "Mercedes? The fuhrer rode them in parades. Porsche? Ferdinand Porsche designed the Beetle." (…) I know all this, and yet my suspicion of Germany, my inability to reconcile, remain. They surfaced this week, when I went to see Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others), the Oscar-winning German film, which suggested to me that in some respects the East German regime, formally the antithesis of Nazism, was in fact its direct heir. (…) Is there something cultural about Germany that allowed Nazism to construct a genocide apparatus of unrivaled efficacy? Perhaps. But that is a question for Germans to address.

Unfortunately, too many people felt the way that Burston feels about Germany. After the Berlin Wall feel, Margaret Thatcher did everything that he could to derail the reunification of Germany because she thought that it was a dangerous and bellicose nation. French President, François Mitterrand shared her aversion, and only supported the German Reunification by making a bargaining with Helmut Kohl, the German Chancellor on European integration  to create the common market and a common currency in order to avoid Germany from becoming the only superpower in Europe. I may be incredibly naïve, I don’t think that German racism is different from other kind of racism and although, I believe that countries have cultural tendencies, I don’t believe that they determine their identities. People and culture change and history modifies behavior and societies. I’ve never viewed the Shoah as solely as part of Germany history and as a tragedy for which only Germans are responsible. After all, the Shoah happened because the world allowed it to happen and it cannot be disconnected from the European and the American history of anti-Semitism. After all, few people stood up when the Nazis were taking families from European cities to butcher them in concentration camps. Nations are made of people and although there is such a thing as human nature for after all, human beings tend to repeat certain kind of behaviors, existence precedes essence and the identity of a nation, and people evolve and change as they learn from their experience, their mistakes, and their tragic and horrific history.

Rules and exceptions and homosexuality

Dawn Stefanowicz uses her personal experience to argue not only against “gay parenting,”but also about that homosexuality is an abnormality. Stefanowicz had a terrible childhood with her dad who was gay and instable and she argues that his immoral and instable behavior was due to his homosexuality, which in turn made him a bad parent. Due to this unfortunate experience, her argument is that gays shouldn’t be parents because their homosexuality leads them to live a lifestyle that is toxic for children:

I feel sorry for kids today, because they can't even go to most counsellors or teachers without hearing the gay rights rhetoric. The professional may try to change your negative perspective about your parent's lifestyle choices as if you, as the child, have the problem. There's no really safe place to go to get help. Entering adolescence I made vows to never have children and I meant it. (…) I am in touch with many families in which about 40 children have been impacted. Many of the children have dealt with fear, anger, and depression. Without a doubt, we deal with sexuality confusion. Suicide has come up quite a bit with adolescent boys who have gay fathers. They appear to be very angry with their dad. There are insurmountable odds that these children have to face. Some of us have been exposed to pathogens. This would be expected as we are in high-risk situations that haven't even been researched yet. Our parents often die early. We have a hard time coping with the burdens we carry, while some of us don't make it and commit suicide.

The problem with Stefanowicz’s logic is that it uses one bad experienced to argue a general and definite point of view and that it ties together without proof two things by arguing that one leads to the other simply because she is seeking simple answers. In other words, the fact that there are some gays who make bad parents doesn’t mean that gays shouldn’t be parents just like the fact that some men are rapists, doesn’t mean that all men are rapists and violent.

Poetry and life

“In a concentration camp you’re not really afraid of looking crazy by talking to yourself, since everyone there has something or other affecting them. Whispering poetry to yourself or reciting it out loud lends you a sort of solitude, allows you to imagine for an instant that you belong to yourself again. It’s like therapy. In fact, the richer and more complex the poetry, the more effective. You’re in the middle of the communal bathroom, being shoved by people trying to get to the water basin. That’s a discipline you must keep up, because if you don’t wash, you let go of yourself and begin looking like a tramp. So everyone is pushing to get to the giant sinks where the water is running, and in the middle of that formidable stench, those inhumanly foul odors, you are saying, “Calm, calm, stay calm! Feel the weight of a palm”—you are reciting Paul Valéry and suddenly you are alone, autonomous, private. Of course thirty seconds later somebody knees you in the leg and you’re right back in that roiling mass of people, but for that one second you’ve managed to escape. You went deep inside yourself to find strength, and you alone know that it took incredible resourcefulness to be anything but yourself.” Jorge Semprún.

Love, marriage, money, and talent

Colm Tóibín writes about Henry James’ views of marriage, love, money as impediments to his ambitions as a writer. He argues that James’ was so conflicted about love and money that he ended up giving up on love and seeking the right balance between art and money in order to preserve the purity of his work. Sugary excerpt:

All of his life as a writer, James worried about both the purity of his work and the making of money. It was as though he himself was a married couple. One part of him cared for the fullness of art, and the other part for the fullness of the cupboard. He sought both with stubborn, steadfast zeal. Sometimes when he realised that he could not achieve one without failing the other, he argued with himself. However, he seldom gave up trying to match them. He struck hard bargains with publishers and editors. His notebooks are full of hopeful jottings of ideas that might come to full fruition not only as works of art, but as objects that would take the measure, as he called it, of the great flat foot of the public.

The argument between moral and artistic principles and between commerce and art interested James deeply, and it might have been enough for him to intensify this argument in pure drama, make it as simple as the row between a husband and a wife over the publication of a book, or the direction of a career

Morality and cultural transmission

“There is no “morality gene”: that much is certain. But morality might be “in” the genome, in that it emerges from the activity of a particular set of neurons, which in turn are created by a complex series of genetic and developmental interactions (including those with the environment), much as language is “in” our genes. Or it may simply be part of the social structure, like a particular human language, and be passively assimilated through the mere fact of growing up in that environment. The fact that all human societies share certain features, such as morality, would then be explained by the fact that all human societies, like all human beings, can trace a direct lineage back to the original small band of early Africans, some 100,000 years ago. Whatever they did – speak, paint, be moral – we still do, too, through cultural transmission.” Matthew Cobb, “Are mammals moral?”

Culture, religion, and individual choice

“Cultures and religions are not harmless concepts. They are institutions; a part of the organisation of society. Usually, people who advocate those views, reduce it to an individual level and individual choice. But in reality, culture is part of the institution of the ruling class. Religion is an establishment that practises and advocates a certain way of life. As part of society’s organisation and institution, it forms and regulates the way society functions. And various political movements and social movements intervene all the time and criticise it constantly. They try to improve or change the shape of the society that exists.

So to argue that we need to respect those institutions, effectively you are saying, keep the status quo; you don’t have the right to criticise it. However, society does that all the time. I don’t think the problem is limited to individual choice.” Fariborz Pooya.

Atheism and quietude

“We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects (even including objects in the form of one of man's most useful innovations: the bound book). To us no spot on earth is or could be "holier" than another: to the ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock, we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library or the gallery to another, or to lunch with an agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or beauty. Some of these excursions to the bookshelf or the lunch or the gallery will obviously, if they are serious, bring us into contact with belief and believers, from the great devotional painters and composers to the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Newman. These mighty scholars may have written many evil things or many foolish things, and been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no more of them today, and why there will be no more of them tomorrow. Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism, as did, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Lutheran pastor hanged by the Nazis for his refusal to collude with them. We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness.” Christopher Hitchens.

Pakistan and the Taliban

Ziauddin Sardar writes in the New Statesman about what he believes to be the Taliban takeover of Pakistan. What is frightening about Sardar’s article is that he shows that in spite or maybe because of the fact that Pakistan is an US ally in the fight against terrorism, it has become radicalized in such an extent that the Taliban and other Islamists are no longer controllable by the country’s military:

Musharraf's strategy is to contain the Taliban of Afghan and Pakistani varieties alike, while weeding out al-Qaeda jihadis, or "foreign elements", as they are known in Pakistani military circles. The foreigners are a legacy of the Soviet-Afghan war. When the war ended, many of the central Asians who came to fight the Soviets were not welcomed back in their countries. For want of an alternative, they settled in Pakistan. Most of these foreign jihadis are Uzbek. Musharraf has simply bribed the local tribes to attack and eradicate the Uzbek jihadis. The battle between Pashtun tribesmen and al-Qaeda in Wana, southern Waziristan, in which more than 200 al-Qaeda fighters and some 50 tribal fighters were killed a fortnight ago was a product of this policy.

Musharraf's problem is that the Taliban cannot be contained. The Pakistani Taliban have now acquired enough confidence to break out of Wazi ristan and NWFP into other parts of the country. "What's happening at the Lal Masjid in Islamabad is a trial run for the rest of the country," says Rahman. "If the Taliban succeed in Islamabad, they will turn Pakistan into Talibistan."

Anti-Europeanism is as dumb as anti-Americanism

The Economist has an excellent article against anti-Europeanism. It argues that anti-Europeanism is based on erroneous arguments and that more importantly, it isn’t an effective response against anti-Americanism. Sugary excerpt:

Europe-bashing is a passion of the right and the right is hardly in the political ascendant these days. The argument is based on a familiar sleight of hand: the bunching of worst-case scenarios. Do Europe's empty churches really mean that Europeans have abandoned their faith? Three-quarters of Europeans still claim to be Christians, and European sociologists talk of “believing without belonging”. Are European Muslims really poised to take over Europe? They constitute only 4% of the population and come from very diverse backgrounds. Have European countries really lost the will to assimilate newcomers? Several countries have introduced citizenship tests and ceremonies that are modelled on the American variety.

But anti-Europeanism is influential nonetheless. The end of the cold war has removed the glue that held the Western alliance together. The Iraq war has left a legacy of bitterness that extends beyond the Bushies. And the anti-Europeans have an important resource on their side: their disproportionate interest in matters European and their disproportionate willingness to publish books on them. American anti-Europeans have produced a steady stream of books with titles like “America Alone”, “Our Oldest Enemy”, “While Europe Slept”, “The West's Last Chance”. The foreign-policy specialists to whom one might look for a corrective are much more involved with other challenges, like the Middle East and Asia.

Questions of faith

Evil and normalcy

Sasha Abramsky reviews Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. He shows that evil is democratic and that all of us have the ability to do evil acts and to ignore them. In order words, what matters more often than not is the situation, within which a person finds oneself and not its character. Sugary excerpt:

In the second section, the study's relevance for our understanding of Abu Ghraib is explained. Essentially, Zimbardo argues it's futile to blame a "few bad apples" when a situation has been created that puts a premium on certain forms of violence and cruelty. Don't blame the character of the torturers, he writes, blame the situation they're thrust into. Or, to use his own metaphor, it's not bad apples in a good barrel, rather it's good apples being corrupted by a bad barrel. If Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld declare the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the war on terror; if intelligence officials start waterboarding, beating, and even killing suspects; and if military officers such as Geoffrey Miller -- the man who made torture the norm in Guantanamo -- visit Iraq and urge a toughening-up of the treatment of detainees, nobody, Zimbardo eloquently argues, should be surprised at the acts that then unfolded on Tiers 1A and 1B of Abu Ghraib.

Finally, as something of a feel-good ending, Zimbardo concludes with a chapter on heroes, trying to identify what makes some people refuse to go along with the crowd when the easiest thing for them to do would be to act complicit in harmful activity.

Zimbardo is, perhaps, not a master of narrative writing, but his book is nevertheless an extraordinarily valuable addition to the literature of the psychology of violence or "evil."

Masculine, feminine

“What I call a masculine way of thinking is not confined to men and does not apply to all men. It is a way of perceiving the world in terms of the essentials and stripping away the decorative and the dross. This way of thinking can be seen in Florence Nightingale’s reports and statistical analyses. The feminine way of thinking, which again does not apply to all women, is made up of myriad observations, thoughts and feelings, with constant interruptions and changes in what is being attended to, often with details to the fore and the wider picture ignored. Not all women who think in a feminine way are as self-centred as my mother was. Most women are interested in all the people they encounter in their life and through the media, though the wider world doesn’t always catch their attention. The feminine way of thinking grew out of domestic settings in which women had a multitude of overlapping tasks, usually involving people, and where they had little control over their situation. Many men who think in a masculine way make one major error. This is that, when engaged in interpreting a situation in which people are involved, they disregard how these people interpret their situation. Men who make this mistake fail to understand that what determines our behaviour isn’t what happens to us but how we each interpret what happens to us, and that no two people ever see anything exactly the same way. Thus a girl may learn from her father how to see the essentials but, if he does not understand that an individual’s perception of a situation is an essential, the girl is likely to be as inept in dealing with people as many men are. On the other hand, if her father shows her how essential it is to understand how other people think, she acquires the great skill of combining clarity of thought with compassion.” Dorothy Rowe, “The Triumph of Daddy’s Girl.”

America and its melting pot's identity

Harvard Magazine has an essay wondering if the melting pot metaphor is no longer a viable one to apply to the United States given its current immigration situation. The autor of the essay Ashley Pettus shows the current immigrant’s experience is much difference from the one of those who made the United States a melting pot and that nowadays immigrants are facing more challenges not only to realize the American dream by succeeding economically, but to integrate American society. Sugary excerpt:

At the turn of the twentieth century, America faced a profound crisis of identity. Streams of Europeans who didn’t look, sound, or behave like Americans crowded into chaotic city neighborhoods and took on low-paying, often dangerous jobs. While industrialists profited, a growing clamor of anti-immigrant voices accused foreigners of lowering wages, threatening the social order, and undermining the country’s racial standards.

The subsequent story of European assimilation offers a message of hope and caution for contemporary times. Between the 1920s and the 1970s the mainstream expanded to absorb new elements. The boundaries of “otherness” shifted far enough so that Italian-Americans could afford to rediscover their “ethnic roots” from their secure position as fully “white” Americans.

It’s too soon to tell whether newer immigrant groups will make a similar journey from the margins to the center of American society. Some clearly have already forged upward paths by gaining access to higher education and leaving their parents’ enclaves behind. But for many others, the future will largely depend on the success of policy efforts to slow the tide of immigration and address the hard realities at the bottom rungs of the economy

Misandry and feminism

The Times of London has a worth-reading and short letter from a reader, who responded to Jean Bethke Elshtain’s review of Legalizing Misandry written by Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young, which agreed with the thesis that men were now the persecuted sex. Here is the part, which I like best not because I agree with it, but because I think that it makes a legitimate point:

“Every movement, and particularly if it is fighting injustice, tends to attract extremists, and the feminist movement is no exception. But it is also true that sexual harassment in the workplace, domestic violence, job discrimination and rape are still severe problems that are by no means rare. To argue that men are now the persecuted sex and at a disadvantage compared to women borders on the delusional.”

Idiots, ideology, and responsibility

Alvaro Vargas Llosa writes about the return to power of “Latin American Idiots” who are “political leaders who clung to ill-conceived political myths despite evidence to the contrary.” Llosa argues that although young Latin American Idiots are in touch with their time, they are still political ideologues who have no interest in pragmatism or with reality. Latin American Idiots believe that the economic and political situation of their countries caused by the schemes of diabolical and blood thirsty imperialists and this worldview makes them heroes because they believe that they are fighting powerful forces. Sugary excerpt:

For these young Idiots, Latin America’s condition is the result of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism, followed by U.S. imperialism. These basic beliefs provide a safety valve for their grievances against a society that offers scant opportunity for social mobility. Freud might say they have deficient egos that are unable to mediate between their instincts and their idea of morality. Instead, they suppress the notion that predation and vindictiveness are wrong and rationalize their aggressiveness with elementary notions of Marxism.

Latin American Idiots have traditionally identified themselves with caudillos, those larger-than-life authoritarian figures who have dominated the region’s politics, ranting against foreign influence and republican institutions. Two leaders in particular inspire today’s Idiot: President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and President Evo Morales of Bolivia. Chávez is seen as the perfect successor to Cuba’s Fidel Castro (whom the Idiot also admires): He came to power through the ballot box, which exonerates him from the need to justify armed struggle, and he has abundant oil, which means he can put his money where his mouth is when it comes to championing social causes. The Idiot also credits Chávez with the most progressive policy of all—putting the military, that paradigm of oligarchic rule, to work on social programs. […] The current revival of the Latin American Idiot has precipitated the return of his counterparts: the patronizing American and European Idiots. Once again, important academics and writers are projecting their idealism, guilty consciences, or grievances against their own societies onto the Latin American scene, lending their names to nefarious populist causes.

Llosa’s article puzzles me because the phrase “Latin American Idiots” freezes the debate by debasing it to a third grade level. Calling Chávez and his compadres idiots does not just delegitimate them, but more importantly, it takes them off the hook because after an idiot doesn’t know any better because he follows simply his nature by acting idiotically. Is there injusticein the world? Yes. Are many countries given a raw deal because of the faults of the system? No question, but the real question is whether it means that politics should  become religions that should be contended in denouncing the faults of human beings and the sad state of the world, dividing the world between good and evil, without ever being trying to change the world. Marx called religion the opiate of the masses and the fact that Chávez and others are feeding their people  ideology instead of governing proves that they are very consicious of it.

Obnoxiousness and lawyering

The Village Voice has an entertaining piece Kenny Heller, whom it calls the most obnoxious lawyer in New York City. Heller has been disbarred for his behavior and has even being tried and being in jailed for his behavior. Sugary excerpt:

In 1993, an ex-girlfriend accused him of rape, but the Manhattan D.A. didn't pursue it after Heller had been arrested and initially charged with sexual abuse, according to court records. Heller turned around and twice sued the woman and her sister for false arrest, slander, libel (because the sister sent a note on a returned box of candy Heller sent, stating, "Due to the fact that you raped my sister, my mother will not be accepting gifts from you") and "conspiracy to defame and destroy [Heller's] reputation as an attorney." The first lawsuit sought $60 million from the ex-girlfriend and $40 million from her sister. The second lawsuit sought $400 million. The ex-girlfriend's attorney claimed the lawsuits were "designed solely to harass" and produced a letter Heller wrote to her stating that he would halt all legal action against her if she would agree to speak to him again. Years later, the cases were dropped. […]Such tactics don't necessarily doom a lawyer. Behavior, however, can do it. Ed Hayes, the model for tough-guy lawyer Tommy Killian in The Bonfire of the Vanities, says of Heller, "If he was a little bit more affable, he could have been a major power in this city. . . . But he's not affable."

I think that the point that people refuse to get when it comes to lawyers is the following, obnoxious people don’t make good lawyers but that they make obnoxious lawyers.

Keep on keeping on

“I do not believe that, just because the Bush administration has bungled the promoting of democracy, we should abandon the very idea of democracy promotion. The United States is too powerful to be a neutral entity—a giant Switzerland with no influence on anybody else. If we in the United States are not promoting democracy, we will end up willy-nilly promoting something nondemocratic, which will either have to be dictatorship (the policy of the previous sixty years) or chaos (the result that we have actually achieved). Therefore we had better promote democracy.” Paul Berman.

The invisible man behind the Invisible Man

Mathew Perry reviews, in Book Forum, Arnold Rampersad’s new biography of Ralph Ellison titled simply Ralph Ellison: A biography. Perry talks about Ellison, his stubbornness and his strong belief in what Sartre called Litterature engagée, which is the principle that writers have the obligation to commit to a cause other than simply literature. Sugary excerpt:

Fifteen years before, he had put his invisible man down a hole in an attempt, he said in his 1953 National Book Award speech, "to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth-century fiction." Throughout the '60s and '70s, as intellectuals and writers clenched their fists and took to the barricades, Ellison appealed hopefully to America's literary past as a way to transcend the country's racial fractures and ferocious contests of identity.
His stubborn faith in that tradition was breathtaking. Some were baffled by what they saw as his scholarly aloofness; others were outraged. (During his life, he was accused of all kinds of things: of not writing protest fiction à la Richard Wright, of being too cozy with whites, of spurning the civil rights movement.) But to Ellison, being engaged did not mean marching in the streets. Operating in the higher frequencies of culture, Ellison, in scores of essays and talks, commemorated the synthetic genius of the American vernacular style and the moral vision of a cherished group of writers—Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane—who both nourished his growth as an artist and provided the seeds for democratic renewal. Whatever America's social and political strain, the work of Ellison's literary heroes pointed beyond the impasse. "These writers," he said, "suggested possibilities, courses of action, stances against chaos."

I read Ellison’s Invisible Man in the 11^th grade and I hated it. Now, I understand why. I think that Ralph Ellison became a writer because he thought that literature was the most effective form of social activism and because he believed that racism and segregation were first and foremost cultural issues. The trouble with this point of view is that it makes the temptation to transcend literature hard to resist. At the end of his life, Sartre gave in to this temptation by believing blindly in the benevolent nature of communism, which led him to distribute tracts from le Parti Communiste Français in the streets of Paris. Ellison, I believe, also fell into that trap because he didn’t understand to engage or rather to lead to social activism literature must not just be, but that it has to be great and to stand on its own merits.

Fundamentalists and Rape

Australia's Daily Telegraph has a story on a Muslim who has just been condemned for raping a woman to punish because she was reading the bible. I can already hear the exclamation of those who will say that Islam caused, but unlike them, this story gives me pause because it indicates that religious fundamentalism can an excuse for rape. I don’t think that there are many men who can rape on command, but I do think that many exist, who can used absolute values to justifies the unjustifiable.  In other words, that this man would have found a reason to rape the victim no matter what and that he would have found any justification to do it and to try to get away with it. I don’t make any difference between “fundamentalist rapists”according to their religion, meaning that to me the actions of this man are as condemnable as the ones of the Polygamist and alleged rapist Warren Jeffs. What I find most disturbing is the fact that communities exist where rape is acceptable for traditional reasons.

Duras, Ballet, and style

Lee Rourke has a creative and intriguing review of Gwendoline Riley’s new novel, Joshua Spassky, which makes me want to read it (unfortunately, it won’t be out in the US until the end of May). He compares Riley’s writing to Marguerite Duras by making the following metaphor:

The writing of Gwendoline Riley, to me at least, is more like Marguerite Duras in ballet Shoes: like Marguerite Duras Gwendoline Riley knows what to leave behind, what to resist, to ignore; she knows that writing is much stronger for this; she realises that the spaces between the words matter — she is fearless, brave enough to turn her back, to deliver her own idea of contemporary Literature, and, more importantly, because of this remarkable maturity her prose, like Marguerite Duras’, is as delicate in movement as a ballet dancer’s.

Marguerite Duras wrote what I think was the best novel of the last century, L’Amant (The Lover). It was an exquisite book, which I think change French literature by showing it that it can be elegant and refine without being snobbish and old-fashioned. Therefore, if Rourke’s metaphor is accurate then Riley must be a delightful writer.

The New Humanism and apologies

“What the New Humanism isn't about is the intellectual self-confidence that calls a spade a spade and faulty judgment faulty. Intellectualism is unkind. Smart is mean. Spirited debate may incur feelings of low self-esteem, especially among the losers. But then, dumb is dangerous - in life, art, and politics. Never mind that it's religion that encourages blind agreement and intellectual submission, or that what we look back on as "the enlightenment" was forged in the fires of the bitterest scholarly debates the West had ever seen, or that thousands of very, very bright men and women learned what being sorry meant because their apologies were extracted from them through violence to reason and conscience. Never mind the robust intellectualism of old humanists - a Huxley, a Dewey, a Santayana, a Lippmann, What would a New Humanist make of Lippmann's comparison of an average voter to a theater-goer walking into a play in the middle of the third act and leaving before the last curtain? Should he apologize to hoi polloi? Or Russell on the same theme: "Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man." Elitism. Pure elitism. We should apologize for that.” R Joseph Hoffmann, “An Essay on Man: A Trumpet Blast Against the "New" Humanism.”

Divorce, mothers, and New York City

New York magazine has a worth-reading article about the tribulations of divorced or rather of soon to be divorced mothers in New York City. The article focuses on the experience of a soon to be divorced mother, who finds that people’s responses to her new situation go from piety, solicitude, and ostracism. What makes the article interesting is that it shows that societal attitudes toward women are divorced or who will still hasn’t evolved as much as it should have in a city as avant-garde as New York City. Reading it made me wonder how difficult it must to be divorced mother in other cities, which are not as progressive as New York City. Sugary excerpt:

I once wrote an entire book about how one shouldn’t reach for easy feminist interpretations of the world. And yet, even to me it seems that there is some residual sexism at work: While a woman outside of marriage is still considered a vulnerable and troubling figure, a man is granted a higher measure of autonomy. My husband, for instance, hasn’t been receiving quite this level of solicitude. I don’t think we are nearly as quick to assume that divorced men are falling into a life of despondency. I don’t think that we are as concerned about what will happen to them, that we are filled with this exquisite worry over their situation. We assume they will marry again, and until they do, we assume they’re fine.

Prison rape

David Kaiser has a powerful letter about Rape in American prisons in the New York Review of Books. He shows that prison rape is ignored not only by the press, but also by advocates and legislators although it is something, which occurs in American prisons too frequently. However, what Kaiser doesn’t say is that the American judicial systems view prisons as a place to isolate the worst of society and not to “reeducate” to reform them. It is for that reason that prison rape is ignored because there is an overwhelming presumption that prisoners are no longer viable members of the society and that they deserve any wrong that happens to them.

Bashing America as Europe's national sport

“Contrary to popular misconception, the European national sport is not football - it is bashing America, a simple pastime that many Europeans seem to enjoy. Sadly, Europeans tend to ignore America's strengths rather than emulate them. In 1789, the US cobbled together a constitution that has, to date, defined and preserved rights more effectively than anything Europe has achieved in the intervening two centuries. Even today in the UK, free speech is an undervalued human right, yet it was enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution when the British were still chasing Napoleon around Europe.” Clive Stafford Smith, “Have you received your gift pack?”

Africa and oil

On Harpers’ website, Ken Silverstein has an interview with Nicholas Shaxson, which focuses on African Oil politics, which shows that oil has made some African countries very important not only for the United States, but for the West:

Western schemes to “guide” Africans to behave better often fail, because African rulers—especially oil-rich ones—tend to be quite good at mastering their own destinies nowadays. We can best help by making changes at home. One way is to curb our fuel consumption. Another matter cropped up repeatedly during my 14 years of research: the draining of Africa's wealth into rich-world tax havens. Current transparency initiatives don't touch this issue; but instead we pretend that it's only the Africans who are corrupt. Don't forget that New York and London, swimming in foreign dictators' loot, are two of the world's biggest tax havens.

I wonder if things are as simple as Shaxson makes them to be, is Africa the only continent where politics isn’t complex and where the environment is Manichean? My argument isn’t that change isn’t possible and that Africa is chaotic by nature, but rather the trouble may be precisely one of infantilisation in the sense that Africans are seldom able to take control of their own destines and of their own politics.

France's health and salvation

Michel Gurfinkiel thinks that France is a third world country that needs to be saved. I know that some cannot see past their nose when it comes to France, but it seems to me that a country whose voter turnout exceeds 80 percent for the first round of a presidential election can’t be rotten country.

Pink Sunday

Ségolène Royal is in the second round of the French presidential election. She will face Nicolas Sarkozy. Because I'm a fervent supporter of Ségo, I'm enjoying my Pink Sunday. Why Pink? Because pink is a color associated both with womanhood and with French socialism, which I find very bland  and archaic in spite of my support for Ségo.

Bloody or Pink Sunday?

I'm anxiously waiting for the results of the French presidential election. It looks good for my candidate so far, but I remember what happened with the estimation in the American presidential election.  Let's just say that I'm so nervous that I haven't been able to eat brunch.

France is Royal!

Well, the First round of the French presidential elections is tomorrow and this video is about what I hope will happen tomorrow. The song is by Yannick Noah (Joakim Noah's Father) and its title is Ose, Dare, which is fitting because I think that to win my candidate Ségolène Royal will have to capture the French imagination in order to enable the French to dare to vote for her tomorrow.

Europe makes America possible

“[…] as long as the United States remains the United States, the connection to Europe will remain very strong. Perhaps it will become more discrete, even clandestine. Perhaps it will express itself differently, more gently. But it's an integral part of America. What is America? It's a new Europe. I think Americans know that. They sense that it functions and olds, like Enée leaving Troy to found Lavinium: the new world instead of Europe. America is the fire of the European Enlightenment set alight on new shores. Without this idea, it would be nothing more than an amalgam of communities, a juxtaposition of bubbles, the sort of post-modern society some people dream of, but perhaps no longer the American dream.” Bernard-Henri Levy.

Arming victims of gun violence

The most interesting article I’ve read against gun control since the Virginia Tech massacre is the one in the Australian by John Lott. He argues that Gun laws disarms the one who are most vulnerable to gun violence and therefore do not achieve their state goals of reducing gun violence. It is a point of view, which I find intriguing even though I disagree totally with it. Sugary excerpt:

Within hours of the Virginia attack, publications such as The New York Times and leaders of gun-control groups were calling for more gun-control regulation. But perhaps it is time for a different approach. After all, following the Luby's massacre, Texas and many other states began allowing their citizens to carry concealed hand guns.

There is an important reason to believe that the Virginia attack may also be different. All these attacks shared something in common: citizens were already banned from having guns in those areas.

The problem with gun-control laws is not that there isn't enough regulation, rather that it is primarily the law-abiding, not the criminals, who obey these laws.

Virginia Tech has rigorously enforced its gun-free zone policy and suspended students with concealed hand-gun permits who have tried to bring hand guns on to school property. But whether it is the three-year prison terms that can await those who take guns on to property of K-12 schools in most states, or the suspensions and expulsions at universities, these penalties are completely meaningless for someone intent on killing.

French Elections, immobilism, and contemplativeness

The First round of the French presidential election is on Sunday and I must admit that I’m having trouble sleeping because I’m so anxious about the fate of my champion, Ségolène Royal. It is possible that she won’t make it, and what saddens me is that there is nothing that I can do. Jeremy Harding has an article about the French elections in the London Review of Books, which is instructive even though it fails to read correctly the candidates, their message, and the state of France. Harding concludes his article with the following sentences:

There is a glimmer of hope in French immobilism and the dogged willingness of France’s voters to unthink the thinkable. It lies in the possibility that the long assault mounted against the so-called French model by neoliberalism may not last for ever. In which case, digging in and doing nothing will prove not to be as foolish as it looked at the time: a handful of French republican values will come through intact. Yet the dangers of simply trying to hold out, including ethnic unrest and endemic unemployment, are too terrifying for many voters to contemplate.

I don’t think that France is an immobile nation as much as it is a contemplative one which is trying to decide not only where to go and what it wants to be but also what to accept and to reject from the world as well as what to transmit to it.  I prefer Ségolène Royal to Sarkozy because I believe that she epitomizes Frenchness in the sense that she has style, class, and even though she hasn’t yet decided what she wants to be even though she knows in her soul who she isn’t. I like Sarkozy energy and Americanism, but I don’t like his view of society and his methods, which are too brutal. Anyway, I hope that Ségo makes it through the first round because I think that she can do for France what Blair and even Thatcher did for  Britain because she has the will, the strength, and the douceur to take the French out of their contemplativeness by galvanizing them.

Guns and choice

Spiegel has an article on the response of some Americans to the editorials of European newspapers on the Massacre in Virginia Tech. Europeans see the problem as one having to do with guns and violence while many Americans, probably the majority sees it as a problem of evil. In other words, Europeans point the fingers at guns and many Americans point the finger at people. However, the key issue is about the choice made by citizens about the society within which they want to live and about ho they choose to balance liberty and security.

Utopia and cosmopolitanism

“Global utopia as cosmopolitan belonging has been incarnated by a handful of nomad intellectuals, politicians, or businesspersons who feel at home anywhere and who have developed a specific international culture (kissing hello, eating ethnic food, pre-googling their interlocutors, asking the taxi driver for local information). The problem is that these privileged faces of globalization hide the reality of ever increasing mobility. The average migrant is not freer, but more docile.“ Ivaylo Ditchev, “Fluid citizenship.”

Smoking, art de vivre and joie de vivre

Mary Blum explains why the ban of smoking in public places signals the end of the French art de vivre. I don’t agree, I think that art de vivre to mean something has to go together with joie de vivre and in the case of smoking, it just doesn’t anymore because public health overweighs style especially when it ruins the quality of life of others.

Monogamy, limits, and relationships

“Monogamy was never related to love. It was created to let us know where our offspring came from; it was a financial matter, to let us know who our children belonged to and who was entitled to inheritance. It was imposed on women and did not obligate men. Modern Western society transformed monogamy into a sacred cow, into choice rather than coercion, and something associated with love. Every couple has limits, even open couples. They should speak freely about these limits. Every couple lives with potential betrayal, and betrayal usually closely approaches the limits the couple sets for themselves. But, in most cases, the couple does not set its limits together, and each partner has his own private, internal negotiations. Many heterosexual couples are afraid to negotiate. But the limit is determined anyway, so it may be worth deciding together. Limits may sometimes change a few times through the course of a relationship.” Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic.

Anonymity, School shootings, and celebrity

For Lionel Shriver, campus shootings in the United States can be explained by the media coverage that follows them. Shriver argues that the excessive)) compulsive media coverage takes the shooter away posthumously from the humiliation and the alienation of the college experience, which led him/ her to act and thus enabling him/him to both get some attention and have some kind of poetic justice against the system. Sugary excerpt:

Every time one of these stories breaks, every time the pictures flash round the world, it increases the chances that another massacre will follow. In the main, all of these events are copycat crimes. Campus shootings are now a genre, much as, in literature, campus-shooting novels are a genre, one of whose entries I am guilty of writing myself. They are part of the cultural vocabulary, and any disgruntled, despairing or vengeful character - of any age of late, since grown-ups now want in on the act - now has the idea of shooting up a campus firmly lodged in his brain.

I do not believe that the choice of schools or colleges for the pursuit of grievance or, often, for the staging of what I call "extroverted suicide", is arbitrary. For most of us, school and university are the seats of profound and formative emotional experiences, and the psychological power of these locales does not necessarily abate with age. Only last month I had reason to walk down the hallway of an elementary school in the US, and the lockers, lino and acrid chalk-dust smell sent my head spinning with memories, not all of which were pleasant. I felt claustrophobic, smothered, actively grateful to be spared the tyrannies of Mrs Townsend's home room, and relieved to get out. In fact, I couldn't believe I was allowed out of the door without a pass.

For a lucky few, school and college are where we first distinguish ourselves. But for the majority, they are the site of first humiliation, subjugation and injury. They are almost always our first introduction to brutal social hierarchies, as they may also sponsor our first romantic devastation. What better stage on which to act out primitive retribution?

Atheists are not victims

Paul Thornton argues in the Latimes that Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are wrong to say that Atheists are members of a minority, which victims of discrimination and of oppression because they can’t run for political office for example and win. His point is that to make that point is to insult other minorities who have had to endure real discriminations. Sugary excerpt:

Dawkins, Harris and other secularists are correct in pointing out our chances of getting elected. Recall Howard Dean's awkward attempt to pass off his relationship with Jesus to Bible Belt Democrats during his 2004 campaign. But they're wrong to lump atheists with historically marginalized groups -- gays, blacks and others -- as sharing a similar struggle. Having a hard time getting elected to high-level office is one thing; overcoming and still struggling with the shameful American legacy of institutional discrimination is another -- and atheists shouldn't conflate the two.

I think this debate about the victim status of atheists is so useless because it is meant to be a distraction from the real issue and that it is whether a democratic society can be other any other than secular without becoming dangerously intolerant.

Life is just cruel, brutal, and senseless,

“The downside of being an advanced society knit together by a mass press is that there will always be persons of this kind who opt to act out their despair in a fashion designed to play to the nation, or the world, at large. The alternative would be if humans still lived as tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, where all members are intimately linked in a quest for survival and there is neither room nor motivation for existential angst.

Take, for example, the Piraha in the Amazon, the subject of an article in last week's New Yorker. The linguist who has investigated them told me last week that there is no such thing as depression among the Piraha — they're too busy staying alive. While their life expectancy is somewhere around 40, and they are thoroughly sexist by our, they likely would find Don Imus' comment pretty funny if it were translated for them.

I'm sure most of us would rather be us. But that means that we will always have to put up with people given to leaping up onto the public stage now and then to strut and preen. Sometimes, like all the wise heads last week, they will fashion aggrievement over something somebody said on the radio. But then there are will be others who get up there with a gun.” John McWhorter, “Suicide Shooters.”

Feminists and traditionalists

David Blum blasts Leslie Bennetts’s book The Feminine Mistake, which argues that mothers shouldn’t make the mistake to give up their jobs for their children. He argues that her book is useless and that her thesis is simplistic and Manichean because she is just another feminist arguing that men are bad and that women are victims. Sugary excerpt:

Ms. Bennetts's basic thesis about men is that they're good-for-nothing layabouts who escape true responsibility unless you shame them into service. "In my own experience," she says, "husbands will get away with whatever you let them get away with when it comes to sharing housework." She includes in these chapters her own husband, Jeremy, whom she gives credit for going grocery shopping and making the bed, and little else — and who prompts her to complain when her friends remark on his seeming helpfulness. "The sainted Jeremy may look like the Husband of the Year in comparison with a lot of other guys," she writes, "but that just goes to show how low we set the bar for men in this society." She goes on to make clear that Jeremy only "helps" (her quotation marks, not mine) because she "made it clear that I wasn't going to be any husband's unpaid servant ... if we were going to raise children together, we had to share the work — or he could forget the whole deal." Is that the kind of marital negotiation Ms. Bennetts advocates as the key to a happy life?

Sometimes, I have the feeling that I live in a world where women can’t be happy because they are at the center of war between feminists and traditionalists who are engaged in a holy war for their soul. The one thing I know for sure is that they will both lose because holy wars are always unnecessary and because women aren’t slaves to their femininity, but to their passions just like men.

Globalization as a miracle

Clive Crook believes that Globalization is a miracle not an ill and the West and the United States have made tremendous gains because of it. He argues that the Globalization of labor hasn’t harm Americans workers because although the average wage of unskilled workers has fallen, the wages of other members of the workforce has risen:

True, labor's share of national income has fallen in the United States and in other rich countries. In industries using mostly unskilled workers, labor's share of income has fallen significantly; in industries using mostly skilled labor, its share has tended to rise. But, thanks to trade, which has made prices lower than they otherwise would be, pay in real terms has kept on rising regardless -- albeit more slowly in some places than in others. In America, real compensation per worker has risen by about 20 percent since 1980. In Europe, it has risen by more than 30 percent. (Note, though, that America has added new jobs at roughly twice Europe's rate -- hence its consistently lower unemployment rate.)

Yes, growth in American wages and benefits was lower at that rate than the country had grown accustomed to. But see this in the global context: Despite the staggering increase in the effective global labor supply during the past two and a half decades -- a phenomenon that is off all the charts and that, to repeat, heralds unprecedented inroads against global poverty -- wages and benefits in the United States managed to keep on rising. This seems little short of miraculous.

The problem however is that American workers will not be persuaded by such type of arguments because they perceive globalization not as a phenomenon, which is leveling the playing field, but as one which distorts it by making them disposable since they can be replaced whether they are skilled or not by people in other countries, who will be cheap and less demanding. The real question is really about whether Globalization is a miracle or an ill, but about whether it will continue to happen in a vacuum of any kind of governance to control its shortcomings and to ensure that common rules exist so the globalized world has some values, such as equality and equity, which still have some meaning.

Death, secularization and Islamisation

Richard Neuhaus reviews Philip Jenkins‘s book God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis, which takes the other side of the Islamization of Europe by arguing that it is neither inevitable or happening. Neither Jenkins’s arguments nor thesis persuade Neuhaus, who believes religiously fanatically that the death of Europe is probable because of its secularization. Sugary excerpt:

Europe is a historical phenomenon, and Europe without its familiar historic forms is not Europe. To speak of the death of Europe is not to suggest that the continent called Europe will disappear. It is possible that “Eurosecularity” in sustained tension with an Islamo-Christian cultural ambience will flourish, at least economically, for generations to come. But, with the establishment of Eurabia or the Maghreb, Europe“in anything like its familiar historic forms” will be a memory. That is what is meant by the death of Europe.

At a recent dinner party with European intellectuals, I put to an influential French archbishop Daniel Pipes’ projection: Either assimilation or expulsion or Islamic takeover. That, he said, puts the possibilities much too starkly. “We hope for the first,” he said, “while we work at reducing immigration and prepare ourselves for soft Islamization.” Soft Islamization. It is a wan expression. Whether soft or hard, the prospect is that, in the not-so-distant future, someone will publish a book titled Allah’s Continent.

Sex education and Abstinence

The truth is in the pudding and it shows that costly (a billion dollars) American federal programs don’t work according to a survey, which shows that young people who are given abstinence only education are as likely to have sex as other people from their same age group. I still can’t believe that the US spent a billion dollars for abstinence programs.

Looking for answers

The best two articles, I’ve read so far about the Virginia Tech tragedy come from the Guardian and the Times of London. In the first, Jon Ronson gives some valuable insights about the mindset of the people who commit this type of senseless acts. In the second article, Gerard Baker wonders about America and about why school shootings happen more frequently in America than anywhere else in the Western world:

But why, we ask, do Americans continue to tolerate gun laws and a culture that seems to condemn thousands of innocents to death every year, when presumably, tougher restrictions, such as those in force in European countries, could at least reduce the number?

[…] The simple truth is that Americans themselves remain unwilling to take drastic measures to restrict gun availability. This is rooted deep in the American belief in individual freedom and a powerful suspicion of government. Americans are deeply leery of efforts by government to restrict the freedom to defend themselves. A sizeable minority, perhaps a majority, believe the risk that criminals will perpetrate events such as yesterday’s is a painful but necessary price to pay to protect that freedom.

Healing homosexuality

Christianity Today has the personal account of someone who talks about his struggle with homosexuality. He describes the hard road he had to go through to become “a new person in Christ. I am a heterosexual man who struggles at times with homosexual thoughts.” It is a sad, but worth-reading article because it shows that how one’s perspective can affect one’s life and why religion can be dangerous when it becomes intolerant and inhumane by setting standards impossible for some to meet:

I can't speak for everyone. There is no single journey of healing for the person who struggles with homosexuality. At one point in my life, the temptation to lust was an hourly harassment. Today, it is more like a pesky bird that occasionally flies overhead and wants to build a nest in my hair. I even find myself struggling with heterosexual lust at times. While that may seem like progress, God has convicted me that exchanging one form of lust for another is still sin.

I continue on the road to healing and healthy masculinity. My masculine identity is becoming more solid. I am deeply in love with my wife. I am feeling better about myself as a male and as a person. I am thankful to God for how far he has brought me.

Aung San Suu Kyi, Courage and powerlessness

The Guardian has an extract of Gordon Brown’s book Courage in which he writes about Aung San Suu Kyi the imprisoned Burmese opposition leader who has been detained for more than 20 years. He describes her as a woman of courage even though he doesn’t seem to have a plan of how to get the Burmese government to release thus again emphasizing how powerless great powers such as Britain can be in front of rogue states such as Myanmar Burma:

Indeed, the more I read, the more I wondered at Suu Kyi's great courage; lonely and sustained, it had shaped her life and resulted in her becoming the world's most renowned female prisoner of conscience. Facing one of the most tyrannous regimes in the world, she had demonstrated that courage by living under house arrest for most of the past two decades, far apart from the husband she loved, and from her beloved children, missing all their years of growing up.

To understand Suu Kyi's courage we need to understand firstly her devotion to duty - and in particular, the influence of her father, Aung San, who secured Burmese independence from the British in 1948 but who did not live to see that independence come into force - and secondly, and most important of all, the strength of Suu Kyi's underlying belief in democracy and human rights. Her courage has shown itself not in the fearlessness of impetuous confrontation, but in a strength of character rooted in passionately held beliefs - beliefs that have sustained her through years of oppression and deprivation and cruel separation from her loved ones.

History and Glue

“History is the glue that binds us. If there is anything that aggravates the bleep out of me, it is America’s utter failure to recognize and reflect on our forebears. Looking back at what has worked, and what hasn’t, in our past can illuminate possibilities for our future.” Laura S. Washington, “The United States of Amnesia.”

Tae Kwon Do and the veil

The Toronto Star has an article about a group of Muslim girls playing Tae Kwon Do who were asked to fight without their veils in Quebec. The referee made the following justification to justify his decision:

The equipment that is allowed under the world Tae Kwon Do federation rules doesn't include the hijab.

I have the feeling that there are going to more of these kinds of conflicts because there is too much ambiguity around the issue of the veil and the circumstances under which it becomes inappropriate in every society. In this particular case, I wonder if there wasn’t an overreaction and a purposeful inflexibility with the interpretation of the rules in order to provoke a confrontation.

Writing is scary

The Globe and Mail had an interview this Sunday with Michael Ondaatje (who wrote the English Patient and Anil’s Ghost). He talked about his new book Divisadero and about how scary writing can be in general:

It is scary. There are writers who plan everything beforehand and know what the last sentence is going to be. I'm so envious of them [laughs]. Even five days before the end, I'm not quite sure if this thing is going to click together. It's why one has to do this in the privacy of one's own home.

The story begins very small and I see what's there. I was interested in the idea of a family that splinters — people who grow up in a very tight universe, and then something happens and they go out over the whole world. You grow up with people till the age of 15 or 20, and then you go off and live such different lives. How are you connected any more? So that allowed me a very open form. Then I crawl down that road.

Realism and good wives

“A familiar picture soon emerges of a carefully groomed woman with primped hair and a wasp waist who calms down the children and touches up her lipstick when her husband comes home from work, listens charmingly to his day’s debriefing, and then offers him a well cooked but thrifty dinner. […] Now, though, it seems that this vision is being revisited, and not only by Stepford wives, or those alarming “surrendered wives” of the American religious right. Ordinary women are at last beginning to realise that feminists, in their passionate rejection of traditional marriage, may have thrown out the man with the bathwater, and that they rather wish they hadn’t. A man, like a woman, needs an incentive to get married and stay married; feminism forgot that, and forgot too that marriage is more in women’s interests than in men’s. […] It’s a mistake in any relationship to insist too much on egalitarian principles. Feminism, understandably, has concentrated too much on women's rights and, by extension, too much on husbands’ duties. Why, on top of working long hours and forsaking all others, would a man put out the garbage and change the nappies for a woman who is too busy with her own career and too tired by her own schedule to bother much about him? Or, to be blunt, to have sex with him? […] I think that my generation, and later ones even more so, have been led astray by romantic 1960s notions of sincerity and authenticity; it began to be believed that in the name of existential good faith and psychological well being individuals ought always to act and speak in accordance with their feelings — telling it like is and letting it all hang out. So sex without passionate desire — the boffe de politesse of a kindly marriage — is inauthentic.” Minette Marrin, “The good wife is an old fashioned realist.”