The Republic of Dissent

Language, Love, and the Elvira complex

Lisa Friedman has a fun article in the New York Times about communication between men and women. She makes the point that women must speak to men in a language that they must understand. Sugary excerpt:

THE simple truth is that if you want to be heard by your husband, you must speak a language he understands.

An example: A friend of mine is married to a wealthy spendthrift who used to drive like a maniac — tailgating, speeding, weaving between lanes. My friend repeatedly expressed her fear about his dangerous habits but he didn’t modify his behavior; money was the language he spoke. She gave him one final warning: slow down or else. He didn’t, so without any fanfare, she withdrew $40,000 from their bank accounts and bought herself a luxury convertible. I hear he’s a pretty safe driver now.

Friedman’s article is interesting because it shows two things about the relationship between men and women. The first is that the burden for success and communicating is placed on the woman under the pretext that men don’t get it and that it is their nature to be insensitive and inattentive. The second is that women have to raise their men, their husbands in order to make them behave well not only toward them, but also toward society. I don’t know, but that seems to me to be too much to ask out of women and to be a recipe for disaster for it creates the overbearing assumption that a woman can change the man she loves with love, patience, understanding, and flexibility. That’s called the Elvira complex, which is the belief for a woman that she can change the man that she loves with the strength of her love. In both Molière’s Don Juan and Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Elvira loves the hero and tries at the end in spite of his shortcomings and infidelities to save him by pleading with him by exposing her naked and wounded heart. It never works because words although they may change the world, they cannot change a man. The point is that women make too often the mistake to believe that they can mold their relationship by speaking differently, by trying and loving harder because they feel that they carry most of the burden of failed relationships. I’m not arguing that they should stop trying, but that they must understand as Elvira did that it isn’t their job to do all of this work and to save their man’s soul. It must be very difficult to be always the one who has to find the right words, to speak in the other’s language in order to get a few drops of love.

Wide open world

“When everyone has a blog, a MySpace page or Facebook entry, everyone is a publisher. When everyone has a mobile phone with a camera in it, everyone is a paparazzo. When everyone can upload video on YouTube, everyone is filmmaker. When everyone is a publisher, paparazzo or filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. We're all public figures now.

The blogosphere has made the global discussion so much richer, and each of us so much more transparent.” Tom Friedman, “Ever-watchful little brother makes for good citizens and businesses.”

Becoming all powerful in France

I find this article in the Independent on Sarkozy’s attempt to control the French secret service worrisome because it confirms my biggest fear about him, which is that not only does he dislike opposition, but also that he finds it illegitimate. But again, I may be blinded by Sarko-skepticism and my strong belief that too much power in the hands of one man is dangerous and especially inappropriate in a democracy.

Rome and America

“When I think fundamental differences between Rome and America the social character of the two states comes powerfully to mind. Rome was a slave-holding polity for its entire existence; America threw off slavery in a bloody civil war. America in its mind—and to a considerable extent in its reality—is a middle-class nation; Rome’s social stratification was extreme, with all of the power and wealth in the hands of a few thousand families. The story of America is one in which civil rights and basic respect have been extended to more and more people over time; Rome was a society in which divisions based on gender and background were sharp and appalling. During the past century America’s government has moved to put into place many protections for the ordinary citizen—to raise incomes, to provide health care, to clean up the environment; Rome did not care much for the welfare of the ordinary citizen, except, famously, to provide the “bread and circuses” necessary to keep the urban proletariat of Rome from rioting in the streets (which cost more than one emperor his throne). Finally, America remains a democracy, even if it is a battered and tarnished one. Rome was never a democracy.” Cullen Murphy.

Inspiring fun

It's been a difficult and hot week so I'm looking forward to the weekend. This video shows Yannick Noah (My first idol and Joakim Noah's Dad) singing at the fête de la musique. The song is called Simon Papa Tara and it is about an experience, which Noah had when his dead grandfather came to visit him to tell him about life. It's a fun song.

Making a good point on Blair

Julian Baggini has a great post on Blair and his justification for the war in Iraq. It is worth reading because as always Baggini looks at this issue from a different perspective:

So, Blair’s point is that if we allow the brutality of the resistance of baddies a reason not to confront them, we actually end up treating people better the worse they are. And that’s kind of crazy.
Except that, of course, you can’t just ignore that factor either. You don’t try to take on a nuclear armed North Korea, because it would be catastrophic if Kim Jong-Il retaliated. So, actually, in a strange way again, sometimes, if someone gets too bad and powerful, you do have to back off.

Redefinition and transformation

“Yes, we shall change; but the essence of human identity lies in this continuing self-redefinition. And if we remember that our identity and our freedom lie in the intersection between our impersonal but unique bodies and our personal individual memories and shared cultural awareness, it is difficult to worry about the erosion of either our identity or our freedom by technological advance.

If, as I believe, the distinctive genius of humanity is to establish an identity which lies at an ever-increasing distance from our organic nature, we should rejoice in the expression of human possibility in ever-advancing technology. After all, the organic world is one in which life is nasty, brutish and short, and dominated by experiences which are inhumanly unpleasant. Human technology is less alien to us than nature (compare: bitter cold with central heating; being lost without GPS and being found with it; dying of parasitic infestation or spraying with pesticides). Anyone who considers the new technologies as inhuman, or as a threat to our humanity, should consider this. […] Self-transformation is the essence of humanity, and our humanity is defined by our ever-widening distance from the material and organic world of which we are a part, and from which we are apart.” Raymond Tallis, “Enhancing Humanity.”

La femme Némirovsky

Benita Eisler has a good article on Irène Némirovsky, who wrote one of the best books published this decade Suite Française and who died in Auschwitz. Eisler attempts to show to answer the question who is Irène Némirovsky. However, in my opinion, she fails to answer that question for after reading her article, the reader is left with more questions than answers. Eisler’s portrait left with a sour taste in my mouth, which only increased with the discomfort that I felt a soft indictment against someone who cannot defend herself. Eisler’s portrait of Némirovsky is purposely one-dimensional and focuses on Némirovsky’s ethnicity and her attitude toward it to explain her condemnable actions before and during the Second World War. Sugary excerpt:

In September 1940, Némirovsky tried to distance herself from other émigrés. Writing to Pétain, she underlined the distinction between "honorable" foreigners such as herself, and "undesirable" troublemakers. Pétain's reply could be described as statutory: Two weeks later, there was a census of all Jews in France — native and foreign-born, naturalized, and stateless. That same year, her novel about the Jewish Diaspora of the Ukraine was published. " Les Chiens et les Loups" ( Albin Michel, 334 pages, 17.50 euros, translated as "Dogs and Wolves") follows the teenaged Ada Sinner, as she flees a pogrom in the Kiev ghetto to become a painter in Paris. Once there she finds she belongs nowhere, neither among rich nor poor Jews, artists or philistines. Rejecting the two men who love her, Ada, pregnant and proudly alone, washes up in an unnamed Levantine port roiled by revolutionary upheaval, to deliver her child among strangers. It was the last novel to appear under Némirovsky's own name in her lifetime. The following year, the third in a series of " Otto Lists" made it a crime to publish or sell works by Jewish writers.

Before Vichy would have ended his employ, Michel Epstein resigned from the bank for reasons of health. His wife's writing became the family's only source of income. This fact is crucial to the questions that loom over the darkest phase of Némirovsky's career. She regularly contributed to the most infamously anti-Semitic publication of the period, Gringoire, becoming a close friend of its editor, the notorious collaborator, Horace de Carbuccia. Jonathan Weiss claims that financial need compelled the novelist to "overlook" the paper's editorial stance, along with the writings of her fellow contributors. Gringoire enjoyed a circulation of 600,000 and paid accordingly. This is a feeble defense. Other writers survived — those who would have been unwilling to appear in Gringoire's pages, whose anti-Semitic graphics were harder to "overlook" than its prose.

How, then, to explain the company she kept — her friends and professional associates, almost all of whom turned out to be collaborators? Neither survival nor anti-Semitism yields plausible answers. Rather, the key to Némirovsky's willed blindness can be found in her terror of communism — indeed, of leftist politics in any form. Well into the Occupation, she denounced the Resistance, whose members "want to take everything from those who own the riches of this country."

What never comes across is how much Némirovsky was attached to France and how much it must have scared her to realize that she could be forced to leave her adoptive country and to die because of her ethnicity. As Eisler points out Némirovsky came from a intellectual and well to do family, which means that the situation in which she found herself must have been not only very difficult, but must have put her in a place, where she never expected to find herself given her education and statured, the one of the menacing Jew. There is so much that we don’t know, so much that we will never know about Némirovsky. However, the one thing that we can know for sure is that Némirovsky and her family found herself in the cruelest and most inhumane of situation and one in which I or for that matter all of the people are trying to reopen her grave in vain and pompous attempts to see the color of her soul. Sometimes, it is easier to accept to get dirty hands when you cannot accept to sacrifice your family for morality or for an idea. That's the Galileo principle. Was Némirovsky an angel? Of course, she wasn’t. She was a great writer and a twisted who fitted perfected with the darkness of Pétain’s France and of her time.

Literature and the perils of memory

Hasdai Westbrook has a great post on Günter Grass and his new book Peeling the Onion recounting his life and some forgotten aspects of his childhood. Westbrook assisted to a reading that Grass gave in New York and found it to be a sad and frustrating spectacle. Sugary excerpt:

Perhaps even more surprising was that Grass didn't seem to recognize how this act of concealment exposes him to the charge of utter hypocrisy, that it could be seen to undermine all his activism as the "conscience" of post-war Germany, as the man who put words in Willy Brandt's mouth and accompanied him to Warsaw where Brandt - a man whose one key act of concealment was that of his own name, to escape murder by the Nazis for his resistance - knelt before the monument to the Jewish dead of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. How could Grass counsel and cajole for such monumental accountability and stand there with that secret jangling in his pocket?

Grass said he hadn't written about it until now because he always mistrusted this kind of biographical self-investigation, mocking those authors who seemed able to remember exactly what they thought 30 years ago or when they were children. He kept coming back to the writing of "the book," as if the book was the issue not the particular passage in it - another concealment, a kind of cloaking in generalities. "To write a book like this, you have to wait till a special age," he said whimsically. "Why?" said Elon, endeavoring to drag him back to earth, "the longer you wait, the less you remember." Grass shook his head. "If you ask me what happened two weeks ago, I don't remember," he replied. "Ask me what happened in the summer of 1941, I know." This last point was made with finality, as though to cast aside any doubt, even though he was directly contradicting his own criticism of other authors from a moment before.

Although I too find Grass’s loss and regain of memory problematic, I find it difficult to judge him. Nevertheless, Grass doesn’t seem to recognize that he is not an ordinary German and the fact that his work and political activity focused on enabling Germany to face its history and its own memory, makes it difficult to comprehend that his loss of memory. Moreover, the fact that Grass doesn’t understand that he cannot wash away his past with his exceptional talent as a writer sets hurdles, which complicate the ability of readers to accept his contradictions. However, as I wrote last year, I’m not one of those who are scandalized by Grass and who believe that he is fraud. I know that life is more complicated that and I agree on some level with Rushdie, which defended Grass’s last year by insisting on the fact that he was not an adult when the events he forgot happened. The most important question however remains what this whole episode tells us about Grass and about his ability to grasp and to live with the fact that he spent his life advocating principles by which he himself couldn’t live by. This observation is both tragic and sad. It just reminds me how human and flawed people with great people can be.

Facebook, MySpace and social status

Roy Greendale has the best post of the day on his blog on the Guardian about preliminary research, which suggests that the difference between Facebook and MySpace has to do with class in the United States. Danah Boyd, the author of the article on which the post is based, writes on her blog that her article isn’t an academic, but simply a work in progress based on her observations in the field. In any case, here’s a sugary excerpt:

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

[…] The division around MySpace and Facebook is just another way in which technology is mirroring societal values. Embedded in that is a challenge to a lot of our assumptions about who does what. The "good" kids are doing more "bad" things than we are willing to acknowledge (because they're the pride and joy of upwardly mobile parents). And, guess what? They're doing those same bad things online and offline. At the same time, the language and style of the "bad" kids offends most upwardly mobile adults.

Modesty and feminism

Pia Catton had an article discussing a thought-provoking book written by Wendy Shalit titled Girls Gone Mild. Shalit argues that there is a backlash against modern feminism because it is pursing crudeness as a way to liberation, when a return to modesty is the best course to follow for women. The article asks interesting questions, but after reading, I couldn’t help coming to the conclusion that both Catton and Shalit were missing the most important point. Sugary excerpt:

Here we are, decades after the feminist revolution, and yet crude self-display -- of a kind that makes the daring of the 1960s seem quaint -- is considered something that a "normal" college girl might eagerly choose to do for a stranger with a camera and a release form. What is going on? "We continually malign the good girl as 'repressed,'" notes Wendy Shalit, "while the bad girl is (wrongly) perceived as intrinsically expressing her individuality and somehow proving her sexuality."And indeed the bad-girl image -- revealing clothes, a willingness to engage in casual sex, a glorification of the inner "bitch" -- is strangely popular these days. It is the kind of daring post-feminist pose -- presented as liberated and free of gender stereotyping -- that shows up in music videos, racy advertisements, gossip columns and celebrity profiles. (Think of Lindsay Lohan on even a good day.) It is not hard to find versions of the bad-girl image in the hallways of the average American high school. Luckily, Ms. Shalit argues, a rebellion is under way. In "Girls Gone Mild," she claims that more and more young women today, put off by our hypersexualized culture, are reverting to an earlier idea of femininity. They wear modest clothing and even act with unbrazen kindness. They don't mind abstinence programs at school, and they prefer a version of feminism based on self-respect rather than sex-performance parity. They also take matters into their own hands when craven adults neglect to object to the objectionable. […] Ms. Shalit has little patience for the thinking of the older generation of mainstream feminists. They are, she says, "so committed to the idea of casual sex as liberation that they can't appreciate or even quite understand these younger feminists." To them, modesty is a step back, even a betrayal of the liberationist spirit. "They don't understand," Ms. Shalit says, "that pursuing crudeness is the problem, not the solution."

What struck me while reading this article is how difficult it is for too many women to see other women as individuals and to make femininity some kind of a tight and revealing dress, which tells the world everything about the woman wearing it. What if we started treated women as normal people who are not only entitled to make their own choices, but who must make them in order to redefine constantly their own essence without allowing it to be crushed, bruised, molded by those who still believe that a woman is a member of the fairer sex unless she represents something, which they want her to represent. Modesty, crudeness, shallowness, artificiality … etc are just side issues for what matters is that a girl’s, a woman’s choices aren’t taken away from her from those who considers that because of her gender she too isn’t condemned to be free.

The saddest thing to me isn’t that it is good and sexy for girls to be bad and wild, but rather that those decisions aren’t made for themselves and that when they are, they doomed them forever for most societies believe that there are certain mistakes, which girls, women aren’t entitled to make and that they are not allowed to go the dark side unless it serves a short-term and exhibitionist purpose. The point is that bad girls are rewarded for their behavior for the light is put on her behavior. However, bad girls are never allowed to learn because there are no rewards for growth and maturity. Very early this morning, CNN and other new networks interrupted their programs to show the release of a certain celebrity. What I’m against is precisely the objectification of women and their choices by elevating everything that women do and their femininity to a level that makes it impossible for them to be themselves because they are constantly psychoanalyzed and because they are in the middle of a battle between the feminists, the rejectionists, and all the others. Here's a revolutionary idea: what if we just allowed women to be human, to say no when they want to say no and to say yes when they want to say yes, to be bad when they want to be bad, good when they want to be good, modest, immodest, crude, inhibited and to learn from experience without being castigated and categorized for life.

Pregnancy and public ownership

“My issues with the glut of advice being given about pregnancy are twofold. Instead of pregnancy being one of the happiest times of life, it is instead filled with well-meaning but mismatched advice that can seriously damage your health. And second, what happens next? Pregnancy results in a baby. The Children’s Society has quite rightly recently condemned the risk-averse attitude of parents who want to keep children wrapped in cotton wool and not allow them to work out or take risks for themselves. This risk-averse mentality is now starting in utero.

This is, of course, what you can expect of a society that regards the pregnant woman as its collective property. It is entirely logical – as well as nuts – that society should extend the same overinflated dangers of pregnancy and sentimental public ownership of the pregnant to a risk-averse way of regarding the newly born child.” Kate Johnson, “Hey, I’m pregnant not stupid.”

Margaret Thatcher and Gays

Brian Coleman explains why Margaret Thatcher is a Gay Icon. I have to admit that I don’t get it for it seems to suggest that policies don’t matter to reach the status of Gay Icon:

In my experience many of the gay Politicians in the Tory party (a not inconsiderable number) joined the Conservative party and became active during the Thatcher years. Whilst her government acquired an unfortunate reputation for not being gay friendly, the notorious and unnecessary Section 28 (under which no one was ever prosecuted) did serious damage to the equality agenda.

However, whilst the underlying ethos of Thatcherism (based on individual liberty) might well be pro-gay it was Mrs T's personality which attracted so many homosexual men to the party. In a profession dominated by men with dandruff and hair coming out of their noses or women who appear to have been dragged through a hedge backwards (a la Shirley Williams), the pure elegance, feminine perfection, perfect dress sense, and sheer determination to change society drew many gay men to the Iron Lady.

These adoring feelings of some gay men for Thatcher just show that unrequited love also exists in politics and I don’t find that sad fact reassuring. That doesn't meant that gays can't share her political views, her conservatism for that would be a stupid thing to say, but I believe that icons should fulfill greater expectations than politicians. Is the Iron Lady an icon? Absolutely for she represents the best of a certain something to a lot of people  and she has many traits and accomplishments which are admirable. However, the fact the she is a Gay Iron just confirms the notion that at some point, what we are and what we represent escape us and go beyond our actions.

Don Quixote and Latin America

The Los Angeles Times had an interesting article yesterday on the cultural significance of Cervantes’s Don Quixote in Latin America.What is fascinating about the article is that it showed how cultural differences are expressed in literature. Sugary excerpt:

In the Latin American imagination, Don Quixote has functioned both as a symbol of the former colonies' knotty old-world heritage and as a rebel figure whose absurd behavior pulls the rug out from under the Old World's affectations and delusions of superiority (and, by extension, those of any great power). Over the last four centuries of Latin American cultural history, Cervantes and his mad visionary have had many disciples and imitators. What's striking is how powerful their presence remains even today.

[…]"For us a realist is always a pessimist," the Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz wrote in "The Labyrinth of Solitude," his biopsy of the Mexican soul. In Mexican and Latin American culture generally, Ochoa says, "There's almost this need for failure. There's almost a pride in it. It makes you a survivor. This appropriation of failure becomes a character-defining thing: Because of failure, we are what we are, and we're better for it."

The glorious debacle. The defiant last stand. The mythic sacrifice. The impossible dream. For many Latin Americans, these symbolic tropes reach back to historical traumas that are burned in memory: the destruction of the great preColumbian civilizations, the folly and ultimate collapse of Spain's global empire. They conjure up the repeated missteps of Latin American democracies, the ephemerality and abuse of laws, constitutions and ideals that have been trampled underfoot by countless dictators and despot revolutionaries.

Monogamy as a religion

“That word "sacred" is key to all of this. We do indeed make a religion of our relationships - putting our faith in them, often against all the evidence. Of course that's what faith is, and monogamy is a religion with only two disciples in which they together are also God. Perhaps, then, we are collectively suffering from, as Richard Dawkins might put it, a sort of monogamy delusion. Yet if that is the case, it seems we would rather not be stripped of it, even while so many of us are stripping in an altogether more profane sense.” Peter Ross, “Why we love to …cheat.”

When Christopher Hitchens is right, he is brilliant...

Europe and the politics of identity

“The true significance of Sarkozy's victory in France, it now becomes clear, was not so much economic as political. The slogan that won him the election was not the pseudo-Thatcherite "work more, earn more". It was his promise to rescue France from a "national identity crisis". The fact speaks for itself that, before leaving for Brussels, Sarkozy held a meeting with the National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. Sarko did not steal his voters by promising them lower marginal tax rates.

All over Europe, the politics of identity threatens to trump the economics of individualism. You can see it in the polls, which reveal that between 40 per cent (Austria) and 80 per cent (Hungary) of European voters favour strict limits on foreign workers. You can see it in the recent populist attacks on hedge funds in Germany and on private equity in Britain. Above all, you can see it in Sarkozy's success. If I had to hazard a guess about Gordon Brown's strategy in the year ahead, it would be to turn New Labour into National Labour. Those recent Brown speeches about British identity were merely the preliminary barrage. Starting tomorrow, expect him to outflank a liberal Conservative leader who hesitates to articulate traditional Right-wing views.” Niall Ferguson, “Europe must stop fighting itself.”

Modern America

“In America today, we seem to prize the self-reliant ideal more than ever. In fact, so much do we prize it that we don't want to pay taxes to support the common good. In one hyper-wealthy Silicon Valley town, where houses commonly sell for more than $2m, the streets are full of potholes: when I visited, I was told that town residents would rather ruin their own cars than pay taxes so that someone else could drive in safety.

The American dream is of a private home with a private yard, in which each child has their own room, their own iPod, their own computer and, by the time they're 12 or even younger, their own mobile phone. We spend our waking moments plugged into our Game Boys. We seem to withdraw as far as possible from each other, encased in our own worlds. Alone in our little houses on wheels, we idealise the emotionally self-sufficient hero. This hero either doesn't marry, or marries someone who leaves him. He deals with tough people but remains chivalrous to ladies, to children, and the disabled.” Sara Paretsky, “Mean Streets.”

Summer and fastlove

The New York Times has an insightful article about summer, short-term romance, and summer house share, which is a great read. The article describes the summer lives of a couple of middle-aged men for whom the summer seem to be the best time to find a fun and a short-term relationship. The picture that we get is that more often than not men are able to prolong their youth not just by dating young women, but also by seeing as their right the desire to live like a teenager for as long as society tells them that it is acceptable to do so. Sugary excerpt:

Summer towns encourage a vacation mentality where there is an “unrealness about what happens,” he said, likening it to how women say that hooking up if they go to the Caribbean doesn’t count toward the number of men they have slept with.

As for Mr. Blesso, who is 36 and single?

“I would like to get this sorted out before I turn 40,” he said.

There is something about the four-oh that turns many women off summer playboys. Adrienne Matt, 38, a strategist at an advertising agency, said she arrived for her first weekend at a Fire Island house a few years ago to find it was being run by a man in his 40s, who had done his best to fill the rooms with “vapid, insipid women.”

“It was disgusting,” she said. “He ran the house only to have sex with 25-year-old girls.”

Some men, no matter how old, do not seem to know any other way to start a relationship than hoping a tryst that starts at a party will grow into something meaningful. Stan Ellenberg, a lawyer in Philadelphia, was in share houses in the past, but now owns a weekend house in Margate, N.J., a beach town south of Atlantic City. He is 60 and ended his marriage eight years ago.

His last long-term relationship started when he met a woman who was 38 at a share-house party. They clicked and slept together on their second date, and it lasted five years, Mr. Ellenberg said.

But things fell apart. “She had a bad history,” he said. “Her prior two husbands were both my age.”

No matter. He says he still finds it easy to meet younger women in nightspots at the shore. “The secret is I never divulge my age,” he said. “It doesn’t work all the time, especially with women who are single and want kids. But if they’re in their late 30s or 40s, they don’t care as much.”

I have nothing against men who want to stay 25 years old for the rest of their lives (why you would to is a mystery to me, although I’m frightened about the idea of reaching 30 shortly, I don’t want to be 25 again) what irritates me is the fact if those men were women they would be called old broads and seen as pathetic. Women should be allowed to be fluffy and to see summer as the perfect opportunity to have a short, but hot relationship with young men. As a fairly young person, I am all for women dating young guys because they are able to teach them things that I have neither the time nor the patience to teach them, which means that by the time they become middle-aged, they will be less likely to  be too self-centered and too self-involved. Life is too short to spend your most important years grooming a man. To get beyond the gender issue, I think that we are entering an era where relationships are impossible because they are implausible because life, societies, and individuals are in flux and are defining old boundaries and modernizing old traditions. The “vacation mentality” is going to become the primary mentality because old rules and traditions have taken the fun out relationships and modernity has cheapened by taking the soul out them.

Le Paris actuel

“I've been living part time in Paris for the last seven years. Everyone sees it as a beautiful, romantic city. Which it is... But 10 minutes from St Germain-des-Prés and you end up in Château d'Eau, home to the Turks, Africans and Indians. In the sixième the only non-white face you'll see is the domestic help. I wanted to write about le Paris actuel. The French are terrible about integration, and they know it.” Douglas Kennedy.

Brides and the obsession of the perfect wedding

Judith Martin has a review of Rebecca Mead’s One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding. The thesis of Mead’s book is that American brides are victims of the consumerism of American society, which justifies the excesses of weddings by arguing that a wedding day is the most important life of her life. Sugary excerpt:

Mead neither whitewashes the excesses that are now commonplace nor takes the indulgent approach of those who repeat "Oh, well, it's her day" in the hope that normal relations will resume at the end of the day.

Rather, she depicts the bride as a victim. A victim in a hugely expensive dress (variously described as the size of a "pup tent," "with skirts so voluminous they could suffice for a parachute jump," and with "sleeves as puffed as a freshly baked popover" ) at the center of an orgy of self-glorification, perhaps, but a victim all the same.

There are economic forces at work, she argues, that lead brides into serious debt, draft them into spending their long engagements plotting social field maneuvers rather than canoodling with their fiancés, and cajole them into playing out their childish fantasies in front of everyone they know.

I wonder if things are this simple for I believe that American brides just have the means and the excuses that they need to be excessive in a society, which celebrates excesses. The key question to me is however is why a wedding is considered the most important day of a woman’s life, is it because she fulfils finally her purpose as a woman by giving herself to a man or rather by getting a protector, who will play the role that her father can no longer play. That isn’t to say that wedding or marriage are meaningless, but rather they are based on traditions and views of gender and society, which need to be updated. But of course, it doesn’t mean that weddings aren’t meaningful occasions and that brides are doomed creatures condemned to crash back to earth once they realize that married life isn’t a fairy tale. The most important thing are measure and the bride's ability to make her own choices.

Revisiting old Europe

The New York Sun has an editorial on what it believes to be Europe’s greatest opportunity. The editorial argues that old Europe hold the keys for Europe to become something other than an assembly of countries with different interests by reviving the comatose European constitution with a mini-treaty. However, after reading the article, one understand that the Sun doesn’t believe in Europe, but rater believes that the only way for Europe to survive would be to Americanize, which isn’t a bad thing in itself, but simply an indication of their American-centric view of the world. Sugary excerpt:

The real issue at stake in Brussels may not prove to be the precise wording of the treaty, nor even whether it is unanimously agreed, but whether the people get to vote on it. What the Old Europeans dread is the shock of rejection that they experienced two years ago when Monsieur Chirac lost the French referendum, leaving him a lame duck and the constitution in tatters. […] Given half a chance, the EU always reverts to its default position of bureaucracy rather than democracy. Yet once European electorates realize that the new treaty is but the old constitution writ large, voters may yet revolt against whatever late-night deal their elites cook up over cognac and coffee in Brussels. That the Old Europeans now sing some of the same tunes as the New is but a sign of the way in which the wind has shifted. By our lights it all ads up to an opportunity for President Bush to end his term with an entente with Europe in which he declares victory on exactly the terms Mr. Rumsfeld threw into such sharp relief to so much outrage and ridicule but a few years ago.

Hillary, Feminism, individuality, and judgment

Some feminists don’t like Hillary Clinton because they don’t like her conception of power and the fact that she is her own woman. That makes me like Hillary Clinton more because I believe that women should be themselves before being anything else even feminists. I have lived through this dislike, embarrassment, Disappointment, resentment, ambivalent feelings towards a Woman Presidential candidate earlier this year with Ségolène Royal, which helped me to realize one thing: the trouble with women is that they believe that women should be like themselves and that they see difference as a menace especially if it is leading to power. A good example of this egotism and egocentrism happened during the French elections when Sylviane Agacinski, the wife of the former French prime minister Lionel Jospin and a French philosopher and intellectual took the extraordinary step of writing an op-ed in the world to slam Ségo because she dared to argue that women should vote for her because she is one of them. However, she never even lifted her little finger to defend Ségo against sexist remarks because she believed that she a beautiful idiot who didn’t deserve to become the first French President. The cruel remarks against Ségo were made by women and the accusations of sexism and misogyny didn’t made them stop because her adversaries had succeeded in making her a beautiful, but dumb and incompetent woman, whom therefore other women had no problem savaging because in their eyes, she deserved to be savaged and insulted because she was beautiful, but stupid, dull, and incapable of governing France. What is happening with Feminists and Hillary Clinton is the same process of judging, looking for crack and faults in order to justify incredibly harsh statements about Hillary and a life that is first of all her own. I was listening to Arianna Huffington, which I like and respect, earlier this week talking about the issue and she talked about the fact that women needed somebody that is passionate about their issues not controlled and I thought, “Really?” My argument isn’t all feminists or all women that don’t like Hillary have a problem, but rather that in most cases their dislike and the way they express show us something about women, which help us understand that women are the first obstacle to their own liberalization and to the advancement of their rights. The most sexists and the most misogynists people are too often women because they personalize everything and don't believe in individuality. Feminists should remember that Hillary isn’t running to become the leader of the feminist movement and she doesn’t want to be their friend or their sister or their mother or whatever else, but to become the most powerful leader of the free world. Feminists have the right to reject Hillary, but they don’t have the right to make her fight and her choices about them and to personalize her quest to power as if women were not entitled to be individuals without it shrinking and dirtying their world.

Huffington, Nora Ephron, Anna Quindlen, and the others are entitled not to vote and not to like Hillary or rather the way she does politics. However, they are not allowed to make it about something bigger than their own biases and their own taste and to attempt to delegitimize Hillary’s womanhood by arguing that she is becoming a man, that she doesn’t get women, and she doesn’t deserve to become the first woman president. Feminists never have long love story with other women because they only feel comfortable when they are down and on their knees, which is of course when their cavalry can come to the rescue. When a woman becomes powerful, especially if she grasps power through politics, she becomes an island to feminists because she becomes bigger than her gender and forges her own path without listening to them or following what they believe is best for her. Hillary has great rivals in her quest to become the Democratic nominee and surely they re things about them that Feminists can love without putting forward their distrust and their dislike of Hillary. In other words, feminists should do what other women who don’t want to give their individuality even in the name of other women and for feminism have had to go and that is to grow up and to realize that they are not the center of the world.

Fears, the old testament, crime, and punishment

“Whipping up exaggerated fears, however, is always harmful to society. We are in danger of starting a new witch-hunt, one in which the smallest suggestion of sexual deviancy is enough to bring the mob on to the street. Newspaper campaigns to “name and shame” offenders who have served their time in prison do nothing to combat the threat they are said to pose. This is the mentality of the lynch mob. It does nothing for public safety, and the net result is merely to drive the wretched paedophile farther underground, making him a far greater threat than if he had been gradually accepted back into the community.” Magnus Linklater, “This Misguided, Old Testament Approach to Paedophiles.”

Idealism, religion, and slavery

Michael Gerson has a column in the Washington Post, which argues that the end of slavery was brought by idealism inspired by religious faith. He writes that the example of the role, which faith played in freeing slaves should inspire societies, which are struggling to find the proper role for religion, Sugary excerpt:

The abolitionists demonstrated that religion and conscience can be a force for good in the world, that the darkest instincts and destructive interests of humanity can sometimes be overcome, and that idealism is possible and powerful. "While there is little evidence that human nature has changed for the better over the past two millennia," concludes Davis, "a few historical events, like Britain's abolition of its extremely profitable slave trade, suggest that human history has also been something more than an endless contest of greed and power."

The trouble with Gerson’s argument is that it is the same idealism, which led to slavery in the same place and which gave humans the freedom to believe that they could chain other humans. The abolitionists used religion and conscience for the good, however slave owners and other use to justify the unjustifiable. After all that is the trouble with religion, it makes the impossible possible and the unjustifiable justifiable too often to argue that it is good in itself.

Socialites and work

“They lunched. They threw parties. They shopped. And they kept lists — A-lists and B-lists, and lists of people who could never make the lists.

But in today’s new-money world, with millions of freshly minted, constantly striving millionaires, socialites want more. They’re no longer content with being ladies of leisure — they have to be hyperachieving ladies of leisure.

Perhaps it’s the Paris Hilton effect, with more and more people trying to turn the business of being an heiress (or heir) into a business. Or maybe it’s an attempt to stay relevant in a world where the idle rich are being replaced by the workaholic wealthy and everyone has to have their own company — or at least their own business card. (Even if it says Mrs. Mary Smith — Philanthropist, Birkin Bag expert.)

In the Old Money days, socialites introduced themselves quietly, as “Mrs. Astor” or “Ms. Dupont” and left it at that. Today, when you meet a young socialite, they inevitably start pitching their latest book, jewelry, fragrance, interior-design business or new line of imported 800-thread-count, French linen baby bibs.

To prove just how busy they are, some socialites.” Robert Frank,“What Do Socialites Do All Day?”

The Lord of the Rings and Botox

Richard Ouzounian has an amusing review of the adaption of the Lords of the Ring to the stage. He uses Botox to show how superficial he believes the adaption is:

The revised production of The Lord of the Rings that opened at the Drury Lane Theatre last night is not unlike a friend who's been hitting the Botox a bit too heavily. At first glance, they may seem sleek and lovely, but look closer and you'll find that everything underneath is frozen and unmoving.

What is the point of this theatrical adaption of the Lord of the Rings? It leads to wonder whether every classic has to become a play to remain relevant. Is theater losing its particularities and becoming just a way to scale down a box office success or to test the waters for a future film?

Dawkins, appearance and irrationality

Francis J. Beckwith argues that Richard Dawkins is irrational because he is incapable on focusing on something other than appearance and is uncompromising. The problem with Beckwith’s criticism is that he uses circular reasoning to reach his preestablished conclusion that Dawkins is irrational. Sugary excerpt:

But Dawkins, in fact, does not actually believe that living beings, including human beings, have intrinsic purposes or are designed so that one may conclude that violating one’s proper function amounts to a violation of one’s moral duty to oneself. Dawkins has maintained for decades that the natural world only appears to be designed. […] But this means that his lament for Wise is misguided, for Dawkins is lamenting what only appears to be Wise’s dereliction of his duty to nurture and employ his gifts in ways that result in his happiness and an acquisition of knowledge that contributes to the common good. Yet because there are no designed natures and no intrinsic purposes, and thus no natural duties that we are obligated to obey, the intuitions that inform Dawkins’ judgment of Wise are as illusory as the design he explicitly rejects. But that is precisely one of the grounds by which Dawkins suggests that theists are irrational and ought to abandon their belief in God.

So if the theist is irrational for believing in God based on what turns out to be pseudo-design, Dawkins is irrational in his judgment of Wise and other creationists whom he targets for reprimand and correction. For Dawkins’ judgment rests on a premise that—although uncompromisingly maintained throughout his career—only appears to be true.

The modern woman?

“I think my situation is the next step on from the Bridget Jones era. I’m 39, single and have a one-year-old daughter and life has never been better. Most girls tell themselves, ‘If I get to a certain age, and I haven’t had children, I’ll go ahead and do it on my own’. The one thing I was always very clear on is that motherhood was something that I didn’t ever want to miss. I knew I wanted a child much more than a husband. […] With hindsight, I probably should have started looking for a husband when I was 23 and not now when I am set in my ways and so strong-minded. Now in my thirties there is a dearth of good men. Either that or I have appalling taste.

Women of my age who say they don’t want kids are in denial. You’re scared to admit that you’re desperate. About two years ago I was at that point when I was thinking that I would like to have a baby — I was considering various options from artificial insemination to fostering — and then, randomly, got pregnant by mistake. So many girls of my age and in my position would love to get pregnant by mistake.

It was with a chap I was seeing on and off, and he was with somebody else and it was never going to work out. He’s made no contact at all.

I hate that single mother thing — every family is a single mother because there’s only one mother and one father. But as soon as you say single mother, people kind of think of that teenage, housing-estate, living-off-benefits scenario. But I think there’s going to be a whole generation of well-to-do single mothers.

Men are getting less and less necessary. I don’t know how couples maintain relationships while looking after a brand-new baby. I couldn’t have. In many ways doing it on your own is easier. You don’t have to compromise when making decisions.” Andrea Manning.

Integration, Assimilation, and Citizenship

Ajmal Masroor makes an interesting difference in an article about Immigration, Integration, and Islam between Integration and Assimilation. He argues that that Islam is not impediment to integration, but that it is to assimilation. Sugary excerpt:

I ask you not to confuse it with assimilation. Islam would be opposed to any notion of assimilation. Integration is not about socially engineering a new generation based on no distinct faith, ethnic or cultural identity. This is precisely what assimilation would do. Islam proposes people to become loyal to their faith but their cultural or ethnic differences a reason for greater interaction and celebration.

[…] integration it is not a one-way street. Minority communities do not have a moral obligation to integrate into the majority community. Such a suggestion assumes the majority communities’ values, lifestyle, cultures and customs are superior. This is simply an arrogant supposition. Integration must have an element of give and take and willingness to share.

Integration is not the end but simply a process where people of all background come together to make connections and develop shared values mutually. The outcome is a cohesive and integrated society. Integration is like a watch. A watch has small components inside; each component by itself can not be called a watch, although they may function individually. However when all the components are arranged in an orderly fashion the watch works perfectly.

Since I know a lot less about Islam than Masroor, I will focus solely on his understanding of assimilation and integration. I believe that assimilation would be rejected by any group, which believes culture has nothing to do with citizenship even though it cannot be allowed to clash with the rules of a society. Assimilation implies submission and subordination rather than the acceptance of a new allegiance and that is precisely why the emphasis should be placed on integration in the immigration debate. Those who prone assimilation are in fact implying that culture is everything and that integration is impossible because the values that it supports are no longer strong and seductive enough to force immigrants to accept that no matter where they come from and what they believe, they have to be citizens of their new country by following its rules and respecting its social compact. They believe that immigrants are by gaining citizenship are entering in a form of traditional marriage with their new country, which plays the role of the husband and the father to which they must obey. To assimilate means to change identities to espouse a new one and more importantly it makes nationality one dimensional by making it solely about culture and everything else that has gone and passed. To integrate means to accept established limits and to acknowledge and respect the tradition and history of a country and understanding that they matter even though they don’t have to determine the present and the future. Citizenship is about love and respect, but also about understanding that as in every relationship, not everything is permissible no matter the justification.

Malthusianism, Misanthropy, and egotism

Frank Furedi slams today’s Malthusians for taking advantage of human pessimismfor making their point that there is just too many humans on the planet. Furedi argues that Malthusians have a cause, but don’t have argument to justify their belief that population’s growth is the root of all evils. Sugary excerpt:

Where in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Malthusians warned that population growth threatened people with starvation, today’s Malthusians denounce people for threatening the planet by consuming too much. As a result, contemporary Malthusianism has an unusually strident and misanthrophic streak. In the West, the population-control lobby castigates those who have large families for being environmentally irresponsible. Having children, especially lots of children, is now discussed as an ‘eco-crime’ on a par with pollution. From this perspective, a new human life is seen as little more than another producer of carbon; new life is seen as a form of pollution. So it would be better, the Malthusians argue, if these new human lives did not exist at all. As one Malthusian crusader notes: ‘A non-existent person has no environmental footprint; the emission “saving” is instant and total.’ (1) This preference for the non-existent over the existent speaks to a powerful anti-humanist sensibility. And it is not only eccentric and isolated misanthropes who value ‘non-existence’ as being somehow morally superior to existence – rather, this outlook is symptomatic of a wider trend for devaluing the status of human life today.

Reading Furedi’s article left me with ambivalent feelings for I thought that he remained on the fringe of the issue he was addressing by focusing solely on Malthusianism, which is an easy target because of its extremism. The most important question isn’t whether Malthusianism are right, but whether it is reasonable to believe that there can be no limit to human consumption and procreation. In other words, is it still defensible to argue in our century that the earth belongs to the humans and that they are free to use it any way they want to? Of course, humans all want to be free to choose any type of lifestyles, which they want even if it involves excesses, but the key issue is what we should do when certain lifestyles no longer become sustainable. You don’t have to me a misanthrope to argue that humans are prone to excesses and are late to realize the damage that they do to themselves and to their environment. Malthusians are wrong, but unfortunately, they are dressing an important issue, which society will have to deal with which is how to find the proper balance between human freedom and responsibility. Is it possible and acceptable to place limits on human egotism?

Of Males and Sex objects

Sarah Sands wondered in this weekend Financial Times about the sexual worship of males. She asks whether male youth wanted to become sex symbols and I think that she misses the point by making the question about what men want for people don't always get what they want. Sugary excerpt:

The question is: do male youths want to be sex symbols? Until recently, they had to be gay and exhibitionist to attract that kind of attention, whereas girls received it passively. It is an unfamiliar experience for boys to be adored merely for their looks. Yet if men, rather than women, have become society’s sex symbols, they have been complicit in the change. Young men are visibly more narcissistic than a generation ago. The big money in the beauty industry is in male toiletries. Men such as David Beckham have consciously appealed to both sexes with flirtatious changes of hairstyle and experimentation with thongs and sarongs.

The beautiful boys of ancient Greece exhibited themselves in gymnasiums. Men – and not only gay men – are now doing the same.

The open admiration of young men in ancient Greece was part of a culture of manliness where women played a subservient role. In modern Britain, it looks like the reverse. Young men are flaunting themselves peacock-style because they are no longer necessarily the economic providers. However, beautiful boys may discover, as many beautiful girls have done, that being a sex symbol is a limited kind of existence. Once those Abercrombie & Fitch men notice the first sign of jug handles and sprouting body hair, they will need a second string to their bow.

The real question is about whether the people who desire men are able to express their desire in the way males are about to express their desire for women too often by objectifying them. The fact that men have a choice in this matter is important, but what is more important is the fact that making men sex symbols is possible and that this possibility levels the sexual objectification playing field. Appropriateness here is thus secondary for society hasn’t crumble with the sexualization of women and equality is the first criteria because it places the emphasis on gender roles, objectification, and its significance. Thus, I am not shocked when it see an Ad with a beautiful man flaunting its assets, but rather I just say to myself that it is about time that men were also allowed to become, to say things crudely, pieces of meat. After all, if manliness can't deal with sexual objectification what does it tells us about itself?

The feminine beauty

“The references to sex around us have been multiplied dramatically in the past few years just because Media and Society mirror the needs of the masses. In 21st century the dream of sex has clearly been established. The new American Dream is the Sex Dream. Everyone that walks on this Earth with has one basic desire, “must-have-sex, must-have-sex”!

How come our perception of beauty got that distorted? Hmmm, according to scientific researches (hehe) most men seem to like: Slim girls, busty breasts, small nose, small chin, long silky hair, smooth skin and juicy lips. Rather infrequently does nature gifts a woman with all of these features: a girl hardly ever has both full lips and a small chin / it’s quite impossible for a girl to be thin and busty breasted. Alright, nature screwed up… Thank God there’re the plastic surgeons to alter female looks. Thank god –furthermore- for Photoshop that can promote unnatural body & facial proportions in publicity photos. Great, now teenage boys think a girl’s breasts should be round like a balloon, and a girl’s wish is to have fleshy porn-lips like her celebrity idol –let’s not call names here…

The whole misunderstanding was the equation of beauty with sensuality. No. I gotta choose more suitable words for my statement: The whole misunderstanding was the equation of exterior appearance with sensuality. On account of plastic surgery advancements and people’s craving for sex, society tried to materialize a woman’s aura at the time she flirts her male victim. Hey! Girls need a beauty canon to follow so that they’ll be able to achieve multiple orgasms (metaphorically & literally), right?

Yet true sensuality lies on HER dilated pupils, HER warm smiles –while a woman’s lips swell and redden when stimulated sexually, HER seductive body language and tone of voice. There are women very hot, and some not so -something which is reflected at their behavior. But solid eroticism is not engraved in the physiognomies, but arises through them each time a love interest shows up. Therefore:

A woman is erotic when she is in love.

A woman is beautiful when she loves herself.” Jane Eagle, “Irving Penn and Female Beauty.”

Négritude, French, and French colonialism

The Sidney Morning Herald has an interesting portrait of Nigerian writer and 1986 Nobel Literature Laureate, Wole Soyinka. Soyinka talks about his political struggle against Colonial Rule in Nigeria and about his activism. He makes the following point about French colonialism and Négritude, which is enlightening:

He also attracted fire from intellectuals associated with the so-called Negritude movement, which endeavoured to define and promote an African spirit and took exception to his use of European literary techniques. Soyinka cautioned his Negritude critics against promoting a stereotypical dichotomy between Western rationalism and African emotionalism. "A tiger does not proclaim its tigritude," he wrote. "It acts."

Yet Soyinka later came to accept "that Negritude was an insurgent tool that was needed for the peculiar nature of French colonialism, which tried to make its colonials French and denigrated African values - unlike the British, who felt that the black man could not apprehend European civilisation, so left their colonials alone with their culture".

Négritude in my opinion was a failed but good faith attempt to create a literary movement, which would separate French African literature from French literature. I think that it failed for two reasons. It failed to realize that blackness is not enough to create and to sustain a literary movement and that although literature can be about language, it cannot be about color. In other words, Négritude continued the stereotypical stubbornness of the French to make French literature and the French language be about Frenchness for the truth of the matter is that once France made the choice to become a colonial power, it could no longer claim French solely as its language and claim to have the sole right to control and to mold it.

Believing

“I believe: I'm happier now than I have been previously. I'm more reconciled to the person that I am. I'm not advocating childbirth as the key to joy but being a mum has made me very happy. […] I believe: that in the West we are far too child-centric. I am absolutely guilty of this. The happy news is that we all have rather less impact on who our children end up being than is supposed. […] I believe: it's not a good idea for teachers to have affairs with their 15-year-old pupils. But you should be wary of making moral judgements on the way people find love. The world is full of all kinds of strange romantic permutations and as long as they're consensual they're fine by me.” Zoë Heller.

Chivalry is dead

“The gentleman is, conventionally, one who is kind, self-effacing and self-sacrificing – and what makes those values essentially masculine? Are women not expected to be gentlemen too? The answer lies, of course, in history, and history has not been kind to women.

A woman was not, until recently, expected to be strong and brave because she was held to be basically helpless. She needed men to protect her and to go out and do things for her – and by implication make all those difficult decisions for her (such as what ideas about the universe and politics were true). […] So why are we still in love with the idea – with the idea of nobility, with the idea of the strong silent man who does things no woman wants to do? We are nostalgic, of course, for something that was always a myth.

Even women who command armies and corporations fantasize about the surrender of responsibility: hence the persistence of meaningless male traditions like opening doors and booking restaurants. These are holdovers from a time when women were believed to find such demands frightening.

And that's largely what we mean by “gentlemanly” today: We think of trivial social gestures such as ordering wine rather than helping a stranger or resigning over a scandal.” Russell Smith, “Gentlemen are so over.”

American prose and English

Lindesay Irvine argues that American novelists lead the field of narrative prose. She argues that American prose has a swager and a quality, which English rpose. I disagree partly with her because I think that she may not have the necessary distance to appreciate English narrative prose. Sugary excerpt:

[…] American and English narrative prose - like an alleycat and a domestic puss - are two very different varieties of the same species. And the alleycat is tougher, quicker on its toes - and much more at home on the streets than its English cousin.

American, as opposed to colonial English, prose is generally agreed to have really got going with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. ("You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.") There are other great novels before Mark Twain's, but these were written in an even more constipated version of the kind of writing we know from the early English novel.

What Twain did was to stop policing the boundaries between book language and the kind used by regular folks in day-to-day life. It was a decision that opened the door to the vigorous life and invention of vernacular and oral English. It has given American novels a cocky swagger that survives still: the energy of Philip Roth's prose, the sweet spin that George Saunders gives to his tales of McWorld, the tragic passions of Toni Morrison. And so on - and on and on.

English literary language is a pitifully genteel thing by contrast. It's not like there aren't great novels written on this side of the Atlantic; of course there are. But the number of English writers that can accommodate the full register of the language are few indeed. Martin Amis has a go - aping his mentor Saul Bellow - but the result is cartoon Nabokov that never really gets out of the library.

It's hard not to conclude that this is intimately bound up with the issues of social class. The novel developed as a bourgeois form, fuelled by the 19th-century's ambitious new stratum rising from the working classes, (and has carried on being a form that working class writers in this country use as the means to get out of the working class). Class is somewhat more fluid these days, but it's still a social division - and the English novel shows it.

Most American novelists, of course, are bourgeois writing for bourgeois (although not always: DeLillo is an Italian Bronx boy, and it shows). But because America's social world does not have the same enduringly strict boundaries, neither does the language.

The best thing about American prose is its informality. Language in America isn’t worshipped for itself and people in general and most writers in particular don’t have the paralyzing veneration for the English language that the French have for their language. Language remains most of the time a vessel, an instrument at the service of the writer and not the other way around. This loose attitude towards language has of course both benefits and inconveniences. It enables the most gifted and hard working language to experiment and not to be afraid to create their own style, but on the other hand. However, it also dumbs down English in the sense that less and less people, knowing that they can get away with writing it badly, take the time to write well because erudite language is more and more impenetrable and thus become a barrier between the writer and the reader. In others words, America is not only the land of fast food, but also of fast literature.

Desperately seeking God to avoid the Abyss

“I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it. And by some miracle I do not find that this experience is crushed or even lessened by the knowledge that, in all likelihood, I will be leaving the earth sooner than I had thought. Quite the contrary, I find life thriving in me, and not in an aestheticizing Death-is-the-mother-of-beauty sort of way either, for what extreme grief has given me is the very thing it seemed at first to obliterate: a sense of life beyond the moment, a sense of hope. This is not simply hope for my own life, though I do have that. It is not a hope for heaven or any sort of explainable afterlife, unless by those things one means simply the ghost of wholeness that our inborn sense of brokenness creates and sustains, some ultimate love that our truest temporal ones goad us toward. This I do believe in, and by this I live, in what the apostle Paul called “hope toward God.”” Christian Wiman, “Gazing into the Abyss.”

Feminism and language

Madeleine Bunting has an article on the British version of the Apprentice in which the winner, a man, won against a talented woman. I liked reading it, but for some reason it made me smile because I kept asking myself not so much the outdate question. “Where’s the beef?” but rather “what's new?” The point that I’m trying to make is that the way too many people talk about gender makes it depressing and tiresome. This fact shows that feminism is stuck in the sixties, which doesn’t mean that it is irrelevant, but out of its time for it is a betamax VCR in the age of Ipods and YouTube. That said, I agree with Bunting even though her point takes me to a very different place. Sugary excerpt:

The odds are always heavily stacked against women in any competitive office environment. The socialisation of women is always about grooming them to please other people - their parents, their teachers and eventually their boyfriends, their bosses. It cramps their intellectual flair, their imagination and their drive. It engenders self-doubt; it makes women chary of claiming potential, preferring to point to solid achievement rather than make claims on what they have not yet been able to prove.

The beauty of Anguish

“Any self-help book will tell you that many people don’t like to take responsibility for their lives and will sometimes pretend they have less choice than they do. I prefer to say that we suffer anguish.
God doesn’t exist and there is no moral code we can take off the metaphysical shelf and follow. That could sound positive and liberating, but I prefer to say we are abandoned.
People say that existentialism is a pessimistic doctrine. How can they think that when I tell them it’s all about anguish, abandonment and despair? It’s the most optimistic philosophy there is.
People say that if you are an existentialist, you can do whatever you want. Let me tell you a story. In the war, a young boy came to me and said, “Look, my mother needs me but so does my country. What should I do?” I said, “Don’t ask me. Work it out for yourself.” That’s why I’m France’s number one thinker and Camus isn’t.” Julian Baggini, “Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism (Digested).”

Immigration and irrationality

Steve Chapman has a good article on immigration in which he dissects some of the arguments made against immigration by the people he calls the nativists. He makes the following point, which is central to the debate, “Many Americans think illegal immigrants are prone to all sorts of destructive behavior—committing crime, having children out of wedlock, dropping out of school and refusing to learn English.This is not a full and fair portrayal. Still, there is some truth to the charge that when we import foreigners, we also import social problems. Even immigration-rights groups acknowledge a problem and the urgent need to address it. But you can't fix a problem until you understand what it is.” The problem with the current immigration debate is precisely that much of it is irrational and emotional and  that pragmatism is left out the window therefore making compromise very difficult.

Totalitarianism and megalomania

“The concept of totalitarianism was originally the brainchild of Italian fascists like Giovanni Gentile who defined it as 'comprehensive, all embracing, pervasive - the total state'. The self- aggrandising myth of a new class of political aspirants in the inter-war years was that they could control everything and everyone and remake man, woman and nature in their own image. Totalitarianism was at first, at least, the ideological expression of this grandiloquent self- deception, doubtless rooted in the history of imperialism and in the illusion of the modern state, and not an analytic category defining a new social formation. It was a dangerous illusion since it led its bearers to try constantly to prove the truth of their self-deception: into ever escalating, acts of destruction and displays of power to demonstrate the validity of their supra-human claims.

But should we not resist turning a self-deception of the modern political imagination into a would-be social and scientific category? It reminds me of what I would describe as Foucault's error: that of turning the advertising slogans of Bentham's panopticon - that it would be all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful, a perfect machine for grinding rogues honest - into the truth of the disciplinary power it embodied. It seems to me we should not repeat the same mistake of taking the megalomaniac at his word and turning his rodomontade into theory. We may laugh at him, as Charlie Chaplin did in The Great Dictator or Lubitch in To Be or Not To Be, or we may psychoanalyse him, as Adorno did in Elements of Antisemitism, but not take his pretensions too seriously.” Robert Fine, “The Concept of Totalitarianism: three comments on Claude Lefort.”

Stop fighting over the Sixties !

Daniel Finkelstein has some worthwhile things even though self-satisfying to say about hippies, capitalism, the sixties, and love and freedom. His argument is that money can buy love and that on the contrary to what is believed capitalism that is responsible for the Sixties Revolution:

Because of the Sixties. It is even clearer now than it was at the time that this was a watershed decade. Forty years ago, it was thought that the generation gap between teenagers and their parents would be a permanent feature of modern life. Instead, there was just one generation gap, but the gulf yawns between those who grew up in the years before the Beatles and those who grew up after it.

The mistake is to regard this as the consequence of the counterculture. The real cause of the Sixties revolution was something much more powerful and much more widespread – capitalism.

Finkelstein isn’t totally wrong, but his argumentation is sad because it is useless attempt to rewrite history in other to justify the present, where some of creating a false dichotomy between the rich and the workers and the leftists and the freeloaders. Capitalism doesn’t need to be responsible for the Sixties revolution to be a force for the good, but it needs to about something more soulful than being rich. Finkelstein reminds me of Sarkozy with his attempt to say that only capitalism can create values and lead to freedom. It is a legitimate point of view to have, but it doesn’t justify a rewriting of history. Finkelstein makes me sad because he is the proof that the real battle for the future of the world and indeed of capitalism isn’t between the rich and the poor, but among the rich, among the caviar right and the caviar left. The poor don’t have the tools to fight because they are too hungry and ill equipped for an ideological and societal struggle. The middle class is too preoccupied by keeping the gains that it has made in the last decades and too worried about the future of its children. Only the rich have the time and the means to fight. The real battle is about how much to change the status quo. It opposes two groups of rich. The first one is the one which feels that it deserves to be rich and is so because it is better than everybody else (because of nature or because of God). Its members say to the masses, who are hungry “Let them cake”. The second group is made of people who feel fortunate to be rich, believe that being rich comes with both privileges and responsibilities. They are aware that the system can only work if it is based on merit and if the poor do not become roaches. I for one are tired of people who are still fighting over the sixties to justify the present and to reduce the alternatives that exist for the future.

Downsizing and Christian Asceticism

“Christian asceticism today is not so much about disciplining the body as living in a world where the cultural and religious structures that supported spiritual commitment in the past seem to have been stripped completely away. We live in a time when it is difficult to be a genuinely spiritual person. Post modernism deconstructs our religious symbols, theological mysteries and above all denies any sense of the sacred. […] We also live in a world where the dogmas of economic rationalism and consumerism rule supreme. These are based on a naive belief in the infinity of growth. Kenneth Boulding has rightly pointed out that anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either mad or a rational economist! A radical spiritual commitment to justice and equality seems completely discordant in this kind of cultural atmosphere. So asceticism today will not involve physical penance so much as a determination to undertake a deliberate downsizing, an abandonment of the notion of infinite expansion as the only way to manage economics and measure success, and a willingness to stand against much which post modern culture believes is true.” Paul Collins, “Downsizing as a Form of Modern Asceticism.”

Living in different languages

The New Yorker has an interesting interview with David Hoon Kim. Kim is a writer and he writes in different languages including French and English. He has some valuable insights on the differences between French and English, which show writing and the world indeed, are very different for those who speak and write in different languages. Sugary excerpt:

I’ve always been disturbed by how often people confuse the words “nationality” and “ethnic origin”—both here in the U.S. and in France—as though the two were interchangeable. (One’s nationality, all too often, is not the same as one’s ethnic origin—and sometimes neither is the same as one’s national origin.) For me, these terms are far from interchangeable, and my nationality and my ethnic origin give only a partial picture of who I am. I speak French and Korean but do not have French or Korean nationality, which doesn’t keep me from feeling French or Korean, especially when I’m in the U.S., just as I feel very American when I’m in France. As a result, rather than adhere to a nationality or seek affiliation with a native language, I see myself as an inhabitant of the French language, a denizen of the Korean language, and a citizen of the English language. For me, the bond between language and identity is at once unavoidable, tenuous, and paradoxical. I suppose this might be what I was trying to get at in my story, even if the character’s ancestry happens to be Japanese, not Korean. […] Good writing is praised differently in France than in the U.S. For example, people here will say, “Fitzgerald writes very well,” but people in France will say, “Proust writes French very well.” Before I showed any of my French writer friends my work, I was always checking and double-checking each word in the dictionary, a habit that has since carried over into English. I think the French language was instrumental in forming me as a writer.

Hating the rich and the need for ladders

Ross Clark characterizes the protests around the G8 as a revitalization of radical leftism and as a resurgence of the pathological hatred of the rich. He argues that anti-globalisers are mostly anarchists who are against any form of order and who have no legitimate complaints. Sugary excerpt:

It would be easy to dismiss the resurrected anti-globalisation movement as a bunch of incoherent nutters. But that would be to underestimate the influence of anti-globalisation on left-wing thought generally — and not just on the fringes. It has become such a commonplace to blame the oil industry for any meteorological-induced hardship in the Third World that no one seems to protest any more — even though such cheap jibes are polluting serious debate over climate change. Likewise, no one seems to mind any more that Western clothes manufacturers — in adverts by once respectable aid charities — are blamed for creating poverty in the Third World: when the reality is that they only attract workers to their factories by paying higher wages than any other local employers.

Clark attempts dishonestly to brand as leftists, extremists who are apolitical for they are in the streets precisely because they no longer believe in politics and think that protests are the only way to provoke change. This would be clever if his arguments weren’t polluted by his erroneous assumption that all anti-globalizers are leftists who hate the rich when in fact even a shallow examination of the globalization debate show that the real divide isn’t really between the left and the right, but between those who like the status quo because it makes them winners and enables them to offer nothing more than charity to the others and those who want to shake things up in order to catch up and to make globalization really global by compressing and flattening the world.

Most people in our world want to be rich and the tragedy isn’t that there exist people who are rich, but that there aren’t enough of them and that poverty not only exists, but that it spreads like a disease by condemning millions of people to a life where they will never escape the distressful conditions within which they were born. So it is easy for Clark from his little and comfortable world to castigate spoiled groups of people who represent nobody, but themselves in order to then use them as blindfold not to see that the most important people in the globalization debate aren’t anti-globalizers and that the most important events weren’t the violent protests of Rostock. The most important people of the globalization debate are the leaders of the G8 and yes, the rich. The most important events were the elaboration of a tiny aid package by the G8 to help Africa and the collapse of the World Trade Organization’s Doha talks last year. Everything else is just window-dressing for globalization is here to stay. Thus, the key question isn’t whether to globalize or not, but rather what form to give globalization and whether it is possible to make the current model with all of its inequities and inequalities the only alternative.

Ross Clark likes the status quo not because he is a conservative or because he loves riches, but because he believes that globalization is an extension of the state of nature in the sense that winners are the fittest and the losers are the weakest who must just work harder to become stronger and to climb the ladder. However, globalization has made those notions archaic for the ladder is crumbling and is becoming so unstable that it is too difficult to climb. It is no longer possible to shut the losers out of paradise by throwing them the meager remains of a luxurious meal so that they can shut up and let the others enjoy the sun. Of course, the rich must not apologize for being rich and feel guilty about having so much when others have so little or nothing at all. They must just consent to make the rules of the game fairer so that the poor and the losers can aspire to a better life. After all, if hard work is no longer enough to survive and at least to give millions of people the hope that their children have the chance for a better future, what kind of world are we creating?

When anyhing becomes religious

Ruth Gledhill has an account of “Erotic Church Service” of the Church of the Carthusians in Cologne, Germany on her blog. Reading it made me laugh, but then I wonder why an erotic church service should be taken less seriously than other religious services. Are some church services more legitimate than others and if they are, who makes that decision? In other words, if religions are so divine that they can’t be judge or even discussed rationally, then isn’t the absurd, the peculiar and the immoral allowed always to take on the form of the religious to avoid judgment and command respect?

Eroticism on campus

William Deresiewicz has written in the American Scholar the best article, which I have read in a long time about Love or rather sex on college’s campus. He argues that sexual, erotic intensity on campus among professor and students should not only be tolerated, but encouraged. I agree with him wholeheartedly because I share his view that the teacher and student relationship is so disturbing within American culture that it is infantilized or rather sexualized in a vain attempt to eradicate the key fact that teaching is about awakenning desires and that there is a key difference between erotic intensity and inappropriate sexual behavior. Sugary excerpt:

If there’s one god our culture worships as piously as sex, it’s children. But sex and children, sexual intimacy and familial intimacy, have something in common — beyond the fact that one leads to the other: both belong to us as creatures of nature, not as creators in culture. […] Teaching, as Neil Postman says, is a subversive activity — all the more so today, when children are marinated in cultural messages from the moment they’re born. It no longer takes any training to learn to bow to your city’s gods (sex or children, money or nation). But it often takes a teacher to help you question those gods. The teacher’s job, in Keats’s terms, is to point you through the vale of soul-making. We’re born once, into nature and into the culture that quickly becomes a second nature. But then, if we’re granted such grace, we’re born again. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his mortal soul?
This is the kind of sex professors are having with their students behind closed doors: brain sex. And this is why we put up with the mediocre pay and the cultural contempt, not to mention the myriad indignities of graduate school and the tenure process. […] Teaching, finally, is about relationships. It is mentorship, not instruction. Socrates also says that the bond between teacher and student lasts a lifetime, even when the two are no longer together. And so it is. Student succeeds student, and I know that even the ones I’m closest to now will soon become names in my address book and then just distant memories. But the feelings we have for the teachers or students who have meant the most to us, like those we have for long-lost friends, never go away. They are part of us, and the briefest thought revives them, and we know that in some heaven we will all meet again.
The truth is that these possibilities are not quite as alien to American culture as I’ve been making out. Along with the new stereotype that’s dominated the portrayal of academics in film and fiction in recent years has come, far less frequently, a different image of what a college teacher can be and mean, exactly along the lines I’ve been tracing. It is there in Julia Roberts’s character in Mona Lisa Smile, in the blind professor who teaches Cameron Diaz’s character to love poetry in In Her Shoes, and most obviously, in Tuesdays with Morrie, that gargantuan cultural phenomenon. Robin Williams offered a scholastic version in Dead Poets Society. But we seem to need to keep the idea, or at least the person who embodies it, at a safe distance. Both Mona Lisa Smile and Dead Poets Society take place in the 1950s and at single-sex schools. Cameron Diaz’s mentor and Morrie Schwartz are retired and dying. The Socratic relationship is so profoundly disturbing to our culture that it must be defused before it can be approached. Yet many thousands of kids go off to college every year hoping, at least dimly, to experience it. It has become a kind of suppressed cultural memory, a haunting imaginative possibility. In our sex-stupefied, anti-intellectual culture, the eros of souls has become the love that dares not speak its name.

Deresiewicz is absolutely right. The best teachers I’ve had were those who made me desire something more than a good grade and who were less worried about going through their curriculum than about what I was feeling and seeing. Nowadays sex is so divinized that it is everywhere and that it has become dangerous and this explains why eroticism is disappearing. The difference between sex and eroticism is the difference between Playboy and Lolita. Erotic intensity should be welcome in an Academic setting precisely because it makes us aware that we are not solely sexual beings and that there is a gap between desire and action, which ethics may render unbridgeable. I don’t think that it is possible to learn in a sterilized or rather purified environment where there are no bias, no shortsightedness, no passion, no sex, and no microbes. The less college campuses resemble the real world, the less most unprepared students will be to face for after all in the real world is still a sexualized jungle where women and men flirt, cuddle, battle, and annihilate each other because they couldn’t get their pound of flesh.

Modernizing religion

“It is not so much that religion is finished, then, as that it is subject to something analogous with natural selection. It is the survival of the fittest, with fitness defined as the ability to cater to a more personalised conception of spirituality that speaks to people as individuals with their own concerns and desires, and even offers relief from the external regulation and surveillance experienced in other spheres, from education to work. In that sense, religion can offer a more humanising ‘subjective life’ alternative to more demanding ‘life-as’ roles in the secular world […]. This is certainly not at odds with moralism, however: there is a market for that too. It is striking, though, that moralism today usually takes the form of a concern with the private sphere, most obviously the churches’ interminable debates about homosexuality.

It is worth noting that this emphasis on private morality is actually very much in tune with the secular idea that religion is a private matter, which should have little or no bearing on public life. This is another sense in which religion has adapted to prevailing social mores: even at its most controversial, religion is about personal lifestyle. […] While refreshingly laid back in comparison with the prurience we associate with religion today, it is a fundamentally conservative form of religiosity, premised on the idea that society needs religion to hold it together, irrespective of whether people believe in it, much less whether it happens to be true. This form of religion really does seem to be dying out today. The fashionable piety is not to conform to social convention on religious matters, but to be true to one’s own beliefs, whatever those happen to be. Hence, religious moralism turns out to be all too compatible with moral relativism; being hung up about homosexuality is just another lifestyle choice, much like homosexuality itself. Tellingly, religious conservatives are more concerned with defending their right to disapprove than with imposing their beliefs on anyone else.”Dolan Cummings, “What's left of Christianity? The politics of belief in 2007 AD.”

Hitch vs. Hitch

The Independent has a worthwhile article on Christopher Hitchens and his very different brother and their differences. I didn’t know Hitchens had a brother, but it is interesting to read what he thinks of his brother’s eccentric behavior and beliefs:

Peter Hitchens went on the attack in a review of his elder sibling Christopher's new anti-religion book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything .

"People sometimes ask how two brothers, born less than three years apart, should have come to such different conclusions," wrote Peter, adding enigmatically: "To which I'd answer that I'm not sure they're as different as they look, and that it's not over yet."

Other than an acknowledg-ment that, "[Like] everything Christopher writes, it is often elegant, frequently witty and never stupid or boring" , Peter's review was damning, and even questioned whether Christopher truly believed his own assertion that there isn't a God.

Peter, 55, confirms to me that he was implying in his review that Christopher, 58, was closer to religious belief than he had ever accepted. " There is always, in the atheistical struggle with God, the fight against temptation. If it didn't matter to you, why write a book about how wrong it is? The first person you have to convince with any book you write, is yourself. If you didn't need convincing... why go to all those lengths?"