The Republic of Dissent

Doubt and true believers

I have read a lot lately about doubt and true believers. John Cornwell recalled the following episode about Graham Greene and faith in his article in the Guardian on Doubt and faith to make the point that Dawkins, Hitchens and others are wrong about religion and its absoluteness:

Not long before his death in 1991, I was sent by a newspaper to Antibes in the south of France to quiz Graham Greene about his religious beliefs. His faith, on the surface, seemed to be a mix of superstition, guilt and scepticism, spiced with Catholic orthodoxy. He thought it only natural to hope for an afterlife, but heaven sounded boring and hell implausible "because God is supposed to be infinitely merciful". And he admitted to uttering a prayer whenever his plane came in to land. He said he had met John Paul II, whom he thought an unpleasant dogmatist, in his dreams: "Instead of dispensing communion wafers he was giving out ornate Italian chocolates."

So which central doctrine, I asked Greene, enabled him to describe himself as a Christian? He said that he started writing fiction while working as a reporter on a provincial newspaper. So he felt he had an intuition, "as good as any Glaswegian chief sub-editor", to distinguish between fact and fiction. When he read the story in John's gospel of the two disciples racing each other to the empty tomb after Christ's body had disappeared, he felt that it was "authentic reportage". It was this, he went on, that "enabled me to doubt my doubt about the resurrection". Doubt my doubt! […]

As someone who had wavered between agnosticism and atheism for two decades, before having returned queasily to Christianity, I empathised with Greene's faith as "doubt of doubt" as opposed to faith as certitude. Faith is a journey without arrival, complicated by false turns, breakdowns, dead ends and wheel-changes. Faith, like love, is seldom entirely constant; nor is it irrevocable. While frequently assailed by doubt, faith is open to provisional, symbolic interpretations (most Christians outside the American bible belt do not take the book of Genesis literally). Those who pursue a religious vocation are not spared vicissitudes of faith and doubt, any more than card-carrying atheists. Mother Teresa, the Albanian nun who worked for the poor in Calcutta, left letters in which she spoke of her doubts right up to her death: "Where is my faith?" she once wrote to a confidant. "Even deep down ... there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. If there be a God - please forgive me." By the same token, Professor AJ Ayer, the most ardent atheist of his day, proclaimed that he believed in an afterlife following a near-death experience in 1988 when he was clinically dead for four minutes. After a few days, and an outcry from the atheists' society, of which he was the president, he partially recanted: "What I should have said is that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my attitude towards that belief." Doubt of doubt.

On Point had a good show on Mother Teresa and her battle with her own doubt, which lasted more than fifty years. The question, which I was forced to ask myself, is whether doubting is forbidden for true believers. That took me back to the issue of  the nature of religion and to my conviction that it ought to be a private matter and that proselytizing should stop be for true believers an obligation motivated by the belief that non believers will die in hell or that God wants them to save the world. To come back to Mother Teresa, I do not doubt that she was a great person and that her doubt in fact makes her more human than saintly. That is the problem for religion, Catholicism especially, needs saints in order to reassure itself that it is right about human frailty and the ability to overcome it with the help of God. If saints are humans, have faults, and more importantly doubt then it must mean that God isn’t the answer and that as Camus said alone once we realize that we must rebel against the way things are. Isn’t that what Mother Teresa did, but tirelessly refusing to believe that the poor and the sick of Calcutta deserved their fate? At the end it all comes back to the myth of Sisyphus and to what we choose to believe when the rock that we spent a tremendous amount of effort and of blood to punch on top of the mountain, come back down pitilessly while we look at it thinking with tears in our eyes about the time we spent to get it up. At that moment, the question isn’t whether to continue, but whether we make the decision to believe that the human condition is vile and unsatisfactory in itself and that we must therefore look for something more, for something divine. The other alternative is to choose rebellion by refusing to aspire to be Gods to accept to be humans. At the end, Jesus became for Mother Teresa a man not a God and that it was that which helped to survive, because she understood that she was alone and that all she could do is to be a woman of action.

Post-Western Europe

“Europe is increasingly taking a post-western shape. Until now, one of the striking features of the European project was the steady development of a post-national polity whereby the sovereign national state had to share its sovereignty with other levels of governance, which included regions and the EU itself. While this remains a feature of contemporary Europe, there is a more far-reaching development apparent that goes beyond issues of governance. The reshaping of Europe since the end of communism and the enlargement of the EU, the prospect of the inclusion of much of the former Yugoslavia and possibly Turkey's eventual membership, suggest a change in the identity of Europe in the direction of a multiple constellation of regions. This is more than a geopolitical shift; it is also a shift in cultural self-understanding. Europe today is no longer a western enclave centred around the core founding states. [...] What we are witnessing today is the emergence of different civilizational heritages. These do not so much make redundant or challenge the western heritage as add to it. The richness of Europe is the richness of its civilizational heritages. Until now the dominant approach has been to emphasize the diversity of Europe in terms of its nations. Indeed, this is the main meaning of the term "unity in diversity", which has come to be the principal statement of its cultural and political identity. This is a unity defined in terms of the diversity of national cultural and political traditions.” Gerard Delanty,“Peripheries and Borders in a Post-Western Europe.”

The war of roses

In this video, Laura Kipnis and Harvey Mansfield talk about their different views of gender, more about importantly of femininity and masculinity. What is striking to me is not really how far apart they are, but simply how little progress seems to have been made since the sixty on the way gender is used as prism for everything or for most things. Watching this video, reminded me of that old Chris Rock’s raw joke about some women's reluctance to practice a certain form of sexual act, which men cannot seem to be able to live without and the joke was that he looked at them as he would an old Betamax VCR  and wondered surprised, “Do they still make you?” All of this to say that people needs to stop trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to gender and to accept that the issue isn’t really gender, femininity, or masculinity, but power. In order words, the essential question is whether the second sex can be first and whether we live in a word where Simone de Beauvoir can have the same aspirations as Jean-Paul Sartre. Everything else is fluff, interesting, and thought-provoking fluff, but fluff nevertheless.

Jane Austen and Modern America

“(…) Remember when Camilla Paglia said Austen’s popularity could be explained as a cultural symptom in reaction to the O.J. Trial, as people longed for stories in which no one was being butchered? That was a good one. Or how some claimed that the return to Austen was a result of the fin de siècle’s prompting us to take stock and return to works of past centuries? Seems pretty thin now. Others claimed that Austen’s resurgence happened because we needed to measure the worth of our male heroes, from Bill Clinton and Brad Pitt to Kurt Cobain and Ross Perot. (Jane Austen and Ross Perot?)

So here we are, circa 2007, finding ourselves in danger of being asked yet again, “Why Austen? Why now?” How delightful. How frightening. I’m determined not to be caught off guard, so I’ve constructed some all-purpose answers to explain the latest Austen craze, suitable for everything from The Nation to “Larry King Live” to Marie Claire. Anyone struggling for words is, of course, welcome to use these as conversational building blocks:

Option A: “Today’s Austen mania is a form of cultural compensation for the disaster of the Iraq War and for the genocide in Darfur. Her novels offer us a way to forget the world’s evils by allowing us to travel back to those halcyon post-French Revolutionary days of Napoleon.”

Option B: “Austen’s timeless narratives of women’s romantic searching provide a welcome distraction from the Supreme Court’s rolling back of abortion rights, as we yearn for an era when many women had the power to refuse a proposal of marriage.”

Option C: “Austen’s newfound popularity signals that empire-waist frocks are due for a fashion revival; that irony, having been shunned after 9/11, is back and better than ever; and that Wal-Mart will roll back prices on its imported teas.”

This list is just a draft of talking points. I still have a few more ideas to work out. For instance, can it be an accident that Austen’s popularity is surging, just as Jane magazine has gone defunct? ” Devoney Looser, “Jane Austen, Yadda, Yadda, Yadda.”

Rambo is back!

Spiegel has a summary of major German Newspapers’ reactions to Sarkozy’s speech in front of ambassadors yesterday in which he elaborated on the major goals and objectives of French foreign policy. Spiegel calls Sarkozy Rambo and I have to say that it is a fair metaphore even though their physiques are so drastically different though I 'm sure that he is in Sarko's mind he is as physically imposing as Stallone. Sarkozy raises some eyebrows when he talked about the possibility of the use of force in Iran. My favorite excerpt comes from the Berliner Zeitung:

(With his speech) Sarkozy freed even himself from the illusion that he is strong and consistent. Now he is just feeble and volatile like all the others. Now you can say that the disappointed have themselves to blame because they believed in the unbelievable. The joke is that it's always going to work that way, because people always want to believe that there is somebody who will be able to change everything and because people actually usually disappoint themselves with their grand pledges.

Kouchner and the return of idealism

Bernard Kouchner has an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune in which he explains why he went to Iraq and what France wants to do in Iraq. He writes that France wants to be a mediator and to help the Americans succeed in Iraq not only because America is France’s ally, but also because it is in the interest of France to do so. Sugary excerpt:

What can France do to help this ravaged country recover hope? First, it can be modest. No one imagines that we have a magic formula. But as one Iraqi official said when I asked him what France could do, "It can offer a fresh look." Another official added, "Restore our self-respect."

Everyone knows that France did not support the coalition's intervention in 2003. Although the invasion ended a brutal dictatorship, the methods used to build a secure and democratic Iraq have failed. It is time to start anew. There can be no lasting military solution to this crisis. The solution has to be political. The Iraqis themselves, including those most hostile to the American presence, may not want the foreign troops to leave immediately, but a withdrawal must nevertheless be planned, in consultation with the Iraqi authorities. At the same time, a broad-based government of national unity must be established. France is prepared to act as mediator in this endeavor.

Yes, France can help to provide a fresh look. It can do so because it did not take part in the 2003 intervention and because it is bound to Iraq by longstanding ties of friendship and because it has a broad spectrum of contacts with all of the country's communities. And it can do so because we are the allies - sometimes troublesome, as true friends are - of the Americans.

I wonder if France can really help the US in Iraq by simply serving as a mediator and whether mediation can be effective in this case given the fact it would probably view suspiciously since it is instigated by another Western country. I like and respect Kouchner very much, but I think that his time as foreign minister will at least tell us whether idealist rebels can make good foreign ministers especially in times when inaction may be less dangerous than action, but still objectionable. On the subject of Kouchner, he had to apologize to Al-Maliki, the Prime Minister of Iraq, for calling for his ouster in an interview in Newsweek.

Like a wink and a smile?

Modernism and modern youth

“Here is evidence that modern youth, regardless of nationality, race, gender or class, has promoted sensation and rebellion, vitality and life, instead of rules and regulations. Antithesis has commonly been its social and cultural role in the modern age. “If individuality means anything”, wrote H. G. Wells in his scandalous novel of 1909, Ann Veronica, “it means breaking bounds – adventure. Will you be moral and your species, or immoral and yourself? We’ve decided to be immoral.” But this exaltation of personal experience with its likely impropriety was also the impulse behind modernism as cultural urge from roughly the 1870s on. Modernism was an adversarial outcry against predictability, convention, and stifling notions of duty and responsibility. Modernism, with its countercultural essence, embraced spontaneity and surprise. It pointed to the rot within the time-honoured and it in fact fêted that rot.

Indeed, modernism and the culture of youth have gone hand in hand. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” was the mantra of the 1960s flower children, but this caveat has been the inspiration of both youth and moderns for well over a century. Thus a history of modernism is bound to be a history of youth, and a history of modern youth must perforce be in large part a history of modernism.” Modris Ecksteins, “The Birth of the Teen.”

Money, America, and Reading

John Freeman argues that Americans don’t read because they are obsessed with money and that reading is seen as a waste of time in the land where time is money. Sugary excerpt;

America has always had one of the lowest literacy rates in the western world. The former book review editor of the LA Times, Steve Wasserman put it bluntly. "Reading has always been a minority taste in America," he said, "and that's OK." But I think what we're seeing now is something new which has to do with how a culture operates when all values become subservient to that of making money - when reading is not supported either from on top and from below.

One major part of the Republican revolution has been a full-scale assault on public welfare programming - which includes our national education budget. Indeed, Reagan ran on the platform that if elected he would abolish the department of education. Happily, that didn't happen, but as America's public schools turn out more and more illiterate children, the call has gone up to take the money we put into schools and put it into a private school system.
At the same time, the industries which support reading have been ground up and fed through the increasing corporatisation of American life. Book publishers and newspapers have been bought up by giant conglomerates. Publishers, once mildly profitable, have been forced to keep up with blockbuster driven media; newspapers, once wildly profitable, have been used as cash cows. And now that the media companies are done with these newspapers, those same owners are cutting back on all forms of news, including book pages.

And all the while reading is under assault from new forms of technology. At what point do we halt and do something drastic?

[…] We live in a visual culture now, one where a large part of what we see and absorb is telling us to buy. Barring a revolution, America will remain a consumer society, so I think some of the campaign to get people reading again in America should involve making books visible.

Part of the problem lies in the education systems in most American states, which create a society where few have a good education, which exposes them to the value and the magic of reading and where most don’t and have therefore to focus on surviving and on earning a living. The point is that not many kids learn that reading is fundamental. In the US, a good education is not only expensive, but it is also selective in the sense that where one starts is not only important, but also critical. Thus, although the American education system is based on merit, it also punishes those who have been unfortunate to be born in the wrong side of the tracks and to have stumble early in life. Catching up in the American education system is becoming increasingly difficult because doing so takes time and money, which explains why reading becomes secondary.

The quest for religious moderation

I took the time to watch Christiane Amanpour’s documentary God’s Warriors on CNN and I thought that it was fascinating even though it left me wanting more. In the last part, which focused on Christian Evangelists in America, Amanpour interviews Ralph Reed, who makes a insightful point about moderation in religion and in politics, by asserting that only fanatics or true believers (on the left and the right) are passionate enough about the issues to have the drive and to make the effort necessary to make a difference. I have the strong suspicion that he is right even though I wish that he wasn’t.

On the same subject of moderation, Carol Sarler has an article on the Spectator website in which she argues that it is a waste of time to wait for Muslim moderates because fundamentalism comes from the fact that religion is about interpretations and because believers are like snake handlers, with whom debate is pointless and unfruitful. Sugary excerpt:

When it comes to matters of faith and belief, it is not simply that the division tends to happen; it is that, surely, it must happen. As already declared, I come at this from the outside so, please, be gentle; still, it seems to me axiomatic that if you believe there is one god, and that this god has made available to you one scripture, then all beyond that — language being the inexact medium that it is — is interpretation. The inevitable problem, therefore, is that a thousand interpretations of one god’s one word mean 999 misinterpretations by people who read it and got it wrong; apostates could scarcely be worse! […]

There is a slew of young men currently writing in newspapers about how they used to be jihadists but have now seen the error of their ways and become ‘moderate Muslims’; each charts slow self-realisation of their own idiocy, rather than a peaceable conversion wrought by a sensible chat over a cuppa with an elder from a warmer, fuzzier mosque than their usual blast-happy haunt.

Whether the folly or the world will end first is not, at the moment, a happy bet. But if our time is to be limited, it would be nice to see less of it wasted on pleas for Muslim grown-ups — or anybody else — to get inside the heads of their militant mutineers with a view to gentle persuasion. The only understanding likely to be productive is of the kind needed for sufficient intelligence to catch them and thwack them; in short, as with the decision not to engage with the snake handlers, less of the word of God, with which one may disagree, and more of the laws of Man, with which one may not. At least we all know what they are and even (especially?) within the tension of terrorist threat, they are open to absolutely no interpretation at all.

Cake, caviar, and poverty

“Here’s the big issue. Many consequentialist arguments tell us we are morally wrong to spend money on luxuries, or even comparative luxuries, while people are dying because of a lack of basic needs. It may be unrealistic to expect people to actually give away all their “excess” wealth, but really, it is immoral not to.
If you take my argument above seriously though, does it not suggest that it may in fact be better to live in a world where some live in poverty and others have lives of great opportunity, than one in which everyone lives at a reasonable level of subsistence? In other words, although we may indeed be obliged to do more than we do to help the desperate, we are not in fact obliged to keep only what we absolutely need for ourselves?
If the answer is yes, then the bread and circuses argument can actually end up being rather harsh, since it implies some people living terribly can be justified, if that is the price we have to pay for a decent number of people being able to enjoy the finer things in life.” Julian Baggini, “Let us Eat Cake.”

Facts and the Clash of civilizations

In this video, Olivier Roy who is the author of Secularism confronts Islam talks about the so-called clash of civilization and has interesting things to say about it. It is a great video even though it is a bit long.

Gopnik, Sarkozy, and romanticization

I’ve just finished reading Adam Gopnik’s long piece on Sarkozy in the New Yorker. My first reading make me want to confront not only Gopnik on what I believe is his romaticization of Sarkozy and his coming to power, but also the fact that he let himself tempted by the seductive traps of easy metaphors and shallow analysis. For now, I am going to focus on the first part of the article and on my general impressions. Sugary excerpt:

There are certain realities of Sarkozy’s position that are easily overlooked—again, not unlike Clinton’s in 1992. His election, over the Socialist Ségolène Royal, was far from a rout; and in the legislative elections that were held the following month, as a kind of consolation for the losers, he actually lost ground. A stronger Socialist candidate—Strauss-Kahn, say—could likely have won the election for the left. The election was really won only on the night of the Presidential debate a few days before the final round of voting, when Royal harangued Sarkozy for two and a half hours about his weaknesses and flaws as a man and as a politician. This allowed Sarkozy to look wistfully harried and play the one part that he had never had the chance to play before—a sympathetic, erring middle-class French husband being blasted by a furious wife. (Emphasis added)

Gossip swirls around Paris about Sarkozy’s relationship with his own wife, the darkly beautiful Cécilia, as it did in Washington about the Clintons, but it tends to come down to a fairly coherent story, which is that both have had romantic attachments outside their marriage but have come back together now not from convenience but out of real passion—he adores her the way short, ambitious men adore beautiful women who are taller than they are but tolerate their advances. He sent her off to Tripoli to rescue the Bulgarian nurses—a group of unfortunate women who had been sentenced to death by a Libyan court on the implausible charge of deliberately injecting Libyan children with H.I.V. She brought the nurses back, but there have been allegations—strongly denied—that the mission’s success was connected to an arms deal between the Libyans and the French. Anyway, there seemed something unduly personal about using one’s family, rather than the usual channels of Euro diplomacy, to make an international deal, even an impeccably humanitarian one.

What bothers me is that Adam Gopnik asserts certain facts without proving them thus giving the reader the false impression that they are accepted facts and thus making them part of conventional wisdom. Furthermore, Gopnik’s discussion of Sarkozy and his wife never takes into consideration the context, which is this article should be everything. Instead he discusses their passion for each other as to assert explicitly that on the contrary of other power couples (he cites the Clintons) they love each other. Who cares? How does he know that? Why does it matter? The fact is that Gopnik is stuck on sentiments and glitz because France to him is sentiments and glitz. I mean I have trouble imagining him writing such an article about an American politician, no I'm wrong on this point because what Gopnik has done is in fact to push France in the background to focus and to Americanize Sarko. This leads me to my main point of contention so far in my incomplete reading of his article: he focuses on Sarkozy without discussing France and without understanding it. In other words, Gopnik is so excited about his subject Sarko and obviously so eager to provide the first complete analysis on the Sarkozy’s regime that he puts France and everything else in the background because he has transformed Sarko into a mythical figure.

It is important that I return Gopnik’s assertions about Ségolène Royal and the presidential election. I am not going to focus on its sexist aspect, because it would be a waste of time and because sexism is the least important aspect in this matter. Gopnik’s assertion that Ségo was the weakest candidate, but that nevertheless she lost the election on the night of the debate, which seems to be contradict his assertion that she was a weak candidate. If that were true, the Socialist Party wouldn’t be in shambles right now and Dominique Strauss Kahn (DSK), the stronger candidate would be running away from his party to become the director of the IMF in order to avoid the flames that is destroying everything socialist in France at the moment. The fact is that Ségolène Royal had no party to stand on for the Socialist Party not only didn’t support, but because it was not only a weak and passé “machin” (thing) to use De Gaulle’s word to describe the UN, but an undisciplined and divided one.  Of course, Ségo wasn't perfect, but no candidate is, and she lost because she couldn't overcome in my opinion the limits of socialism. Again, because Gopnik only cares about Sarko, he destroys everything that stands in his way to elevate him beyond even the country he is supposed to be presiding over. When Americans talk about France and its politics, usually that they are tempted by two stereotypes, the first is to romanticize them and the second one is to belittle them by emphasizing the so-called French follies and refusal to assert pragmatism ignoring that each country has its own follies and its own fantasy. Gopnik couldn’t resist romanticization because to talk about France he needed to believe that it has elected a leader that is not just a politician, but that is for once understandable to Americans because he is larger than life and more importantly France.

Bourne again

“In The Bourne Ultimatum, as in the first two instalments, the only bad guys are CIA operatives. They think little of bugging phones, using spycams to track troublesome elements, shooting uppity journalists, and blowing up CIA men gone wrong in the teeming streets of foreign cities. As Cosmo Landesman says in The Sunday Times, Bourne is ‘the perfect liberal hero’. He allows ‘liberals to enjoy all the forbidden pleasures of the espionage blockbuster: they can see him kick ass, break necks, smash faces and shoot fellow human beings, and not complain about civil liberties because the victims work for the CIA’. Bourne is, says Landesman, ‘the John Rambo of the liberal intelligentsia’ […]Bourne is a ‘humanitarian’ action hero. His character captures the shift from foreign ventures designed to boost the authority of the West to international escapades designed to flatter the egos of crisis-ridden Westerners. […] Matt Damon is the perfect actor to play such a character. He’s good-looking but not dazzlingly handsome, and he permanently wears a blank expression. If Bond’s effortless charm and super-coolness was meant to reflect that Brits are the best in the world at foreign diplomacy, and Schwarzenegger’s ridiculous muscles were supposed to symbolise America’s brute strength in the face of weasely foreign enemies, then Damon/Bourne’s namelessness and plainness capture a culture that doesn’t really know what it stands for.” Brendan O’Neill, “Jason Bourne: a ‘John Rambo for liberals.”

France is always guilty

I’ve read several articles on Bernard Kouchner’s visit to Iraq and too many of them show a worrying trend, which is a stubborn and illogic insistence that France or rather Chirac’s France doomed the Iraq war. The argument is that because France was opposed to the second Iraq war is divided the West, which crippled the war effort. I know that it is hard to follow but the point that many article are making is that Sarkozy is rectifying Chirac’s mistake, which was not only to refuse to participate in the war, but to weaken the western alliance for anti-American reasons when France’s participation would have made Iraq a success story. In the New York Post for example, Amir Taheri writes the following:

ONE key promise that Nicolas Sarkozy had made during his presidential election campaign last spring was to "correct foreign-policy mistakes" made by his predecessor Jacques Chirac.

Chief among these was Chirac's desperate efforts to prevent Iraq's liberation from Saddam Hussein's regime of terror. Chirac failed to save his friend's regime but managed to sour relations with the United States, Great Britain and more than 40 other democracies that joined the Coalition of the Willing to liberate Iraq in 2003.

Sarkozy's moves to correct the mistake started before his election, when he met President Bush at the White House in 2006 and described Chirac's policy as "arrogant."

The surprise visit paid to Iraq by France's new foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, this week is another move by Sarkozy to shed Chirac's legacy. No better man than Kouchner could have been chosen to signal France's change of policy. For Kouchner is one of a handful of people in the West who recognized the murderous nature of Saddam's regime and called for its overthrow as early as the 1980s.

In the Times of London, Bronwen Maddox continues the same line of argument by stating that,

Kouchner’s arrival follows the corncobs-and-hamburger informal summit between George Bush and Sarkozy. It shows that Sarkozy intends to put clear distance between himself and his predecessor Jacques Chirac, even on the most sensitive subject of Iraq, where Chirac had broadcast to the world his satisfaction at having foreseen the US’s predicament.

[…] What is there for France in involving itself in Iraq? A lot, given that it has no need to take responsibility for the outcome. It stands to gain the step forward on the world stage which Chirac had been seeking by opposing the Iraq invasion, wanting to set up France as an alternative pole to that of the American superpower. At that time Kouchner was a rare French voice in at least tolerating the invasion, calling his fellow officials “America-phobic”.

Chirac succeeded in shrinking support for the invasion to a devastatingly slender column, but the strategy then backfired.

The instinctive deep support for the US from Central and Eastern European countries, and at the start for the invasion itself from Italy and Spain, isolated him in his antiAmericanism, with his lone companion Gerhard Schröder, then German Chancellor. Both have been replaced by pro-US leaders.

Grandstanding aside, what can France contribute? It is helpful to have a country other than the US, Britain, or Iraq’s immediate neighbours, try to seek out common interests among Iraqis. US attempts to broker a deal are inextricably bound up with its urgent desire to reduce troops; the pressure on Bush – and his successor – is visible to the world.

I’m not buying it. I think that a lot can be said about Chirac and France’s refusal to participate in the Iraq war. It is possible to say that the French suspicion toward American power played a role in Chirac’s decision to say no to war. However, to focus merely on that is to offer a partial account of history for it is to say that France was solely responsible for the Iraqi crisis, which led to the war in 2003 and that Chirac had no other motives, but to want to hurt the American effort in Iraq. The point is that Chirac even if he may have right for the wrong reasons was right and that Sarkozy and even Kouchner never dared to say that they were in favor of the war in Iraq because they couldn’t defend it by simply arguing that the opposition was America-phobic. I agree that Sarkozy is signaling that he isn’t Chirac and that he indeed believes that he sees the world as divided between the West and the rest meaning that he would rather be wrong, but on the side of Bush than right, but on the side of the side of the rest of the world. That fragmentation of the world worries me. It is a reaffirmation of the so-called clash of civilizations, which implies that the West and the rest of world are so different that it is always preferable to be on the side of those who shares your values and your “blood” than to be on the side of those who don’t share those values and have a different culture. In other words, allegiance is absolute no matter the issue and no matter right and wrong. I don’t agree. The world isn’t divided between the West and the rest. Moreover, America is larger than the West because it is the symbol of the extraordinariness of human potential. I believe that the world needs America not just to stand there and to survive, but to be itself: to be good and to continue to be idealistic and to believe in difficult and sublime dreams. America isn’t just a country. It is a grand and sublime idea, which is that anything, even the impossible can happen with hard work and good deeds. It is for that reason that I thought that Chirac and Villepin went too far in expressing their rightful opposition to the war, they forgot that America was larger than the Bush administration and its childish rhetoric on French surrender and old Europe.

Looking for a fight: Jason Bourne and his women

Sarah Churchwell has an article on Comment is Free titled “The Bourne Misogyny.” Her thesis is that the Bourne movies use women characters in a stereotypical fashion, by making them accessories. Sugary excerpt:

There are female action heroes these days. In TV shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess and now Heroes, and movies such as Catwoman, Elektra and the Matrix films, women kick some ass. But these are all science-fiction fantasies: they take place in imaginary worlds, and several of them were notable flops. The rule seems to be that the more "realistic" an action film, the more hapless the women. The men can outwit entire government agencies, fight off 43 assailants at once, emerge from spectacular car crashes unscathed, and survive 10-storey drops into the East river (merely what Bourne does in Ultimatum). The women mainly stand around looking anxious. Joan Allen, who plays a CIA boss in all three films, has a slightly less thankless task; her character makes some intelligent decisions, but she isn't exactly stirring.

I disagree. I watched the last Bourne film, the Bourne Ultimatum last Friday. I thought that it was very good because it didn’t try to do too much and because it focuses on one person Jason Bourne played by Matt Damon. However, let’s assume that Churchwell is right for a second and that the women characters of the film are merely there to fill the screen. What would it mean? In other words, can a film be about misogyny to use Churchwell’s terms and still be not only entertaining, but worth seeing and instructive? My answer to that question is an emphatic yes because I think that films are not meant to please people and to portray reality as we wish it would instead of how the filmmaker perceives it to be or want it to be. Screaming that the Bourne Ultimatum is misogynistic because it doesn’t fulfill one’s vision of the world or of gender is not capricious, but it is also so useless. Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour is in my opinion one of the best movies ever made and yet, some have argued that it is misogynistic and Séverine, the woman character played by Cathérine Deneuve is not a real woman, but just an embodiment of a male fantasy. The point is that complaining that a movie portrays something bad or is bias toward something is in most cases nothing more than an assertion of one’s tastes and preferences unless more is provided to show that one’s taste should matter more than the one of its creator. Thus, after reading Churchwell’s article, I am left wondering where is the beef.

A French Doctor in Iraq

Bernard Kouchner, France’s Foreign Minister made a “surprise’ visit to Iraq yesterday. Although the visit doesn’t astonished me given the recent intimate meeting between Bush and Sarko, I still wonder what must the French diplomatic officials who were there during the 2003 Iraq crisis must be thinking. Charles Bremner, the Times of London’s Paris correspondent wrote the following about Kouchner’s visit:

Under Mr Chirac, Paris refused Iraqi requests to train the security forces and invest in reconstruction and it sought a firm timetable for the US retreat.

France, which once had close ties to the Saddam Hussein regime, has been criticised by the Iraqi Government for giving priority to its relations with Sunni leaders. [Emphasis added] Paris now wants to balance this with closer links with the Shia Muslim and Kurdish leaders who control the government, according to Dr Kouchner's aides.

Dr Kouchner has long had a friendship with President Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish President of Iraq and has also established a relationship with Adel Abdel Mahdi, the Shia Vice-President.

France is also keen to restore its influence in a region in which it has long been one of the main diplomatic powers. The opening to Iraq is matched by a new dialogue with the Hezbollah opposition in Lebanon.

Bremner seems to imply that Chirac said no to the Iraq war because he was close to Saddam Hussein and that to me is a rewriting of history. Anyway, I think for me the more important question is what will Kouchner and more importantly Sarko will do next. I wonder if they will go beyond symbolism to express their support for the failing Iraq enterprise. The most striking thing about the new French diplomacy is that it is implicitly erasing whatever marks Chirac and Villepin (who was the Foreign Minister at the time) made by making what many consider to be their only real accomplishment, that is their opposition to the Iraq war, something passé and that no longer matters. It is funny how rapidly a page can be turned in international relations.

Forcing people to become good

“The seduction of authoritarianism is that it is easier, much easier, to install screaming smoke detectors than persuade patients to stop smoking; to shoot the messengers rather than investigate totalitarian religion; to stop law-abiding people from drinking or protesting rather than take action against teenage gangs or real terrorists. […] More insidious is the notion that people can be forced to be good. If you are a puritan, you can believe we would be a happier society if cigarettes and alcohol had never been invented. If you can close your eyes and sink into the daydreams that there is no need to protest about climate change or that sexist, racist and homophobic preachers are the invention of the media, you will be happier still.” Nick Cohen, “Even the Begonias are Puritans Now.”

A summer catchy song

This is to me the perfect summer song because it is funny and relevant. Its name is EPO te quiero (EPO, I love you) and it is about the drugs in cycling and le Tour de France in particular. The group's name is La Plage (the beach) and they are the same guys who did the famous Zidane's head-butt song Coup de Boule last summer.

Refusing to believe in the end of Europe

“But the fact that significant sections of new immigrant communities have little interest in integrating into European societies is not a result of any demographic law. They are not in the business of ‘demographic rearmament’ and have no long-term plans for taking over the continent. If there is a problem in Europe today, then it has little to do with immigrant communities and much more to do with the failure of European societies to socialise and integrate these communities. […] Yet immigrants who come to Europe for a better life are unlikely actively to resist integrating into society; the real problem lies, not with the separatism of the immigrant, but with the confusion amongst host societies about what it is that people should be integrated in to.

There are many young immigrants in London, Paris or Berlin who are more than willing to embrace a new way of life. Unfortunately, European societies seem incapable of providing people with a vision that might inspire them. It is not surprising that some immigrants find it difficult to take to a culture that is clearly so confused about itself; nor should we be shocked to discover that immigrants can even become repulsed by what they perceive as a way of life without meaning.

Matters are not helped by the reluctance of Europe’s political and cultural elites to engage with the problems that face society. More than any other group of people, these elites are responsible for today’s cultural pessimism.” Frank Furedi, “The End of Europe?”

Sometimes, it really takes two

I read two articles this morning, which made my morning even though they left me very pensive. The first one is from the Little Professor on the new movie Becoming Jane, which strangely enough is not widely available in Washington DC. Sugary excerpt:

After watching the film, it struck me that biopics about the life of the author inadvertently contribute to the death of the author. That is, such films frequently represent authorship as transcription or collage; the author's own unique contribution frequently gets lost in the mix.  On the one hand, Becoming Jane does want to argue in favor of the imagination, in the form of Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe.  Radcliffe's bestsellers derive, we are told, from an mental "landscape," a wild and eerie place pointedly not embodied in her reserved, restrained figure and rather shabby setting.  And Jane's own plots, we are also eventually told, will also be unreal, if in a different sense: although Jane initially rejects the comforts of poetic justice in Fielding's Tom Jones, the novel which is also the source of her sexual awakening (this is one of the more literate seduction techniques in recent memory, I must say), her experience of romantic loss teaches her the need for stories in which everyone gets their just rewards.  In that sense, the film detaches fiction from "real life."   

I have seen the movie so it would be unfair of me to make a judgment about its quality. The first thought that I had when I heard that there was a movie about Jane Austen’s life, I wondered if that wasn’t a way for the makers of the movie (and the author, Jon Spence for it is based on a book titled Becoming Jane Austen) to have it both ways. Let me explain what I mean. My guess is that the movie would have been harder to sell and to commercialize if it didn’t make the assertion that it was about Jane Austen. Thus, Jane Austen in this case is the hook to attract a wider audience even though it seems clear from the reviews and from the trailer of the movie that it may be a well-made romantic film about a young woman trying desperately to find love. How many times have we seen that before? So to make it fresh and sexy, they used Jane Austen to attract bookish people who want to know more about the writer and they use Anne Hathaway to attract a younger and hipper audience who like her in her roles in the Princess Diaries and in the Devil Wears Prada. I wouldn’t surprise if Becoming Jane were a good movie, but I wonder if it sells what it promises implicitly that is a film about the life of Jane Austen.

The second article was a post by Louise Tucker on the Blog Books of the Guardian. It is about the fact that Ann Patchett was involved in a controversy when a book Truth and Beauty (which was a good, but a difficult and exhausting read because it is so intense) about her friend Lucy Grealy was assigned to freshmen at Clemson. Some people had trouble accepting that fact and went to extraordinary lengths to prevent her from giving a lecture at the School. Sugary excerpt:

Which brings me to my question. At Clemson, the minority did not win. Patchett still gave her talk, despite her friends urging her to cancel, despite the unfriendly newspaper and TV coverage and despite the fact that her book had been described as a "sewer". But, if Clemson, in the supposedly free US, can try to ban a writer and her work on this basis, how is it any different from those who imposed a fatwa on Salman Rushdie, or tried to imprison Orhan Pamuk? If bigots and the religious right can make the most mild-mannered and uncontroversial of writers think twice about discussing her work in public, what hope is there for those whose writing is far removed from either of those descriptions? And what hope is there for education, if teachers hesitate to include titles that may cause offence? I wonder now if I would still blithely choose to teach Madame Bovary (adultery), or Orlando (transsexual, or transgendered main character depending on your perspective), or even Ulysses (all those yesses...) what happens to our education system, and to our freedom to read, if, and when, those decisions are hampered by fear?

I think that Louise Tucker puts her finger on one of the contradictions of America, which is after all the only country on earth, which guarantees the pursuit of happiness to its citizens. However, increasingly in some parts of America, some thoughts, writings, forms of expression are forbidden because they are deemed anti-American or immoral. The question of purpose and of effectiveness is never asked in this type of heated confrontation between those who value free speech and those who asserts that not all speech is free and that they know obscenity and vileness when they see them. In other words, is it rational or even American to argue that some speech is so vile that is contagious for Americans who are so weak and so vulnerable that they can only be infected by materials, which are deemed by some to be inappropriate? What I’m trying to say is that it is easy to understand why it is difficult and forbidden to read Lolita in Tehran, but not why it is the case in Clemson or any place else in the United States.

Morality and leadership

“How to get people to do the extraordinary in difficult, dangerous or harsh environments, without recourse to high compensation packages, or in conditions where human rights and social activities are circumscribed is, of course, the day-to-day business of military leadership. […] First, there has to be some moral component of good leadership that extends the goals of individuals beyond themselves and their own narrow ambitions based on self-interest.

For where there is a high element of personal risk, sacrifice or hardship involved, people have to believe that what they are doing will make some worthwhile contribution to society, their nation or to mankind as a whole. Fighting against the tyranny of Hitler provides one obvious example of where a clear moral component created high levels of motivation among people. People firmly believed in what they were doing and the entire country united behind the political leadership of Churchill. The reverse is, of course, true of the war in Iraq. Tony Blair not only failed to persuade the majority of British people of the need to go to war in the first place, but subsequently lost any popular support amid the calamitous attempt to establish Western-style democracy in Iraq by military force.

[…] A leader, however inspirational, has to be professionally competent.

Furthermore, people have to believe that those whom they are working for, are also fair. In addition to competence there has to be integrity. There can be no double standards and it will always be expected that leaders should share the same risks and hardships as their people. Morale will never be high in companies where the workforce are being laid off while the management reward themselves with high levels of remuneration. Loyalty cannot be just one way. No human being wants to belong to a failed organisation and people will work extraordinary hours, make great sacrifices and take enormous risks if they feel that they can be assured of success. Nevertheless, defining moments for leaders are usually found in moments of crisis, adversity, chaos. For anyone can lead when things are going well, but it takes extraordinary qualities of leadership to maintain motivation when things are going badly.” Michael Rose, “Through the Maze of War.”

Happy Birthday to India

India is celebration its 60 years of independence from English rule and the first word that comes to my mind is Wow because India impresses and fascinates me. Last week, Pankaj Mishra (whose latest book Temptations of the West is out in paperback has an excellent essay in the New Yorker on the colonial past and on the Indian partition that led to the creation of Pakistan. In its editorial this morning, the Hindu writes the following about this commemoration:

India can have it both ways: an ancient civilisation that is a confluence of many streams of humanity; and a relatively young independent nation. Its biggest achievement as an independent modern country is its vibrant political democracy. Its biggest deficit is its inability over six decades to overcome the largest mass of poverty and deprivations in the world.

At 60 independent, secular, and pluralistic India finds itself, by any objective yardstick, stronger than it was at 50. It faces major challenges as well as opportunities in the political, economic, social, cultural, scientific, technological, creative, and external affairs realms. ‘Rising India’ is a work in progress. To get a representative sense of how we view ourselves, we invited an exceptional range of participants in, and observers of, this work in progress to give us their assessments and perspectives.

It is difficult not to be impressed with India’s successes even though its future as a superpower isn’t written in stone. In this video, Edward Luce who wrote an interesting book last year on India untitled In spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India, talks about India, its achievements, its challenges and its future. It is a long video, but a fascinating one.

Fascination, artists and evil

Sign and Sight has an interesting article on the fascination that too many artists have with evil and with people who embody it such as Hitler and Kim Jong II. Georg Diez, the author of the article uses the expression “the idiocy of artists” which he admits can be visionary even though he deplores this morbid fascination. However, Diez doesn’t answer the question whether this kind of art can be more than visionary and can defuse evil by humanizing and thus reminding the world that all of the people it has in a way elevated or rather debased to the mythical level of the Devil were all too human. For that reason, not only memory is important, but so is also the recognition that good and evil are about humanity and its choices. Of course, artists are prone to exaggeration and to provocation, but that is the beauty of art and its ability to serve as a mirror for society. Sugary excerpt:

Fascination, obfuscation, clarification always have been weirdly connected around the character of Adolf Hitler. In some cases, particularly in recent years, in the case of Bernd Eichinger ("The Downfall"), Bruno Ganz and the Parkinson's Hitler twitching in the bunker, it really isn't clear why this story is being told again – except perhaps to summon up the devil again, show him to two million Germans in the cinema and thereby keep him alive. Hitler's shadow is long, but not as long as it is made out to be. And even when the talk turns to Sophie Scholl, to the role of the resistance, or now to Stauffenberg and Tom Cruise – it often seems as if we Germans just can't or won't let go of Hitler.
"Images cannot be dispelled," Jonathan Meese once said, with Hitler in mind. "If you want to be rid of certain images, you must give them the chance to fight themselves." But it doesn't look like Meese wants to dispel Hitler; it seems more like an invocation. […]
But Hitler continues to be a popular image for German artists and intellectuals to wank over, however bizarre this might seem abroad. Meese stages his on-line Hitler posing and his whole Germanic carryings-on with an anti-authoritarian gesture – which can only serve to conceal the kick which he gets from this authoritarian strutting. This is not about post-modernism, this is not about deconstruction, it is about using Hitler's power. Dirty is good, is the old art reflex at play here; dirty is fun, the excusatory logic behind it.
But it's not funny. It's not funny when Meese gives Eva Braun as his MySpace girlfriend, a neo-Nazi centrefold, in an up-beat Obersalzberg pose with a polka dot skirt. And it's also not funny when his friends include Richard Wagner and Pope Pius XII, Hochhuth's "Deputy", the Pope who kept quiet about the persecution of the Jews, this figure of historical ambivalence in all its holiness – whereby "ambivalence" conceals a slight but real, original fascination. Meese, with his Hitlerisms, is not going down particularly well in these days of low-level democracy and grand coalitions.

Crappy Bible

Sam Jordison asserts that the Bible isn’t a good book in the sense that it contains too many literary sins. It is a great read, even though it makes me wonder if a book can have many literary sins and still be good not for the writing ,but for the story. Last year, I read Robert Alter’s translation of the Five Books of Moses and I enjoyed it very much in part because Alter succeeded in making it not only readable, but also digestible by not trying to make it a literary book. Nevertheless, I think that Jordison is right to say that one has the right to say that the bible is crap:

The literary quality of the Bible is an issue that I think is worth addressing. Firstly, there's the simple point that if the Bible really were the word of God, you'd think that He would be able to make it more interesting. Secondly, there's a war being waged against reason at the moment and it's gone time that reason started landing a few punches of its own. Why not freely state the obvious, but hitherto rarely mentioned, truth? The Good Book is not, as is so often suggested, a damn good read. It's crap. If the two Testaments tell the greatest story ever told, I am a monkey (and not just the distant descendant of one).

[…] Firstly, I do not want to suggest that the ancient books of the Bible are not fascinating and valuable historical documents (no matter how dubious their own claims to veracity).

Nor am I saying that one should not read the Bible. On the contrary, it's vitally important that those on the side of reason should study it, especially in order to know and understand what they are up against. Similarly, if more people who call themselves Christians actually read the book, they might spot a few of its internal contradictions and realise that far from being the meek and mild socialist of popular conception, the Jesus in the New Testament is an unforgiving egomaniac, obsessed with demons, who likes nothing more than to have his dirty feet kissed (Luke 7: 44-5). They might also see that the God they pray to, is, as Evelyn Waugh once quoted Randolph Churchill, "a shit." Failing that, literalists might at least start taking the instructions about not eating shellfish as seriously as they do those that encourage homophobia, and so lessen the burden on our over-fished seas.

Thirdly, and most importantly in terms of such an artistic judgement of the Bible, I'm not denying that some absolutely wonderful manipulations of the English language can be found in the King James version. I also wouldn't dream of suggesting that this translation hasn't been profound influence on English literature. What I would say, however, is that the most important word in the previous sentence is translation.

From l'amour to la guerre

Adam Thorpe had a review in Guardian on David A Bell's latest book of The First Total War (which I’m planning to read during my vacation), which chronicles France’s evolution from a nation who believed in fraternity to one, which learned to believe in War. During the Iraqi crisis of 2003, France was portrayed as a pacifist nation and Chirac had even to reject this claim by asserting explicitly that France didn’t believe in the Sixties’ mantra of making love not war. Sugary excerpt:

More controversially, Bell ascribes the revolution's embrace of perpetual warfare to cultural rather than geopolitical causes (the need to defend itself, for instance). It blames les philosophes and, further back still, Christian pacifism. "The true key to the museum of the 18th-century imagination", its emphasis on inner virtue and humility, was a proto-Romantic rebuke to court culture.

The Enlightenment regarded warfare as "fundamentally irrational", with Voltaire calling it "a million assassins in uniform". It was a primitive "remnant" of barbarism, a social pathology to be eradicated in a Europe where all were brothers - at least in commerce. Bell notes how Immanuel Kant disagreed, seeing the goal of peace as better conforming to moral laws rather than to historical inevitability. Meanwhile, the advocates of war were finding a shadow argument based on classical models: civilisation as a disease, war as a vaccine. For these powerful currents of thought to become embodied in political reality, where the pacifist line would undergo a kind of double-helix twist into horror, all that was needed was the destruction of the aristocratic system. In 1789, the French obliged.

[…]Within weeks, France was pitted against most of Europe. Even Robespierre came on board, now on his way to becoming the architect of the Terror. War was imagined as bringing about, in Bell's words, "an extraordinary break in human history". With it came delusional fantasies of romantic self-expression that condemned hundreds of thousands to grisly ends. Bell cites the military engineer Lazare Carnot declaring to a soldier who had lost his face: "None of us would refuse glory at the price it cost you." Although the French deputies balked at killing the British prime minister, they called for the extermination of his subjects. Total war, as opposed to "limited" war, was born; it was now in the hands of glacial types like Saint-Just, whose savage methods, coupled with France's demographic advantage, led to the republic's astonishing string of victories. In 1793, when the Catholic and royalist Vendée area rose up in internal rebellion, the republic's response was certainly total: an estimated 250,000 men, women and children perished "out of a principle of humanity", as General Carrier put it during the mass drownings at Nantes. The "hell columns" anticipated the SS by a century and a half, yet Bell points out that the names of some of the worst butchers still adorn the Arc de Triomphe: like Vichy or Algeria, the Vendée remains an awkward cyst in the national psyche. For Bell, it is the place where total war "was first revealed to its full, gruesome extent".

Pretentious and working vacation

Since everybody including the energizer Bunny (Nicolas Sarkozy) believes in the importance of summer vacations, I have decided to take one. I am going to take a trip to the French Riviera in my head. What does it mean? It means that although I am stuck in DC, I will nevertheless take a mental trip to the Côte d’Azur to recharge my batteries to be ready to go in September. Because I need this blog to feel alive, I will continue to post even though the number of my posts will wary from day to day. I know it was already this case, but this time, I’m asking you to be understanding and forgiving. I will thus continue to post every day, but my mind will be in Nice so my posts might be from time to time too fluffy and too shinny. My vacation will end after Labor, but probably sooner. Enjoy the end of the summer, and don’t forget that I will be posting throughout my pretentious vacation.

Getting beyond questions of Faith

The best article I read last weekend was David Martin’s review of John Gray’s 
Black Mass: Apocalyptic religion and the death of utopia in the Times of London Literary Supplement. In his book, John Gray argues that even secular ideologies, which are predominant today have been shaped by religion in some form and that today, the world is experiencing the death of utopia, which is leading to the return of Apocalyptic religion, which is the source for more violent conflict. In his review, Martin criticizes Gray’s book for being incomplete and for ignoring points, which contradicts his thesis. Sugary excerpt:

Yet in Black Mass he begins: “Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion. The greatest of the revolutionary upheavals that have shaped so much of the history of the past two centuries were episodes in the history of faith – moments in the long dissolution of Christianity and the rise of modern political religion”. I happen to think the first truth has greater analytic power than the second, and the notion of the long dissolution of Christianity ignores what recent research has to show about the resilience of Christianity through most of the nineteenth century. But the power of Gray’s analysis does not depend on whether he has read deeply in the sociology of religion, or on the extent to which he gives a one-sided account of New Testament scholarship, as if much modern criticism had not challenged Albert Schweitzer’s eschatological emphasis in The Quest of the Historical Jesus a century ago. Rather, his analysis depends on revising the boundaries of categories like religion and politics: it is boundary changes that generate whole new vistas of argument. Once you revise your categories in a sufficiently radical way, the conferences of our contemporary Conservative and Labour parties in secular Britain, each of them singing Blake’s “Jerusalem” from a different hymn book, look like assemblies of votaries devoted to what Tennyson called the “one far-off divine event / To which the whole creation moves”. The French may think master-narratives are out, along with belief and morality, but in fact the language of politics, even in secularist France, is saturated in a teleological moralism. Political language is, as Georges Sorel eloquently showed, profoundly mythic. [Emphasis added]

Gray pours particular scorn on the idea that we have arrived at some “sunlit upland” where liberal democracy is in principle victorious: Francis Fukuyama eat your heart out. All the supposed signs of a secure and liberal future, such as the European Union and the United Nations, are founded on a contingent historical flux which can change direction at any time, and could just as easily usher in the hegemony of Chinese or Russian totalitarian capitalism. For Gray, the boasted achievements of the United States are equally precarious, as witness the reversal of its most solemn constitutional guarantees at the onset of a terrorist threat far less dangerous to its way of life than the actions taken to combat it. Our democratic order is not founded on some secular version of Christian Providence but a vulnerable local achievement, only exportable by violence on the mistaken assumption that, once you strike away the chains of history, tradition and culture, a New Man will emerge in the image and likeness of Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine.

After reading Martin’s review, I kept wondering whether at issue wasn’t the question of the omnipresence and the omnipotence of religion (independently of God's existence) within civilizations. Gray and Martin believe in the omnipotence of religion in the sense that they believe that religions are in fact inescapable and that secularism is condemned to become religious or to adopt religion theology to justify its moral values. Even though this belief leads both Gray and Martin to different conclusions, it is striking to see that they have trouble imagining politics, morality, and even the world without religion. I may be wrong, but I believe that it is from this belief that the problem  conflict originates since it cheapens the discussion on utopia, ideology, modern politics and everything else. After all, once you limit the parameters of an essential discussion, it becomes practically impossible not to reach erroneous conclusions and to escape the traps of circular reasoning.

Pitying Middle-aged men

“The world is run by middle-aged men, although sometimes, if you are a middle-aged man, it doesn’t feel like it. No other socio-demographic group is subject to such ridicule, contempt or sarcastic admonishment. There seems to be something intrinsically funny about everything that the middle-aged man does, whether it is planning barbecues in the comfort zone of his back garden or plotting to climb Everest. He is a bore or a charlatan; preparing early for death or clinging pointlessly to the life-affirming qualities of youth. A middle-aged man in love is absurd. His wish to drive a fast car is the sign of existential crisis. His jeans mean that he refuses to grow up. Listening to the anthems of his youth on a rackety turntable is nostalgic tristesse; listening to 50 Cent on a newly-acquired i-Pod means he is half a dollar short, at the very least, of proper maturity.

And yet it is the most fragile of human conditions, middle age. It demands the most delicate of balancing acts as we lean comfily on the experiences of a life half-lived and yet feel the need to look forward to novel challenges. We are worldly wise but yearn for fresh adventure. We will almost certainly have dealt with burdens and bereavements and have come out the other side, trying to invest emotionally in a future that we now know will turn out to be the usual battered compromise between aspiration and bracing reality. That requires a certain amount of irony and courage.

Men take the brunt of middle-age jokes and that’s proper and correct. Middle-aged men run the world and hegemony is blood-related to hubris and humiliation. The more powerful you are, the more amusing your plight if you suffer a setback.” Peter Aspden, “How to be a Middle-Aged Men.”

Laïcité and Islam

Guy La Roche from A fistful of Euros has a great post on Olivier Roy’s new book on Islam in the West, Secularism confronts Islam published by the Columbia University Press. La Roche’s post provides an excellent summary of Roy’s main points about the French laïcité and its confrontation with Islam. It is a great read. Sugary excerpt:

In short, even when Secularism confronts Islam focuses on the confrontation between Islam and secularist values, which, as Olivier Roy demonstrates, are not necessarily exclusively Western, it is most of all a work that, by its sheer depth, inspires readers to think about many other concepts. It inspires readers to even rethink some of those concepts in order to gain a better understanding of all the dynamics at play. As we all know, the first step in solving a problem is understanding that problem. Or, to pick up my silly monster metaphor again, if you are afraid of something, the best thing to do is to confront the scary monster by trying to understand it. More often than not you will find it to be much less threatening than you initially thought it would be. The monster may even confront you with yourself… Or, in this case, with the dynamics of our own societies.

A fine romance

The meaning of a lunch

Nicolas Sarkozy is having an informal lunch with President Bush in Maine (Kennebunkport ) in the Bush family residence. The Boston Globe has an interesting article on the “Lunch” in which Sarkozy says the following:

France is friends with democracies, not with dictatorships. […] Do we agree on everything? No. […] Because even in family, there are disagreements. But we are still the same family.

Ah! I think that it isn’t necessary to comment on that quote. Nevertheless, as I have always said, although I liked Sarkozy’s Americanism, I don’t think he knows much about America, but rather likes it because too him, it is synonymous with power and money. There is nothing wrong with that, but to me, America is about more than that, much more than that otherwise, it wouldn’t America, but just another materialistic country, which never wonders about existential purpose and never questions its actions. Well, because I believe in small victories, I hope that they had some French wine and that it means that it is a beginning of a new and less confrontational relationship between the US and France. Well, I am allowed to dream or am I?

The internet and culture

“Today's internet, quite literally, turns the mass media age on its head. Anyone with internet access can publish anything online, which results in the mob chaos of YouTube, the blogosphere and Wikipedia. As the traditional media gatekeepers lose their power, the very idea of cultural authority is undermined, meaning that everybody (ie: nobody) can legitimately determine aesthetic standards or truths.

The economic consequences of this anarchy are particularly corrosive. The digital revolution fatally undermines the value of the copy, thereby resulting in a cultural economy increasingly dependent either on advertising or a confusing and often deceitful confusion of independent and commercial content.

The end result is disastrous for both the creator and consumer of culture. The internet is producing the cult of the amateur, a dumbing-down of culture, in which innocence is replacing expertise as the determinant of value. Worse still, as the copy loses its economic exchange value, the only way artists will be able to make a living will be through the live performance of their work. So the end result of the so-called "democratised" culture will actually be a shrinkage in both the size of the cultural economy and in the number of professional artists. That means fewer professionally-produced books, movies and recorded music. Only the rich will be able to afford to physically access the artist in an economy where value will be increasingly determined by physical presence. Instead of more cultural democracy, therefore, the internet will create more cultural inequality and privilege.” Andrew Keen, “Is Today's Internet Killing our Culture?”

Humanizing Sartre

It is too hot in DC to think and to write (I know it is a pathetic excuse not to post), so I thought a good alternative would be to post this excerpt of a BBC documentary on Sartre. Why Sartre? Because although I prefer Camus 71.9% of the times, Sartre reminds of the absurdity of it all and of the fact that it is impossible to escape the fact that humans have to choose who they are and to accept responsibility for it. Ian Birchall asserted that that Sartre was an optimist in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago in answer to David Bryant’s claim that Sartre was a nihilist:

For Sartre the fundamental fact about the human situation is that we are free. Far from it being a paradox that there is a "powerful note of optimism" in Sartre's work, his whole philosophy is an optimistic one. As he said of his critics in his 1945 lecture Existentialism and Humanism: "I wonder if their grievance [against existentialism] is not its pessimism but its optimism."

Throughout his life Sartre took the side of the oppressed. He opposed the war in Algeria at some personal risk, and sold socialist newspapers on the streets of Paris to defend activists against police repression. His particular judgments can be debated, but Sartre's life and work form a defence of moral responsibility which can enlighten a new century.

Although I think that the optimism of Sartre can be questioned, I think that Birchall is right about the fact that Sartre isn’t amoral and a nihilist for otherwise, it would be difficult to explain his conversion to Communism and his emphasis on choice and responsibility. Whether it is optimistic or not to be a voluntarist, Sartre believes in voluntarism so much so that he thought that human nature and even experience couldn’t be an excuse for bad choices and other catastrophes. That explains why he wrote a short essay on Baudelaire in which he made the argument that, on the contrary to conventional wisdom, humans always live the life that they deserve to live precisely because they choose to live.

A manly man and his delusions

“Human government is not viable or sufficient without divine government above it in some unspecified relationship.

Is such a divine, transcendent power possible? The atheists say it is not. They say that man is by nature a tool-maker, not a religious being who yearns to worship God. In their view worship is nothing but a tool to get what we want; the power allegedly over us is "out of us" in the sense of originating in our selves. […] Is there an atheist alternative to tyranny? Is there such a thing as a non religious principle, replacing God, that is truly transcendent and not a tool of our passions? […]

There was an Epicurean atheism in the ancient world quite different from ours today. That atheism also uncovered tyranny behind the mask of religion, but it was content to point out the power of injustice. Injustice in this view was the way of the world, and there was no remedy for it. The only recourse for a reasonable person was to stay out of politics and live a life of pleasure, seeking calm, watching storms of the sea from ashore, and suppressing one's indignation at injustice.

Today's atheism rejects this serene attitude and goes on the attack. In its criticisms of God it claims to be more moral than religion. But it cannot do this without becoming just as heated, thus just as susceptible to fanaticism, as religion. Today's atheism shows the power of our desire for justice, a fact underestimated by the Epicurean pleasure-lovers. But it ignores the power of injustice, which was the Epicurean insight. Atheists today angrily hold religion to a standard of justice that the most advanced thinkers of our time, the postmoderns, have declared to be impossible. […] The weakness of atheism, however, is to take account of only one of them, the fact of injustice in the case of Epicurean atheism or the desire for justice in our Enlightenment atheism. I conclude that philosophy today--and science too--need not only to tolerate and respect religion, but also to learn from it.” Harvey Mansfield, “Atheist Tracts.”

Sarkozy and naked truths

That’s it! I have decided to stop taking the New York Sun seriously when it comes to France and its politics. The paper has an editorial on Sarkozy that is so unserious that it would made laugh if it wasn’t meant to be taken seriously despite the fact that it is grotesque. The argument is made that in fact Sarkozy is some kind of Anglo-Saxon superhuman politician who is revolutionizing French politics for once by doing what he said he would do and by “un-Frenching” France. Sugary excerpt:

The fact is, our spies tell us, the French just don't know what to make of their new head of state. After 12 years of the unspeakable Jacques Chirac, whose treacherous and venal regime dragged the name of France through the mud, they elected Mr. Sarkozy 10 weeks ago, hoping that a tough-minded conservative would crack down on rioting Muslim immigrants who were being egged on by Islamist elements and at least manage their country's decline with a little more dignity.

It seems the Parisian elite, for whom cynicism is a second nature, mistook their man: they assumed that, like the rest of their politicians, Mr. Sarkozy did not mean a word he said. His admiration for "les Anglo-Saxons" was naiveté. They ignored the fact that he held an election rally in London, aimed at the hundreds of thousands of ambitious French voters who have emigrated there to escape the dead hand of the French state.

The irony is not lost on Mr. Sarkozy that his Hungarian father once fled to France to escape socialism [communism]. The elites put his refusal to adopt the explicitly anti- Israel (and implicitly anti-Semitic) rhetoric of French politics down to the fact that his maternal grandfather was born Jewish. And they waited for their eccentric president to drop his "American" habit of jogging daily and for France to go back to self-satisfied normality. […] The real test of the Sarkozy presidency will come when unpopular but necessary foreign policies coincide with unpopular but necessary domestic policies. Once Leftists and Islamists take to the streets, French governments rarely resist and, having once caved in, never recover. As interior minister, Mr. Sarkozy famously dismissed rioters two years ago as "racaille," a word that was, politely, translated as "scum." Sooner rather than later, he will have to confront not just a few paparazzi on a lake, but a challenge from a combination of Islamists and Leftists at home. Then we shall find out what Nicolas Sarkozy is made of — and whether the superhero can live up to his image.

In other words, what the Sun likes about Sarkozy is that to them, he isn’t French at all and that he will make France less French and more anglicized. I find that insulting because it is condescending and proof of the editorialists’ complex of superiority to argue that a reformed France is an anglicized France and that only a Frenchman with foreign origins could do a good job “managing” France. The end of the editorial is telling for it implies that after because Sarkozy in spite of the his non-French blood remains a Frenchman and may thus still disappointed by surrendering instead of fighting, which is of course the French way.

Seeking the Human within the Sacred

Roger Scruton defends religion against what he believes to be Atheist’s triumphalism. He argues that  by Réné Girard’s theory about violence and the sacred, showed that religion is the solution against violence and that a rational person is the one who seeks to understand it rather than to mock and challenge it. Sugary excerpt:

Thinkers like Dawkins and Hitchens conclude that religion is the cause of this violence and sexual obsession, and that the crimes committed in the name of religion can be seen as the definitive disproof of it. Not so, argues Girard. Religion is not the cause of violence but the solution to it. The violence comes from another source, and there is no society without it since it comes from the very attempt of human beings to live together. The same can be said of the religious obsession with sexuality: religion is not its cause, but an attempt to resolve it. […] I suspect that, like Nietzsche, Girard has reminded us of truths that we would rather forget—in particular the truth that religion is not primarily about God but about the sacred, and that the experience of the sacred can be suppressed, ignored and even desecrated (the routine tribute paid to it in modern societies) but never destroyed. Always the need for it will arise, for it is in the nature of rational beings like us to live at the edge of things, experiencing our alienation and longing for the sudden reversal that will once again join us to the centre. For Girard, that reversal is a kind of self-forgiveness, as the concealed aggressions of our social life are transcended—washed in the blood of the lamb. […] Of course, you don't have to follow Girard into those obscure and controversial regions in order to endorse his view of the sacred as a human universal. Nor do you have to accept the cosmology of monotheism in order to understand why it is that this experience of the sacred should attach itself to the three great transitions—the three rites of passage—which mark the cyclical continuity of human societies. Birth, copulation and death are the moments when time stands still, when we look on the world from a point at its edge, when we experience our dependence and contingency, and when we are apt to be filled with an entirely reasonable awe. It is from such moments, replete with emotional knowledge, that religion begins. The rational person is not the one who scoffs at all religions, but the one who tries to discover which of them, if any, can make sense of those things, and, while doing so, draw the poison of resentment.

Scruton is missing the point for he sees atheism as a kind of absolutism, which can withstand neither criticism nor dissent when the contrary is true. I suspect that Hitchens and Dawkins have read Girard’s La Violence et le Sacré and his other texts and found it interesting and accepted that Girard believed what he wrote, but weren’t persuaded by his theory. You will rarely see an atheist at the corner of a street on a microphone screaming madly to try to convert people by telling them that the end of the world is coming and that they must repent in order to be saved. The point is that Atheism is most cases isn’t a religion and that Atheists aren’t trying to proselytize or to evangelize but are simply asserting their right not only to dissent, but to live in a society that doesn’t pick a side and decides that religion is not only good, but the norm. Atheism is about the right not to believe, to express it, and to defend secularism against attempts to make religion thought and belief not only the norms, but also the only things acceptable. Isn’t there anything more frightening and triumphant that to claim that to without religion, human beings are not whole and that damnation is the punishment for those who don’t believe?

Of course, it is possible to argue that religion exists because there is a human need for the sacred as there is one for sex, bad faith, and chocolate, but such a statement doesn’t say much and doesn’t advance for the debate for need has nothing to do with reason or with morality. In spite of its shortcomings of , Scruton’s article is interesting because it proves Hitchens, Dawkins, and other Atheists’ point about the faithful and their religion: they have trouble accepting dissent and difference. Most of the people who “believe” cannot accept the fact that someone can assert without her/her assertions being on ignorance, arrogance, and human frailty that s/he doesn’t need religion, but s/he cannot stand it. Why does religion faith leads, in too many cases, to so much insecurity and intolerance.

Relativism and reality

“The main reason why I react to and take a stand against relativist constructions is the concern that a social science that follows this path risks declaring itself incapable, and undermining its legitimacy. The justification of social science lies in its ability to provide answers to questions about how society and social change should be understood. […]

If we wish to continue the work of creating a science about society, I believe that we have to stop and ask ourselves on what grounds we have rejected the natural scientific approach to knowledge. It seems to me over-hasty on the basis of the assertion that nature and society are different to draw the conclusion that the paths to knowledge about these two are also fundamentally different. If nothing else, natural science has shown us that the accumulation of knowledge is possible, and that scientific knowledge stands up to tougher tests and examinations than any other knowledge.

But universities are once and for all institutions where people should think big rather think right. Ideas should emerge here and be argued over, irrespective of how crazy they are. At least to some extent we should also devote ourselves to introverted navel-gazing and disputations on the existence or non-existence of reality. I think it is even more remarkable that constructivism has gained influence even in other contexts, and most remarkable is its influence as a new kind of critical theory. As a knowledge base for social criticism and change, relativism must be entirely toothless, as it by definition must acknowledge the equal value of all assertions. If one’s political opponent has a different knowledge base than oneself, then her argument cannot be challenged on the basis of reason. Her attitude must quite simply be acknowledged to an equal extent as one’s own. How politics should be pursued under these conditions, I cannot really understand.” Christofer Edling, “Reclaiming the Real.”

Voodoo, Benin, Africa, and the problem with exoticism

Nick Middleton has an exotic account of his trip to Benin. He describes his tours of Voodoo temples and some magical rituals, which fascinated him. Sugary excerpt:

Benin is the cradle of voodoo – a religion with a reputation for evil, largely made in Hollywood. Believers trust in the power of nature and a vast array of spirits that preside over earthly affairs. Communicating with the spirits – to seek advice, or simply to make a social call – is an everyday occurrence, best accomplished via possession and trance.

[…] MAGIC AND the spirit world are an essential part of everyday life in Benin. Down on the coast, in the town of Ouidah, I’d visited a temple full of pythons (each the manifestation of a spirit) and a sacred forest that was home to a king. Beninois kings have magical powers. Several hundred years ago, this one had turned himself into a tree, but people still come to bring him food and offerings and to ask for advice.

[…]The king chuckled when I asked about his magical capabilities. They could be used for all sorts of purposes, he told me: “For example, I can bring rain. If I want to, I can bring it right now, but I rather like the sunshine.”

We all laughed at that. Then he added that his supernatural powers also meant he had no need for policemen or an army. He said this with the faintest hint of menace.

MR METOKAN had finally managed to tie the grass skirt around his protégé’s waist and things were proceeding.

[…] Minutes passed. Members of the congregation, still clapping and singing, also started to wander outside. Mr Metokan left. I followed.

The yellow youth in the grass skirt was swaying beneath a mango tree, muttering to himself. The rhythmic claps gave way to a mesmerising beat on a drum as the lad began to dance.

He jumped and he twisted away from us, rolling his head and flailing his arms. Crouching low and leaping high, he danced manically and with reckless abandon – a glazed expression having taken hold of his face. It was then that I noticed the short knife in his hand. And splotches of red mixed with the bright yellow paste on his upper arms. I thought this was probably a good time for me to slip away.

What troubles about Middleton's article is the fact that he slipped away as before the end of the voodoo ritual because he didn’t want to face certain truths and to realize that he was dealing with people who could bleed and were just like him. Middleton viewed everything throughout his trip to Cotonou  and other town of Benin with an almost condescending or naïve distance that helped to enjoy the exoticism of the place he was looking for without pausing and asking questions that would have showed it the commonness of Benin. This attitude made Middleton dehumanizing Benin and its people, but transforming them into nothing better than the innocent or simpleminded beings that Hergé portrayed in Tintin in the Congo. An emphasis on the exoticism and a focus on the peculiar of Africa is part of the problem with the way people look at Africa because it reaffirms their prejudices that it is a different, foreign, exotic, and magical place where foreigners can either find salvation or spirituality or return to nature and where peace, development, and modernity is impossible. Viewing Africa with such distance, naïve reverence or a condescending sense of wonder explains why too often the unacceptable and the atrocious are considerable acceptable and tolerable in Africa. In last year’s movie Blood Diamond, the main character played by Leonard di Caprio has a saying, which unnerved me and made it difficult to enjoy the movie, “T.I. A” (this is Africa) as if it explained the violence, the corruption, the blood, the wars, the poverty, and the fact that nobody cared. Every time, I heard that I wanted to respond “No A.I.W (Africa is part of the world).

Saving the world and buying books

Kate Taylor mocks in the New York Sun the high number of books on people's experiences wither a simpler and more modest life, which are based on the authors’ attempt to reconnect with nature in the Thoreau sense of the term or to do experiment with something new and noble such as stopping to shop. Taylor implies those books use gimmick in order to give readers the impression that by buying them they are saving the world and thus, making a difference by simply buying the book. Sugary excerpt:

Wondering what you can do about global warming? The literary world has an answer: Buy a book.

In a gimmick one might call Walden Redux, a number of authors have gone off the grid for a year, reducing their consumption and carbon footprint. They document the experiment, and then, in a slightly atavistic gesture, their publishers deliver it in traditional dead-tree form for you to consume. […]The one-year experiment also appeals to a culture that believes in (or at least wishes for) spiritual renewal on the cheap: the idea that you can take a sabbatical from your investment banking job to be a yak herder in Nepal, then return to your life rejuvenated, with a new Zen perspective on your 90-hour work week. We change our minds, so that we don't have to change our lives.

The message of the eat-locally books is similarly seductive, and unthreatening: All we need to do to change the world is to educate ourselves, to cultivate awareness of our role in the environment. Which you can do by growing a garden, or giving up toilet paper — or, for $19.95, just buying this book.

I wonder if Taylor isn’t blinded by her cynicism and by her unwillingness to consider that this trend about authors experimenting may be about more the fact that it is difficult and too expensive to be Thoreau nowadays. Thus, these authors are offering something to people something that they many never get the chance, the courage, or the money to do.  What matters here is the quality of the experience and of the writing even when their authenticity can be questioned.

Believing in God to avoid hell

“[…] In order to be certain that God doesn’t exist, you have to possess a godlike mental capacity – the ability to be 100% certain. A human can’t be 100% certain about anything. Our brains aren’t that reliable. Therefore, to be a true atheist, you have to believe you are the very thing that you argue doesn’t exist: God.

Perhaps you will argue that being 99.999999% certain God doesn’t exist is just as good as being 100% sure. That strikes me as bad math. As other philosotainers have famously noted, a small chance of spending eternity in Hell has to be taken seriously. Eternity is a long time.

Let me put this in perspective. You might be willing to accept a 10% risk of going skiing and getting hurt, but you wouldn’t accept a 10% risk of a nuclear war. The larger the potential problem, the less risk you are willing to tolerate.

An eternity in Hell is the largest penalty there could ever be. So while you might not worry about a .00000000001% chance of ending up in Hell, you can’t deny the math. .00000000001% of eternity is a lot longer than your entire mortal life. Infinitely longer.” Scott Adams, “The Atheist Who Thought He Was God.” (Hat tip: Pharyngula)

Interdependence and Solidarity

Christoph Bertram has an op-ed in the Daily Times on the weakening of the United States and its consequences for Europe. He argues that a weakened American means a weaker Europe and that for that reason, European governments cannot and should distance themselves from the US:

The result of protracted US weakness is also a weaker Europe. In the heyday of American dominance, European governments profited doubly: they were part of a powerful West and courted as a potential counterweight to US dominance by third countries. If they dissented from US positions, this did not seriously impair the West’s strategic efficacy because American power was more than sufficient to compensate.
That arrangement no longer works. If European governments today distance themselves from America, as their citizens frequently demand, they will both antagonise and further weaken the US. At the same time, they will undermine their own international influence, allow others to play off Europe against America, destroying as well what chance remains for rebuilding the West with a reformed America. European leaders, even when they are unhappy over US positions, therefore need to combine forceful support for the transatlantic community of interests with discrete, if firm lobbying in Washington not to strain it to the breaking point.
Whether they can successfully perform this difficult act, remains to be seen. Fortunately, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Gordon Brown understand the challenge, and at least some parts of the Bush government seem aware of the problem. In the long period of American weakness, European leaders will have to demonstrate statesmanship for the West as a whole. It is a role for which decades of US supremacy have scarcely prepared them.

The most interesting question is whether there can only be a strong Europe with a weaker America because it is obvious that there can be a strong America with a weak Europe. In other words, can Europe only succeed in its quest to become a dominant world power if America becomes less powerful, This question is important because increasingly on both sides of the Atlantic , the belief that Europe and America are in a relationship especially on economics matter is one where there can only be one winner is becoming prevalent. The biggest challenge of this relationship is for both sides to accept compromise and change and more importantly to resist the temptation to score easy points against the other.

Deconstructing God

This video (hat tip: Murad Ahmed) is a long one in which Christopher Hitchens discusses his latest book, God is not Great and answers some interesting questions about religion, materialism, Darwinism, and Karl Marx. It is long, but worth watching.

Writing and self-consciousness

“This business about the omniscient narrator also has a bearing on Lyra and the alethiometer and the loss of grace and innocence and confidence and so on. At the beginning of the twentieth century, with the modernists, we lost confidence in storytelling - think of Joyce, and Woolf to some extent, and E M Forster with his 'oh dear - yes, the novel tells a story' as if it were a shameful thing to do. Suddenly the novel became self-conscious about itself and about the process of storytelling, and a huge awkwardness set in that resulted in a split between the people who tell stories - the middlebrow - and the others who would do anything rather than tell a story who were the other thing - the highbrow. Hugh Walpole on one side, James Joyce on the other, and never the twain shall meet. Whereas in Victorian times everyone read Dickens. The gulf is lessening now because people are becoming less self-conscious, or rather learning to deal with their self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is like shyness - charming in a child of twelve but not so charming in someone of 32 or 42 or 52, so to deal with it you have to pretend you're not shy. The way to deal with self-consciousness in storytelling is to pretend that you're not self-conscious. Writing for children is liberating because it forces you to pretend you're not self-conscious.

There is a lovely passage in an essay by Umberto Eco about the difficulty the post-modern chap has in telling his girlfriend that he loves her. He doesn't want to say 'I love you' because those words have been used without irony by Barbara Cartland. Finally he finds a solution. He says to her, 'As Barbara Cartland would say, I love you.' Ha! The tongs of irony you need to hand the sugar of affection.” Philip Pullman.

Sarko in Wolfeboro or an emperor in America

Sarkozy is spending his vacation in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire (He was invited by Michael Appe, a former vice president of Microsoft). He arrived last week and already an incident has happened with the press because he forgot that the American press may love him, but that they aren’t scared of him and will not respect his privacy. No wonder it rained early this morning in Washington, DC. Roger Cohen wrote the new following about Sarkozy’s visit:

Even, it seems, while on vacation. Here is the French president, a few days into his lakeside holiday in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, jogging down a forest trail, chatting to journalists, swimming, cavorting, strutting his stuff.

Mon Dieu! So much for "la France profonde," the deep or essential France with which former presidents felt they must commune in their summer breaks.

When De Gaulle headed for his beloved Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing went fishing in the Auvergne, and Mitterrand sojourned at Latché or with his mistress in Gordes, and Jacques Chirac stayed at the summer presidential residence in the Fort of Brégançon, they were making statements about their power: its roots, its latitude and its eternal essence.

Goodbye to all that. The world has moved on. Brands replaced mysticism. France got globalized. Sarkozy is not about to pretend otherwise. His aim is to shake his country from tired habits. Any means are good. […] With some coaching from Tony Blair, Sarkozy has intuited that politics these days is about style. Economic power lies with central bankers, global corporations and high-rolling masters of the universe. Military power is constrained by mutually assured destruction and the 24-hour news cycle. What remains are image, perception and identity.

I’m happy that Cohen is enjoying so much to bask into the sunlight of his fantasies about Sarkozy, but I wonder if his Sarkolatry isn’t blinding him to the fact that the new French president likes flash and bling a lot more than flair and substance and that because he cares so much about image, he might not globalize French as Cohen seems to want him to do. Image is almost everything, but it still hasn’t taken the place of policy.

Happy days are always in the past

“It's all about money nowadays. There's no accent on quality, on standards, and they don't write parts for women anymore. When I first went into pictures, women absolutely ran the show. Bette Davis practically owned Warner Brothers. She was my favourite. Every time she's on television, I love to watch her work. [The Stars of today] They're all too self-involved, y'know? And they're so unaware of what goes on anywhere else.” Lauren Bacall.

The changing and growing melting pot

The New York Times Magazine has a great and long (9 pages) articles on the tensions, which exists in an Illinois town, Carpentersville, because of its growing immigration population. It is worth reading because it shows how emotional the issue of immigration is becoming. Sugary excerpt:

There are essentially three camps on the assimilation question, which I would describe, albeit simplistically, as the pessimists, the optimists and the cautious optimists. The pessimist camp includes self-proclaimed populists like Lou Dobbs, who see few parallels between the present-day migration from Mexico and the surge of Italians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “We are a melting pot,” Dobbs said on one of his many broadcasts on immigration. “And while our pot is full, and looks as though it’s going to get fuller unless we do something about it, we are not melting.” The intellectual force behind such thinking is Samuel P. Huntington, a Harvard professor, whose 2004 book, “Who Are We?” makes the argument that Mexicans — unlike the earlier immigrants from Europe — don’t subscribe to what he calls the nation’s Anglo-Protestant values and so have not become Americanized, instead forming their own social and linguistic enclaves. “There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society,” he writes. “Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.”

The optimists suggest that like the Eastern and Southern Europeans before them, second- and third-generation Mexicans will master English and become quite American in their behavior and customs. (And, of course, influence the culture, as well.) According to the U.S. census, 40 percent of Mexicans in this country are foreign-born, or in other words are first-generation and, like new immigrants before them, have not been particularly proficient at acquiring a new language. Numerous studies have indicated that for their children, English becomes the primary form of communication.

[...] And then there are the cautious optimists, a small but influential group of scholars who have been studying the influx of Mexicans into this country for years. They argue that many Mexican immigrants are indeed ambivalent about Americanization, and that upward assimilation and downward assimilation are happening at the same time, something they call “segmented assimilation.” They suggest that becoming an American can have both positive and negative repercussions, depending on what aspects of this culture you acquire. For instance, studies conducted by the sociologists Rubén Rumbaut and Alejandro Portes indicate that as immigrant children become more like Americans, not only do they learn English, but they also spend less time on homework, their blood cholesterol rises, divorce rates go up and levels of incarceration increase. They become more like native-born Americans in those ways, too. Moreover, Mexicans may well experience discrimination, which limits their options.

I’m an optimist when it comes to this issue because I think that America is more than a country, it is an idea,  an experiment that will continue to live on as long as people exist who want not only a better life, but who believe in the pursuit of happiness. There is no doubt that the melting pot is changing because American is changing. However, America has never been an unmovable country, it has changed, and it has gotten better precisely because its principles and its boundary are irresistible to all people no matter their ethnicity, their origins, their culture, and their language.

Doubting France's new flashy diplomacy

Colin Randall wonders if France’s murky deal with Libya is more important than the fact that it helped saved the lives of the Bulgarian medics. Randall believes that new details about the deal give new light about the involvement of Cécilia Sarkozy and the events that led to this liberation of the medics. Sugary excerpt:

When the medics were freed, I wrote here about the questions being asked, in France and beyond, about the nature and advisability of her role. Unnamed EU officials were said then to be exasperated that Mme Sarkozy had effectively hijacked their work.

One reader implied that this was unfair since the president's wife seemed to linger in the background on release day, letting the EU external relations commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner do the talking.

But the fact is that French officials, and the world's media, inevitably focused on the involvement of Mme Sarkozy, just as - I imagine - the Elysée hoped they would. It looked indeed as if France had finally and dramatically pulled off, with some deft diplomatic footwork and a touch of humanitarian glam, what everyone else might have to labour for goodness knows how long to achieve.

The rumpus over the claimed linkage between freedom for the nurses and anti-tank missile for Tripoli has revived those doubts about her engagement, and perhaps introduced one or two more.

[…] More details of the deal, and whether it truly played any part in freeing the medics, will trickle out via the media even before the parliamentary inquiry, approved by M Sarkozy, reaches its own verdict. Sarko says there was no link; his defence minister backs him up.

But the experience really ought to cause Mme Sarkozy and her advisers to consider the lessons to be drawn from her first adventure in first lady do-gooding.

My conclusion when she was initially under attack was that we should be grateful if her intervention brought a terrible human ordeal as much as an inch closer to its happy outcome.

Before commenting on Randall’s assertions, first, I must admit that Cécilia Sarkozy is my favorite Sarkozy and that I like her although I have no idea why because I'm having trouble accepting the fact that I like her. Two different issues are at stake here. The first one is whether it is acceptable for the wife of a head of state to play a role in the country diplomatic affairs and to that question, my answer is a resounding yes with one caveat, that the wife be willing to be held accountable when there are controversies as in this case. The best example of this is when in 1994, Hillary Clinton took charge of the Clinton Administration’s attempt of to reform healthcare, but understood that she was undertaking a political role and has to answer to the American Congress. Opinions differ about how well she handled the responsibility to involve and to listen to Congress, but the point is that she went before congress, lobbied its members, and answered their questions. This is the way things should be done in Democracy when a political spouse chooses to become directly and public involved in matters of state. The cynic within me believes that one of the reasons Sarkozy involved his wife was because he knew that she could not questioned by parliament about the nature and the extent of her involvement.. It is for that reason that Bernard Kouchner was kept in the dark so that the details could be kept secret and that the French parliament would not be able to get meddle. Thus, I think that Cécilia Sarkozy should be able to be involved in matters of state as long as she is willing to be considered and to be treated as a member of her husband’s team.

The second issue is about the deal itself and about whether it was kosher to put things mildly. My answer is that I don’t know. I have strong feelings against it, but those are just feelings and I don’t believe that diplomacy and international relations should be about feelings. France isn’t the first country to strike a deal, which seems unsavory and too self-serving in order to avoid a tragedy and those who are outraged should stop to pretend that in this case, it is another manifestation of l'exception française (French exceptionalism), when all it proves is that Sarkozy can use realpolitik when it soothes his purposes and what he perceives to be the French national interest. The key element here is whether this deal will give Libya incentives to continue to have better relations with the West and to respect international law. For this reason, it is too early to tell whether the French Sarkozy deal with Libya was a good one, because everything will depend on the future conduct of Gaddafi and Libyan officials. Thus, for now, I don't whether a line was crossed here and I’m just enjoying seeing those who believed that Sarkozy was the best Frenchman since Alexis de Tocqueville eating crow.

Participation and innocence

“Participation is war. Any form of participation is already a form of conflict[...] Participation is often understood as a means of becoming part of something through pro-active contribution and the occupation of a particular role. However, it seems that this role is rarely understood as a critical platform of engagement, but rather based on romantic conceptions of harmony and solidarity. [...] From the beginning of "Sex and the City", Charlotte York is portrayed as the most innocent of the four protagonists. Throughout the series, she is the only one who follows "dating rules" and expresses a serious desire to marry and have children. In Episode 55, Charlotte decides to quit her job as a curator at a Manhattan art gallery. When she reveals her intentions to her disapproving friends, she explains why she wants to stay home. In order to not feel "bad" about her real motives (wanting to be pregnant and redecorating the house), she justifies her decision by stating that she want to "volunteer at Trey's hospital and raise money for the pediatric wing". In Charlotte's case, doing volunteer work for an important social cause is portrayed as her voluntary participation in a good cause that prevents her from being judged for quitting her job.

Isn't this kind of practice precisely the modus operandi that we can find in so many "socially relevant" practices today? There is an interesting similarity between this way of arguing and the way in which particular practices have hijacked the notion of participation as a positive, unquestionable means of engagement (which forms their economy). But the question is: how is it possible to "participate" in a given environment or situation without having to compromise one's role as an active agent that is not interested in consensus and "doing good", but in asking questions while attempting to inform practice in a particular direction? Becoming a vector in the forcefield of conflicts raises the question of how one participates without catering to pre-established needs or tasks, or – from the point of view of the traditional architect – how it is possible to participate in, for example, urban micro-politics by inserting friction and asking questions rather than doing local community work through Section 106 agreements.” Markus Miessen, “The Violence of Participation.”

Shazia Mirza

I find Shazia Mirza funny because she's fearless. After watching this excerpt of her latest show (hat tip: Faith Central ) I wondered about how a debate between her and Ayaan Hirsi Ali would go. Who will draw the most applause and more importantly who win the argument? My bet is on Mirza although it may just be wishful thinking on my part.