The Republic of Dissent

A woman's voice

Via the Columbia Journalism Review, Megan Garber makes an excellent point on Hillary Clinton and the fact that she is disliked for things she can’t help such as her voice:

Because, to state the obvious, Clinton’s voice isn’t just Clinton’s voice; it’s also a woman’s voice, and everything else that that implies. That fact may not be the point of all the voice-overing when it comes to Clinton, but it’s certainly the subtext. It seems that we—myself included—spent so much time fixating on the traditional Woman in Power problem (and where we, as a society, will draw that classic, fuzzy line between assertiveness and bitchiness) that we initially missed the other side of the problem: the even fuzzier, and even more classic, line between self-assertiveness and victimhood. Because Hillary’s biggest problem, due respect to Tina Fey, isn’t that she’s a bitch. It’s that she won’t stop complaining about people saying she is. In that sense, Clinton’s voice—metaphorical and literal—has become, perhaps, a little too revealing. About her, but especially about us.

Compare Clinton to Obama, who, in matters of timbre, is, apparently, MLK, JFK, and Mel Tormé rolled into one velvet-voiced demigod. Salon has an entire piece today analyzing Obama’s voice (“Does Obama’s baritone give him an edge?”)—complete with expert testimony as to the voice’s being “the window into the heart,” and other such profundities—and illustrated with a doctored photo that casts Hillary as Lucy (her voice high, thin, and often shrill) and Barack as Ricky (his voice smooth, bold—and good enough, after all, to be a basis of his career). The piece summons the spirit of Chris thrill-up-the-leg Matthews in its treatment of the visceral splendor of Obama’s voice:

When it happens that something within us shivers or tingles at the words of a great and moving voice—Martin Luther King Jr. for my generation, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt for my parents, or even perhaps for some others Benito Mussolini—it is because there is something that leaps forth from the very anatomy of the speaker, revealing the innate grain that vibrates with a receptive grain of our own.

Now, compare that to one of the piece’s analyses of The Meaning of the Female Voice:

We wouldn’t want our hectoring mother speaking to us from the White House for the next four years.

Which says a lot—in whatever voice you say it.

I know that I like to repeat it, but Ségolène Royal had the same problem. People were able to focus without embarrassment and with too much ease on her voice to argue that she was fake, inauthentic, maternal, and manipulative. People like to talk about Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, and Angela Merkel to make the point that it isn’t about sexism, but about the political talent of the woman running for the highest office in her country. I disagree Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, and Angela were running in countries which had  a parliamentary system, which meant that people were voting first for a party and second for the leader of that party. After Nancy Pelosi made it and yet, it would be disingenuous to argue that she would have been able to do what Hillary Clinton seems to be unable to do, that is to move mountains.

Beckett, Mallarmé and foreign languages

Marina Warner has a fascinating article in the Times Literary Supplement on Beckett and Mallarmé and the role that a foreign language played in their development as writers. Beckett of course chose to write in French and Mallarmé flirted with English even though he never chose to write poetry in that language. Sugary excerpt:

When Beckett was asked why he wrote in French, he gave a celebrated answer: “Pour faire remarquer moi”. Like the word “panais”, this is a phrase that is not quite French but purposely askew; it draws attention to itself on purpose to say, “to make people take notice of me”. The turn of phrase is “pidgin”, Michael Edwards has commented, adding that this deliberate clumsiness establishes “a gap, a confusion, and we find ourselves conversing in Babel”. Beckett thus shares with Mallarmé a pleasure in unfamiliarity and also a sought-for dépaysement, an estrangement through the foreign tongue. For Beckett did not assume French identity in the trilogy of novels in which he first adopted the language: the man himself might have come back from Paris and shocked his parents in the respectable Dublin suburb of Foxrock by wearing a beret and smoking Gauloises, but his literary personae stick to Irish caps or vaudeville toques. They have names like Molloy, Moran or Malone.

[…] In 1930, in one of her most free-associating essays, “On Being ill”, Virginia Woolf meditated on the relation between sounding and meaning:

In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning, gather instinctively this, that, and the other – a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause – which the poet, knowing words to be meagre in comparison with ideas, has strewn about his page to evoke, when collected, a state of mind which neither words can express nor the reason explain . . . . In health meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in illness, with the police off duty . . . words give out their scent and distil their flavour . . . . Foreigners, to whom the tongue is strange, have us at a disadvantage.

Mallarmé and Beckett were “foreigners” in relation to English and French respectively, and they both used their advantage, but with this difference: Mallarmé’s English lessons exhibit a scrupulous, chaste fastidiousness with language that Beckett profoundly shares; a near-pedantry, the grammarian’s niceties. But Mallarmé’s writings in English sever language from subjectivity, and syntax from significance. They do not possess Beckettian poignancy, or his sense of personal hebetude.

Beckett is the most important and most impressive writer of the last century not only because he wrote his best works in French, but also because he was able to subjugate French, which is very difficult. French is not only difficult language to master than English, it is also a more poetic language than English and that is why in my opinion Mallarmé never adopted even though he would have been able to master. It was a greater challenge for Beckett to chose to write in French, which is probably one of the reasons he took it on than it would have been for Mallarmé to write poetry in English, which is probably the reasons why he never crossed that frontier because he knew that poetry in English is White Chocolate and never come close to French poetry.

Libertinism, the Death of authority and of the West

Sugary excerpt from Sally Thomas’s review of Diane West’s The Death of the Grown-up:

Take the parents whose idea of good, safe teenage fun is to hire a stripper to cover herself in whipped cream, so that their son and his football teammates can lick it off, or the mother who sues the school district to protest her daughter’s suspension, because official policies do not spell out explicitly that oral sex on the school bus is against the rules. Take “Cucumber Girl,” teenage star of a sex-education video intended for California tenth-graders, who “chirpily instruct[s] viewers, in modified Val-Gal-speak, on the proper way to don a condom,” using a cucumber as a demonstration model. Take the middle-age Batavia, New York, Rotarians posing nude for a fund-raising calendar. Take them all, please, back to Central Casting.

At least, that’s the tempting response. It’s tempting to argue, But most of us aren’t like that. After all, most of us aren’t. We don’t hire strippers to entertain our children. We don’t, as in another case West cites, hire out hotel suites to give our children a “safe” place to experiment with alcohol and drugs. Some of us go so far as to keep our children home—for the day, or for the next twelve years—to limit the influence of the Cucumber Girls, at least in our own families. As William Grimes of the New York Times points out, “In one case after another, the community reacts with outrage, or a judge throws the argument out of court. Common sense and local standards, it seems, do occasionally score a victory.”

It’s that occasionally, however, that’s telling, and scarily so. Why does “one case after another” come up in the first place? Why do “community standards” only “occasionally” prevail over absurdity? And what happens when the “community standards” themselves verge on the absurd?

[…]To give context to these contemporary events, West constructs a historical trajectory that arcs from the World War II–era entry of the word teenager into the popular lexicon, to a future of multicultural uncertainty. By her account, the rise of the student radical in the 1960—and the accompanying acquiescence of sycophantic college administrators and parents who laud destruction of property and the hurling of mindless obscenities as “acts of conscience”—begets, in an unbroken lineage, the Islamic terrorist threat of our own era, “The Real Culture War.”

[…] What, exactly, is everyone afraid of? Mainly, says West, they are afraid of defying the cultural narrative, also in development for the last thirty years or so, which asserts that no culture may claim to have advanced any further, or to have accrued any greater wisdom, than any other culture.

[…] On the geopolitical level, West claims, the same argument currently carries the day: Who are we to say that blowing people up is ‘gross?’ That’s their culture, whether they’re Islamists or Sinn Fein. In other words, when “community standards” go global, we’re the spring-break parents of the civilized world, and this does not bode well for civilization.

I have to admit that I am confused for I don’t get the point between Libertinism, the supposed death of the Grown-up, and of the West. Both Thomas and West are taking so many detours to avoid stating what they really mean that at the end of it, I am with my head spinning wondering what is their point and why they don’t have the guts to be politically incorrect to the end and state directly what they mean. To me, this real debate is really that too many people feel that the West is threatened by a bunch of elitists who reject the laws of nature, their past, and their culture because they want to be liked by the rest and because they refuse to give childish fantasies and to accept that not everything and everyone is equaled and more importantly that evil exists and must be combated. This debate takes me back to the second round of the French election. Sarkozy promised to bury the inheritance of May 68, which was responsible to the fact that French society was too permissive and too amoral. Tolerance for the intolerable had become the greatest virtue when the French needed to work more and to have a state, which behaved as the dad in a traditional family by not rewarding laziness, transgressions, and excesses. Sarkozy was thus promising to make France more traditional and more Western by returning it to its real natural values. All we need to understand that this type of grandiose statements about the West needing to be itself and to respect its values is about as authentic and noble a quest as Manifest Destiny is to examine what Sarkozy has to done so far to epitomize his own high moral aspirations. He has been such a libertine that the French are missing old presidents who may have been bad managers, but which were more demurred. The real issue is really one of identity not of values because what Thomas and West are really saying that the West is becoming like the Rest and that is a problem because the Rest can never be as good and as virtuous as the West no matter what how hard it tries. In others words, the world is populated with the right and the wrong kind of people and it is going to hell because the right kind of people are behaving badly by admiring the wrong kind of people and refusing to respect their rightness. That's the reason why the right kind of people should have more babies and should accept who they are.

Wishing for a Democratic defeat

Here is something that I never thought that I could wish or even hope for: A Democratic defeat in presidential election. After this long and divisive primary, I have come regretfully to the conclusion that the Democratic party doesn't know what it stands for, it has selective values, which it adapts depending on the year and depending on the candidate it falls in love with. Last night's debate has just convinced that it is better for the Democrats to lose than to win or at least I think that it is better for the United States because they have absolutely no clue where they want to take their country for unity isn't a destination. Anyway, I want the Democrats to lose because I think that a party who is capable of turning a race between a "woman" and an "African American"into a disgusting, painful, to watch, and superficial movie doesn't deserve to have the presidency of the most powerful nation in the world.  I hope that something will happen that will change my mind because I hate the fact that I dislike strongly the Democratic party right now.

Singing the blues

I'm singing the blues today. Everything looks blue and deadly and I cannot blame the weather. Let's hope that the rain helps. The singer's name is Patricia Kaas and the title of the song is Mademoiselle chante le blues.

Words aren't everything

I’m not sure if I agree with this:

But words are not about individual creativity, however witty or wicked. We don't carry an arsenal of our own words around with us, ready to trip off the tongue, Babel-style. Words are meaningless if they only have meaning for us.

We make language between us, and the hammering-out of what words mean doesn't happen in a vacuum. Movements in politics, society and technology, shifts in how we see ourselves - all these changes have a bearing on the words we use. We agree on the meanings of words from moment to moment, and because society changes, the meanings of words evolve. […] When I need to get things done, I have a habit of furrowing my brow and declaring, "Right, let's get down to the nitty-gritty," and I was horrified to find that the phrase allegedly has its roots in the slave trade. For me it's the same as saying "let's get down to the nuts and bolts", and I've never used or heard it used in a racially abusive sense. So should I carry on comfortably trotting it out? Does it matter any more what I am trying to say when I speak those words? This is not as straightforward as you might think. Identity politics matter, and identity politics are often played out in language.

[…]If 'who we are' rather than 'what we do' now defines our public selves, where does that leave the words we use? Is our common language under threat, with certain words ring-fenced and segregated, meaning and offending differently depending on who uses the word? Even within a community, words can be a battleground. The rehabilitation of 'Nigga' by the hip-hop generation continues to infuriate older activists from the civil rights era. In the UK, too, the n-word irks.

When we start worrying about words, we have failed politically.

Shirley Tent’s argument reminds me of Paul Eluard’s beautiful verse, Les mots ne mentent pas (Words don’t lie). If language becomes solely a matter of interpretation, then what’s the point? It is possible to simplify the debate by asking the Husserlean or as I would prefer to say Sartrean question which whether a word is a thing in itself or for itself. I believe that the answer is somewhere in the middle because I want to believe Eluard and to live in a world where it is possible to say what you mean and to mean what you say no matter if people get it or not.

Sarkozy, French cuisine, and horror vacui

Charles Bremner mocks rightly Sarkozy’s desire to have Unesco protect French cuisine:

The most quaint point was his [Sarkozy's] announcement that France will apply to Unesco to have French cuisine listed as part of the world's heritage.

I know that there is a history to this, but it seems bizarre to claim that something as intangible and alive as cooking can be protected like a monument. And surely French cuisine, among the finest in the world, hardly needs defending.

[…] You can talk about cuisine in numerous countries around the world. But France is the only one to have such diversity and such possibilities for transforming the produce of local artisans, be they on land or sea," he told news agencies.

French wine producing regions such as Saint-Emilion and the Loire Valley already enjoy World Heritage status. Other French sites include Chartres Cathedral, Mont Saint Michel and the banks of the Seine in Paris. No doubt cuisine is culture as the listing advocates say.

But what is Unesco supposed to do about it?  Will it list restaurants like the Michelin guide ? Will Unesco police pounce on cooks who mess up their mayonnaise?  Will it protect cassoulet and bouillabaisse or ensure that French restaurants in San Francisco serve real camembert ?

Ideas such as this show that Sarkozy is trying like mad to find the “miracle” idea that will make him popular and omnipotent again. His problem is that he suffers from horror vacui. He fears emptiness, nothingness, and inactions because he loves himself so much and believes so much in his power to change things that he cannot accept his unpopularity and  that sometimes doing nothing is best. The trouble for him is that unfortunately or rather fortunately, the trou d’air that he is experiencing is normal and will more likely pass if he stops resisting it. Sarkozy needs to start accepting that he wasn’t Superman yesterday, that he isn’t Inspector Clouseau today, and that he isn’t going to be Spiderman tomorrow, a superhero who regains his powers after an existential challenge against himself and evil.

Cool illiberalism and identity politics

Fairly new, but interesting observations by Stanley Fish on Identity politics:

An identity politics voter says, in effect, I don’t care what views he holds, or even what bad things he may have done, or what lack of ability he may display; he’s my brother, or he’s my kinsman, or he’s my landsman, or he comes from the neighborhood, or he’s a Southerner, or (and here the tribe is really big) my country right or wrong. “My country right or wrong” is particularly useful in making clear how identity politics differs from politics as many Americans would prefer to see it practiced. Rather than saying she’s right on immigration or he’s wrong on the war, the identity-politics voter says he looks like me or she and I belong to the same church.

Identity politics is illiberal. That is, it is particularist whereas liberalism is universalist. The history of liberalism is a history of extending the franchise to those who were once excluded from it by their race, gender or national origin. Although these marks of identification were retained (by the census and other forms of governmental classification) and could still be celebrated in private associations like the church and the social club, they were not supposed to be the basis of decisions one might make “as a citizen,” decisions about who might best lead the country or what laws should be enacted or voted down. Deciding as a citizen means deciding not as a man or a woman or a Jew or an African American or a Caucasian or a heterosexual, but as a human being.

The problem of course is that human beings are either too unsophisticated or uncomplited depending on your perspective. They are used to choose things based on something, anything that ties them to political candidates. The exception remains to this rule remains gender. Tor women, making the choice not to vote for woman political candidate is a sign of independence and emancipation while voting for a cool guy who has something else in common with them other than gender is a sign of solidarity and pride. Ségolène Royal fell into that trap during last year French presidential election where even though she was able to become the French Socialist candidate because she was the new thing, she was unable to win the presidency in part because women refused to vote for her because they didn’t like her and thought that she was incompetent. Hillary Clinton is falling into that trap prematurely because even the women would vote for a democratic candidate normally are finding it difficult to vote for her because she isn’t an empty vessel and because yes, she has a personality and a past. In other words, voters, especially women have less trouble voting for candidates who have something in common with them except in the case it happens to be the weaker sex, because then, it becomes a lot easier not to vote for her  because the woman candidate is breathing. The point is that  it is facile for male candidates who run against strong women candidates to become hero and to be elevated to godlike status. Obama is just being Sarkozysized, he is superman because he is running against the mean woman who thinks that America owes her something; the interesting question is what is going to happen when he is running against another man.

The burden of a woman's body

Unfortunately, this is true and there may be no exit:

[…] Feminists must reject the male gaze and use those ten seconds it takes to apply lip gloss to bring down the patriarchy. (Why sensible feminists have not figured out how to band together and write press releases to disassociate ourselves from the crazy women who pretend to speak for us, I’ll never understand.) Fashion magazines don’t help much either. Elle talks to Ashlee Simpson. And writes down what she says. To be recorded for all time.

If you’ve ever read one of the hundreds of books on the market telling women how to dress and how to shop, you know why fashion writing needs some more smart girls to come over to their side. These books exist, and are in some ways needed, because there is a huge disconnect between the fantasy world of Vogue — where women spend their days romping in fields wearing $1,500 sequined leggings — and reality. Yes, those egg-shaped coats look charming in the magazine, but can someone who weighs more than 80 pounds wear one? The magazines won’t tell you because to them, no such woman has ever existed. Not every woman can afford to hire someone to make these decisions for them so some may need help deciding what works on their bodies.

Instead of alleviating our body fears, however, so many books advising what to wear do nothing but exaggerate them.

The beauty of accents

A neverending trial

Nick Cohen on the Left and its tolerance of the intolerable:

In the twentieth century, many on the Left were willing to support or minimize the crimes of the communists. To condemn Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile, say, but ignore the victims of the Soviet Union and its satellite states was one characteristic double standard. To demand that the West scrap its nuclear weapons while implying that the Soviet arsenal was purely defensive was a second. In a usually ill-defined manner, they did not believe that communism was wholly rotten and that the progressive rhetoric in communist propaganda was all lies.

[…] Far leftists go further and are open in their support for jihadis. The apologias from some liberals are so comprehensive that they must also support radical Islam in their hearts. Far leftists have to head to the far right because there is simply nowhere else for them to go now that the revolutionary guerrillas and communist regimes of the twentieth century are history. A love of violence and hatred of their own societies – well merited or otherwise – leads them to conclude that any killer of Americans is better than none.
To explain the catastrophic collapse of their hopes they have revived the false consciousness conspiracy theory, which has been present in socialist thought since the early defeats at the turn of the twentieth century, and given it an astonishing prominence. They hold that the masses rejected the Left because brainwashing media corporations 'manufactured consent' for globalization. Democracy is a sham, the political parties are all the same and human rights are meaningless. What fools call freedom is a smokescreen to hide the machinations of the real rulers of the world. The theory of false consciousness is very close to the antisemitic conspiracy theory of classic Nazism. Indeed its adherents often topple over into the antisemitic conspiracy theory of classic Nazism.

Something tells me that Jonah Goldberg read Nick Cohen’s What’s Left before he wrote Liberal Fascism or maybe not for it has become too conventional to blame the left for everything even though we all know that liberals are losers.

The war on Terror and Africa

Bush is in Africa and yet, nobody seems to care probably because American doesn’t any real African politics or rather that its African politics is always 90% realpolitik and 10% percent good sentiments. Donald Steinberg has a great article on Bush’s visit in Africa in which he writes thoughtfully not only about Bush’s trip, but also about the impact on his presidency on Africa. More specifically, he argues, rightfully in my opinion that the war on terror has harmed Africa. Sugary excerpt:

Subsequently, President Bush made the “war on terror” our dominant foreign policy theme after September 11, 2001, which harmed American engagement in Africa in two ways:

First, it diverted attention, financial resources and military engagement from the continent and toward other priorities, especially the war in Iraq. While paying welcome attention to fighting HIV/AIDS and expanding trade with Africa, the Bush administration responded tepidly or not at all to the evisceration of democracy, good governance and social services in these anchors.

Second, Bush generally supported existing leaders who were smart enough to proclaim themselves “allies” in the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorists – similar to the professions of anti-Communism that emanated from cynical African leaders during the Cold War – often through military aid that strengthened repressive regimes. The US has supported so-called anti-terrorist campaigns, such as the ill-advised Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006-2007, no matter the consequences for regional stability, refugee flows and humanitarian impact.

The point is that separating terrorism from other issues can be detrimental to Africans because it ignores both history and the context. The point is that terrorism in Africa is tied to political and economical instability, which enables terrorists to have a safe haven in some countries as Bin Laden found one in Sudan for so many years. It is therefore impossible to cut off the terrorist issue from other issues.  More importantly, even though no one is interested in answering the chicken or the egg question, it is undeniable that even if it is hard to believe that terrorists aren’t born, but made, terrorism in Africa will continue as long as many of its countries enjoy neither political nor economical stability and continue to lack a strong civil society.

Losing the moral high ground

Via the International Herald Tribune, a good point about America, Torture, and losing the moral high ground:

We Americans reviled torture, as individuals and as a nation. When it was exposed, we reacted. Torture was one reason we invoked for overturning Saddam Hussein.

Today, we Americans have come up with "waterboarding," which sounds like a fraternity prank. It is el submarino: cruel and, for a people that respects itself, unusual.

Obviously, we are a far cry from an Argentine military which put thousands to death in a long nightmare of official terror. But what are we prepared to accept?

Our justification is the same that was used in Argentina: What Dick Cheney calls harsh interrogation is needed to protect innocent people from terrorism. Our government contracts some of this harsh interrogation to private mercenaries who pledge no allegiances. Not even the Argentines did that.

George W. Bush denies that we torture, which adds hypocrisy to our sins. His attorney general refuses to call waterboarding torture and won't rule out its use.

Whatever Americans may think, judgment elsewhere is plain. When our highest authorities excuse torture - even applaud it - it is no surprise that terrorist ranks swell, and so many people loathe us.

Even if torture did provide useful information, what is the longer term cost? By employing such terror ourselves, we lose claim to a higher moral plane.

The inheritance of Wilsonianism

Pankaj Mishra reviews Erez Manela's book The Wilson Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism in the London Review of Books. He concludes his review by making the following assertions, which I find both pertinent and instructive:

Wilson’s rhetorical achievement – which distinguished him sharply from traditional European practitioners of realpolitik – was to present America’s strategic and political interests as moral imperatives, and its foreign interventions as necessary acts of international responsibility. European leaders periodically stressed their civilising mission, but no one before Wilson endowed national exceptionalism with such a modern and unimpeachably noble aspiration as ‘democracy’.

Intoxicated by the moral passions of Wilsonianism, American liberal intellectuals would work harder than their European counterparts to justify wars that political leaders promised would make the world safe for democracy. These sincere believers would also be more vulnerable, when faced with the collapse of their bold schemes, to the guilt-laden ‘fear that what we had meant, and what alone could justify it all, was not the meaning and the justification of those who will decide’ – Lippmann’s words, which handily summarise the long, tormented mea culpas produced by liberal hawks after the catastrophe in Iraq.

What neither hard-headed politicians nor their intellectual dupes fully understood was how the rhetoric of liberalism and democracy had gone down in the colonised world. Certainly, Wilson, working deep in a world run by and for white men, could have little sense of the bitterness and disillusionment felt by his ‘darkie’ admirers. But the excuse of racial and intellectual seclusion could not be claimed by apparently liberal politicians and journalists who stridently echoed Wilson’s rhetoric after the collapse of Communism when the world seemed riper for remaking, more ready to absorb Western values while fulfilling Western interests, than at any time since 1919.

[…] The victories of the Cold War – and the giddy speculation that history had reached the ideological terminus of liberal democracy – revived illusions of omnipotence among an Anglo-American political and media elite that has always known very little about the modern world it claims to have made.

Apocalypse and Europe

Well nothing about this video is new. People have been preaching the fact demographics are everything forever. What the fact that people believe that France and Europe will die because they are not making the right babies show is that to them once again blood and genes mean everything. Thus, one is born and cannot become French, European, and Western.  Integration or even assimilation doesn't work, which explains why immigration threatens national identities since immigrants always remain "the other" and always dilute the sanctity of French, European, and Western identities, which of course have never changed since the beginning of times. We all know that Sarkozy is as much a Gaul as de Gaulle.

Africa, Paternalism and Silliness

The silliest article I’ve read in a while is Michael Knox Beran is the City Journal on what he considers to be "Trendy Paternalism" in Africa promoted by celebrities and of course elites with simplistic views of Africa and selfish motives.  Long sugary excerpt:

If paternalism doesn’t work, why does the paternalist mentality persist? Joseph Conrad suggested an answer in his 1902 novella Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s antihero, Kurtz, is a man of benevolent intention who goes to Africa with grandiose dreams of saving people but who ends by slaughtering those natives who resist his hunt for ivory. The story’s narrator, Marlow, finds a report that Kurtz prepared for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. Kurtz, Marlow says, “began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might of a deity,’ and so on, and so on. ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded.’ ” The thesis of Sachs’s The End of Poverty is not essentially different. He, too, believes that Westerners “can exert a power for good practically unbounded” over people who have not reached our “point of development.”

The patina of benevolence, Conrad suggests, often conceals a messianic narcissism, an incipient megalomania: Kurtz spent his days in Africa “getting himself adored.” Egotism and the desire for adoration are useful stimulants when they spur people to produce things that other people want or need. But it is a tawdry ambition that deters, as the paternalist philosophy does, people from realizing their own potential.

Reading Conrad, one is uneasily reminded of today’s Africrats. Under the guise of helping Africans, they aggrandize themselves, burnish their fame—and, not least, get themselves adored. Their tours of Africa are exercises in hero worship, part Roman triumph, part Felliniesque spectacle. The landing of the jet on some remote shimmering tarmac; the heat of the African sun; the exotic savor of the desert or of the jungle air; the fawning masses: all contribute to the narcotic spell that these progresses cast over those who undertake them.

Then comes the encounter between the benign magician—the Prospero from the northern latitudes—and the Suffering African. Amid a glitter of flashbulbs, the august tourist, like a monarch touching for the King’s Evil, lays hands on the dying AIDS patient or the undernourished child. Bobby Kennedy and Princess Diana perfected the art with which the superstar feels another’s pain; Bono, Madonna, and Angelina Jolie have carried on the tradition. A messianic odor clings to Sachs’s account of this celebrity satrapy, in which the superstars figure both as agents of grace and as high priests of a cult: “The Live 8 concerts, Bono’s ONE campaign, Angelina Jolie’s work for the United Nations, and many other acts of leadership and grace are drawing millions of eager individuals into a new commitment to work for the end of poverty, and thereby for a world of peace and shared well-being.”

The fact that Beran uses Joseph Conrad to teach its readers about Africa and to make his point about he considers to be paternalism shows that he does neither understand his subject nor seeks to understand it for he isn’t concerned about Africa or Africans, but rather about what he views as the bigger danger, liberal and hollywood elites who believe enough in their principles to become activists. After all, Beran looks with contempt to those people and tries to bind them with Conrad and his Heart of Darkness in a cynical and fanatical attempt to continue old and futile ideological wars in the West between the left and the right. That’s why Beran’s article is insulting because he objectifies and instrumentalizes Africa and Africans the same way he accuses others to do it. He misdirects constantly the attention of the reader in order to avoid answering the essential question which doesn’t interest him and which he can’t answer because of his lack of knowledge and pompousness: is Africa such a different place, so unlike the West, so encrusted in the Heart of Darkness that it must be left alone and that any attempt to help, with good, bad or naïve motives, is paternalism? 

I can’t answer yes to this question because I believe that Africa is part of the world. Africa isn’t a sacred place where people are not people and where humanity is closer to abnormality or to savagery. What is paternalist is precisely the notion that Africa is only a place for specialists, that Africanity is so different from humanity that people should leave it alone. Beran believes that Africa is the way it is and that Africans are the way they are because nature, god, or whatever else wanted them to be that way so any attempt to mess with the order of things is tantamount to playing god and to be indeed paternalistic.

Newspapers and journalism

A good point about the decline of newspapers and journalism (hat tip: Roy Greensdale):

[…]the decline of newspapers has almost nothing to do with the lengthy moral failures of print journalism. And in case two, how do you explain growing newspaper circulation in countries like India? They must be practising a kind of super-journalism!
I could call it a tribute to journalism’s culture of self-flagellation - but it is actually a typical human response: seeking to explain events beyond our control by reference to ourselves.

Beating around the...

A good example of muddle thinking from John Rentoul on Multiculturalism:

Multiculturalism has become the great boo-word. No one is in favour of it. At one level, though, it simply means respecting different cultures. Nearly everyone is in favour of that. At another it means the opposite of integration, and in that sense nearly everyone is against it.

In practice, nothing is as simple as either meaning. Should pupils be allowed to speak Punjabi in schools where the majority speak Punjabi at home? Most people might say that schools should not have multilingual signs, that English should be required in classrooms, but that what pupils do in the playground is their own affair. […]The funny thing about multiculturalism is that it brings out the most tangled of muddled thinking from people with a reputation for being too clever for their own good. First it was the ABC, as the Archbishop of Canterbury's own office calls him; last week it was Robert Gascoyne-Cecil. First we had "liberal" nonsense about accommodating sharia in British law; then we had jihadist terrorism blamed on the soft touch society that fails to stand up to the "firm self-image of those elements within it who refuse to integrate".

This is nonsense not just on stilts but in a helicopter gunship some distance above the Earth's surface. The reasons why Mohammed Atta flew his plane, or why Mohammad Sidique Khan put on his backpack, did not include the separation of their families from mainstream society by misguided policies of multiculturalism. Their hatred of the West was, if anything, driven by the opposite: by their fear of a culture of consumerism, hedonism and sexual equality that seemed to them to be all too attractive to their largely integrated fellow Muslims.

Just one question is skillfully avoided: what is exactly is multiculturalism?

It's all about being mental

Lisa Appignanesi has an interesting article about the use of madness and shrinks in literature in the twentieth century. It’s a great read because of sugary excerpts such as this:

In the popular imagination, Lolita has become the story of a paedophile, an obsessive seducer of underage girls. But it can also be read as a stunning parody of a psychiatric case study - one introduced by the stolidly earnest Dr John Ray who assures us of its clinical authenticity, who names Humbert Humbert as a pervert and who warns that psychopaths such as him threaten our world to the same extent that communism does. Roll on the clinical McCarthys to exterminate it. Had our "demented diarist", Humbert Humbert, Dr Ray suggests, gone "to a competent psycho-pathologist, there would have been no disaster - but then neither would there have been this book." Humbert Humbert is an expert at baiting the psychiatrist and driving him crazy:

I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists, leading them on; never letting them see that you know all the tricks of the trade; inventing for them elaborate dreams, pure classics in style (which make them, the dream-extortionists, dream and wake up shrieking); teasing them with fake primal scenes; and never allowing them the slightest glimpse of one's real sexual predicament.

In Nabokov's world, artist and analyst - artful deceiver and earnest liar - vie with one another over the terrain of human suffering. "Why not," says Nabokov, "leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?"

After love and chocolate

I'm still hung over form all the caramelized love that comes with Valentine day. I can't think clearly so I guess i just going to have to wait a day or two until I recover from all that noise that comes with the thirst for love. Anyway, this is a video of one of my favorite songs of the last five years. The singer is Marc Lavoine and the title of the song is J'ai tout oublié and he sings it with Cristina Marocco.

Europe and Venus

George Wheatcroft has an excellent review of James Sheehan’s Where have all the soldiers gone: The Transformation of Europe, which focuses of the demilitarization and civilianization of Europe. The best part of the review is the one where Wheatcroft discusses the popular and cliché notion that Europe is Venus and America from Mars:

What sense does "Mars and Venus" have in the light of the past century, and the price paid by different countries? In 1914-18, 1.3 million Frenchmen were killed defending their country, which is to say more than twice as many as all the Americans who have died in every foreign war from 1776 until today. There has been much anguish about American casualties in Iraq, where last year was the worst since 2003, with all of 901 deaths.

Reading that, the European may reflect silently on the dates Aug. 22, 1914, when 27,000 French soldiers were killed in a day, or July 1, 1916, when 20,000 British troops died.

It isn't necessary to agree with Evelyn Waugh writing to his friend Graham Greene - "Of course the Americans are cowards. They are almost all the descendants of wretches who deserted their legitimate monarchs for fear of military service" - to see clearly that the United States isn't a warlike country at all. In many ways it has always been more deeply peaceable in its instincts than ever Europe was.

And is the civilianization of Europe such a bad thing? Although there has been much grumbling about the Bundeswehr's inadequate contribution in Afghanistan, some of us cannot see it as an occasion for pure regret if the Germans have changed character so drastically. In World War II, the Wehrmacht was unquestionably the best army, man for man and unit for unit, not least against the less ferocious "citizens in uniform" of the British and American Armies. Is that really a cause for British or American shame? When German rearmament began in the 1950s, at American urging, Gustav Heinemann resigned as Adenauer's interior minister, with the words, "God took arms out of our hands twice; we must not take hold of them a third time." Was he so wrong?

The truth that the assertion that Europeans are from Venus is the people making it are in fact decrying the feminization of Europe because the main complaint is that Europeans have lost the so-called “manly values” and their manliness because they are less willing to fight wars because of their past experience.

Killing tolerance

Ian Buruma makes the interesting argument that there is a war against tolerance in the West. He argues that this war is not only targeting elites by portraying as out of touch with the real people, but also foreignness:

[…] The common man, rooted in the real world, supposedly knows better: uncompromising toughness, the hard line, is the only way to get results. In the United States, the word "liberal," in the mouths of populist radio hosts and right-wing politicians, has become almost synonymous with "effete East Coast snob" or, worse, "New York intellectual." Liberals, in this view, are not only soft, but are somehow distinctly un-American.
The association of elites with foreignness, tolerance and metropolitan cities is nothing new. Elites often can speak foreign languages, and big cities are traditionally more tolerant and open to mixed populations. Modern populism - American politicians running, or pretending to run, "against Washington," or French populists speaking for "deep France" - is invariably hostile to capital cities. Brussels, the capital of the European Union, stands for everything populists, whether left or right, hate. And Muslim immigrants live in Amsterdam, London or Marseilles, not in the kind of small towns where right-wing populists find most of their support.
Still, the politics of resentment works best when it can tap into real fears. There are reasons for people to feel anxious about economic globalization, pan-European bureaucracy, the huge and not always effectively controlled influx of immigrants, and the aggression of radical political Islam. These anxieties have too often been ignored. There is a sense among many Europeans, not just in the Netherlands, that they have been abandoned in a fast-changing world, that multinational corporations are more powerful than nation-states, that the urban rich and highly educated do fine and ordinary folks in the provinces languish, while democratically elected politicians are not only powerless, but have abjectly surrendered to these larger forces that threaten the common man. Tolerance is seen as not just weak, but as a betrayal.

I agree with the concept of the “war on tolerance” even though I believe that it is just a continuation of a so-called fight the values of the sixties which infantilize Westerners and make them unwilling in the name of anti-racism and tolerance to defend its identity and to affirm its superiority. The real divide here is between those who believe in nature and manliness and those who don’t. In other words, tolerance is viewed as an unmanly value because it doesn’t acknowledge nature, that life is a competition, and that not everything is good or equal.

The net and publishing

Nicholas Clee argues that publishers are lost online for two reasons:

The first reason is that publishers and authors have been understandably tentative. Stephen King experimented [ putting his works online and trusting readers to be honest and to pay for downloading them] with comparatively unimportant novels; if he posted The Duma Key online, everyone would really sit up, as they would if HarperCollins posted a new Michael Crichton, or Random House a new Ian McEwan.

The more important reason is that there is no way of reading electronic texts that competes with the printed book. Amazon reports that sales of its e-book reader, the Kindle, have exceeded expectations; but the company has conspicuously failed to provide figures. You can be sure that the number of trees spared is modest.

Nowadays, everything is porn

Rolf Potts on Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love:

So while Gilbert’s tale is nonfiction, the appeal of “Eat, Pray, Love” lies in its sense of fantasy. Around the middle of the 20th century, pulpy American men’s magazines published what has come to be known as “adventure porn”—breathlessly told tales that involved hairy-chested men fighting crocodiles, exploring rivers and surviving diseases in far-off lands. Women characters didn’t figure much in these stories, unless they were helpless victims, hot-blooded savage-vixens or hookers. Though this era of men’s travel writing has been ridiculed, these stories no doubt lent a sense of escape to the working stiffs who read them—men who weren’t likely to ever leave the country, but enjoyed the vicarious problem-solving that came with the pulpy adventure.

The legacy of “adventure porn,” I think, is not the kind of adventure writing you see in Outside magazine, but books like “Eat, Pray, Love.” Instead of wrestling crocodiles in distant lands, our protagonist wrestles despair; instead of exploring rivers, she explores emotions; instead of surviving disease, she survives heartbreak. Men occasionally appear in this survivor’s tale, but they are as one-dimensional as adventure-porn wenches, and mainly serve as a sounding board for the protagonist’s feelings. When these men are giving our heroine love and help, she gushes with admiration; when they can’t intuit her emotional needs, she reacts with despair (and vague contempt). Rarely does she ponder what—besides emotional availability to her—might motivate these men in day-to-day life. 

Fortunately, I don’t think women read “Eat, Pray, Love” as a prescription for practical behavior. As with adventure porn, the pleasure of reading lies in its vicarious problem solving—the passive joy of projecting yourself into the protagonist’s shoes, pondering how you might hold up from situation to situation, and hanging on for the happy ending.

Call it “travel porn for women.” Just don’t expect me to relate.

It is become acceptable to call everything porn and even more popular to call something porn for women. I think that it is a sign of sophistry and of intellectual laziness. There is something about that trend that bugs me because I feel that it is precisely like hiding vegetables in brownies in an attempt to make kids eat them even though I’m not sure that what is hidden here are as healthy as vegetables. The porn has become like corn syrup, it is everywhere and that I’m starting to fear that we are entering a time where it is no longer going to talk about the pleasures of life without talking about porn and forgetting about eroticism like it has become difficult to talk about food without focusing on junk food and forgetting gastronomy.

Kerviel, Trading, and Poker

Christopher Caldwell on the Jérôme Kerviel affair and Trading:

The stars of the trading floor resemble the stars of professional sports. In both walks of life, there are a lot of “intangibles” – it is hard to break down the relevant gifts that go into making a superior performer. Sometimes you see a basketball player, with a clear path to an easy basket, attempt an absurdly elaborate reverse slam-dunk and miss. Coaches used to bench players for this kind of indiscipline. They do not any more, because they understand something about human nature.

Sport looks like a practical job, built around the accumulation of points. But inside players’ heads, sport is a heroic succession of brilliant stunts. It resembles a dream. That dream is a mighty force. The frame of mind that leads a player idiotically to mess up an easy basket is the same frame of mind that allows him to make 10 consecutive three-pointers as if he is in a trance. Coaches indulge their players because they sense that harnessed fantasy is often more practical than practicality.

Like athletes, traders tend to go for the gold, to follow their dreams, to trade to the extent of permissible risk. In such situations, the goal of their companies is not to kill that wild ambition by introducing a voice into traders’ heads saying: “I don’t feel right about this.”

I think that Caldwell has the wrong metaphor because I believe that trading is more like poker and that traders are more like poker players (I don’t believe that poker is a sport no matter what Espn says). The problem with trading is that like poker more the stakes are high, less the players are connected from reality because their focus is on the possibility of making a score and becoming the champ. In sports, in general, players know when they are losing and that you have to be good to be lucky, with poker and trading, players always believe that anything is possible and that you can overcome anything including stupid and risky decisions with luck.

Parenting and confrontation

A good point by Mark Bittman:

I sincerely hope that the moronic idea of hiding food that kids don’t like in foods they do — see “The Sneaky Chef” and “Deceptively Delicious” — is a passing phase. (The funniest thing about these two books is that the public uproar wasn’t over their approach to cooking but over which author had the idea first.) This does a real disservice to kids and — not that this is my bailiwick — is evidence that today’s parents will do anything to avoid a confrontation.

[…] Is “Eat your vegetables” such a bad command? Generations of eaters have grown up on those very words and most of us came around to realize that spinach and broccoli are actually pretty good, especially if you put some olive oil and maybe a little lemon and garlic in there.

Western superiority

Simplistic, fashionable, and provocative assertions from Ibn Warraq:

The great ideas of the West—rationalism, self-criticism, the disinterested search for truth, the separation of church and state, the rule of law and equality under the law, freedom of thought and expression, human rights, and liberal democracy—are superior to any others devised by humankind. It was the West that took steps to abolish slavery; the calls for abolition did not resonate even in Africa, where rival tribes sold black prisoners into slavery. The West has secured freedoms for women and racial and other minorities to an extent unimaginable 60 years ago. The West recognizes and defends the rights of the individual: we are free to think what we want, to read what we want, to practice our religion, to live lives of our choosing.

[…] One could characterize the difference between the West and the Rest as a difference in epistemological principles. The desire for knowledge, no matter where it leads, inherited from the Greeks, has led to an institution unequaled—or very rarely equaled—outside the West: the university. Along with research institutes and libraries, universities are, at least ideally, independent academies that enshrine these epistemological norms, where we can pursue truth in a spirit of disinterested inquiry, free from political pressures. In other words, behind the success of modern Western societies, with their science and technology and open institutions, lies a distinct way of looking at the world, interpreting it, and recognizing and rectifying problems.

The edifice of modern science and scientific method is one of Western man’s greatest gifts to the world. The West has given us not only nearly every scientific discovery of the last 500 years—from electricity to computers—but also, thanks to its humanitarian impulses, the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. The West provides the bulk of aid to beleaguered Darfur; Islamic countries are conspicuous by their lack of assistance.

Moreover, other parts of the world recognize Western superiority. When other societies such as South Korea and Japan have adopted Western political principles, their citizens have flourished. It is to the West, not to Saudi Arabia or Iran, that millions of refugees from theocratic or other totalitarian regimes flee, seeking tolerance and political freedom.

The one question that comes to mind when reading Warraq’s assertions is whether there is any essentially western about liberal democracy, human rights, rationalism, and self-criticism. I don’t think there is, but again the fact that Warraq was talking to Tariq Ramadan shows how limited and idiotic the dialogue about the West and its so-called clash with the rest has become.

When literature becomes life

Carole Angier on a Fred Wander’s The Seventh Veil, a new novel on the Shoah and "Holocaust literature':

Némirovsky and Zsolt (like Paul Celan and Tadeusz Borowski) were writers before the Nazi storm broke over them. Wander (like Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel) became one afterwards. An overwhelming number of Europe's artists and intellectuals were Jews, before the Holocaust; their existence was one of the reasons for it. It is also why the Nazi genocide is one of the best reported in history.

Fred Wander, the son of poor Galician immigrants to Vienna, was an extraordinary man, and an extraordinary Jew for his time. The Jews of Europe were, as is often said, tragically obedient: in the West, out of loyalty to the laws that had freed them; in the East, out of an age-old caution. Wander obeyed only his instinct. Before the events described in The Seventh Well began he had already escaped from a dozen internment camps in France. In the book he plans to escape from a transport (but changes his mind when he sees the expanse of snow); and at the end saves himself by an act of disobedience. This instinct, and his early apprenticeship to poverty, got him through two and a half years in Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen and Buchenwald. Afterwards he returned to Vienna, then went to the DDR, and finally to Vienna again. He died in 2006, after the reissue of his autobiography, characteristically entitled Das gute Leben, or The Good Life.

No Holocaust writing can be read today without reference to the great touchstone, Primo Levi. In the case of Wander it's especially appropriate. For despite their differences - Levi the rationalist and endurer, Wander the poet and rebel - their aims and conclusions are remarkably similar. Like Levi, Wander declined to add to the list of accusations; even more than Levi, he set out to record a side of the camps that seemed to him neglected - how a few managed to keep alive 'our true selves'. And most of all, the two come to similar conclusions about what those 'true selves' were. From the pit of Auschwitz, Levi gives Dante's answer: we were not born to be beasts, but to pursue virtue and knowledge. And from his many camps, Wander agrees. What keeps a man alive, he says, is the love of life, even there, and especially the love of art, of knowledge, of the spirit.

I've always wondered whether literature could ever be up to the task of a story on a historical event such as the Shoah. But then, I read Jorge Semprún L'Ecriture ou la Vie and understood that the expression "up to the task" is inappropriate. Wander, Levi, Semprún don't write to create or to recreate but to find a way to live with their past, their memories to strike a balance between the desire to never forget and to survive without losing what was denied to them by too many people: their humanity.

Les feuilles mortes

It's a beautiful Sunday and yet, I feel as moody as this beautiful Yves Montand's song. The trouble with February is that it is either the ideal month to write or to decry the fact that you have no inspiration and that your brain is an casket. It's neither cold nor hot enough to avoid thinking and to surf on thorny realities.

Selling domestic culture

Carl Bessai on the necessity of governments, in this case the Canadian Federal government, to sell domestic culture:

Bessai has been lobbying for changes to domestic film policies - and attitudes. He chairs the First Weekend Club, an organization that encourages people to see Canadian films on their opening weekends so they have a shot at sticking around for a second week in theatres.

But he believes that legislative intervention is necessary to give Canadians access to the films supported by their tax dollars. He doesn't understand a system that funds the making of films but then doesn't do anything to help them get shown in theatres.

"This is my sixth movie, so I've had six of these experiences," Bessai says. "And you know what? It's like you get a little bit numb after a while. You stop investing in the hope that your film will actually stay in the theatres. You know it won't."

Without subsidies or quotas, what's the incentive, he asks, for theatres to show an unknown Canadian film instead of a Hollywood movie with more obvious box office potential? "They'll say 'We can play a blockbuster with no advertising, no work, do nothing and everyone will come, or we can take your stupid Canadian movie and no one's going to come.' "

The Canadian-versus-American issue looms large in Bessai's career - and not just on the exhibition end. As a Vancouver director, he finds himself competing for resources - in particular crews - against Hollywood blockbusters that ride into town with bigger budgets. It means, Bessai says, that domestic productions rarely have access to the best crews, and small production companies like his are expected to match the prices the big studios offer for location rentals (part of the reason, along with bigger tax breaks and gorgeous scenery, he shot Normal in Victoria instead of Vancouver). It's enough to make a director feel like a second-class citizen in his own city.

[…] "I believe in the domestic film culture," he says. "I can't be a colonial, I can't be someone who just sits here with no voice and just continues to digest Americana - Canadians have a right to their own stories."

The only word that comes to mind when I read Bessai’s words is “ah!” because one only has to look at France to understand that governments don’t know how “to sell” culture because first, they don’t understand it and  second, because they aren't good at selling anything.

Le Deuxième Sexe and self-help

Jessa Crispin reads Le Deuxième Sexe:

What dates the book is not de Beauvoir’s analysis of how society works — it’s that there is no instruction manual in the back. Every day someone new publishes a book telling me how to live my life. Jenni Kosarin from He’s Just Not in the Stars wants me to date a Capricorn or a Scorpio. Ian Kerner from Sex Detox wants me to abstain from sex for 30 days. Sylvia Ann Hewlett wrote Creating a Life because she wants me to have kids now; after all, my ovaries are not getting any younger. Leslie Bennetts and her Feminism Mistake wants me to get a job, any job. Just in case I am unsure who these books are intended for, they’re all bright pink. I admit that I dip into these books from time to time, and that it’s helpful to know, for instance, it’s not my fault an Aquarian drove me crazy, it’s just that Cancers should not date Aquarians. Ever. Yet how all this advice will lead to perfect happiness is not entirely clear. “Trust us. We’re the experts,” these authors say. Never mind those other books directly contradicting our theses.

While de Beauvoir wants women to know what they’re up against, she’s not going to tell you what to do. Part of me wishes she would. Especially since it is obvious that de Beauvoir would be incredibly disappointed that my mantra during setbacks is: “I can always get a lobotomy and marry a chiropractor.” I imagine her blowing cigarette smoke in my face and saying: “You want advice? Grow up.”

De Beauvoir had no time for self-help, accusing women who look for self-actualization (today’s Oprah viewers) of being useless: “She lets herself be fascinated with the hope of self-realization without doing anything.” What do we get if we do attain independence? Dignity. The knowledge that our efforts slowly erode the strength of the patriarchy. It doesn’t quite have the allure of “diamond ring” and “tighter, slimmer abdominals,” does it?

Beauvoir doesn’t offer any advice for the simple reason that she, as Sartre, believes in both freedom and responsibility. The sad and modern assumption that there is a secret to human existence and that personal experience and choices are always the same explain the popularity of Self-Help books. Nowadays, people feel more and more anxious with the idea that they are condemned to be free, that there is no master plan and that they are their own god. They look for short cuts, advice, for anything that will take the place of God and show them the way. Simone de Beauvoir’s answer to this need for answers, for advice, for easy way out is to say to her readers decide for yourself for I’m not going to take responsibility for your choices, that delicious burden rests on your shoulders. It is an empowering message, which in fact shows that one of the saddest and most dangerous fact about our world is that it dehumanizing existence by divinizing it. Modern people have become afraid of simply living, learning, making choices, making mistakes, and accepting to be little Gods to be human.

Second acts in literature

James Frey is trying to have a second act and judging from the article in the Independent (hat tip: Mark Sarvas) it may be possible for him to have a comeback. I hope that he succeeds because I thought that both the buzz and the outrage around his memoir A Million Little Pieces were too loud to be true and ended being less about literature than about the unavoidable traps of celebrity literature.

France and Chad

Arthur Goldhammer has an excellent post on his blog on French Politics about the shady ties between France and the current embattled government of Idriss Déby of Chad. It shows Françafrique is still alive and well so much for the thought that Sarkozy and Kouchner were going to change everything. Sugary excerpt:

Chad hangs in the balance, Paris would have us believe, while French defense minister Hervé Morin sends a "message of support" to the government in place. Foreign minister Kouchner issued a new "warning" to the rebels and invoked a supposed "duty" of France "to protect, perhaps now in a more decisive way if need be, the legal government." Mind you, of course, that in exercising this "duty," France would not be behaving in the bad old imperial ways but would merely be enforcing the will of the "international community," offered in a unanimous Security Council resolution (solicited by the French).

Jérôme Kerviel, the French and the mépris of capitalism

Agnès Poirier’s reading of the Jérôme Kerviel and the Société Générale scandal:

Beyond the humour and self-derision that such a story provokes, Kerviel's coup and the way the French are taking it have revealed once again the very different nature of French attitudes towards haute finance, and towards capitalism in its most abstract form. Together, they are looked on with utter suspicion by most people in France.

[…]I remember how in school, when I was 13, we would all snigger at the concept of an ever-virtuous free market. "As if a free market didn't produce gross inequalities!" we would say on cue. The free market may have become a necessary evil for my generation, but most of us still agree that only strong state regulation can correct capitalism's inherent injustice.

[…]Of course, globalisation and the growth of the European Union have weakened the power of nations and the extent to which nation states can play solo in the world economy. Nonetheless, France continues to live a very French paradox: her schoolchildren are taught to despise capitalism, yet she remains the second-largest trading nation in Western Europe. France boasts some of the world's leading utilities and transport and construction companies, and yet maintains a large public sector, employing 4 per cent of her labour force - that is to say 864,000 people - in the country's 1,100 state-owned companies.

The question is: how long can France thrive on her contradictions? Perhaps as long as the French find Zidane's headbutt and Kerviel's ?5bn coup equally sublime.

France is probably the only developed country where Jérôme Kerviel could be regarded as Robin Hood precisely because the French look suspiciously not only at capitalism, but also at wealth, which to them isn’t as in America a sign of success, but of exploitation. The point is that most of the French still believe that the most of the rich make their wealth by exploiting the poor and by taking advantage of an unfair system. In America, someone who is rich is most of the times not ashamed of showing his/her wealth because s/he feels that it was earned. In France, people who earned too much are encouraged to feel ashamed of their wealth and to hide it because it is considered indecent to show it when too much people don’t have enough to live.

Things fall apart again

Peter Monighan has a must-read article on Chinua Achebe and his essential novel Things Fall Apart. It talks about the dilemma faces about writing in English, describing Nigerian post colonial life truthfully, and accepting English literature in spite of what he perceived to be the racism of some of its giants such as Joseph Conrad. Sugary excerpt:

Things Fall Apart emerged at a time when very few Africans had written novels. Literary conceptions of the continent were still steeped in reductive romance, primitivism, and colonial sentiment. Providing an expansive alternative to those conceptions was, to say the least, a mighty accomplishment for an author still in his 20s. Achebe forged an original voice by merging African storytelling traditions with elements of the Western literature that he most admired growing up — including one of its foundations, Greek tragedy, as well as modernist techniques like the breaking of linear sequence. In a tale of a tribal leader floundering to come to terms with a new social order in an Igbo village, he suggested the destructive power of colonization, as well as Nigeria's struggles to achieve postcolonial stability.

[…] His decision to write the novel in English, a choice some critics questioned, was similarly deliberate: English was the language in which Nigeria had been misrepresented, so he would redress inaccuracies in that language, too. To emphasize the inadequacy of those earlier portrayals, he worked Nigerian proverbs and idioms seamlessly into his prose.

Achebe says it was his love of English literature that inspired him to believe that somewhere there would be a Nigerian equivalent. He came to realize that it might even reside in him. He sees a kinship between novel writing and Igbo storytelling. In the Igbo fascination with stories and proverbs, he says, he finds a "struggle with language, to make language say as much as possible to our condition."

[…] In a 1975 lecture, and then in an essay, Achebe took Conrad to task for emerging in his seminal short novel, Heart of Darkness, as a "thoroughgoing racist" even as he denounced imperialism. Achebe pointed out that Conrad had deprived his African characters of any voice, granting them only eight caricaturing words in the whole short novel. Pointing, still today, to those meager eight words, he says: "That's all that Africa has, of language; the rest is screaming, shrieking, howling — animal sounds, you see."

His criticism of Conrad drew vigorous protest from the author's defenders. But Achebe says his intention was simple: to ask "why does one go to Africa for this kind of exoticism that demeans people, makes them less than their worth?"

I agree strongly with Achebe’s point of exoticism for I think that that too often people use it as a way to belittle cultures that they don’t understand and to protect themselves from questioning their complex of superiority. Things fall apart to me is one of the greatest English novel and possibly the quintessential African novel of the last century for two reasons.  The first is that it shows that not that Africans can write, but that they can create a legitimate and remarkable literary universe that is understandable and admirable by non-Africans in a language that isn’t supposedly theirs. The second reason is that it exposes the chauvinism of the French language and of the French literary world, which are still resisting difference and what they perceive to be Africanness and foreignness. There is no French equivalent to Things fall apart because English is a much more welcoming language and adaptable language than French and because Anglophones are more open to the fact that they don’t own English and that others have to write to shape, mold, and adapt it to their own cultural and identical realities. It is for this reason that it is a lot easier to Africanize English than it is to Africanize French. To the French, their language is something that they are willing to lend, but not to share because they believe that they gave birth to it and that nobody has the right to adopt it and to mold it. In short, Achebe showed with Things fall apart that it was possible in English to explore, conquer, or create old and new literary territories.

Over-parenting, bad-parenting, and heaven on earth

Johann Hari on “Over-parenting”:

The rise in bulimia, anorexia and self-harm among teenagers is partly a product of all this over-parenting. As Dr Levene says of a typical teenage self-harmer she treated – a 15 year-old girl who carved the word "empty" onto her arm with an old razor: "She felt little control over what happened to her. Cutting was one of the few things over which she did feel control."

Why is this happening? Why have so many of the baby-boomers turned out to be baby-Führers, strangling their kids with their apron-strings? Their children are the safest who have ever lived. They are more likely to die in their beds of old age than any generation in history – yet their parents fear, constantly. There is no detailed research explaining this paranoia but there are some prosaic explanations.

Parents are having fewer children, later in life, often after gruelling fertility treatments. We live in a paranoid culture where every negligible risk is blown up by a 24/7 media into a drum-beat of doom. We live in a hyper-consumerist culture where we define ourselves by what we own. Children are inevitably drawn into this vortex, as another glistening status symbol. 'Have you seen my handbag? Have you seen my child?'

Whenever I talk to my friends' parents as they crash-land into their children's lives for another burst of command-and-control, it's clear this is not about their child's needs but their own. They need their children to be dependent on them (and Successful with a capital-S) because they see their kids as extensions of their own ego, not as separate individuals with their own lives to live. This isn't love. It is narcissism. It's time we told these middle-class Boomer parents: you need to grow up – or your children never will.

I don’t like the term over-parenting because it misses the point because there is only good parenting and bad parenting. I think that baby-boomers have trouble letting their kids go because they don’t want to become their own parents and admit that they cannot remain young (in the pejorative sense of the word) forever. Victor Hugo said more than a century ago that heaven is parents remaining young and children remaining children. Parents today just have the same vision and are doing everything they can to live heaven on earth.

Caucuses are anti-democratic

After the manufactured madness of Super Tuesday, Daniel Finkelstein has an interesting post on Caucuses and the American political system. He makes this essential point:

I don't want to single out Montana or Romney. In Alaska Barack Obama won 9 delegates with the support of a grand total of 302 people. He required 51, 124 to win the same number of delegates from Delaware.

What is going on?

By putting together so many state elections so early, many local parties were not ready to have their main state primaries on the same day. But they didn't want the cost of holding two primaries. Thus the caucus has had a revival.

It is, however, ludicrously undemocratic.

It's not as if the use of caucuses leaves the result pretty much the same, with any distortions simply being a reason for one state to be cross with another. No. The use of caucuses made a big impact on the distribution of delegates on super Tuesday.

Romney, Huckabee and Obama all gained delegates as a result of this system that they otherwise might not have won. Caucuses (and state conventions) clearly favour the choice and enthusiasm of activists over those of ordinary voters.

Caucuses are uniquely American in the sense that they are both a sign of an incredible optimism and idealism, which become naïve and destructive in spite of their good intentions. The aim of Caucus aims at transforming an election into big party where people will be forced to come together by defending enthusiastically their candidate. I would rather vote alone and not have to discuss my vote with people who are too often apolitical and irrational.

When something new becomes old

Anne Applebaum on Sarkozy:

Sarkozy's whirlwind romance is damaging because it reminds everyone that his public behavior is no less wacky and unpredictable than his private life.

Certainly this is true on the international stage, and especially in Europe, where diplomacy normally moves at the sedate pace of a Viennese waltz and where Sarkozy's penchant for whirling off in all directions at once is, shall we say, unsettling. Indeed, "controlling Sarko," as one Scandinavian politician put it to me, has now become a task for the entire European diplomatic corps. At times this requires straightforward damage control: The French president seems, for example, to be obsessed by Turkey, whose accession to the European Union he wants to prevent at all costs.

[…] But his colleagues have enough work just keeping track of him. Since becoming president, Sarkozy has opened a new military base in the United Arab Emirates, conducted (unsuccessful) peace negotiations in Lebanon, invited Moammar Gaddafi to Paris (where the Libyan leader cheerfully told the press he had not discussed any human rights issues with his French host) and promoted French nuclear energy technology while simultaneously pushing Iran to halt its own nuclear development. So far he's visited some 20 countries. One French newspaper gleefully quoted King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia declaring that "President Sarkozy resembles a dashing and high-spirited thoroughbred, but like all thoroughbreds, he should submit to be reined in to find his balance."

Sarkozy's domestic policies reach in multiple directions, too.

[…] Maybe this whirlwind of hyperactivity will eventually add up to something; certainly it makes a welcome change from the somnolence of the later Chirac years. But it definitely provides an uneasy context for a public romance. If Sarkozy were a staid and predictable politician, his tabloid love affair and abrupt marriage might be joyously embraced by a dewy-eyed nation. In present circumstances, it looks like one more madcap adventure to add to the growing list.

I think that it is easier to love Sarkozy and to view his hyperactivity as signs of future greatness when one doesn’t have to live with the fact that he is the president of her/his country.  I may be old-fashioned but I believe that unpredictability and instability coupled with hyperactivity is potentially catastrophic for a country especially the president is a republican monarch. The point is that the people who like Sarkozy because he is new and exciting usually do because they don’t have to live in his circus and can come from time to time to laugh at some who do and to like it because to them it is still new and adventurous.

Critical Literacy and emancipation

An interesting on Critical literacy made by Luke Slattery in the Australian:

If critical literacy were simply a tool for textual engagement there would be no criticism of it. In fact it is a faddish pedagogy cobbled together from a grab-bag of post-'60s theories - a touch of Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed; a tincture of Michel Foucault; a nod to Jacques Derrida - with emancipatory ambitions. It is a form of pedagogical resistance to the structures of oppression: race, class and gender.

[...]Unlike some critics of the new literacy, I wouldn't want to deny students an engagement with these notions; but I don't believe we should build an approach to literacy around an ideology of textual resistance that easily descends to cliche and is, moreover, unresponsive to any kind of hermeneutics not fed by these socio-political energies. It is not, simply put, a pluralistic environment.

[...]The subject we call English has always had an emancipatory edge. It has the potential to induct young minds into an intense world of sensibility; to what the literary critic Randall Jarrell called the "attention, submission and astonished awe that real art always requires of us". Deepening this is the collective aim of cultural literacy, which stresses shared knowledge.

With critical literacy, it seems to me, we see a shift in the pedagogical aim. Literacy loses its high-end individualist aspirations and its emphasis on cultural knowledge. It entails attention and submission to the mantras of race, class and gender, and a view of all textual performances as encoded power. This might be a good way to transmit received dogma and to foster right thinking, but it is no way to develop critical intelligence.

Football and American politics

It's Super Bowl Sunday and I'm rooting for the Giants! How can a  die hard Red Sox root for the Giants? Because I believe that the Patriots have more in common with the Yankees than the Sox. Anyway what Super Bowl Sunday shows about America is that  Americans love big things, shows, and violence and that explains why American football is so popular because on the contrary to Sumo, it is straight forward, requires no finesse and  involves men who don't have to worry about being too manly. My theory is that Americans only take an interest in politics when it start to resemble a sport particularly football, that is when there are violent exchanges and when the goal becomes to tear down and bloody each other.

Debray and Mitterrand

Jeremy Harding on Régis Debray’s views of Mitterrand:

Mitterrand’s is the most nuanced portrait. There is very little about his policies but it’s soon evident that Debray has a low opinion of him, lower no doubt for his having once been so smitten. He describes the charms of his subject, along with his faults – closely studied from inside the court – with a Saint-Simonian eye, praising his magnanimity but dwelling chiefly on two great shortcomings, as he understands them. The first, to use a Debrayism, is ‘mediological’: the literate Mitterrand was far too happy to abandon the graphosphere and service the requirements of the videosphere by founding a personalised presidency, not least during his illness, when the fate of the nation seemed to hang on every detail of his health. Once a ‘man of the pen’, he became in the end ‘a man of the image, monopolising the screen with his states of mind and live confessions, director-producer of his own ego in countless news reports, films, interviews’.

The second is that Mitterrand would not do the sort of intellectual heavy-lifting that Debray expected of a good leader. The president classed ‘friends of the Idea with the elves and fairies’, he says, supplying a Mitterrand quotation by way of evidence: ‘“A certain idea of France” . . . the expression is General de Gaulle’s. I don’t like it. I don’t need an idea of France; France is something I live.’ To Debray De Gaulle’s ‘certain idea’ – aim high, win or lose but never settle for mediocrity – was a good one, while an idea of any kind was a start. To have no idea, to reject ideas out of hand, was simply nonsensical. Strange that Thatcher, more the ideologue than De Gaulle and just as forceful about ‘certain ideas’ – aim low, never lose, find greatness in the stuff of mediocrity – should have hit it off with Mitterrand.

Mitterrand’s ‘short-range lucidity’, Debray argues, was not a compensation for his lack of an idea, since close up, as he explains, ‘a bad point seems as good as a good one.’ As for Mitterrand’s ‘anti-intellectualism’, it ‘had seemed to me to indicate courageous freedom of mind, leavened with dandyism and guile: really it expressed an allergy to deductive exposition, and I am afraid to the very idea of truth.’ The verdict is harsh but so was the consequence. As far as Debray could see, Mitterrand’s presidency coincided with the hollowing out of the left in France. It became a clannish assortment of managers and opinion-chasers, clinging skilfully to power for 14 years, at great cost in terms of the ‘philosophy’ of socialism and what he describes as its ‘soul’. ‘And now,’ he reflects, ‘we are all lighter, physically and morally.’ He agrees that it was part of a larger story unfolding far beyond the borders of France and that it may not matter; or that maybe it matters too much to him. ‘There are churches for people worried about the meaning of life. Each to his own catechism.’

French fairy tales

Simon Jenkins on Sarkozy and the end of the état de grace:

There is already a wild recklessness to Sarkozy's rule. He came to power last summer like a boy suddenly finding himself king of the castle. He decided to launch a "Marshall plan" for the suburbs, to ban advertisements on state television, to found 10 universities, to reform the 35-hour week, to protect French banks from sovereign wealth funds, to build a military base in the Emirates and to tax mobile phones. He commissioned the economist Amartya Sen to rewrite French statistics so as to embrace the country's much-vaunted "quality of life". He invited the philosopher Edgar Morin to set out his vision of a renaissance in France's new "politics of civilisation".

[…] France just now appears led by invisible desires. Will its president be reduced to gazing on his Cleopatra and crying, "Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space!" Shall Elysée be drowned in a thousand kisses? Or did the fox speak true? Will the opacity of the heart's desire lend a boldness, an inner wisdom, to Sarkozy's rule?

Either way, a new chapter in French history is being written, and, who knows, perhaps a new chapter in the art of government.

Et oui, even in France, fairy tales don’t last.