The Republic of Dissent

The beauty and power of anger

Brendan O’Neill on the war  on anger:

The psychologisation of anger has two consequences: first it separates our anger from the experience or the condition that gave rise to it, so that our ‘expressions of rage’ are always judged to be disproportionate, irresponsible and illegitimate. This can be seen in the relentless rise of rages, from ‘air rage’ to ‘golf rage’ to ‘work rage’. People who suffer from these rages, from the alleged psychological condition of losing the plot in airports, on golf courses or around the water cooler at work, are seen as irrational individuals with moral and mental flaws rather than rational actors expressing loud’n’rowdy displeasure with having been treated badly.

[…] This leads to the second consequence of psychologising anger. In robbing anger of its social element, and transforming it into a personal problem that requires one-on-one corrective therapy, the anger-management movement nurtures a society that is obsessed with policing individuals’ inner lives rather than focusing on transforming the world around us. From the anti-angry worldview, society should devote its resources to correcting rage-afflicted individuals rather than fixing the things that made us angry in the first place.

[…]  The war against anger is not a top-down conspiracy. This is not Nineteen Eighty-Four, with faceless authoritarians decreeing that certain emotions must be outlawed. Rather, today’s nervous and insecure elite instinctively fears certain emotions and champions others; indeed, it is precisely because the authorities are adrift and directionless that they feel the need to police the mind and to pacify what looks to them like an unknowable, untrustworthy mass of people: the public.

I agree with O’Neill because increasingly society wants us to believe that anger has no value and that angry people (especially angry women) are just a bunch of irrational or self-indulgent people who should be feared. Anger is as legitimate an emotion as joy and I believe that it is the most powerful emotion of all because one cannot who s/he is unless s/he knows what makes her/him angry. One of the scariest problems with modern societies is that their members have become too apathetic in a futile attempt to achieve total control over themselves and their lives. Anger has become inconvenient because it highlights the possibility of losing control and more importantly because it reminds us that sometimes shit happens and that we may not be able to do anything about it.

The power of anger comes from its ability to force us to confront our own powerlessness, to accept it and then to do something about it. There is a war on anger because people don’t want to hear that they don’t have full control and that in spite of their prayers, their efforts, their aspirations, or whatever else, things may still end up badly, terribly, or tragically to them. A society where it is forbidden or considered crazy to be angry is a dying society crippled by its belief that humanity only deserves to survive if it becomes perfect and if people avoids necessary clashes with reality. I am willingly to bet my right pinky that the most violent societies are the ones where anger is the most vilified and where people learn very early that they have to bury their anger.

Hip Hop is universal !

The song is Demain c'est loin (Tomorrow is far away), the group singing it is Iam.

Behind Geert Wilders's veil

Spiegel has an interview with Ian Buruma in which he discusses the latest controversy surrounding Dutch politician Geert Wilders and his anti-Islam movie. It was an instructive read. The most interesting part of the interview is Burama answers when asked whether Wilders should be compared to Jean-Marie Le Pen (the French Far Right leader) and Jörg Harder (the Austrian Far-Right leader) and whether the Netherland’s guilt over its brush with Fascism made it a liberal and tolerant society for decade:

I would compare him in the sense that he taps into the same feelings of resentment and fear. The common man feels the threat of Muslims moving into his neighborhood, whereas the elite live in leafy suburbs and don't have to confront these issues. Immigration and the Muslim issue in particular has become the focal point of a much larger sense of anxiety which has to do with the European Union, globalization, erosion of the authority of the nation-state and economic uncertainty. That general sense of insecurity and resentment makes a country very vulnerable to the kind of populist demagoguery that you get from people like Wilders and Pim Fortuyn before him.

Still, while Holland may have had a National Socialist Party in the 1930s, there has never been a true right-wing tradition and people are very suspicious of it today -- and the fascist tradition seen in right-wing movements in Austria or Germany has not been apparent in the politics of Wilders or Fortuyn. Their demagoguery is based on the idea that we live in a free country and our liberties are being threatened by foreigners.

[…] It [the guilt of the Dutch’s brush with Fascism) did a lot to drive tolerance, but it also stifled necessary debate -- and in that regard people like Theo van Gogh had a point. As soon as people started talking about the potential problems of integrating large numbers of non-Western immigrants in Europe in the 1990s, they were quickly denounced as racists, with people evoking the war in a knee-jerk reaction. By the same token, other people, including van Gogh, suggest that anybody who makes accommodations to Muslims in Europe (who these detractors call the "Islamofascists") is tantamount to a Nazi collaborator. This kind of response also silences the debate.

Writing transgressively about sex

Howard Jacobson on the memoirs of what he calls “Prada Prostitutes,” high-class “hookers such as Belle de Jour: The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl:

You can't mess around with sex, in life or in literature. It is never not serious. When a man denies the significance of an adultery with the line, "It didn't matter to me," and the wronged woman replies, "Then why did you do it?", they both miss the point. Everything in sex matters, including the experience of its not mattering. Isn't that what O pursues, the sensation of nothing mattering, least of all herself? And isn't that why some men visit prostitutes, for the intense experience of abnegation associated with payment, for which next to nothing is given and next to nothing is felt?

[…] We have to be careful, with sex, what we don't believe. Jean Genet never accepted that Story of O was written by a woman. No woman had a sufficient understanding of sexual degeneracy, he thought. The more fool him. And the more fool those who lambast Belle and Bruna, not for being shallow, but for telling lies. "It's a fantasy," wrote Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian when The Secret Diary of a Call Girl was shown on ITV. Rosie Boycott, writing in the Daily Mail, said the same. For both, what made the programme nonsense were the 68 per cent of prostitutes suffering stress disorder equivalent to a combat veteran's that it didn't show—even though that's the street, and Belle de Jour doesn't work the street. But so what? The prostitute might change her place of business but male desire remains forever male desire. What Belle de Jour does, in Bunting's view, is "buttress men's sense of entitlement to use a prostitute." "Use." Not visit, not hire; "use." That is, depersonalise and do violence to her.

[…] If it is inhumane to belittle the miseries of the prostitute, it is no less inhumane to minimise the miseries that make some men their clients. There is at least this to be said about the Prada call girls with their obliging mouths and vaginas—along with the freedoms they insist on for themselves, they grant men the freedom to be creatures of desire. Why, when all is said and done, should a prostitute not be touched by a man's shyness or ineptitude or sadness, or made curious by his turning up in her room looking for he doesn't know what, or excited when on rare occasions what he does want coincides with what she does? Is the battlefield so unforgiving that none of this is conceivable, and that any man who goes out looking for such an eventuality must be treated as a criminal?

Ah, there is so much to say that I don’t know where to begin. I am not sure that I like the idea that sex is such a sacred subject or rather a vital one that it is necessary to be careful with it. The sacralization of sex is a problem not really in literature, but in real life because it reinforces the absurd notion that when people are having sex, they are involved in an activity that is more important than themselves that the readers, others, and more importantly they have to take seriously. The problem nowadays is sex is not only the supreme and the sublime, but that it is what feels the most real to too many people. The memoirs of Prada prostitutes, to use Jacobson’s expression, thus become a hic because they transgress the rule that sex is serious and that it mustn’t be used to bug people by reminding them that sex is both personal and meaningless in itself. Depersonalization, degradation, and violence can therefore be sexual and writing about sex, prostitution, even when one insists that one is telling about one’s experiences doesn’t have to fit a mold. Writing about sex doesn’t have to mean to treat the subject from any other perspective than the one of the writer and with unnecessary and undeserved respect in order to be taken seriously and to affirm the idea that one is dealing with reality.

The refusal to believe sexual tales written by high class hookers is nothing more than the denial to women the power to transgress and to violate willingly the sacred without it being the fruit of a impregnation by a phallus, which at one point or another dominated and conquered them. What bothered Jean Genet was that he couldn’t imagine that a woman could be his equal or the equal of Sade because to him, women followed and didn’t violate the laws of Nature because they were, as Baudelaire stated famously, natural thus abominable. Thus, the question of credibility is purely one of gender, prejudice, and societal norms. People have never really focused on the credibility of Sade’s Justine or Genet’s Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs. The sex within those works although it is transgressive is considered serious because its depravity is sublimated by its masculinity and because the laws of nature which make it possible for sexual male fantasies to be considered serious in themselves, believable, and thus worthy to become part of the readers’ reality.

Because I don’t worship sex and because I don’t believe that it is serious  in itself, I am neither obsessed nor bothered by the memoirs of prostitutes whether they are the work of males or females, high class or low class people, or believable or unbelievable. However, what interests me is the realization that I live in a time when both women and men are willing to make sex about morality and something grand when it becomes an instrument used by women and mastered by women writers who don’t give a damn about what others think.

The psychoanalyzation of politics

Charles Bremmer on Sarkozy’s psyche and people’s obsession with it:

Since France loves psychoanalysis, the shrinks have had a field day. In books, seminars and television appearances they have described Sarko as neurotic, bipolar, Oedipal, even psychopathic. One psychiatrist, Hervé Hubert, has been running a popular seminar at Paris VII University with the title “Sarkozy the symptom: a reading of the unconscious”. His diagnosis is widely shared down at the pub. The vertically challenged President seeks the love of the public because his father abandoned him as a child; the swift replacement of Cécilia by Carla is a symptom of self-indulgence and insecurity, and so on.

Some of Sarko's old colleagues have joined the fray. François Léotard, a former Defence Minister, has published a book in which he detects in the President narcissism, aggression and childish behaviour that stem from insecurity. In another approach Jacques Alain Miller, a psychiatrist, told the President this week that his only hope for reforming himself was to undergo analysis. Sarko's problem is his inability to distinguish his ego from his id, Miller concluded.

But there is another way of looking at “Psycho Sarko”. The neurosis may not be on the President's side, but with the French and their mania with him. For months Super-Sarko has dominated conversation. The psychiatrists say their patients bring him up as soon as they hit the couch, so they have coined a new term - “acute Sarkozis”. This means being obsessed by the phenomenon of the President - le personnage mythologique - rather than the real man. From there it is only a small step to seeing that France may not know its President as well as it thinks.

I have to admit that the psychoanalyzation of politics scares me in spite of its entertainment value because it focuses on the fluff and deconstructs substance by making meaning or by reducing it to the psyche. This, in my opinion, deemphasizes political actions for all that matters is what politicians feel, who they are and what they have been thus making their personal side and lives critical since the electorate believes that it is more important for them to know who they are voting for rather than to know their policies. Sarkozy’s problem is since he cannot yet show results to the French even though he loves been describes as speedy and Super Sarko, the extraordinary politician who was going to change France rapidly and thoroughly. He has to give them something else to distract them from the fact that he hasn’t yet decided what kind of president he would be. Sarkozy loves to be loved and idolized. He wants to be all things to all people and from the fact that only results are going to determine if indeed he is more than a good showman who knows how to win elections and charm journalists, but not how to govern and to reform a country.

Bluff and the race card

I find this video fascinating given the Democratic primary season and the fact that it has been about nothing much but race, gender, new politics, old politics and change rather than about substantive issues I find it incredible that Democrats and the American left are unable to have a political election between two attractive candidates without diabolization and unnecessary destruction, which leads me to believe that the Democratic party and American liberalism don't know what they are about, but that they only know what they are against. This Fact explains why it is necessary for the American to manufacture an enemy, a foe to beat in an attempt to avoid having to fight for something rather than against something, and to have an identity based on elements other than rejections and hatred.

It is still not just Globalization, stupid!

Peter Thiel (one of the co-founders of PayPal) has an essay on Globalization on the Hoover Institution website, which is a good read because it makes interesting, but limited points about globalization and our times. Sugary except:

Classic investment strategies no longer work in a world where ordinary economic cycles are broken. The limits of a George Soros or a Julian Robertson, much less of an ltcm, can be attributed to a failure of the imagination about the possible trajectories for our world, especially regarding the radically divergent alternatives of total collapse and good globalization.

Seven years later, the markets have come full circle. The retreat towards tactical cleverness hides a lazy agnosticism about the most fundamental questions of our age. Because we find ourselves in a world of retail sanity and wholesale madness, the truly great opportunities exist in the wildly mispriced macro context — rather than in the ever-diminishing spreads on esoteric financial markets or products. Indeed, one could go even further: What is truly frightening about the twenty-first century is not merely that there exists a dangerous dimension to our time, but rather the unwillingness of the best and brightest to try and make any sense of this larger dimension.

[…] In every possible future, all of today ’s bubbles will burst, and their ideological scaffolding will prove to be but lint in the winds of history.

The waning of globalization in the near future will be a reaction to the excesses of the recent past.  Bubbles have begun to implode across the globe, laying bare the fraudulence of “China,” “technology,” “hedge funds,” and their like. As the world's economy weakens, so will support for the globalist orthodoxy, the political tenability of which rests heavily on the ability of the doctrine to literally deliver the goods. Some policymakers seem to sense this already, with the most immediately obvious of these being the Fed. In this view, the Fed ’s morally hazardous accommodations are best understood not as a perplexing and facile sop to bankrupt homeowners but as a desperate effort to stave off a recession that will end the debate on globalization for years to come.

Globalization became a buzzword applied to all things and used to reinforce the idea that there were no alternatives to a particular worldview and set of policies, which created both wealth and extreme inequality. The point is that few understand that in spite of the fact that globalization isn’t new; it is still relevant because it makes policy and investors’ choices even more essential than ever before because it is clear that markets aren’t fair and the invisible right seldom creates fairness and social justice.

The pettiness of boycotting the Beijing Olympics

Gideon Rachman makes an excellent point on the idea of boycotting the Olympics in China this summer:

[…] But now that the Chinese have been awarded the games, I think it would be an even bigger mistake to boycott them. Much as the West would insist that the boycott was aimed only at the Chinese government, it would be both portrayed and percieved as an insult aimed at the entire Chinese people. The great task of international relations over the next generation is going to be managing the rise of China. Picking symbolic fights - and so whipping up Chinese nationalism - is the wrong way to go about things, I think.I was living in South-East Asia, when China made its first failed bid to get the 2000 Olympics. That rejection - in favour of Sydney - sparked fury even among many “Overseas Chinese”, who saw the snub as a deliberate effort to humiliate China. The Chinese chose not to bid for the 2004 Olympics - apparently it was an unlucky year. (Something to do with the Chinese word for “four” rhyming with death?) So there is a huge amount riding on 2008.

And a huge amount that could go wrong naturally, what with a marathon run in the Beijing smug, the situation in Tibet and the presence of the American president. President Bush has been foolish enough to accept an invitation to the Olympics - which means that if something does go awry, he will be on the spot and dragged into events.

I have no opinion on a boycott of the Olympics nevertheless I think that it would a petty and insignificant act. Further, it is an easy and show-offish to a complicated situation that requires bolder solutions. If the goal is to send a message about human rights, why not do something that will have the most impact, why not have the chutzpah to call for a boycott of all Chinese goods and to stop diplomatic relations with China? The West wants to have both ways, it has become addicted to cheap Chinese goods so it is looking for other ways to prove and to assert their moral superiority of the Chinese by reminding them that they may be an economic power, but that they are still a dictatorship. The point is that all of this talk of boycotting the Beijing Olympics is meaningless because it affirms the West’s insatiable appetite for cheap goods and its lack of courage to put its money where its mouth. I think it is far worse to pretend that human rights mean more than commerce by taking grand but meaningless such as the boycott of sporting event than to admit one’s weaknesses and to admit shamefully that the West is willing to sell its soul for cheap stuff.

Guilty and unhealthy pleasures on Easter

It is hard not to read this article and not to feel guilty afterward because it makes people look unnecessarily foolish. I am just going to say that it is about the second ex Mrs. Sarkozy and her new life, which I hope that she will enjoy without having to remain the prey and the source of people's unhealthy curiosity.

Escaping the madness

This is the song I'm currently listening to in order to escape the madness of the month of March. Of course, I'm still following March Madness and by the way I hope that Duke loses today, that Davidson upsets Georgetown tomorrow, that UCLA doesn't make it to the Final Four this year, and that the Tar Heels win the whole thing.

Bad Friday

The trouble with religious holidays is that most of the timesthey never adjust to the present context for fear of losing their so-called meaning. For example, I never understood the purpose  of Good Friday for Christians, the day of the death of Jesus, to celebrate later his resurrection on Easter. Then, I understood that the point was to remind “the people” that they are guilty and not worthy of Jesus or God.

Sex Scandals and American Democracy

Gabor Steingart in Spiegel argues that Sex Scandals are good for American democracy:

Affairs are as much a part of American politics as cheese on a cheeseburger. There are many presidents in the cheaters' Hall of Fame. Thomas Jefferson fathered at least one illegitimate child with his black housekeeper, John F. Kennedy was intimate with Marilyn Monroe, and Bill Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky is probably the most well documented extramarital affair in human history.

The recent flurry of affairs and sex scandals provides an invaluable benefit to the public. It shrinks the individual politician down to the size of an ordinary citizen, or perhaps to a size even smaller than that, and brings him closer to the voting public, whether he likes it or not. The political parties can no longer lord it over their voters as the guardians of public virtue, a strategy adopted by the Republicans, in particular, in all previous election campaigns.

The Republicans have used the phrase "family values" as a rallying cry against everyone who was somehow different from their ideal: gays and lesbians, the divorced, single mothers or fathers (who now make up more than half of American households).

Perhaps this explains why the phrase "family values" has backfired on those who coined it. The topic is already a taboo among Democrats, if only out of deference to the Clintons. Barack Obama, who is still married to his first wife, Michelle, would be the only candidate who could derive any benefit from emphasizing so-called family values. His wife recently made a tentative stab at capitalizing on the issue, when she said at a campaign event: "If you can't run your own house, you certainly can't run the White House."

I disagree with Steingart because I think that sex scandals are actually bad for American Democracy because they usually end being with a spectacle that dehumanize all of the parties to the scandal by giving them the sweet illusion that they have the right to judge and to condemn them. I don’t believe that American democracy, or any democracy for that matter, benefits from having an electorate that has the mentality of a lynch mob and that feels that it is entitled to know every aspect of the private lives of its politicians because they are at their service.

Questions of image

It's always peculiar to hear a bunch of experts discuss the role of America in the world. I think that more often than not, they miss the point that image is about both actions and distance in the sense that it doesn't matter what America says if it doesn't do what it says and that the more it puts itself away from the world, the less the world feels in touch with it.

Ethnonationalism

Jerry Z. Muller has an article in Foreign Affairs on Ethnic nationalism and its enduring power. It discusses the history of ethnicity and its implications in Europe and the role that it plays currently in  societies that have to deal with populations that are different from the ones of their past. It is a good read. Sugary excerpt:

The most dramatic transformation of European ethnic balances in recent decades has come from the immigration of people of Asian, African, and Middle Eastern origin, and here the results have been mixed. Some of these groups have achieved remarkable success, such as the Indian Hindus who have come to the United Kingdom. […] As a result, some of the traditional contours of European politics have been upended. The left, for example, has tended to embrace immigration in the name of egalitarianism and multiculturalism. But if there is indeed a link between ethnic homogeneity and a population's willingness to support generous income-redistribution programs, the encouragement of a more heterogeneous society may end up undermining the left's broader political agenda. And some of Europe's libertarian cultural propensities have already clashed with the cultural illiberalism of some of the new immigrant communities.

I don’t like the term cultural illiberalism because it is more offensive to me than the term barbarism. More importantly, it puts the emphasis on culture by divinizing it, which encourages fruitless confrontations when the emphasis ought to be on togetherness and the separation between the public sphere and the private sphere.

Renewing the Sarkozy show

Jason Farago summarizes best the lessons of the latest French elections, which his party lost, for Sarkozy :

[…]Sunday was a bad night, above all, for the president, who has been less visible these past two weeks than at any time since his election in May. Everyone knew it would be bad. Ministers doing the rounds on television tried to mitigate the sting of the defeat by saying that the ruling party always loses ground in midterms. But the 2008 municipal elections were more than just a simple realignment or reaction; they brought down the curtain on the manic first year of the hyper-president's mandate. Voters may or may not have voted against Sarkozy, but the Sarko show is cancelled. […] Live by the media, die by the media: that is the lesson of the 2008 French elections. Sarkozy became president by looking like one on TV. Voters in May said that they backed him over Ségolène Royal in part because he had the stature and the seriousness of a president, while she did not. That feels like another era now, when day after day, with each press report on the "unpresidential" behaviour of the head of state, the Sarkozy mythos takes another hit. In the coming days - not least in London next week, when France's "elected monarch" will meet Britain's hereditary one - we will see whether he can regain his standing, or whether Sarkozy's once-vaunted mastery of political imagery is gone for good.

So is the Sarkozy show over?  Of course, it isn’t. Sarkozy is the lead character of a sitcom which is plummeting in the ratings because it is no longer new and because people, in spite of the fact that the show has attractive characters, are expecting better dialogue and a story that will be therapeutic to them because it will touch their lives in some way and teach them something. The French, to the contrary of Americans, don't like their sitcoms and their politics to be about nothing. This fact explains why Seinfeld was never a cultural phenomenon in France. The luck that Sarkozy has is that it is easy to renew a sitcom provided that you have good writers and that his show has no competition since the left is still getting on its own way and the center is crossing the desert in order to find itself. The only real danger for Sarkozy is ineffectiveness, which would convince people that he is not only bling-bling, but also incompetent and then, they would be willing to cancel the Sarkozy show.

Truth and BS

Paul Constant makes the point that all memoirs are bullshit:

It's both safe and satisfying for the media to tut-tut at a shamed author, but all this shame and outrage and bluster are smokescreens that obfuscate a point that needs to be made: All memoirs are bullshit.

The concept of a memoir suggests the imposition of a fictional narrative structure onto a life. Nearly every memoir I've ever read has ended on the false redemptive note of a powerful lesson learned, a "The More You Know" moment that smells questionable at 10 paces. To read a memoir is to buy into the ridiculous notion that someone can experience a life-changing epiphany—finding the love of one's life, say, or a long, hard climb out of substance abuse—and then, six months later, have the wisdom and distance to write compellingly about it. That's not a tall order; it's impossible.

I don’t agree with the argument that because memoirs are made-up, they are bullshit because that would mean that they have no value in themselves, which isn’t true. I know that I’ve said it before but I find this obsession with truth worrisome and dangerous because it betrays a dangerous need to deny the fact there isn’t one truth but truths and to simplify the unsimplifiable.

Sex and political hypocrisy

I agree with this:

[…] Spitzer-type cases have the unfortunate consequence that many cases of failure to live up to ideals are misidentified as cases of hypocrisy, and - even less fairly - the word gets misapplied to examples of human frailty (or just to human nature expressing itself in all the naturalness of its needs and desires) when in fact there was no claim to special virtue in the first place.

Politicians and preachers are the prime targets for accusations of hypocrisy, almost exclusively in matters of sex and money. True, they have only themselves to blame if they pretend to live by high moral standards and then find front pages of newspapers covered with photographs of themselves sucking toes not attached to their wives.

[…] In their relentless pursuit of sensation and scandal the media are always too quick to describe ordinary failings as hypocrisy. There are familiar cultural differences in this; French newspapers would only label a married politician as a hypocrite because he or she has a lover if that politician had publicly advocated marital fidelity. In our Anglo-Saxon world with its adolescent, sniggering and apprehensive attitude to anything sexual, it does not matter whether a politician has said anything at all about sexual morals; a mistress, a prostitute, a visit to a gay bar means open season. 

Anglo-Saxons, Americans especially, are more willing to judge the sexual behavior of their politicians because to them, sex cannot be separated from morality and sexual conduct has to be moral to be acceptable. Although the French are more inclined nowadays to inspect the private lives of their politicians, they are less willing to make a moral judgment about them as long as they are not asked to become voyeurs and to condone what they shouldn’t know. Americans like to be voyeurs because morality is quintessential to America and because purity is an essential trait to maintain America on top of its hill. Americans don’t like politics, which hey believe to be sleazy in itself and hate politicians because they believe they are a bad example. To them, sex is devilish when it doesn’t have a noble purpose. For these reasons, Americans viewed easily risky and “unorthodox” sexual behavior as proof not of human frailty, but of moral corruption. The Spitzer case just shows how difficult it is for Nerds and Epicureans to deal with the aphrodisiac nature of political power in America. If it has been acceptable in the great state of New York for Spitzer, as in it has been in France for Sarkozy, to “enjoy” the pleasures of the political power he had worked so hard to acquire, I am willing to bet that he would have just left his wife and dated as many young women as he wanted.  Unfortunately, for Spitzer, he didn't live in the Elysée and he had to live by American rules because he had, undoubtedly, the ambition to one day reside in the White House.

Patriotism and virility

Interesting, but infuriating point by George Kateb on Patriotism:

The brute fact of patriotism is made brute by the inveterate inclination in men to associate virility with the exertion involved in killing and risking death. No theory can ever defeat or discredit this inclination, which helps to engender the fantasy that the competition of political units is the highest kind of team sports. Men love teams, love to live in a world where they are called on to back or play for their team against other teams, even though the sport of war is soaked in blood. Socratic notions of gratitude or Jamesian notions of infinite indebtedness are not necessary for this love. In the sport, where aristocrats used to play their games, elites now mobilize groups or masses to slaughter each other. Men can become peace-loving for a while, but not forever. The women who love them encourage their inclination to see team sports as the essence of their masculinity, and to call patriotic this inclination when it is projected into politics. The pity is that men lend their energies to a state that sooner or later embarks on an inherently unjust imperialist career and thus gets constantly engaged in policies that are deliberated in secrecy, and sustained by secrecy and propaganda, and removed from meaningful public deliberation. Patriotism is indispensable for sustaining this career of anti-democracy.

In general, an activist foreign policy works tirelessly to de-legitimate any constitutional democracy. Patriotism is the greatest asset in the internal and ever-present war against the sentiments and institutions of free government.

I wonder if Kateb is contending that there cannot be patriotism without masculine virility because that would be just silly.

Running away from American liberalism

David Mamet has a great essay in the Village Voice (hat tip: Jennifer Schuessler) explaining why he is no longer “a brain dead liberal.” Sugary excerpt:

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

[...] I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.

And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

[…] I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

I have to say that this election is making me realize that there is something wrong with American liberalism and that it isn’t in touch with reality, because it is too much in love with its own ideals. However I am wondering is the thing to be when one realizes that one cannot be An American liberal is an American conservative. I hope not.

Mute and uninspired

Well, I'm mute today and totally uninspired so it is better for me to accept my condition to watch old French videos until I rediscover my voice. The singer is Jean-Jacques Goldman, the song is Sache que (Know that).

The dictatorship of value

A Simple, but sad truth from Jeanette Winterson:

I am here because of books. One of the reasons I am here is because I read Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus, aged 16, at the second of being chucked out of the house. Camus is perfect for young people because he is all ardour and belief - his quest to believe in nothing lands him back at believing in each person's spirited defiance against the numbing operations of a machine-world.

Why is Labour intent on turning education into a machine-world instead of a journey into life?

Already, in English literature, kids are not required to read the whole of a text. They are led to believe by their weary and worn-out teachers that a book is not worth reading all the way through. You can spend hours on Facebook, but not Middlemarch?

Hermann Hesse, who is also off the syllabus, wrote a strange and prophetic book, The Glass Bead Game, about a future world where society has become utterly divided into those who are initiated into the mysteries of the game, and the masses who are not.

Reading is a cheap and democratic way of revealing the human mind to itself - all you need is someone to teach you to read and, after that, some books. Why are we turning literature into a new mystery? Why are we saying to millions of kids: “This is not for you?” I'll tell you why, because the sceptics at the altar don't believe a word of this. Their message is clear - literature is of no value to the masses.

The only thing left to say after that is to recognize that we live in a scary and decaying world.

Gatekeeping, Elitism and French culture

Guy Dammann makes the following thought provoking point about the late Robbe-Grillet, l’Académie Française, and the effects of gatekeepers on French culture:

The Académie has a venerable tradition of excluding controversial authors. Tireless scourge of the French establishment Émile Zola stood for election 13 times, eventually giving up after the J'accuse affair forced him into exile in England. Balzac, before him, was passed over for Victor Hugo on the grounds that the genre in which he worked was too lowly, and later because he was too poor. Denis Diderot, polymathic figurehead of the French Enlightenment's racier side and editor of the Encyclopédie, was barely even considered for election while Jean d'Alembert, his co-editor until the censors turned up the heat in 1759, became one of the institution's leading lights.

Robbe-Grillet, on the other hand, stirred up trouble with vigour and relish from the moment his literary career got under way. Arguably, he courted controversy for its own sake as an integral part of the anti-literary aesthetic of the nouveau roman movement whose undisputed founding father - or "pope", as he preferred it - he was.

[…]Aside from the distribution of some 70 literary awards, none of which have the prestige of the Prix Goncourt (administered by another "Académie" set up as a progressive thorn in the establishment's side), the primary function of the immortels is to "safeguard the purity of the French language". This duty they discharge through their own dictionary, the last edition of which was published in 1935 with a total of 35,000 definitions.

[…] the wonderful thing about French culture has always been the dichotomy between haughty officialdom and rampant liberté. For while the academicians police the official language, doing their best to ward off the invading franglais hordes, the less exalted regions of French society have never lost any time in inventing their own argots.

A good parallel here is with the French education system, which, though based on a rigorously old-fashioned "learning-by-rote" model designed to stamp out original thought and its causes, has nonetheless consistently turned out an exceptionally high proportion of the intellectual and artistic world's mavericks, revolutionaries and left-field geniuses. Perhaps, in much the same way, the staid and fusty Académie, in maintaining standards that few find themselves able to live up to, is all the while silently fuelling the rude health of France's unofficial linguistic life.

Dammann is wrong to see in Robbe-Grillet somebody who tried to shake things up because he was so conventional that all of his attempts to be different, to write differently, and to shake things up were fluffy. They were, unfortunately, not well-thought and poorly executed stratagems to remain relevant, which are already forgotten because they weren’t intended to survive their author.

The big question of whether French culture is being “damaged” by its gatekeepers is bigger than Robbe-Grillet and very much relevant because it is impossible not to answer positively that interrogation precisely when considering the case of Robbe-Grillet and of the infamous Académie. The existence and the importance of the Académie Française is the proof that it is possible to have too much of a good thing and that attempts of preserving a culture from commercialization and devaluation can make it elitist and inaccessible. I love the fact that French culture is rich, stylish, difficult, and complicated but I stop loving those qualities when it becomes clear that they have nothing to do with substance or meaning, but everything to do with conservatism and the erroneous desire to resist modernity and simplicity because they are viewed as ways of dumbing down French culture and “unfrenching” it. My point is that I love French culture so much that I don’t want it to be clustered in a museum like the Mona Lisa of Da Vinci under the pretext that it is a masterpiece that ought to be protected from the common folk. My worst nightmare is that I will have to grow old in a world where French becomes a dead language as Latin and where French culture becomes something that only a few members of a shrinking, disappearing and educated elite treasure.

Sacrifice and bravery

I hate the word sacrifice because what it implies is that somebody is settling for less when s/he could be getting more and more importantly that the one doing the sacrificing is the hero while the one for whom it is made is someone less than a hero. India Knight wrote these few words in the Times of London on the subject of being a mother to a disable child, which made think:

Bravery is picking yourself up and getting on with it; bravery is the lioness instinct to defend your vulnerable child with your life – and, if needs be, your sanity. Bravery is dumping the loser husband who’s taken to eating separately because he can’t cope. Bravery isn’t pretending that the inconvenient truth never happened.

Tens of thousands of women (and men) go through their lives as parents of disabled children in a heroic way, every day, without bleating and without the benefits of a comfortable home, a book advance and a sympathetic media.

[…] It’s not a fashionable thing to say but motherhood is about sacrifice and duty. It’s about understanding that you will no longer be able to put yourself first and understanding that there isn’t a personality type that “copes” with difficulty or disability better than anyone else.

We’re all muddling through as best we can; our reward is anything from a hug from a “normal” child to the painstaking ghost of a smile from the immobile face of one who is not. Anyone who feels unable to grasp this should get their tubes tied, pronto. And Hollander should give up writing books, stop pretending that everything’s fine and get the help she so clearly needs.

For some reason, I can’t agree with Knight because I think that parents of disabled children tend to make the disability of their children about them without realizing that for their children, disability is all that that they know, and yes is normalcy. I think that people are too obsessed with normalcy and never realize that no matter whether a child is disabled or not, s/he is always going to have difficulty and will always look at her/his parents to understand how h should look at himself or herself.  In other words, parenthood and especially motherhood shouldn’t be about sacrificing but about accepting the acceptable and rebelling against the unacceptable. Sacrifice is a noble thing.  However, ultimately, it almost never has the effects and consequences it was intended to have.  To say things crudely, shit always happen. Thus, mothers, parents may as well do the right and the most difficult thing that is to accept that disability is going to be normalcy for their child and that her/his happiness doesn’t depend on her/his parents’ sacrifice but acceptance of the fact that her/ his disability isn’t about them.

An empty circle

The argument isn’t new, but on International Women's Day, which was yesterday (I was so excited that I forgot to celebrate it, but then I felt guilty and drank an extra glass of chablis), it always resurfaces as if women are ever going to agree on feminism, femininity, and womanhood when disagreeing is much more empowering and rewarding:

[…] women know ideology has no place when we talk about the dubious practice of stressful, long day care for infants. Mothers of young children can enter the work force but we have produced a society in which mothers are considered to be doing valuable productive work only if they are also in the paid work force. Whether it is inequitable tax arrangements that penalise single-breadwinner families or government-sponsored maternity leave that omits women who have forgone employment to rear a family, ideologues of the Right and the Left have transformed the care we thought of as the freely given gift of mother love into a commodity called child care.

Aside from equal pay, post-war feminism has not done much for women. Its proponents have taken the credit for what women in the 19th century had already done and what World War II accelerated.

My mother went to university in 1947. She wasn't spurred on by feminism but by her family and ambitious, well-educated nuns (one a brilliant graduate of the Sorbonne), whose ideals of poverty and obedience and, of course, chastity, were comprehensively trashed by the feminists of my generation.

Those feminists told us that our problems would be solved by the contraceptive pill and abortion. But the pill was the best thing men ever invented for men because it ensured women's constant sexual availability and men's abandonment of old ideals of honour, also leading to more abortions. Now the research is telling us Australian women are unable to have the children they want. So women are fed up with feminism. Its legacy is barrenness. Of course, the feminists are not going to tell you that.

I always yawn after reading such arguments because their goal isn't to move the discussion forward, but to stall it as a way to show that the debate is meaningless, that femininity and philosophy don't mix, and that nature is always right .

Religion is a lethal weapon in Africa

Sugary excerpt from Steven Epstein’s review of Helen Epstein’s book on Aids and Africa, The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight against Aids:

Perhaps the most frightening stories that Epstein tells about the impact of outsiders concern the practices of the current administration in the US. President George W. Bush has expanded the funding for AIDS prevention in Africa, while promoting abstinence and fidelity. Yet this emphasis has little basis in scientific data. In Uganda, for example, Epstein reports that during the years when the national HIV rate fell by about 70 per cent, the teen pregnancy rate remained essentially unchanged – suggesting that abstinence had little to do with the remarkable reduction in new infections. What such programmes do support, however, is the promotion of God’s work, as understood by Bush’s conservative Christian backers. “AIDS has created an evangelism opportunity for the body of Christ unlike any in history”, according to Ken Isaacs, a spokesperson for the Christian charity Samaritan’s Purse. And while US law supposedly stands in the way of using Federal funds for evangelizing, Epstein reports that “every abstinence event I attended involved much praying and discussion of Jesus”. Sadly, it is precisely in Uganda, Epstein’s success story, where the tide appears to have turned in recent years, and where Epstein now encounters condom burnings in the name of Jesus. Reversing this alarming trend is now among the most crucial steps in supporting the work of Africans who struggle to solve the wrenching problem of AIDS.

I may have an anti-religious bias, but I believe that religion, insofar as it reinforces local beliefs about sex, women, and marriage is lethal in Africa. It encourages people who are suffering and who have no chance to get cured and who are the most exposed to Aids to believe in the unseen and that Aids is solely about sin and evil. In African countries, religion is truly the opiate of the masses because it keeps the people from revolting by pacifying them with the belief that paradise isn’t on earth and that all of the ills that are plaguing them are happening because they are unable to keep themselves pure and to follow God’s sacred rules. The most disturbing thing is that the West that is evangelizing Africa and thus, encouraging dangerous beliefs because it is a fertile terrain. Africans are easy targets, as the poor in the West because they are looking for anything that will make them believe that what is stupidly considered intrinsically African, such as poverty and naivety, is closer to Godliness. Abstinence is dangerous and kills in the African context because it demonizes Aids and its victims who are ostracized and because it encourages the dangerous notion that sex and especially female virginity (for after all a man can profess to be a virgin while a woman’s virginity can be proven with a certain part of her body) are sacred.

The responsibility of writers

Well, it just never stops. It is impossible not read Terence Blacker in the Independent and to wonder what is happening to writers to become suddenly the symbol of what is wrong with modern societies. Sugary excerpt:

Fiction, as John Updike has written, is a dirty business. "Discretion and good taste play a small part in it... Parents, wives, children – the nearer and dearer they are, the more mercilessly they are served up." Writers like to agree with this line, believing themselves to be the tellers of truth, standing as firmly against the pressures of domestic sensitivity as they do against fashion or political correctness. What is the point of telling a story, they ask, if the mess and the agony are fastidiously left aside to avoid a few tears?

[…] Reading a novel, after all, is never a pure experience, untouched by the circumstances which surrounded the writing of it. If Vladimir Nabokov had been a paedophile, who could seriously have enjoyed Lolita? Had The Silence Of The Lambs been the work of a genuine psycho, it would impossible to read. At the moment in 2004 when the acclaimed children's author William Mayne was imprisoned for offences against children, nothing in his considerable literary reputation could save his books. The life had, for the foreseeable future at least, poisoned the work.

[…] Novelists like to see themselves as brave loners telling their particular truth in age of generalisation and cliché but today they can also be part of the celebrity circuit, propelled by powerful publicity machines.[…] Fiction is not about the personal revenge of the writer on the non-writer, and those who use it in that way are simply abusing their power and position of privilege.

Reading is becoming a desensitized experience, which isn’t considered fundamental.  Increasingly, readers are looking at writers like they look at their physicians or their plumbers for they are saying to them that they are “paying” them to give them society and that they better give them that something because reading doesn’t mean much if they don’t get what they are looking for. I think that there is something wrong when readers of  fiction can get to a writer’s face and say to her/him, “You owe me something because I’m giving you the privilege to be read.” My answer to these types of meaningless confrontation is “If that is the way that you feel, don’t read fiction, just read newspapers.” Of course, writers aren't gods, fiction isn't sacred and for that reason, despicable and manipulative fictions shouldn't be given powers they don't have, they should be ignored instead of increasing their visibility by screaming about the responsibility of the writer. Fiction can be disturbing and experience teaches us that in most cases, where the sole attribute of a work of fiction is that it is vile and designed to be a weapon, it doesn't last. So all that there is left to say is beaucoup de bruit pour rien.

Loving the Barbarians

Via Joan Smith in the Independent, an argument against honor killings:

We urgently need to recognise honour-based killings as an expression of classic patriarchal values, which give fathers, brothers and uncles absolute power over women and younger, less-powerful males. In societies built on such values, girls and women are regarded as commodities, not individuals. They are usually married off before completing their education, passing illiteracy on to the next generation.

[…] Honour-based cultures depend on strict rules and even surgical procedures to allay their fears about women's sexuality, and a staggering 97 per cent of Egyptian women have undergone genital mutilation.[…] Patriarchal values are supposed to make men feel strong but the evidence is that they do just the opposite, filling fathers and sons with unbearable anxiety and trapping entire families in poverty. They are the enemy not just of women's rights but economic prosperity, and they have no place in the 21st century.

The problem, as I see it, is precisely the fact that Joan Smith has to explain why honor killings are intolerable and that she has to come back to grandiose, but still incomprehensible words such as “patriarchal.” The fact that it isn’t not enough to say that killing a woman in the name of honor or other values show us that the problem with women may not be solely in what Smith calls “Honour-based cultures.” I think that in the middle of her article, Smith should have realized that she is explained to the members of a modern why killing a woman isn’t acceptable and that is unsettling. It isn’t a matter of wondering where is the outrage, but rather to question why a woman’s body, life or whatever is always considered able to provoke not only men, but all humans to act either as barbarians or to accept it when others do.

Technology makes the ridiculous and the trivial revolutionary and fabulous

Katherine Mangu-Ward has an article on internet application such as twitter in Reason magazine. She makes the interesting point that they help make the ridiculous sublime and the ordinary and the trivial revolutionary. Sugary excerpt:

Twitter is another example of the ridiculous quickly turning to the sublime. Morons who can't choose one bar and stay there on Friday nights want their friends to be able find them. Voila, a service that sends out badly spelled messages about your whereabouts to everyone you know. A few short months later, Egyptian democracy activists are using the same tool to organize and communicate below the radar and/or while in jail.

From frivolous to political is well-documented, but where does the market fit in? [Clay] Shirky mentions another collaborative project, a tool to coordinate teams of people to subtitle Japanese animation called Aegisub. "It ended up signaling the high demand for stuff that American distributors thought was too arcane," says Shirky. As official releases of anime other than Sailor Moon became more common, the Aegisub community decided to delete their bootleg versions.

Why did they start a group only to run themselves out of business? "It's not because of a commercial motivation. It's also not because of an anti-commercial motivation. These aren't people who are motivated by sticking it to The Man....They changed the world to be more like what they wanted and once it changed, they could stop."

It's that impulse—do what you want in order to get what you want and then go back to whatever you were doing—that Shirky ably captures in Here Comes Everybody. Things that seem trivial become tools for building crucially important, often ad hoc, collaborations. Social media erodes the divide between freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly, and intertwining them makes all of them easier to defend.(Emphasis added)

The courage to write Fiction

The Millions has a post on the popularity of memoirs and the fact that many of them, especially the best selling ones, are discovered to be really works of fiction. Is anybody really surprised by this?  If you are surprised, I would love to live in your world, on second thought, I wouldn’t because it is probably the one where Obama is the Messiah or Moses because he speaks the Truth. The popularity of the memoirs is more about the fact that reading has lost its intrinsic value in the sense that nowadays people want to read only if they learn something about themselves, about the world, about becoming more successful, about triumphing from adversity, and about their reality. They don’t want to take the time to think about what isn’t true and to decide what lessons they should learn from a work of fiction because it’s too complicated and because Truth, to them, is what gives literature meaning and value. This belief, is, of course, ridiculous. I have to admit that I hate memoirs because I believe that they are, most of the time, a marketing ploy designed to force critics to focus on a true and endearing story rather than on the writing and the ability of the author to tell it. Nowadays, it takes courage to say loudly and proudly that one writes fiction and doesn’t care about truth, reality, or whatever else that doesn’t matter to the work in question or to its author. Memoirs are like bad Californian or new world wines. Too often, they have too much alcohol to camouflage the fact that those making it don’t have any artistry and believe that their work is solely a product.

Death and Taxes

Chris Dillow has a great post comparing the American and he British tax systems. His conclusion is that the American Federal Tax system is more progressive than the British one despite the fact that Britain has had a leftist government for more than a decade and that America has been govern by a president who believes in Tax cuts above almost everything else. Dillow’s conclusion doesn’t surprising.  Americans, because of their history, are allergic to taxes and are less willing to believe that they can serve a great purpose. Europeans, in general, are more willing to believe that taxes can reduce inequalities and improve society as a whole. In simpler terms, the expression tax cuts is an aphrodisiac quality to American ears  and no smart American politicians can afford not to use it even if when s/he is from the left it means affirming that the working poor and the middle class need tax cuts more than the wealthy.

Weakening the Eu's nucleus

The Spiegel has an article on the increasing malaise between Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, which is weakening the French-German relationship so vital to the stability and the health of the European Union. Sugary excerpt:

It's not so much the self-promotion that seems to drive Sarkozy's foreign policy -- officials at the chancellery and at the foreign ministry in Berlin have become used to that. For instance, he claimed that the EU's new Lisbon Treaty came about mainly due to his superior negotiating skills. He also made sure the world was aware that he alone was to thank for the release of five Bulgarian nurses from Libyan prisons last summer. Sarkozy likes to invoke the "great friendship" that he insists unites him with "dear Angela," but what he then says and does is often anything but friendly, at least from a German perspective.

But now Sarkozy's impulsiveness has truly infuriated the Germans. Many in Berlin now wonder if he is at all interested in good relations with his German neighbors after he cancelled a long-planned meeting with Merkel in the Bavarian town of Straubing, originally scheduled to take place on Monday. Sarkozy, his aides said, was unable to attend the meeting because of his "overbooked schedule," as if a meeting with the German chancellor were some minor event. Meanwhile, Sarkozy traveled to South Africa, as planned, and he apparently found enough wiggle room on his calendar for an excursion to Chad. Instead of the Straubing summit, the two will meet on Monday night in Hanover for a brief working dinner after opening the IT trade fair CeBIT together.

The truth is that even without Sarkozy, the French-German relationship would have grown more contentious. Both countries have grown apart and have more different interests than they have common interests.  Germany is stronger and its influence in the EU has increased since enlargement. France senses that it has to keep pace and is trying to counter the growing German influence with the creation of a Euro-Mediterranean club. The truth is that Sarkozy is making things worse by exasperating the Germans for he seems neither to understand nor to care about their sensibilities and their concerns.  He hasn’t even been willing to change his change to improve his personal relationship with Merkel and this unwillingness shows that he hasn’t yet realized that how important Merkel and the Germans are to the success of his presidency.

Atrocity culture

Jeremy Harding on what he calls atrocity commemoration and atrocity culture :

The end of the Cold War marks the start of a brief ‘humanitarian’ period (1989-2001) and sets off a chain-reaction of atrocity commemoration – evoking both the victims and the perpetrators – that runs on into the post-humanitarian phase (the war on terror). In Latin America and South Africa, the casualties inflicted by the Cold War victors are celebrated in memorial parks for the disappeared, open torture chambers and prisons (including Robben Island). In Eastern Europe, the victims of the Cold War’s losers are remembered in exhibits of police files, interrogation cells, a Lithuanian ‘genocide’ museum, a House of Terror in Budapest framing Communist (and Fascist) abuses, and in Russia itself a Gulag museum, once the infamous Perm-36 labour camp. In several cases these displays are part of a landscape in which truth commissions and legal prosecution hold the foreground.

Some atrocity culture is for domestic consumption, especially in the former Soviet bloc, an aspect of the new nation-building. Elsewhere there is an ambition for something like a universal memory, which can transcend history and identity by fixing the meaning of events in perpetuity. That’s the sense of ‘never forget’, one of the ‘twin mantras’, Williams tells us, to be heard in all atrocity commemoration. The other is ‘never again’, an appeal to memory to take up arms and stand guard over the future.

But maybe we’re asking more of commemoration than it’s able to offer. Atrocity museums presuppose an active, moralising kind of memory, scalded into a state of permanent vigilance (‘never again’). Such high-alert modes may only be for groups and nations that reiterate one central truth at the expense of others.

Atrocity commemoration and atrocity culture are just proofs that in most societies, it is easier to talk about the past and its atrocities than to talk about the present. The past and its atrocities are used to settle old scores and to make too often cheap points during ideological and political confrontations. When Sarkozy made the grand pronouncement that he wanted every fourth grader to learn the memory of one French child killed in the Shoah, he did it to make a political point and to argue that he, on the contrary to his adversaries on the left, has never forgotten the lessons of the past and knows that evil exists in the world. The point is that the atrocity commemoration and atrocity culture have become essentially about politics and ideology and have marginalized history, which becomes essentially an instrument to divide, conquer, guilt or even shame. Politicians and others tend to stain History because they always make it about them and their little world.

Technology, ethnic conflicts, and Africa

Via the Globe and Mail, Tim Querengesser has an interesting article on the role that technology, particularly cellphones, plays inciting ethnic tensions in Africa, particularly in Kenya. Sugary excerpt:

The numbers are striking. Mobile phones are everywhere in Africa, despite its relative poverty. In fact, Kibera, Kenya's largest slum, is one of the country's biggest customers for mobile airtime.

And demand keeps growing. In 1999, one in 2,300 had a mobile phone. By 2004, it was one in 10. Now, it is one in four; of the nearly one billion people in Africa, nearly 100 million have a mobile.

The technology has pole-vaulted many African countries beyond their crumbling infrastructure and into the information age. But it has also exposed them to risks. No other continent struggles with ethnic conflict like Africa. With SMS the preferred method to communicate (they're cheaper than calls) and with cellphone-happy Kenya now picking up the pieces after ethnic war, the potential for SMS to incite hate is coming into focus.

[...] During Kenya's constitutional referendum in 2005, politicians preyed on tribal hatreds to sway votes. At the time, vernacular radio was the medium most infected with hate speech.

This time around, tribe was all important and SMS took the lead. "It's easier to use SMS than radio," said Mr. Mucheke. "There's more censorship on radio. There are no controls at the moment over SMS. That made it the most efficient and easiest medium to proliferate hate speech."

The moral block people have to spreading hate is easily overcome when a simple push of a button is all that's needed, adds Mr. Mucheke.

The trouble is that in most African countries, the State isn’t strong enough to stop the use of technology to encourage ethnic hatred and incite racial violence. Moreover, the most disturbing element of the story in that in Kenya and in too many other African countries, different ethnic groups are still viewing themselves not as part of one country and illegitimate holders of political or economical power when the two don’t come hand and hand.