The Republic of Dissent

It's always about race even when it isn't

Nicholas Kirstoff makes the following point about Mugabe, Africa, dictactors and race which I believe shows that he knows nothing about African history:

Africa's rulers often complain, with justice, that the West's perceptions of the continent are disproportionately shaped by buffoons and tyrants rather than by the increasing number of democratically elected presidents presiding over 6 percent growth rates. But as long as African presidents mollycoddle Mugabe, they are branding Africa with his image.

[...] In a 1987 essay in Foreign Affairs, Mugabe called on the U.S. to impose sanctions on white-ruled South Africa for engaging in a "vicious and ugly civil war" against its own people. Mugabe demanded that the world "accept the value of sanctions as a means of raising the cost" of brutal misrule.

If only Mugabe were a white racist! Then the regional powers might stand up to him. For the sake of Zimbabweans, we should be just as resolute in confronting African tyrants who are black as in confronting those who are white.

Mugabe is still in power not because he is black but for the simple reasons that he is part of a small group, which African leaders have always tolerated anti-colonial fighters who become despots. The fact is that never in African postcolonial history have its political leaders pressured a dictator who fought for the independence of his country to give up power and that seldom have they even inserted themselves in the domestic affairs of other countries by asserting human rights and democratic principles. In other words, asserting that everything would be different if Mugabe were white is both misleading, dumb and ignorant because it is like asserting that Saddam Hussein would not have been in power for so long if he had been a woman which is pointless and thus, a disgraceful redherring. Mugabe hasn't become an ancient dictator because he is black, he is still in power because of whom he once was and because Zimbabwe is a country which, just like Myammar, the world, not just Africa, can afford to sacrifice and to be governed savagely.

Apoyar España

Well, I'm going to support Spain today in today's final of Euro 2008 because it isn't the team, which eliminated the most exciting team of the competition, Turkey and because it isn't Germany. I'm a little disappointed that there isn't a match for the third place of the tournament because I think it would have made it possible to have an exciting game between Turkey and Russia. But anyway, Viva España! Let's hope that the game doesn't go to penalty kicks or that the final score isn't a miserable 1 to 0 like the last time.

Double identity

Christophe Willem singing Double Je. Great son not only for a summer Saturday, but for all days during all seasons.

Novels and catastrophes

Interesting:

It remains the method of most sci-fi novels to imagine a kind of heightened present, combining and extrapolating extant technologies (an MP3 player … in your brain!) to demonstrate their psychological and political effects. The post-catastrophe novel does the opposite; it takes away the MP3 player, and almost everything else. It liberates the violent potential of technology (and its enemy, nature) to create an altered world whose chief characteristic is a bewildering lack of technology. This in turn means a severely winnowed human population, and plenty of hardship and casual brutality. This future doesn't intensify the present moment, it contradicts it: What would happen if we didn't live in an overpopulated, technology-saturated world in which travel by foot is considered eccentric, tacos cost forty-nine cents, and the prerogative to commit violence—despite an amazing profusion of handheld weaponry—lies entirely with the state?

[…] Post-catastrophe novels remind us that the end of the novel may come about another way.

The novel, after all, is one of our modern industrial technologies, bound up with all the rest. This is true in a thousand trivial, if world-destroying, ways; novels are printed on pulped trees, and after they're printed they get shipped via oil-burning planes and trucks to the Barnes & Nobles near our homes—except Amazon is cheaper, especially with SuperSaver shipping, and so another set of vehicles delivers the book from Amazon, while the unsold books at Barnes & Noble are shipped back to a warehouse to be marked as remainders, and shipped out again, and so on. The book business is like the rest of our businesses—global, profligate, and controlled by a small and still-consolidating group of conglomerates. You can distribute your work on the internet, sure—but then there's the ecological cost of making a MacBook, and the fact that no one will read you.

I believe that the novel is going to stop to become the most popular form of books if it isn’t already because people going to become even more obsessed with reality, its complexity, and finding ways to overcome it. This obsession is going to make them gravitate towards memoirs (fake or not), self-help books, and other types of non-fiction.

The Big story and indifference

BHL (Bernard-Henri Lévy) on Darfur, Human rights, western superiority and on the reasons why too many on the Left don't give a damn:

And in America and in France, you have a lot of people [of] the Left, to which I belong, [who believe that] we cannot interfere in the internal affairs of Sudan. Let’s be careful not to impose under the flag of human rights the old rule of Western superiority. The result of which is that we are abandoning to that [idea] the worst death, these unnumbered lots of people. And in the end: anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and anti-imperialism. We are prisoners of a scheme of thought in which, if you are a victim and if you don’t play a role, if you don’t have a part on the big stage, in the big history, in the big tale of the opposition of the evil empire and the good anti-imperialist forces, you don’t really deserve attention.

In past decades, in the 60s and 70s during the Cold War, if you were neither with the Soviets nor with the US, you had a pretty good chance of falling into the big hole of the ignored wars. If you didn’t have a real role in this big fight, which [was] supposed to be the fight of the poor against empire, you didn’t exist. These poor people, these women—the son of whom will die in a few hours—have nothing to do with the Big Story, which is the story of Mr. Chomsky, the story of Mr. Badiou in France, the story of people in England, the story of the fight against empire. So [they are] out of the frame, out of our visibility. Nonexistent.

The question, which BHL doesn't answer is the following: what is the point of belonging to a left, which only cares about the Big story and considers that everything else is a footnote to history?

Hoping for a miracle

I'm saving all my energy to pray to help Turkey since it's meeting Germany today in the first semifinal of the Euro 2008 in Basel. The Turks need another miracle because not only is Germany the superior team (on paper)  but also because their team is decimated by injury and due to suspensions incurred by its players getting too many yellow cards. If Turkey were to beat Germany, it would be one of the greatest upsets in the history not only of soccer football but of sports. Anyway, I'm hoping for the best especially given the fact I hate that the German football team is one of the teams that I hate the most in the whole with the Italian one (for obvious reasons) one because I haven't forgotten the way it booted France out of the 1982 and 1986 World cup. Can lightning strike four times?

Zimbabwe and Interventionism

Gideon Rachman on the Tragedy in Zimbabwe:

Tragedy is traditionally meant to provoke pity and fear. But the world is in danger of reacting to the Zimbabwean tragedy with different emotions: resignation and relativism.

The resignation stems from the idea that nothing short of invasion is going to dislodge a brutal and ruthless dictator such as Robert Mugabe. Nobody wants to invade Zimbabwe, goes the argument, so there is nothing to be done. The relativists chip in by pointing out that there are plenty of other tragedies in Africa: Congo, Somalia, Darfur. Why make a particular fuss about Zimbabwe?

But the resignation is not justified – and so neither is the relativism. Zimbabwe can still be saved from economic and political destruction. It is not just another African tragedy. But it is urgent that action is taken now – while the political situation is still in flux.

[…] Britain, the US and the European Union need to cut off the access to hard currency and international banks that allows Mr Mugabe and his cronies to float above Zimbabwean hyper-inflation. Some of the big names in western business also need to re-examine their ties with Zimbabwe. Barclays Bank, which was forced to quit apartheid South Africa, still operates happily in Zimbabwe.

David Aaronovitch in the Times of London makes the case for intervening in Zimbabwe to get rid of Mugabe:

For most of my adult life we have witnessed the incremental and inevitable destruction of a nation, almost in slow motion. After initially ignoring the repression and violence, we have for two decades applied the same strategies of pressure, minor sanction, condemnation, talks, aid and buck-passing, only to enjoy the same flickering hopes, to bemoan their subsequent betrayal and to start anew.

[…] And what do we imagine now? That Zambia's crossness, Angola's criticism (only a few weeks after that country passed on Chinese weapons to the armed forces of Zimbabwe) and Botswana's rather valiant anger will persuade the Harare murderers that the game is up, especially now we are investigating freezing their European assets? Again, one asks, do the diplomats know something we don't, and that the historical record fails to suggest? Is there some Zimbabwean Admiral Dönitz or Juan Carlos, waiting to arrange the transition? Why aren't we just as likely to get Mugabe's Heydrich, Emerson Mnangagwa, the Joint Operations Command strongman?

“Military intervention,” said one BBC person yesterday, expressing the views of the consensus, “is not a realistic option.” It might be better if it was. How many South African or British soldiers would it take to unseat the junta and disperse the Zanu (PF) “veterans”, who are now veterans only of whipping and gouging defenceless people, or raping women without the slightest chance of resistance?

What is happening in Zimbabwe is happening in part because the “international community” and powerful countries haven’t yet figured out a way out of the false dichotomy which makes it seem that the choice is between military intervention and using tools such embargoes and boycotts to avoid dealing with the urgency and danerousness of the situation while maintaining the illusion that it isn’t doing nothing and grandstanding. The time to solve the Zimbabwe crisis was years ago when it became clear that Mugabe was willing to starve his people and to destroy his country to remain in power. I agree therefore with Chris Dillow when he argues that the answer to this mess was for the international community to have never enabled Mugabe to become Mugabe in the first place. Unfortunately, international leaders are prisoners of a mindset that makes them accept the unacceptable in certain parts of the world when their immediate national interests are threatened and when they are unwilling to lose blood, sweat, and tears. 

What is happening now was predictable five years ago and could have been avoided if the “deciders” had been willing to take more risks and to be willing to be humiliated by Mugabe in order to make him go. The truth is that Mugabe is an old fox who knows very well the rules of the game for he has been playing longer that most of the other players. He knows that neither the Brits nor anyone else will dare to intervene militarily in Zimbabwe, and that he will remain in power as long as he sends violently and barbarically the message that he is unwilling to die for power without making trouble for any other country that his own. Dictators are like cancerous tumors, which are malignant when they develop in areas which the rest of the world believe they will not spread or which are expendable. The longer dictators are allowed to remain in power, the more difficult it becomes to get rid of them for after all they all know that the status of ex-dictator is not an enviable one and that they might as well as do everything to hold on to it or even die on the throne when they don’t have much time on this earth left. Powerful nations always imagine that they can solve political cancers with military intervention and I believe that it is in part the reason why they believe that they can take their time in front of trouble because at the end, they will always be able to use force. However, we know that the longer a cancerous tumor is allowed to spread, the less likely it is that surgery will be able to repair the damage done.

Intervening now might get rid of Mugabe, but it won’t solve the Zimbabwe crisis for after all, Mugabe is a product of a system and just a symptom of a graver Zimbabwean illness. At the same time, putting more pressure on Zimbabwe won’t put an end to the crisis because Mugabe knows all that he has to do is to hold on and that South Africa will remain neutral or timidly outraged as long as he makes it too expensive for Mbeki to intervene and accepts to be their bastard by promising that with him at least Zimbabwe may be Burma, but will not become Congo and thus destabilize the region.

Populism and democracy

Thought provoking analysis from Antony Todorov:

It is more the case that populism today is a symptom of the crisis of contemporary representative democracies, rather than the crisis itself. In democratic regimes, populism is manifested as often diverse and contradictory strategies of questioning the foundations of modern democracy. In non-democratic regimes, it becomes a substitute for democracy. In the former, populism fits into the legitimate order of political pluralism – it is one of the many political solutions whose legitimacy is based on pluralism. If modern democracy is understood as a regime in which there is no a one and only truth, party, philosophy or religion, then all kinds of strategies are admissible on principle, including strategies that question democracy. In such a context, populism presents itself as a political platform expressing the true will of the people, unlike the elite, which despite its diversity is united on one point: that of ignoring the true interests of the people.

In the second case, populism presents itself as or claims to be a manifestation of democracy. But here there is a big risk of lumping together, indiscriminately and uncritically, political strategies that recognise the common interest and expectations of the general public (the people) and frankly populist strategies whose sole purpose is legitimation through popular action. Not all political movements, especially in countries in Latin America, Africa or Asia, which appeal to the people and oppose the glaring social inequality that the majority regard as unjust, are populist. Often, however, the policy and especially the rhetoric of opposition against the "rich North", in other words the USA and its monopolies on the economy, information and politics, qualifies such strategies as populist. Yet regardless of whether or not the accusations of populism are legitimate, the phenomenon is symptomatic of a crisis in representative democracy, which seems no longer capable of responding to new social expectations.
In fact, populism is a phenomenon of modern democracy and not of non-democratic regimes, where it is only a substitute for democracy. Populism is an expression of a crisis in representative democracy, which is why its manifestation precisely in the old democracies of western Europe and the USA is most telling.

The winner of this year American presidential election will be the candidate able to have the most effective populist message because that would make him the most likable, which is still the key trait that the American electorate is looking in its president. Americans want a body who is on their sense and who is reassuring them that he will fight for them against all of the evil and the evildoers out there. The most peculiar and disturbing about American democracy is that candidates always run as the outsider because doing so enables them to have a potent populist message, which unfortunately reinforces Americans’ negative view of the major actors of their own democracy. This fact explains why Washington has become a town where the biggest concern of those who come within it promising to change it becomes to just stake by and to win the next election by running against the status quo ante with the same populist message.

Saying No to Rehab differently

Remix of the popular Amy Winehouse's song Rehab. The singers are Cocoon and Julien Doré.

The European Union and Neverland

The childish bickering between Sarkozy and Peter Mandelson (Britain's Trade Commissioner) explains why Euroscepticism is gaining Europe and why so many people are falling out of love with the idea of Europe proposed by self-centered elites and politicians who can’t resist cheap shots. The European Commission has never been as useless as it is today. Its president José Manuel Barroso is invisible because he neither seems to be able to avoid catastrophe nor to extinguish wildfires. Like Sarkozy’s Prime Minister, François Fillon, Barroso is invisible and impotent. The European Union resembles the overweight man in one of the episodes of the series House who can barely move, spends his life in his apartment cooking and paying women to have sex with him. In spite of all that, he refuses to believe that his weight may be affecting his health, but realizes that he has a cancer that came from his love of exotic food. The point is that the European Union doesn’t want to believe that it has a democratic deficit and a “people” problem because it likes the way it now. It goes from crisis to crisis without ever having the courage to acknowledge that it has a problem and making changes because losing weight requires not only courage, but also some humility.

Supporting Turkey

Now that France has been kicked out of Euro 2008,  I'm supporting Turkey. I'm doing so because I believe that a victory of Turkey would be symbolic and show that indeed it is part of Europe and thus, deserves to become part of the European Union. I like the team because the Turks is the only team this tournament, which has demonstrated enough fighting spirit to come back when it was down. So because I think that the balance of power and the established order  in Europe need to be shaken (not necessarily reversed) in almost every area including Football, I'm saying today simply: Viva Turkey! It would be awesome if the Turks could not only beat the Croats today, but also the Germans early next week.

The lefts and change

Sugary excerpt from Martha Nussbaum’s article in Dissent Magazine on the violent divisions of the Indian Left :

HERE WE ARRIVE at an issue that lies at the heart of all the leftist political movements of the twentieth century: is solidarity itself a major political value or is the basic value that of justice to each and every person, treating each and every one as an end? The latter vision is that of left-liberalism, which has always held that the purpose of a politics of human welfare is to improve the lives of individual human beings, and that each human being counts as equally worthy of respect. By contrast, “solidarity,” both on the communitarian right and on the antiliberal left, has suggested to many that the lives of individuals may and often must be sacrificed in the pursuit of class or group goals, and that worries about the justice of such sacrifices are irritatingly bourgeois.

My sentiment is that antiliberal left is winning because the liberal left has realized that antiliberalism is a more potent force than liberalism since it puts it to trial by making it responsible for all the ills of the world and demands not just reform by change, a sweeping revolution that it going to “un-bourgeoised”  the world while at the same time, enabling leftists to escape responsibility for the mistakes and the victims they create on the road not to Damascus, but to Babel. Thus, the left is, in sense, back in the times of Manifest Destiny, a time when people had the arrogance to believe that the mission to civilize the world could be in the hands of the few and could be an excuse for everything. In short, “we want to change the world” is the new “we want to civilize the world” and solidarity is the basis for a new identity politics, which seeks to eliminate every that doesn’t fit the picture of an impure world.

Cha Cha to avoid crying

In honor (I use the word sarcastically) of France's defeat to Italy (again ) yesterday in Euro 2008, here is a great video of Josephine Baker singing Cha Cha. It is heartbreaking to watch Les Blues take every blow against them with fatalism by viewing them as signs that victory is impossible and that therefore they must do everything not to embarrass themselves further by accepting fate instead of trying everything to win even if means losing spectacularly. Anyway, thank god that it's possible to cha cha with a broken heart.

The failures of international justice

The best article I read last weekend was Stephanie Nolen’s article in the Globe and Mail on the failures of international justice in Africa. It’s an enlightening read because it shows the importance of context, which can when it is not understood, undermine noble endeavors. Sugary excerpt:

After the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the international community, which had stood by and watched as 800,000 people were hacked to death in 90 days, stepped forward and offered up a United Nations criminal tribunal for the alleged perpetrators, housed in a vast, air-conditioned building, all blond wood and high-tech gizmos. Twelve years and an estimated $1.2-billion later, it has obtained 25 convictions.

The Rwandan tribunal established some important precedents: For the first time, rapists were found guilty of a war crime; suspects were arrested abroad and returned to Africa to face trial; members of the clergy were convicted for any roles they had played.

But almost from the start, it was also clear that the tribunal would be considered a failure — or, at best, not considered at all — by those most affected: Rwandans. The court sits two days' drive away in Tanzania; for the first seven years, it neither made its judgments available in Kinyarwandan, the language of Rwandans, nor did any outreach with them. It was achingly slow and outrageously expensive and few Rwandans polled saw it as justice for what was done.

[…] In Africa, critics are more common: They accuse the ICC and other international-justice initiatives of derailing prospects for peace in some of the more intractable conflicts, deepening the gulf between states such as Sudan and the West, and being highly political and subject to a Western agenda. Perhaps most gravely, they say, the courts have done little or nothing at all for victims.

"I'm not putting a price tag on justice, but whose justice is this?" asks John Caulker, who heads an organization called the Forum for Conscience in Freetown. "In whose interest do we have the ICC? I should not be saying this, as a human-rights advocate, but when I put on my Sierra Leonean hat, I have to ask: Is this justice to please the international community or to meet the needs of ordinary Sierra Leoneans?"

It is almost impossible for international justice to exist when administered in a context where the officers of the court cannot relate to the accused and the victims and where the rules and the laws used is too vastly different from the local ones. The point isn’t that international justice is an utopia or a form of western paternalism in Africa, but rather that the principle that is so valuable in the American justice system “judged by a jury of one’s peers” is capital to its success. When that principle is forgotten the judgments, which international tribunals render may be just in the sense that they punish people who have committed atrocities, but also unfair because too much emphasis is on punishment that it leads to the subversion of principles on which international justice itself is grounded. Thus, the problem isn’t so much in creating an international justice system, which functions in Africa and elsewhere, but in creating one which is able to take into consideration the culture and the context. The most vicious African war criminals need to be able to mount an effective defense without successfully putting the legitimacy of the process to trial.

Duras and Duras

Edmund White reviews three books by Marguerite Duras in the New York Review, which is a good read and which makes me regret even more that she isn’t as widely read. Sugary excerpt:

[…] Most of the French did not object to France having colonies at the time. But Duras, with her considerable powers to mythologize the past, knew how to invent a suitably leftist record for herself.

And she could see her present in a similarly self-serving way. She loved herself, she quoted herself, she took a childlike delight in reading her own work and seeing her old films, all of which she declared magnificent. When toward the end of her life she ran into Mitterrand in a fish restaurant, she asked him how she had become better known to people around the world than he was. Very politely he assured her he'd never doubted for a moment that her fame would someday eclipse his.

It's easy enough to make fun of her narcissism and her prevarications. But her work was fueled by her obsessive interest in her own story and her knack for improving on the facts with every new version of the same event. For instance, in Wartime Writings there are some previously unpublished pages (about fifty) that are among the most arresting she ever wrote. Written by hand in a notebook during the war, these pages recall her growing up in Indochina and give the first version of the "affair" with the man who would eventually become "the Lover." There are also fragments that Duras later assembled into her first successful novel, The Sea Wall (1950), which is based on her childhood in Indochina as well.

Duras had such a hate love relationship with her past and her memory that it led her to want to reinvent it not in order to be loved, but in order be great. Marguerite Duras reminds me of Sarah Woodruff, the main character of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant Woman. She doesn’t feel that her past is grand enough to make herself standout, extraordinary. Thus, she makes things up not so much because of her ego and narcissism but because she believes as Emerson that to be great is to be misunderstood. It is easier to misunderstand complexity especially when it camouflages an outstanding simplicity. I don’t think that it is possible to read L’Amant, which is in my opinion the best French novel of the Eighties, and not to realize that Duras was afraid to be plain and ordinary. That fear explains why in her stories, she never says very much but keeps secrets and uses silence to perfection to awaken in the reader the desire to come back to her for more.

Chivalry should remain dead

Thoughtful points on Manliness, Feminism, and Chivalry from Brandon McGinley in the Daily Princetonian:

Manliness and feminism should meet at chivalry. This should be their common ground, the place where these two ideas, these two identities, find their most profound expression.

I define modern chivalry as a male disposition of profound respect toward women, which is most importantly and courageously expressed in refusing to make inappropriate sexual advances and defending women from other men who do not abide by that code of respect. It is a disposition that transcends the sexual nature of human males, particularly young men, which rarely orients itself in a respectful manner toward the opposite sex. Chivalry, then, does what it can to replace the aggressive sexuality of young men with a profound and healthy respect for women not because they are weak or helpless, but because they are the object of men's most emotionally and physically dangerous desires.

If there were one word with which true manliness could be defined, it would have to be "courage." It is not strength, force or sex, as too many, particularly young men, perceive, but the courage to use that strength when it is right to do so and the courage to reserve sex only for when it fulfills a true human good. Chivalry requires both of these and many other manifestations of courage; it is one of the strongest expressions of true manliness.

Chivalry should also be embraced by feminism. It tries to harness men's energy and direct it away from the disrespectful misogyny of womanizing and instead toward countering that predisposition. Yes, it does not treat women as equals; it treats them as better than equals, as people who deserve more respect than the hypersexualized male is ready to show. But, in a case of runaway ideology, modern feminism has spurned chivalry as quaint, paternalistic and misogynistic.

Hmmm, I read McGinley’s words and although they are not offensive in themselves, they rub me the wrong way because they sound hallow and because he stops at the water edge of the issue in other to score points on a difficult and complex subject. I’ve never liked the word chivalry not because it sounds old fashioned in the pejorative sense of the term, but because it reminds me of patronizing expressions such as “Christian charity ”and “Loving the sinner not the sin”. What bugs me about chivalry is that it gives men special points for being polite and for treating women elegantly when women receive nothing. Chivalry implies that there is something difficult about being nice and gracious to a woman without receiving something in return, whether at least society’s recognition  or at most a woman’s heart and body. According to that idea, girls, women cannot be chivalrous because chivalry is understating manly strength and virtues that they don’t possess.

Thus, women cannot open doors or engage in any other chivalrous behavior for a men or another woman without it being awkward, humorous or simply inappropriate. The point is that chivalry reinforces gender roles by refusing to recognize that elegance and politeness don’t have more value when it is masculine or when it is directed towards members of the supposedly weaker sex. Thus, the debate isn’t about whether it is acceptable for a man to open a door for a woman or not to slap her when she slaps him. It’s about whether a man should get special recognition from not being a brute or from being civilized while a woman doesn’t because that difference in treatment leads to the conclusion that the man’s task in this case is harder given his superior strength and his nature.

One of the best conversations that I’ve ever had with one of my best male friends was on this issue. He was explaining to me why he had stopped opening doors for women and doing other “free” elegant gestures. He told me that he was simply tired of doing it without receiving any praise any prize, but just a smile or a thank you, which with time had become meaningless. He was tired of chivalry, of doing everything to catch women, he wanted to settle down and to get married.

It is true that feminists make this debate unnecessarily contentious, but that isn’t because they are wrong on the issue, but simply because they have no solutions and would rather have the issue than to settle it once and for all.  Jeanne D’Arc wasn’t just burned because she wanted to chase the English away from France; she was grilled like a pig at the stakes also because she couldn’t be chevalresque and that a woman who doesn’t what men do, who believes in chivalry is a witch that deserves to be burned at the stake. That’s where the crux of the problem lies.

Ireland and the "No"

Colm Tóibín attempts to explain the causes of the Irish No to the Treaty of Lisbon:

While I was prepared to vote for the treaty, I realised that it was almost impossible to defend it in public, especially if there were to be questions or comments from those who opposed it. The treaty was unreadable, for example; it was filled with legal terms and references to subsections of other treaties. Some of its terms were ambiguous and could only be interpreted by judges after complex legal arguments. It was not drafted to be fully understood by ordinary voters. In 26 countries it could be ratified by politicians under instruction from their leaders. In Ireland, because of our constitution, we had to have a referendum.

The treaty was a godsend to every crank in Ireland, on the left and the right. It would undermine Ireland's sovereignty, they suggested; it could introduce abortion; it could interfere with our system of low corporate taxation, which has attracted so much investment; it could undermine Ireland's military neutrality. It could give faceless bureaucrats even more power.

[…] No politician could tell the voters that Lisbon would do them good in any exact or specific way; instead, supporters had to devote most of the campaign denying that the treaty would involve conscription, abortion, euthanasia or higher taxes.

What Colm Tóibín’s analysis of the Irish No shows is that unfortunately there is a wide gap between the European Union and its “citizens” which explains why it is no longer as it once was the realization of a dream of a unified and pacified Europe. I don’t think that the fault for the political fiasco that follows the rejection of a European Treaty lies with the people who are unable to grasp its complexities or who are using their vote in a referendum to express their crankiness. The fault lies with the European leaders who have been so accustomed to further European Integration without having to explain and convince their people by using Europe’s bloody past  as an argument to silence dissent and to guilt those who had doubts as to the way the EU was integrating not to stand in opposition to this great project. The point isn’t that Brussels and its bureaucrats are the cause of every ill in Europe, but rather that the EU lacks visionaries and leaders to defend it passionately. Few European politicians are able to convince the people by using other argument that TINA (there is no other alternative) that building Europe doesn’t have to mean destroying nations, their identities, and their way of life. In simpler terms, eurosceptics have passion on their side and are therefore able to communicate better their negative and scary vision of Europe. Eurocrats are forced to defend the imperfect realization of the great European dream because no European leaders has the guts to have new dreams and to accept that the cold reality that European integration cannot continue without the acceptance and the enthusiasm of the people.

When it's raw, it doesn't go away

As almost always, I agree with Paul Krugman's analysis of the Democratic primary and its raw sexism. The sad thing is that too many people don't get the importance of process in politics and that when it becomes flawed and nasty, it may lead to an acceptable and history result in the short term, but leaves deep scarves, which can only fester and provoke an explosion (I don't believe in political revolutions ). The point is that asserting that the end justifies the means and that some abominations are acceptable when they happen to polarizing figures is a unsettling way to assert that glitz makes might and that might is always right. Contrary to what many believe, feminism will not survive Hillary Clinton not because she is essential, but precisely because it died with Beauvoir's death in 1986 and became a chastity belt, un cache sexe.

Like a manufactured virgin

William Saletan makes the case for virginity restoration surgery:

[...]The virginity fetishism these women endure is sexist, hypocritical, and totally unrealistic. The pressure applied by families and communities to enforce it is obscene. One woman interviewed by the Times says her fiance's family is insisting that she go to Morocco so a doctor of their choosing can inspect her for proof of virginity. Don't even get me started on the mental sickness of insisting that your wife bleed on your wedding night. And to top it off, the procedure is a sham. Restoring your hymen doesn't make you a virgin.

You and I can sit here all day rehearsing these complaints. And some day, God willing, the twisted culture of virginity hypocrisy will wither away. But until it does, hypocrisy is its own best remedy. Help these women deceive their husbands and parents. If they want artificial hymen restoration, let them have it.

I'm no fan of most cosmetic medicine. It's a surrender to stupid social pressures. It's superficial, unnecessary, and expensive. It perfectly expresses our insecurity and triviality. We should use technology to overcome tragic realities, not to alter stigmatized appearances.

But sometimes, a stigmatized appearance can become a tragic reality. That's the paradox of virginity fetishism. The quality of your soul doesn't matter. If you don't have that bit of tissue between your legs, you're garbage.

I don’t agree with Saletan because I believe that virginity restoration surgery when it is about  upholding cruel traditions and encouraging atrocious behavior is a self-indulgent form of surrender, a way to reaffirm the supposed sacredness of the hymen while given one’s a good conscience by believing the manufacturing an hymen is heroic. I don’t believe that virginity restoration surgery helps the women it is supposed to help because to the contrary, it puts the ones who make them victim in a more definite and accepted position of power by showing them that they are to want to sleep with or to marry virgins. In case of clear moral conflicts as this one, the goal should be to take the easy road out but rather to take on the difficult task to confront those who are willing to reduce a woman to her hymen. The fact that women who enter into a marriage by passing the requirement duplicitously or not to be virgin are condemned to submission (which isn’t necessary a bad thing when it is chosen) and objectification for they will have entered into a contract that makes them their husbands’ possession and that makes the goal of their lives their happiness. That is the reason why honor crimes happen because the husband sees the woman as an object that neither disobeys nor embarrasses him. Virginity restoration shouldn’t make it possible for women to enter into these types of situations.

The French and Obama

Dominique Moïsi had a syrupy op-ed in the Financial Times earlier in the week in which he argued that Barack Obama holds a mirror for the French in the sense that he shows them what they want to their own immigrants and blacks to become. Sugary excerpt:

In France, the only other country in the world that sees itself imbued with a universal message, the US has, at least since the second world war, acted as a mirror reflecting the country's deepest fears and hopes. The huge audience that gathered last week at the invitation of a "pro-Obama French committee" in the main amphitheatre of the Institute of Political Studies in Paris expressed, of course, a rejection of the Bush years. But it translated above all a longing for the return of an America capable of constituting once again a source of hope and no longer a cause of fear for the world - an America that would be admired for its recovered essence and not loathed for its abysmal performances.

This America is of course incarnated by Mr Obama. In symbolic terms, the fact that, in the US, black could have become the "colour of hope" is a source of both French admiration for America and self-examination for France, a country that has yet to come to terms with its colonial heritage. It is therefore logical that two questions dominated the pro-Obama debate in Paris, a debate from which foreign policy considerations were largely absent - as if, in the minds of the French gathered there, America the model was already prevailing over America the actor.

Moïsi blinded by his enthusiasm is unable to see the whole picture, which shows that the French love Barack Obama because he is a empty slate that has become a symbol. Obama is like a Hollywood star not an American politician in the sense that the French don’t know anything about his politics, his policies, his ideology, or even who he is but loves his acting and the role that he is playing, the part of the black man who is going to change America and make it more open to the world. The French love Barack Obama like they love Woody Allen.  Americans are still the best at selling universal dreams and big ideas like the one that one man can redeem a country and make it less unFrench, Bushlike, more civilized, and thus, more open to the world. The crucial point is that Barack Obama is loved like so many French love (loved) Rachida Dati and Rama Yade (who have become less popular when they started to be less symbolic and to play a role in partisan politics), the minorities who are part of the Fillon the Sarkozy’s government. He is loved because he is attractive, photogenic, can give great speeches and great interviews. Obama is loved because in both France and America, it is a lot easier to love minorities when they become a symbol. People are “different” become hip and leaders of a movement when they choose to become all things to all people by reassuring about their so-called shameful past. They do so by emphasizing the fact that their success is an unbelievable dream, which their country and its citizen should be proud of and by avoiding the nits and grits of politics by cultivating the appearance to be above its “dirtiness” and accepting to become celebrities.

2000 posts

It is my two-thousandth post and I have to say that I don't how to feel about it because for me, blogging isn't about quantity, but about quality although it is true that is good to have both. In any case, I'm going to celebrate by having a nice glass of Sancerre this evening, which I was planning on having anyway. Apart from that it is so hot in DC that going outside feels like a punishment.

Sarkozy and the French EU presidency

Justin Vaisse has an article on the Brookings Institute website (hat tip: French Politics) on the impending French presidency of the European Union and Sarkozy. It is good read because Vaisse pinpoints what are the principal challenges for Sarkozy and France. Sugary excerpt:

For France more than for any other country, the European construction presents a dilemma. On the one hand, it extends French reach and allows Paris to attain a critical mass. On the other hand, the deeper France integrates, the less French it becomes and the more compromises it needs to accept for a greater collective good. Nicolas Sarkozy was elected on a platform of ambitious measures to reform France – measures which, given the degree of European integration and interdependence, often need the acquiescence and sometimes active cooperation of 26 other member states to be fully implemented. So the temptation is to use the presidency to aggressively promote one country’s specific set of interests rather than act in the European interest, which is, however, the key to a successful presidency.

[...] Sarkozy’s “European software” remains to be fully tested in international and institutional conditions which might prove challenging. On a more personal level, it remains to be seen whether he will succeed in striking the right balance between activism, bluntness and assertiveness, his favorite stance, and the more modest, patient, and consensual leadership that the exercise of the EU presidency demands.

The one thing that it is possible to say about the French upcoming presidency of the EU is that it will not be uneventful not just because events in Europe and in the world, but also because of its importance for Sarkozy, who cannot afford to be at the reins of a failure given its unpopularity at home. The biggest challenge for Sarkozy is that the success of the French presidency may depend on his willingness to think of the long term instead of the short term and doing things that will make the French again see him as Superman. In other words, success in this case may go hand and hand with stability and the willingness not to act where it is unnecessary and not to overreact. The problem of course is that Sarkozy loves nothing better than action and has the tendency to overreact because he believes that the only way to handle challenges and crisis is to get personally involved and to do anything necessary.

The importance of Intellectuals

A few weeks ago, the Financial Times had a great article on the importance of Intellectuals (even though it is decreasing) in France. Sugary excerpt:

But even today the reverence shown to intellectuals is astonishing. Scarcely an evening passes without some worthy, highbrow panel discussion on television between the country’s wise men and women. Le Nouvel Observateur, the weekly leftwing magazine, devoted its cover and many of its inside pages to dissecting how les intellos would vote in last year’s presidential election. Where else do philosophers debate whether jogging is an acceptable form of exercise for a head of state?

Should the rest of the world take les intellos seriously? Dutchman Frits Bolkestein, a former European commissioner and keen student of France who is writing a book about the role of intellectuals in public life, argues that French intellectuals generally don’t know what they’re talking about. Many, he says, resemble minor celebrities rather than serious thinkers.

But in spite of Bolkestein’s scepticism, conversations with Andre Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Levy, Nicolas Baverez and Edgar Morin – four of France’s most provocative thinkers – yield insights on the state of France, the environment, the defence of human rights and military interventionism.

The article led me to wonder not only why in America intellectuals don’t play the same role, but also why there is a vibrant anti-intellectualism in American society, which leads it to despise people who think and to view them as part of an elite, which is trying to unAmericanize America, by making it a French. I think that some of the reasons are historical in the same that America likes to believe that it was created by simple folks who rebelled against the English who were elitists and who were hard workers instead of spending their afternoons sipping teas and their nights drinking French Wine. The point is that even though American founders were part of an elite group and were intellectuals, the story of America is one in which ordinary folks in spite or rather because of their lack of sophistication do something extraordinary precisely because they believe in what Tom Paine called “Common sense.” French has a different history. The French likes sophistication and want their leaders to be better than they are and to know more than they do.  Indeed, if the American Revolution was about Americans saying no to a king because he wasn’t one of them and was condescending, the French Revolution was about the uprising of the people against a monarch who had stopped to act like a king and its queen whom they believe was an imposter. The French who stormed the Bastille did so because they stop to believe that their king was the descendant of God because he was acting like members of lower classes peasants by being standoffish and by showing its love of power and of money instead of being noble and acting divinely and with dignity.  This explains why France returned to different forms of monarchy even after its revolution, why it had a Napoleon after a Louis XV and why today its president is called a republican monarch. In other words, the French recognize and accept that common folks may be honorable and extraordinary people, by that there needs in society to be people whose role is to reach for something higher, to think about issues and to value culture and the art de vivre and de penser above everything else. This explains for example why Sarkozy started to become unpopular when he acted like a nouveau riche, a common folk who won the lottery and wanted to show that he had made it and to show his riches. Americans to the contrary like it when theirs leaders behave like them, enjoy beer, play sport, make grammatical mistakes, eat junk food but values hard work and applies street smart to their problems. It is for that reason that the American presidential will not be about issue, but about identity and that the winner will be the one whom Americans like and believe resemble them the most.

Civilization and Cricket

Sugary excerpt from Pankaj Mishra’s on Cricket, literature, Oliver O’ Neill’s novel Netherland :

One of O'Neill's masterstrokes is to make Hans, a rather banal financial analyst, a cricket purist in a tainted world. Hans can't decide whether the invasion of Iraq is a good or a bad thing. A self-confessed "ethical-political idiot", he is a dullard as husband and lover. But out on the cricket pitch he becomes a figure of solitary moral splendour, making a last defence of civilisation against the barbarians with the straight drive, the cut and the pull.

Adrift in post-9/11 New York, Hans meets Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian buccaneer of part-Indian ancestry, who wants to "civilise" America by introducing it to cricket's manifold refinements. Chuck is keenly aware of cricket's "moral angle": "You ask people to agree to complicated rules and regulations. That's like a crash course in democracy." Deploring America's political isolation, he says: "Americans cannot really see the world. They think they can, but they can't. I don't need to tell you that. Look at the problems we are having. It's a mess, and it's going to get worse. I say, we want to have something in common with Hindus and Muslims . . . With the New York Cricket Club we could start a whole new chapter in US history."

At the same time, Chuck wants to make a killing from cricket : he harbours a fantasy of hosting the rivalry between India and Pakistan in Brooklyn. "I am talking about advertising . . . Global TV rights. Coca-Cola, Nike, they're all desperate to get at the south Asian market." In the novel's most inspired casting, O'Neill turns cricket's colonial son into its radical revolutionary (a decision promptly vindicated by reality: it is British Asians and other globalised Indians rather than the old fogeys at Lord's who have Americanised or "baseballed" cricket with the Indian Premier League's Twenty20 format).

I hate Cricket more than I hate Rugby (the reason why Rugby comes only second on my list of hated sport is that the Haka of the New Zealand’s All Blacks makes at least the first 4 minutes of their games worth watching). However, I agree that sport can say a lot about a country, its culture, and its ability to grow and modernize through the difficult introspection, which forces it to slow down and to focus on quality not quantity.  One of the reasons why America doesn’t like soccer football is because in my opinion it likes to be different and to feel separated from the world and that moreover it believes it doesn’t believe that there is a point to playing with a ball if there is either no goals, no hits or no violence. America is a country that likes to score more than it likes the elegance and the beauty of a player gesture. That is the reason why for Americans view football compares to the ballet, a girly something where there is no action and not enough goals.

The end

Just saw the speech of Hillary Clinton. I'm not going to comment it because it is unnecessary. All of it reminds me of one of my favorite eighties french song about how hard it is to be une Femme libérée. The one lesson that I've learned from all this fascinating, but pathetic drama is that women have to stop to apologize for being bitches and for being flawed, imperfect and wanting more. Here is the video from the song, which explains it all.

Dirty

This is a good read to understand why so few americans vote and why American democracy is, in my opinion, in trouble because its politics bring out the worst in people and its media.

Embracing the unknown

I was rereading L'Amour Fou, the legendary book of poems of André Breton and I bumped on my favorite quote, which I love because it left a burn of my tongue the first time I read it:

l'homme fait un état risible de ce qu'il croit savoir.

Translated roughly, it means that we make a mockery of what we believe to know. I got me thinking that maybe in life, the challenge is to accept what you don’t know and to and the fact that what you know isn’t permanent and doesn’t kill uncertainty.  The trick is to give in to the blindfolds by refusing to see the absence of light as an impediment and to embrace ignorance without making it about bliss and using it as an excuse for inaction and for making the decision to be uncultured. Unfortunately for me, I believe in perfection and my struggle is to accept in the immortal words of Jane Fonda that sometimes good is good enough (I hate the enough in that sentence).

About last night

The only thing that I can say about the political events of last night is that I'm proud of Hillary Clinton and that I despise the Democratic party for finding a way to make an historic occasion one where it was impossible for people to come together because identity politics and resentment (where were the elders and the leaders of the party for stopping this unnecessary psychological and pathetic drama?) . The primaries didn't have to be this ugly and yet, they became ugly because the Democratic party no longer is about ideas. Anyway, the good news for me is that I'm going to be able to put some distance between myself and politics and that I have stopped to the Media and pundits seriously. I don't think the election is going to be close in November, whoever wins is going to win by a landslide (5 to 10 %).

Sex and the funny woman

I find this excerpt from one of Wanda Sykes's shows about how practical a detachable vagina would be for women hilarious and on point.

Différence

Thought provoking point form Stanley Fish on Différence:

“Difference” is the key concept in these socio-political dramas, and difference is an inherently unstable measure. In order to mark it — in order to say where difference resides — you must first identify a baseline, a center; but any such identification will appear to those exiled to the periphery as arbitrary, a function of prejudice and an illegitimate exercise of power: it’s only because there are more of you that you can consign us to the margins and refuse us respect. Armed with this argument (which flourishes in some versions of multiculturalist and deconstructive thought), there is no form of behavior that cannot make a case for its legitimacy and for its right to be free of external coercion, whether it takes the form of legal sanctions or a forced “cure.”

Losing my religion

This spring would have been an important one because when I look back at it, years from now (if I live that long), it will be the one when I stopped to be a liberal, in the American sense of the word, and that I realized that I don't believe that politics is the same as religion. I was watching the Germany-Serbia soccer football match yesterday and they showed Angela Merkel having a great time cheering for her team. I thought that it was great because it emphasizes that politicians aren't demi-God, but simply people with great responsibilities. I don't want politicians to be the ones who decide to whether to change the world or how to change it and in charge of my future. Politics scares me when it becomes about revolutions and earthquake-causing reforms. I was reading Larry Lessig's old posts in which he talked about his belief in political reform, which he assumes would put more power in the hands of the people. I thought that Lessig's convictions although admirable werre troubling because they place too much faith in politics and in politicians even though history teaches us that when they assume willingly and with too much enthusiasm that responsibility, they almost always failed. It is my belief that the few rare politicians who have reformed their countries and changed something have done so not for the sake of change or reform, but solely by trying to do the right thing and to fulfill their responsibilities without trying to become bigger than life, to perform miracles, and by accepting to take the risk to disappoint by becoming boring and conventional leaders if it meant governing well and hitting no home runs that would have led to standing ovations. I've always thought that the fact that America was increasingly an anti-intellectual country explained its desire to transform everything into religion and to transform good people into little Jesuses who are going to change not only their lives, but take back America to a time where it was "pure" because it was only a dream in the heads of the remarkable people who built it. I love politics but only when it isn't about good and evil, cults and Satan-worshipers and when the premise of it all isn't change, but good governance. I don't want politicians to give meaning to my life, but just to do their j.o.b by governing without being burdened or blinded by a sense of their own importance and by doing the right thing at the expense sometimes of their ideology and of their own politics.