The Republic of Dissent

Ending July

I'm ending the month of July with nothing to say except that Joseph O'Neill's Netherlands is a perfect book for an unfocused and worrisome summer. I can believe this is an Olympic year. For the first time in my life, I'm not looking forward to seeing more sports on TV.

Why France is essential to a relevant Left

After reading this long sugary excerpt from Dick Howard writing an article titled An International New Left ?, I have finally understood why France is essential to a relevant Left and why the problem today with both the Left and France is that she (I hate using such pronouns for countries but in this case it is warranted) is dizzied up by a president who doesn’t get her and shaken by citizens who doubt that francité can change the world (which I don’t doubt for a second):

Why France? France, in the shared imagination of critical Americans, incarnated the true revolution. It was the place where 1789 had become 1793, when a 'bourgeois' demand for political rights became a radical demand for economic equality that was finally consecrated in the first step toward a global revolution in 1917. The French revolutionary tradition was the more striking when contrasted to the liberal one that had given birth to the United States. In spite of its grand rhetoric, the latter had not even put an end to slavery in 1776 and was only now recognizing the injustice and social divisions that had condemned a part of the population to a segregated existence that was separate and unequal. For us, the myth of revolutionary France was further reinforced by the support found there for 20^th century anti-colonial movements, including that of Vietnam, where the U.S. had stupidly picked up a lost cause because of its reflexive anti-communist foreign policy. A reflection of the power of this symbolic myth that linked France and revolution: one of my first 'touristic' visits in Paris brought me to the Stalingrad metro station! Why? Because one of our basic criticisms of American liberalism was that it minimized the role of the Soviet Union in the defeat of Nazism. That a Parisian metro station would be so-named signified that political culture in France was not blindly enrolled in an anti-communist crusade.

France also represented for us the land of critical philosophy, principally that of Sartre (Althusser had only recently published For Marx and Reading Capital, and structuralism had not yet crossed the Atlantic [3]). Sartre was the anti-bourgeois par excellence. Although he was not really a political philosopher (despite his grand existential-Hegelian-Marxist Critique of Dialectical Reason [4]), his was a moral stance built on the denunciation of what he called 'les salauds,' who manipulated the freedom that is essential to the humanity of the individual (including their own). Sartre was the Voltaire of his time; and we young intellectuals in the U.S. demanded nothing better than, with Voltaire, to 'écrasez l'infâme' (although we wanted to find the material means to realize the task). In stark contrast, Anglo-American analytic philosophy, which confined itself to analyzing ordinary language and abstract logic, led only to the confirmation of existing social relations. [5]

Finally, Marx's work was available and hotly discussed in the French language, while it was scarcely translated in the U.S. (where, for example, I had no choice but to buy my three volumes of Capital in the English edition published in Moscow, as only volume 1 was easily available in U.S. bookstores). Indeed, this was the time (after de-Stalinization) when 'revisionists' in Eastern Europe were discovering the writings of young Marx, and Western critics were using them as weapons against the dominant ideology of the communist parties.

France is the only country, which at her best, when she doesn’t follow her seductive demons, can be Un-American or rather non-American without being anti-American by representing a way of life that isn’t so much contrary to the American way life but its necessary opposite because it shows that something as pleasing and as inspiring as the American one is possible. The point is that after seeing the adventures of Obama in Paris and watching disturbingly the show that he put with Sarkozy, I understood that the French Left, the American Left, the International Left are in trouble because they have lost France. France is no longer the country of Voltaire, Camus, and Sartre, but of Pascal Bruckner (what a pity!) and Alain Finkielkraut (who is a good leading intellectual to have if he has worthy adversaries to chastise his urge to be both extreme and simplistic).

All about the scarf

Eurozine has a translation of an article published in the Swedish magazine Arena, which gives the perspective of two women, Anne Sofie Roald and Pernilla Ouis, who wore the veil and decided to take it off. It is a must read article because provides a much needed perspective and avoids stereotypes and easy answers:

When I wore the headscarf, I found the feminist viewpoint useful. I didn't have to get dolled up up, make myself attractive to men. It's a sort of uniform showing I'm not sexually interested, a way of signalling that I'm not available.
The headscarf wasn't all that practical. The worst thing was that it made your head so hot, plus we used safety pins to keep it in place under our chins, because it was important to keep it in place. I lived in a detached house, and every time I wanted to go out into the garden I was supposed to wear it, but it was such a bother to put on and take off so in the end I didn't go out at all. In that way the headscarf became a barrier between inside and outside.

[...]The problem with Islam and feminism is that there is no sexual liberation: women have no rights to their own sexuality. Strict sexual morality takes precedence over everything in Islam. If an Islamic feminist could ignore sexual morality, then I'd accept that there could be religious feminism. But as things stand, I tend towards secular feminism.

Where old French Socialists go to die

It seems that all old French socialists are joining the ranks of Sarkozy not only to escape oblivion, but also to feel that they are still relevant and their wasted years in the trenches with the French Socialist party patiently waiting for power are redeemable. Charles Bremner has a good post on Bernard Kouchner, one of those old socialists, who chose Sarkozy over a slow political death and loyalty to French socialists, who never gave him a chance to be all that he could. I still like Kouchner very much, but I think that his decision to become Sarkozy’s minister of foreign affairs shows that he believes that action and power are more important than politics and principles, which he once claims were the bedrock of his political life. Kouchner has valid criticisms of his ancient party, but the problem and the sad thing for people like me who believed that he could resist the aphrodisiac nature of power is that after spending his life trying to affirm his singularity and his refusal to be like most of his peers who would have done anything to be in positions of power, Kouchner gave up because he didn’t have enough faith in what his past represented. Kouchner represents the fact that old French socialists destroyed their party precisely because they were addicted to the glitz of the political arena and believe that politics without power is like a beer without alcohol and that therefore ideology doesn’t matter since a party doesn’t have to have a soul to be successful as long as it has a chance to govern:

Ever passionate in his speech, Kouchner says working for Sarko is "exaltant" -- thrilling --  and fulfilling even if he does not always agree with him. He believes that he and Sarko have revolutionized French diplomacy. Gesturing across the lawn at the grand ministry, he said: "We have broken with the immobilisme -- the passivity -- of the past. We have imposed deep change on the state of mind of this great house... The era of diplomacy without policy is over."

What this means is frantic activity on all fronts by the "hyper-president". It  sometimes lead to confusion and contradiction as it did with Sarko's hot and cold approach to China ahead of the Olympics.  Part of it is the shift towards Nato and the United States which, in the eyes of the public, has come with no return favour from the Americans. The new activism has been exemplified by Sarko's 44-nation summit this month on the Mediterranean and Middle East. Even the sceptics agree that he pulled off something of a diplomatic feat. Kouchner proudly picks up an edition of The Economist, the British news weekly, and reads out the editorial praising the "Club Med" summit. "You see, it works," he says.

Kouchner, who is loaded with charm and looks much younger than his nearly seven decades, depicts himself as an independent spirit. He looks with sadness towards the Socialist colleagues and friends  who, he says, now "hate me" as a traitor to his camp.  It's an uncomfortable position to be in but he can take it, if only because it's the French left that is out of touch.  "The European Socialists are always asking why the French Socialists are the only Marxists left in Europe," he says.

Matters of convenience and justice

Ian Bell has an article in the Sunday Herald on International justice and its contractions, which is worth reading. It asks questions about the International Criminal Court (ICC) for which I’m afraid there are no good answers. I believe that the trouble with international justice is that it is neither truly international nor truly justice that it seeks to administer justice since it takes too many other extra-legal factors into consideration. It deals solely with people against whom there is an almost surmountable presumption not only of guilt, but also of inhumanity. This presumption is always stronger with people who lost power or come from countries with no influence, which explains why international justice solely deals with losers and people of a particular nationality. Sugary excerpt:

It started, in effect, at Nuremburg, of course. Certain hazy concepts were brought into focus. The idea that crimes could be committed against humanity itself began to gain ground. Yet read any of the Nuremburg transcripts and you will find nothing resembling a fair trial. That was never the purpose of the exercise, not with Stalin's prosecutors weighing in, with no sense of irony.

No one cared, or cares: the accused were Nazis. They got better, in terms of a hearing, than they deserved. Should we then conclude that the Allies committed not a single war crime? Dresden might have made for an interesting trial. Do we then decide that the Soviets were spotless? The raped and tortured women of Berlin, in their tens of thousands, might have stood as witnesses.

None of this is meant to excuse the Nazis, or Karadzic, or al-Bashir, or any of the rest of a sick company. Of course not. No- one ever stood trial, anywhere, for the 1915 Armenian genocide, and to this day the Turks refuse to say an honest word about their nation's killing of 1.5 million people. But victors' justice and victors' guilt are often not so very different. Many Serbs believe the ICC is a plot against their nation. Many Africans believe their continent is picked on. They would, wouldn't they?

[…] KARADZIC's lawyer will waste his time if he attempts any of this sort of stuff, of course. Men such as his client understand political realities. Besides, they rarely have useful alibis. It is simplistic, nevertheless, just to celebrate the bringing of a known, shameless killer to justice. Karadzic, like Saddam before him, probably concludes that his only real mistake was to lose. Had he been smart or lucky, like an al-Bashir or a Mugabe, he could have told international jurists where to stick their international justice.

Running and Haruki Murakami

Alastair Campbell reviews Haruki Murakami’s latest book in the Guardian What I talk about when I talk about running and it makes me want to read more of Murakami:

Non-runners should not be put off by the title of the book, a play on Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, because while the neuroses and obsessions of the runner leap from every page, along the way we learn little things about Murakami the writer and Murakami the man. We learn how and when he works. We get an insight into doubts and insecurities when he first started out as a writer, and what he sees as a novelist's greatest qualities - number one is talent, then focus, then endurance; the read across to running in qualities two and three is obvious enough not to need stating. We learn of his sleeping patterns, including his preference for a post-lunch nap which, lucky man, leaves him feeling totally refreshed. He has a low pulse rate (triathletes are obsessed with their pulse rates) and wears Mizuno running shoes. He used to run a bar. His wife has a sweet tooth and seems to spend much of her life at finishing lines. We learn that he rehearses speeches while running - snap - and that he gets nervous before making them - not snap - and prefers public speaking in his imperfect English to his native Japanese with its (for him) infinite choices of verbal expression.

Dizzy up France!

The Financial Times editorial on Sarkozy:

First, Mr Sarkozy’s constitutional package introduces some welcome amendments to France’s 1958 constitution strengthening the role of parliament. But it is hardly the sweeping revision that he originally promised – and that France needs.

His victory appeared so striking only because of the incoherence of the Socialists. Mr Sarkozy is surely blessed with one of the most incompetent opposition parties in postwar European history.

Similarly, the economic modernisation law will inject some useful competition into France’s corporatist economy by deregulating the retail sector and creating a new competition authority. But it is far from the comprehensive legislative bonfire needed to reignite the smouldering economy.

Mr Sarkozy’s ambition and drive are as impressive as his haphazard method is disturbing. Many voters remain unimpressed: his dismal opinion poll ratings are still flatlining.

The French president is certainly shaking his country with vigour. The question is whether he is waking it up or leaving it dizzy.

My two-word comment is how insightful! Apparently, France is so asleep and so bland that it really needs to be rocked up or rather wakened up by any means necessary. I thought that we had learned that action for the sake of action always led to disasters especially in politics and in an old country, which loves its way of life.

Talking about sex

Sugary excerpt of the week from Joan Sauers:

What we've seen isn't so much the sexualization of culture as it is the commercialization of sexuality, and the use of sexual imagery to sell things. When you actually look at the way women talk to their partners and the way women talk to each other, we still don't talk about our own experiences.

One of the things I'm getting overwhelmingly from both women and men as a response to the book [Sex Lives of Australian Women] is they're saying to me, "You know, we always loved watching Sex and the City because those women actually talked to each other about how they do anal sex and how they do oral sex. But we actually don't really talk to each other about that. We talk to each other about our kids, and about our relationships, and about our jobs, and exchange recipes, but we don't really talk about our own individual experiences in the bedroom."

And because of that there's a kind of silence that allows for misconceptions to grow and fester.

Sex symbols as feminist icons

This is an excerpt of a great debate that took at the Cambridge Union Society on whether Jordan (Katie Price), the UK popular sex bomb can be considered a feminist Icon. The debate was not only immensely entertaining, but also thought provoking because it shows that sex plays a quintessential role in the way women look at each other. My opinion on the matter is that the main question of the debate is in fact irrelevant because Jordan doesn't have to be feminist icon to be an icon to women and in fact being a feminist icon doesn't mean anything, it is as hollow a title as being the sexiest man alive (even though less hip) or Sarkozy's prime minister. The woman speaking in this video is Jenni Trent Hughes and she is has a point even though I think that enjoying sex isn't a feminist issue, it is a woman's issue. You can watch the whole debate here, which is worth watching because it is fun.

The irks of pop-intellectualism

I almost completely agree with Kevin Hartnett on this:

One thing I always think about when I read pop-intellectuals like Brooks or Malcolm Gladwell (if Brooks is prince of the practice, Gladwell is king), is the shift over the last couple centuries or so from lay intellectualism to professional intellectualism (I'm not an intellectual historian and I don't know exactly where to date it - in my mind the the change took place concurrently with the the rise of method, around about the time of Darwin). Two hundred years ago it was good enough to be a well-educated citizen with a ruminative soul and you could write with authority about anything - philosophy, history, the natural world. Now to be taken seriously on any of those topics, to be seen as adding to our store of knowledge, you have to have a PhD and work in a university. In part, the change is due to the overall increase in knowledge - it required less learning to be an expert in mathematics a hundred years ago than it does now - but more than that, the change reflects the modern insight that learning shaped by disciplines simply produces better knowledge.

It isn’t fair to compare David Brooks to Malcolm Gladwell for I believe that the difference between the two is an essential one, which shows both the limits and the promises of our times. David Brooks is more pop in this case ideology than an intellectual and is seldom able to say anything new about what he believes. Malcolm Gladwell knows what his limits are and doesn’t take himself as seriously as David Brooks. In other words, he wouldn't compare himself to Montesquieu or to Sartre. However, both Brooks and Gladwell show that intellectualism, nowadays, is about glitz, cuteness, and 30 seconds sound bites. It is about imitating Tom Friedman of the New York Times and making everything hip, cool, understandable, and childishly simple because nothing is allowed to be complex and to require finesse, sophistication, some culture and refined knowledge.

Cold facts?

Via Spiked, Tara McCormack on “Liberal Interventionism”:

It seems that liberal interventionists will not learn any lessons from recent disastrous interventions. The next intervention will always be ‘the one’, the great and pure and successful example that will finally prove the moral superiority of crusading Western elites and rehabilitate the idea of humanitarian intervention. Frankly, it appears that they do not care how much blood is spilt or how many lives lost in the process. All that is needed is for the UN or the ICC to intervene in the right way and all will be resolved.

For advocates of the ICC [International Criminal Court], its establishment has heralded a victory for the powerless victims of state oppression, ushering in an era in which human rights and justice will reign and in which states will be held accountable on behalf of their citizens. The reality is that the citizens of weak and fragile states are further disempowered in this brave new world as the international community intervenes with impunity in the name of human rights and international law.

If only it were that simple, the reason why “liberal interventionism” is still in vogue is that there is nothing else exists to take its place to help the elites and other get rid of the guilt of not intervening especially when a tragedy is occurring which can be hollywoodize and thus leads to a popular call for action.

The appeal of Lourdes

Matthew Engel has a great article  in the Financial Times on Lourdes, the French town in which Bernadette Soubirous is believed to have seen the Virgin Mary in 1858. It explains why it is a popular attraction for the pious and why it has become larger than life. Sugary excerpt:

No other shrine in Christendom can match this. You can easily explain it in worldly terms. Lourdes is well-placed geographically, and its 19th-century rise coincided with the opening of the railway, and the growing popularity of the Marian cult. Indeed, it is hard to escape the worldliness. Earlier this month, a senior priest was reported to be under investigation over a mysterious €440,000 in his bank account. (He denies wrongdoing.)

But you can’t ignore the spiritual appeal. “Compared to a lot of Christian shrines, where the message can be apocalyptic, Bernadette Soubirous’s message was very gentle,” says Ruth Harris of Oxford University, author of Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age. “It’s about healing and penance and prayer.”

When you see the extraordinary daily procession for the Blessing of the Sick, you begin to understand the power that Lourdes exerts. The wheelchairs line up four abreast and lead the parade. It is like Remembrance Day. And we know from wartime that, while the dead are remembered, the wounded are quickly marginalised and forgotten.

At home, the old and sick often live on the very edge of society, along with their carers, excluded from a world dominated by the young and healthy. Here they gain respite. “I love it here,” said McEnery’s mother Nessa, as she was pushed uphill in her wheelchair. “The feelings of the sick are paramount. You’re looked after and you’re given everything.”

I don't know whether to cry or to scream.

An election without dramatic tension

Best sugary excerpt of the week via Lionel Shriver in the Guardian:

America's Democratic Party is experiencing a crisis of narrative. It has literally lost the plot. Having successfully enflamed the public's fictional imagination from January to June, Democrats effectively replaced the ultimate contest in November with the penultimate one. The cliffhanger primaries became the story. Now that Obama is the presumptive nominee, the story is over. Take it from a novelist: you never want to plant your climax in chapter three, in the naive expectation that your reader will dutifully plough through another 250 pages. For most Democrats, as far as the story they really care about goes, the readers-cum-voters of 2008 already know the ending.

This sudden slackening of dramatic tension is proving deadly. This week's controversial New Yorker cover has generated a frisson of excitement, but has nothing to do with rivalry between the candidates. Otherwise, the only palpable energy left in the story - or what's mistaken for the story - is denouement: will Hillary and her sulking supporters successfully blackmail Obama into choosing Hillary as his running mate? Cable television is still bloated with packages about how bitterly Bill is taking his wife's loss, and speculation about bad blood between the former president and his prospective successor (the problem being that Bill and Barack are too much alike). This is where the heat is. These are the stories that have electricity - albeit the residual static from a transformer that just burned out.

When I’m trying to be optimistic about the meaning of this election (which I don't waste too much time doing), I’m hoping that if it were a novel, it would be Marguerite Duras’s Moderato Cantabile that it is that something is happening underneath the silence and the malaise. I’m hoping that suddenly, at the end, there is no so much dramatic event, but meaningful, but predicable unpredictability, which will make it possible to say: c’est justement lorsqu’il ne se passe rien qu’il se passe quelque chose.

The pointlessness of manliness

A two-words response to Harvey Mansfield's definition of manliness: pretentious fluff.

Sarkozyphilis and Americancentrism

If one needed the proof that Roger Cohen doesn’t understand France and suffers from both Americancentrism and from Sarkozyphilis, one can find it today on his column on Sarkozy’s France. In it, he describes  France as being on amphetamines (we all know that amphetamines are very healthy and never lead to abuse and addiction). Sugary excerpt:

Now I know there’s a view of Sarkozy as a Bonapartist Caligula, consumed with himself, brooking no dissent, petulant to the point of puerility and governing in such perpetual motion that he will only see the wall he’s condemned to hit when it’s too late.

True, Sarkozy is not Saint Augustine, Gandhi or the Dalai Lama. I don’t like his attempt to subjugate the media — Le Figaro now fawns to a point that’s cloying and his control-the-message TV machinations are shameful. I also think the president should open his mind to Turkish membership of the European Union.

But this man is a tonic to his country and the most important European leader of his time.

In the space of a year, he has transformed France’s relations with the United States, Israel, its North African neighbors and NATO. On the domestic front, he has got a Socialist leader to confess he’s also a liberal, a word long so taboo to the French left because of its free-market associations that embracing it was worse than admitting incest.

Let’s take international matters first. Sarkozy’s Mediterranean Union summit — a kind of Club Med Bastille Day bash — had its share of vapid ostentation, but was significant for several reasons.

It got the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, in the same room, drew the latter out of isolation and signaled a new European awareness of how its identity has become inseparable from societies across the “mother sea” that have sent so many of their Muslim sons and daughters northward.

At a deeper level, here was the European Union taking the initiative in its neighborhood rather than in the familiar fallback reactive mode where critiquing the United States masquerades as policy. The Union for the Mediterranean is a near-empty shell but an important impulse for Europe to think big.

Roger Cohen likes Sarkozy because he doesn’t understand France and because Sarkozy isn’t his president. He likes Sarkozy because France as an old and archaic corporation on the verge of collapse which needs a CEO to energize it and to whip it into shape. The trouble of course is that France isn’t a corporate and that it is the way that it is in great part because the French and Francité. It is alarming that Roger Cohen can never get out of his way to see the whole picture and that in this case, he is never able to realize that not every country has to American light or Americalike. In other words, it is acceptable that Roger Cohen doesn’t understand France, but what is unacceptable and even offensive is his stubborn attempt to believe that he gets it because when he goes to the French capital, he is an American in Paris. The trouble with Sarkophilis and Americancentrism is precisely their egocentrism.

Nature as an excuse

A good example of how nature is used either to justify the unjustifiable or to make certain chosen behaviors socially acceptable by asserting that they are predetermined by nature:

I have seen many other dads at work; I'm a dad myself, and the conclusion I've drawn is that we're just not cut out for looking after children. Paying us to do so would be an outrageous waste of money.

We're great at the fun, irresponsible stuff: swinging our kids till their arms almost come out of their sockets; jokily throwing balls at them, making them cry and getting told off by our wives; letting them stand up on the wall of the lion enclosure.

That is because we instinctively know that our task is to nurture our offsprings' sense of risk and adventure. And also because we're basically still children ourselves.

What we can't do, and never will be able to, is cope with the sheer attrition and grind of child-rearing in that brilliant, professional way our womenfolk can.

We can't multi-task; we're too easily distracted; we're basically a bit rubbish. And this isn't an excuse. This is a fact.

Even my seven-year-old daughter understands the problem. "I don't want you at my sports day, anyway", she decided. "You'd only be an embarrassment."

All I have to say after reading that is bollocks!

Satire and outrage

The best take on the New Yorker’s now infamous cover created by Barry Blitt comes from Oliver Kamm, who puts it all somewhat in perspective:

It would take an obtuse reader to miss the laboured irony here - complete with portrait of bin Laden and the flag consigned to the fire. Indeed the lack of subtlety is the reason the cartoon fails. The role of Michelle Obama in the campaign and where she stands politically are matters of public interest, as were the equivalent questions directed at the Clintons in the 1990s. Obama's campaign has no ground for complaint; on the contrary, the cartoon unfairly caricatures the opposition to him.

This American presidential election year has been the worst one I’ve ever seen. For that reason, I’ve tune it out (as much as I can) and I’m remaining on the sidelines. I couldn’t/wouldn’t vote for either Obama or McCain if I had the right to vote (I wouldn’t stay home because I think voting is sacred, I would just cast an unchecked ballot). Any discussion of major political issues either has turned to the superficial or leads to false, manufactured, selective, or inappropriately high or low expressions of outrage. Well, I’m outraged out. The cover of the New Yorker and the reactions to it characterized perfectly what this year in politics has been about: shock and awe about the unsublime, about fluff. Americans, this year, want to be riled up and they are going to elect the candidate who either make them go “awww” with a childlike enthusiasm or who does not make scream with fear or disgust “ewww.” What a pity!

219th Bastille Day

It's Bastille Day and to honor the French way of life, I'm just going to enjoy the day, not worry about time, eat and live well, and not follow the flock.

The culture of offense, literature and current affairs

Pertinent stuff from Salman Rushdie:

[…] I may not like the things you believe and, by the way, the fact that you believe them makes me think less of you as a person. I may despise you personally for what you believe, but I should be able to say it. Everybody needs to get thicker skins. There is this culture of offence, as though offending someone is the worst thing anyone can do. Again, there is an assumption that our first duty is to be respectful. But what would a respectful cartoon look like? Really boring! You wouldn't publish it. The nature of the form is irreverence and disrespect.

What pleases me, though, is that at least in Britain there is still the possibility of literary people writing on current affairs. Here [in the US], that's much less true. Who wouldn't have wanted to read Joan Didion's take on Hillary Clinton, or Don DeLillo writing about the US election? In the past, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal could be public intellectuals, but there is much less scope for that now.

Chanson fun

The dignity trap

Rubbish from Jane Shilling in the Times of London on Madonna:

Now, the truly sad thing about being Madonna's contemporary is that, while one's first thoughts on clocking her trolling down the street in her bright red knickers are a) Ooh, look, no tan. Is that all right, then? b) Gnarled hands, wrinkly knees. Are they all right these days as well? And c) Oh honestly, look at the state of her. How is that a dignified look for a woman a month off her half-century? Straight after that there comes popping into one's head a quite different set of thoughts: unwanted, irrepressible and just plain wrong. Hmm, you find yourself helplessly musing. Red satin bloomers, eh? T-bar shoes. I wonder...

[…] This May, Madonna appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair in characteristic dominatrix garb - black leotard, studded corset belt, laced thigh boots. Across her knees was stamped the legend “Madonna - unbowed, uncowed, still taking on the world*”. And in teeny-weeny print in the bottom left-hand corner of the cover, next to the answering asterisk, appeared the words “And she's almost 50!”

Dear, oh dear. That asterisk, that tiny print, that degree of being patronised by a mere writer of magazine cover lines when you are one of the most successful performers, male or female, in the world. Does anyone say of George Clooney, as though he were almost 90 and could still remember his own name, “And he's almost 50!” Would it be any wonder if Madonna's thoughts were to drift in the direction of a culture in which women of a certain age are not patronised with asterisks but cherished and desired?

Come on! What is Shilling’s point? That, in the name of dignity, Madonna should submit to outdated traditions and dogmas in order not to rub people the wrong way and to give them a good example? That’s a standoffish and disturbing point to make because it is a way of making the point that Madonna doesn’t own her life and her body precisely because she is a woman and that for these reasons, the first things she should think about are not her needs and her goals, but the one of other members of her gender. It is remarkable to notice that dignity is always what is used to justify the most unjustified criticism of women who refused to be “normal” or rather who dare to be different and to want power. The message that is being sent to them by suggesting that they are being undignified is that they should behave like everybody and accept that when you are born a woman, you don’t have the luxury to only think of yourself, you have to think of others, your kids, your husband, society, all of the people that have protected you from the frailties of your womanhood. In short, no woman can be an island, while a man can be.

Simple and dark "truths"

Gerald Caplan on the G8 Summit, its African masquerade, and Robert Mugabe:

Every year, going back about 500 of them, we in the rich world have sucked out of Africa more wealth than we have ever injected into the continent. Over the past decades, Western governments and Western corporations have been party to virtually every tyrannical regime, conflict and injustice Africa has suffered. Neo-liberal economic nostrums imposed on African governments by the West have utterly failed to provide promised economic growth but have been wildly successful in increasing grotesque inequality and in impoverishing even more Africans.

How do countries that, until only a few years ago, backed apartheid in South Africa have the right to criticize African governments? In Canada, it's entirely forgotten that, Joe Clark, external affairs minister in the Mulroney government, persistently denounced and refused to support Nelson Mandela's African National Congress because it embraced armed resistance as a liberation strategy.

Every time another soiled Western leader righteously demands that Mr. Mugabe be removed, their African counterparts get their backs up. So should the rest of us. Africans remember what Westerners are pleased to forget.

Robert Mugabe is a tyrant, but no worse than Mobutu Sese Seko or Idi Amin or Emperor Bokassa or P.W. Botha or Jonas Savimbi or any of the dozens of others whom Western countries have backed. Even today, the United States and Britain co-operate closely with the genocidal government of Sudan in the name of the “war on terrorism.” Who condemns that?

Mr. Mugabe is a tyrant but he's the West's tyrant, he's OUR tyrant. The British government made him.

Caplan, of course, isn’t wrong, but the problem is that he is only discussing one truth, which is attractive because it is both dark and simple for it creates exploiters and exploited, tyrants and victims, hypocrites and feeble followers, and of course the rich and strong and the poor and weak.  Unfortunately or rather fortunately, international relations isn’t neither about discovering nor discussing dark truths, it is about finding ways to overcome them to make things work.

The perils of Humanitarian intervention

Jeremy Harding has an article on Kosovo in the London Review of Books, which makes the point that humanitarian intervention doesn’t necessarily lead to an improvement of the situation it was supposed to correct. Harding’s article is worth reading because it shows in my opinion that the debate on interventionism, particularly in America, is too simplified because it ignores the “what happens after” debate and the fact that interventionism is solely a means to an end, which still requires a lot of resources and of work to be realized. The most appalling in this debate is that I fear that future interventions in our century will continue to happen without the countries or the international organizations taking part in it finding a satisfactory answer to the question “what happens next.” Intervention has become a way to make a political statement either about one’s strength or one’s mother Theresa like compassion. Sugary excerpt:

The Nato intervention, which many saw as a rustling job, was regarded as the arrival of the cavalry by the terrorised majority in Kosovo. The bombing is, in retrospect, the least of it. The real injustice of the intervention has been the long aftermath, in which the UN, through fear and indecision, has bowed to majority Albanian wishes and failed to deal with the persecution of Serbs. That persecution may not compare, in numbers, with what happened to Kosovo Albanians under Milosevic – or with what might have happened had he been given another crack at the province – but it has allowed Serbs, in Kosovo and beyond, to claim they are being punished not once but many times, and in different ways, for the crimes of an Oriental despot.

Humanizing the holy and the sacred

I almost agree completely with Jeff Mason when he makes the following argument:

A Sacred spring, stone, building or physical site is a place where the mundane is bathed in Divinity and becomes a place for reverence, meditation and prayer. Sacred places and objects become holy sites of worship and veneration, matters of respect, and self-respect, to maintain and to defend.

How does the universe look when we subtract from it all thought of anything Sacred or Holy?  Have we lost anything? Is anything ‘not there’ that was there just a moment before? Or does the subtraction of the Sacred and Holy leave everything as it is, was, and always will be?  Does the water of a holy spring taste any different from an ordinary well nearby? Does the denial of the Holy pollute the water in some way? I suggest not. The universe is so amazing, so full of wonders and incomprehensibilities that we need no longer imagine the Sacred and Holy to add to its lustre.

The world would be a better place without Holy sites and sacred objects. We are worshipping our own imaginations, laying a narrative on the world that was never asked for or demanded, and which we now have a means to transcend, relieving the world of a not inconsiderable source of conflict and discomfort.

The problem with today’s perceptions of the Sacred and the Holy is that there are tied to religion, which in my opinion, make them not only dangerous, but burdensome for humans for the simple reason that it asks them to reject their humanity, which is holding them back from the Divine. Thus, the issue here is once again religionization, which universalizes and deities the particular when the Sacred and the Holy should remain about the personal, about what each of us believes is more important than anything. Because I agree with Camus that all reasons to live are also reasons to die, I believe that individuals should decide what is Sacred and Holy to them and accept the fact others may disagree fervently with her/his belief.

Good but not better

The best article I read last weekend was the one in the Financial Times on former Czech president Václav Hazel in which he talked about his views of the world, his pro-Europeanism and his love New York. It is a fun read. Sugary excerpt:

Yes, of course it is a good thing that the Iron Curtain fell and that communism ended, but that still doesn’t mean that the world is a better place. The big differences between the developed world and the developing world are deeper than ever. The unifying forces of globalisation incite various forms of chauvinism or nationalism. Terrorists almost have the capacity to fire nuclear missiles. The world is full of various dangers, including ecological ones in the form of climate change, and so on. […] I’d say that it is a good thing that the world is no longer divided in two, but new superpowers are emerging, and who knows what this will bring? China today is more powerful than Russia. Russia is witnessing the rise of a strange, special sort of dictatorship with strong imperialist demands, albeit dressed more elegantly than before.

Vamos Rafa!

I'm just hoping that Rafael Nadal can winWimbledon today. Something tells me that it's going to be a great match especially if Nadal wins for to do so he has to play his best tennis.

Focus

I failed miserably in my goal of focusing during this long weekend on work and other simple tasks. I'm realizing that the point of long weekends may just be to accept distractions and that doing the minimum is fine (which is a struggle for me because in spite of myself, I believe that more is better and that quantity can cheapen quality). Anyway, the good news is that there are a few good movies to see out there particularly Wanted which is a great ride when you just want to be entertained and not to be preached religiously to about the value of your existence.

Fourth of July

What am I doing today? I'm working while watching tv. I'm not going to eat some barbecue or watch the fireworks tonight. I'm just going to try to focus and to read a good book (Netherland by Joseph O'Neill). Anyway, Happy 4th of July to all and try not eat too much.

Ingrid Betancourt

I watched with emotion yesterday the liberation of Ingrid Betancourt and of the other hostages from the Farc by the Columbian army. I made me think about the fragile ambiguity of life, which can take an unexpected turn, which can be changed by something infinitely small, which ends up leading to a cosmical event. Anyway, to come back to Ingrid Betancourt, I may be be binded by my emotions but I believe from what she showed yesterday that she has enough personality not to be overtaken by what has happened to her and to continue to live freely by still choosing what risks to take and what mistakes to make.

Same issues, no good answers

The best article I’ve read so far this week is Kira Cochrane’s on the backlash against feminism in the Guardian. It is a great read although I would disagree with her contention that the issues that she is raising exist solely because there’s a backlash against feminism, which in my opinion was never influential enough to create such powerful counter-movements  and negative responsive. The point, which I’m trying to make, is that not every single issue that has to do with women is a feminist issue and that the problem is that the feminist mindset is outdated precisely because it has never has never proven its ability to resolve any of the issues that it addresses. In other words, feminists are good yapping (which isn’t a bad thing), but not good (I’m being diplomatic) at problem solving and at leading. Sugary excerpt:

The rise of the sex industry is one indication of how women's bodies are considered public property; in the wider culture, we've seen scrutiny of women reach unprecedented levels. In gossip magazines, women's bodies are pored over - a pound gained provoking headlines that they're fat, a pound lost leading to headlines that they're too thin. Circles are drawn around a spot on their ankle where they've failed to apply fake tan, around a bitten nail or a tiny, incipient wrinkle beside their eye - which could just be a stray lash. What is implicit but unsaid is that there is no objective standard of beauty, no level of perfection that a woman could reach at which her body would be perceived as acceptable and in control. In the eyes of these magazines, a healthy body mass index could be considered seriously plump. A woman deemed too fat in one magazine could, on the basis of exactly the same picture, be deemed too thin by another magazine. The constant message is that women's bodies are not our own. They belong to everyone but us, and are there to be picked apart. Women can try to curry favour, come up to snuff, spend hours like, say, Madonna, working out, perfecting themselves. But there's then every chance that they will be derided for the veins on their hands. There's something essentially depressing about women being derided for their veins.

That intense scrutiny of women's bodies is one trend in pop culture. Another related one is the current obsession with women as mothers, a trend being played out all over our cinema screens - in films including Juno, Knocked Up, Baby Mama, Happy Endings, Waitress and Smart People. It's also being played out in the gossip magazines. In the past few years we have seen Jennifer Lopez paid a reported $6m (£3m) for exclusive pictures of her with her twin babies; Angelina Jolie is expected to clear $10m if she agrees to pose with the twins she will give birth to later this year.

In fact, the obsession is such that one magazine editor has said that "it's at the point now where some stars might decide to have more kids just to collect the money from their photos". We've seen Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, former child star Melissa Joan Hart and Myleene Klass all pose naked and pregnant in the past few years - as Keri Russell, an actor who has played a pregnant woman in two films in the past year has said, there is "this weird, crazy pop-culture infatuation with all these actresses being pregnant. Have you ever seen so many pictures of [pregnant] actresses?"

Dreaming on

Another proof (provided by Camille Paglia) that wishful thinking can perform miracles as difficult as the revival of feminism :

One thing is clear: the feminism of the future will be created by women who are young now. The doctrinal disputes and turf wars of the older generation (including me) must be set aside. I reject the term “postfeminism,” which became a glib media tag line in the ’90s and is often attached to me. There is no such animal. Feminism lives but goes through cycles of turmoil and retreat. At present, there is no one leading issue that can galvanize women across a broad spectrum. Feminism certainly has an obligation to protest and, if possible, to correct concrete abuses of women and children in Third World nations. But feminism might look very different in more traditional or religious societies, where motherhood and family are still valorized and where the independent career woman is less typical or admired.
In conclusion, my proposals for reform are as follows. First of all, science must be made a fundamental component of all women’s or gender studies programs. Second, every such program must be assessed by qualified faculty (not administrators or politicians) for ideological bias. The writings of conservative opponents of feminism, as well as of dissident feminists, must be included. Without such diversity, students are getting indoctrination, not education. Certainly among current dissident points of view is the abstinence movement, as an evangelical Protestant phenomenon and also as an argument set forth in Wendy Shalit’s first book, A Return to Modesty, which created a storm when it was published nine years ago but whose influence can be detected in today’s campus chastity clubs, including here at Harvard. As a veteran of pro-sex feminism who still endorses pornography and prostitution, I say more power to all these chaste young women who are defending their individuality and defying groupthink and social convention. That is true feminism!

Well there’s only one thing for me to say: RIP feminism.