The Republic of Dissent

Adieu tristesse

Well, the time has come for me to take some time off to prepare not only my move to New York, but also to adapt to a job change and yes, to have finally a real vacation in a heavenly place outside the US where I can soak my damaged feet in salty water. I’m taking the end of August and the whole month of September off although there is a good, but a small chance that I may be back before the beginning of October. Anyway, in the next few weeks, I will move to Manhattan, change job, have a vacation, start a new job, and come back to this blog to write with some renewed energy. Since May of last year, I’ve been having an atrocious time, which led me to function in permanent crisis mode and to live in a state of permanent anxiety. This period is coming to an end and I believe that things will not only get better, but that I’m going to have an outstanding end of the year, which I hope the quality of my posts will reflect. So there it is, I’m finally done crossing a tunnel, which made cross not only the heart of the darkness, but also despair and self-derogation. The journey is done and fortunately, I’m able to say Adieu tristesse instead of Bonjour Tristesse. See you in October.

Simple wisdom

Potentially hollow deep thought on a Sunday: the challenge of moving at a slowing is to convince one self that one isn't falling behind or just being lazy, but being smart by realizing that life is marathon and that everything isn't about speed. The events, which I enjoyed the most watching at these Olympics were both the women's and men's marathon, which were won by unexpected runners (a Romania mother of 38, Constantina Tomescu-Dita and a 21 year old Kenyan Samuel Kamau Wansiru) who pace themselves remarkably well and then took a chance by running away from the field at a moment when they least expected. The lesson for life might just be that patience and guts are a deadly combination.

Anticlimactic

The word of the day is “anticlimactic.” It illustrates so many of the main events of this year especially Obama's announcement of its Vice-president, which as I said on Thursday everybody in DC with some political sense knew already. Nevertheless, his campaign and the press tried to build up the climax when they knew very well that there was little chance that the decision could live up to the hype given the fact that three months from now it won't make a difference except of course if there isn't a happy ending to just another pathetic episode. What a way to ruin people's weekend by forcing them to watch political pundits salivate and fall all of over themselves in a pitiful attempt to compete with the Olympics! I'm wondering what the answer is going when someone dares to ask the question what does Biden has that Hillary (I think it would have been a nightmare for her if she had been the choice because then she would have been blame for every single thing that will go wrong. But it was nevertheless a mistake of Obama not to as least act as if he wanted to choose her) doesn't? I know the answer and it is that he is more than “likable enough” not only to Obama, but also to the press and the new Democratic establishment. As the Brits would say: Wicked!

The joys of multilingualism

Agnès Poirier attempting to convince the Brits to give up their “monolingualism” to open themselves to the world by learning new languages:

I don't know what's most irritating though: the abyssal linguistic ignorance of the British or their worn-out excuse to justify it, which always comes with a coy smile: "Our nation is simply not good at languages." I have kept hearing it ever since I set foot in Britain, and I'll happily throttle the next person who dares say it to me. Linguistic weakness is not a congenital disease; it's not in your DNA any more than loving Château Haut-Brion 1989 is in mine. Being good at languages only requires political will, state intervention and cultural rigour. In Europe, learning two foreign languages is compulsory; if it wasn't, we'd all live in a Tower of Babel and be at each other's throats.

Multilingualism is not only about escaping foreign tricks and avoiding insults on Italian trains; it is also pure unadulterated joy. Ah, the délices, if slightly sadistic, of reading Proust in the text rather than in Moncrieff's outdated translation; oh, the allegria of laughing with Carlo Goldoni at his Venetian comedies; hey, the fun of hearing King Juan Carlos of Spain tell Hugo Chávez to shut it. Multilingualism makes mental and geographical borders disappear, annihilates chauvinism, and educates the world citizens of tomorrow.

However, before you reach the many ecstasies of multilingualism, you must go through the hardship of learning. I promise you, the rewards are worth all the pain.

If Poirier finds the Brits to be monolingual, I wonder what she would say of Americans and if she believes the French are as good with languages that people from Northern Europe.

Ghost Town

DC is a ghost town right now because everybody is waiting for certain political announcements, which aren't going to make the difference, which the wait for them suggest that they will. We go through the same thing every 4 years. The only difference this year is that both candidates might be tempted to tempt fate and to make choices, which highlight the concerns that voters already have about them. I know who Obama is going to pick (I am about 91% sure that I know. I live around Obamaniacs who can't keep a secret). I don't know who McCain is going to pick, but I am sure that he will react to Obama's pick or non-picks. The one thing I'm going to say about Obama's pick is that if he loses, people will point to his choice as a missed opportunity in an attempt to rewrite history and to make people forget that presidential candidates almost always win or lose elections on their own merit even when they pick the wrong person to be their vice president. which I'm not saying is the case in this situation. To end this post on a puzzling note, I've realized that it is easy to write in French than in English when I'm not feeling well, which surprises me because English is my lazy language.

Migraines

I'm suffering from migraines, which I believe are just a way for my body to evacuate my extreme anxiety and the powerlessness that I feel at this moment and that I'm condemned to accept in order to move forward. The advantage of a migraine and I have to look extremely hard to find one is that it makes you want promise to stop complaining when it stops and to just focus on what is within your control and not everything else. Summer is almost over. It was as morbid as the winter, but with  the help of my migraine, I have to say that I'm looking forward to the rest of the year which is condemned not to be good, but to be extraordinary.

History is only history

Greg Waldmann reviews Robert Kagan’s The Return of History and the End of Dreams:

The Return of History and the End of Dreams is more of an extended essay than a book. It’s barely over a hundred pages long (though not priced accordingly), and its scope is limited. Kagan’s essay exists primarily to roll back the supposed complacency brought on the now two-decade old argument of Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man. It’s difficult to see the need for this. Terrorism and the ascendance of the world’s major autocracies have brought home reality with repeated hammer blows over the last ten years; the reader gets the feeling that Kagan needed something to set himself against in order to give cause for his essay and in order to structure its arguments.

[…]True to form, however, Kagan’s observations lead to overly generalized conclusions. He’s again constrained by space and the oppositional character of his work. We are not, Kagan says, entering a period of international convergence, but instead a “period of divergence.” Reality is a bit more muddled. The “twin realities of the present era” as he sees them can instead be viewed, in light of the economic and political convergence of the 1990s, as countervailing trends. The economic integration of the world still proceeds apace, Europe is still attempting (albeit in a fumbling way) political unity, and billions in the most disparate nations of the world still aspire to the benefits of democracy.

[...]This is sloppy work: the use of the indeterminate pronoun “they” ascribes undue emphasis on Americans’ knowledge of policy and their capacity for agency. It also – and not incidentally –unburdens governments of responsibility for the actions they take, and unburdens writers of their responsibility to think.

I find authors who pretend to use history to make sense of the present and to predict the future arrogant, which wouldn’t be a fatal flaw if they weren’t also as presumptuous and as flashy as psychics who make yearly flamboyant predictions about the future. The problem of course is that they haven’t read Hannah Arendt well to realize History is about the past and not the future and that it isn’t a predetermined force of what is happening or is about to happen. I have stopped taking seriously authors such as Kagan because their analysis is too pop and too fluffy to lead to substantive and constructive discussions.

Cold War Addiction

I have the strong suspicion that Frank Furedi’s reading of the conflict between Russia, Georgia and the West is at least 67.79 % right:

According to the story being peddled by a new generation of Cold Warriors in London and Washington, the world is confronted by a ‘resurgent’ Russia bent on becoming a new superpower. They claim that the Caucasian crisis is the outcome of the expansionist ambitions of Moscow, and that unless the Russians are stopped in Georgia then the Ukraine will be next – and before too long Europe will face the military might of its old adversary.

This fantasy of the ‘Rise of Russia’ overlooks the fact that Russia is a relatively feeble and divided nation. Yes, it possesses oil and other important commodities, but it is a conservative and even defensive, status-quo power. There is little doubt that Russia is dominated by an authoritarian and self-serving regime, which is capable of ruthless and violent behaviour. But its recent actions in response to the invasion of South Ossetia by Georgia are no different to those that would have been undertaken by any regional power confronted by a similar challenge.

(…) What is puzzling about the current situation is not Russia’s response to the Georgian invasion but the reaction of the West, particularly the US. Future historians will surely ask the questions: Why did the Bush administration embark on a course of an aggressive foreign policy towards Russia? Why encourage former regions of the old Soviet Union to join NATO, knowing that it can only provoke and humiliate the Russians? And most importantly, at a time of global uncertainty why open up a possibly dangerous conflict on a new front?

The West has a cold war addiction because it is nostalgic of a time when foreign policy was simple and when, without much effort, it could always argue that it had the high moral ground. In other words, some want to bring back the Cold War because it is familiar and because they feel certain that it will take them to a playing field in which they can win even though the times have changed. It is difficult to either patronize or dominate Russia after Bush claimed to have seen the beauty of his soul and after Sarkozy went to Moscow to play nice with Putin after pretending with stupid male and adolescent arrogance during his election campaign that he would take him on. The point is that the West doesn’t want to make this situation one where testosterones and manliness are the sole criteria for victory and where might make right because there is no leader in the West that is as full of menacing testosterones as and more manly than Putin.

The beauty of power or the power of beauty

After reading the following sugary excerpt from Chrystia Freeland’s lunch with Ukraine’s premier, Yulia Tymoshenko, I am wondering why are guys men never almost face the accusation that they use their sexuality, their looks to gain what they want especially when what they want is political power. I mean is there any doubt that if when a politician looked like Tom Cruise and is talented that he has a lot more opportunities to reach political heights and sometimes to even do it extremely fast? It helps to look good and to be a charmer especially when one is involved in a job that requires seduction and persuasion like politics. The point is that only women (remember Ségolène Royal) are penalized or to be criticized hypocritically for the fact that they are perceived as trying to make the most of what nature gave them, because then they become either as dangerously manipulative as Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction or as stupidly beautiful and shallow as Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde. Only women are required to be gender neutral and asexual in almost everything they do:

I’ve just arrived from an America greatly confused about gender and power and beauty, and her matter-of-factness intrigues me. Yet to Tymoshenko – a self-made millionaire, mother and the most powerful European female east of Berlin – none of this seems complicated. “If we are speaking about what is more important for a woman, her work or her looks, the answer is obvious,” she tells me, looking a little perplexed that the conversation has drifted to such self-evident matters. “She will choose to look good, above all else, even at the cost of her work.”

Tymoshenko cheerfully talks about the differences between men and women in a way that would shock most of us “we-are-all-equal” western feminists. Here are a couple of my favourite assertions: women are better at taking care of things – both kids and countries – than men: “You know how, when a family breaks up, in most instances, the child stays with the mother? She is the more reliable caretaker. It is the same with a country. I simply think that we are more reliable and we are more able to give up living a normal life in order honourably to fulfil our responsibilities.”

Male voters are inevitably sceptical about female politicians: “Every man thinks he is more capable than any woman. This is normal. Women don’t criticise them for this ... In fact, we support them in their sense of superiority.”

Her sensible bottom line when I ask her if being a woman has been a political disadvantage? “Sometimes it hurts, sometimes it helps.” From a politician who uses her beauty as cannily as any supermodel but who also terrifies notorious Russian oligarchs, that sounds like a fair assessment.

Les choses de la vie

A classic, which makes life meaningful and worth living. Madonna is fifty today and my mom just a little bit older, what else do they have in common apart their birthday: they are both exceptional women people. Romy Schneider is, in my opinion, easily in the top 5 of the greatest actresses ever. She's so classically beautiful that her beauty becomes an inconvenient because it is so mesmerizing that people forget that she is acting not just being.

Jenseits von Gut und Böse

When I was young, my favorite philosophy book was Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil) because I love Nietzsche's take on morality and ethics. I wanted to believe (I still do) in the will to power. However, everything changed when I read Camus's L'Homme Revolté (the Rebel) that I understood that rebellion cannot be an end, but a means to an end, and that all revolutions fail because they all have within themselves the seeds of their own destruction (extremism and absolutism).

What's the point of my ramblings? Well, I ran across an Obamamaniac this morning who tried her best to convert me to her new religion. She was a nice woman in her sixties who couldn't believe that somebody couldn't enthusiastically support Obama like some Evangelical Christians cannot believe that people can be content without Jesus’ gin and juice. It took me back to my Jenseits von Gut und Böse days and to this need that we all have to believe in glitter for glitter's sake and to make fluff sublime. It is impossible to understand Camus and to be a pious Obama's disciple. It is impossible to have understood the existential lessons of the twentieth century and to believe seriously that the "Yes, we can" has the same power as "I rebel therefore we exist" when it is just the political equivalent of  Nike's"Just do it" a slogan that is popular because it is empty and means nothing because it just affirms that coolness is everything.

Thus, the existential question of our time is once again who do you want to be and whether you believe that only revolutions can redeem grave injustices. I am on the side of those who say no to easy and pop solutions because to be human isn't about reflection, but about giving meaning to our existence by beefing up our fluff, taking responsibility for our actions, and acting to own up to our desires. There can neither be absolute justice nor absolute freedom. It is not enough to be Meursault and to refuse to lie.

Reviewing History

Timothy Snyder’s review of Mark Mazower’s book on Hitler’s Empire is so appealing that it makes an immediate entry in the list of books that I have to read before the end of the year.

Walking on broken glass

I'm not enjoying the end of the summer in spite of the Olympics or maybe because of them. Anyway, I'm currently on a standby because I still have to move out of DC and to find a place in New York. Those two things, I'm afraid, are going to take the little bit of energy that I have left. It is decided: I'm going to take a vacation in September. It is frightening to realize that one can never get use to instability especially once it has caused mental weariness.

Hidden Identities

Globalized beauty

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on racism, dark skin and globalized beauty:

For those who make and break images, decide who is gorgeous and who is not, light skin and hair and eyes easily please the eye, affirm superior human status. Racism is a given, an understanding infused through the business. Top model agencies will tell you that eager Asian, Arab and black models may look exquisite and flawless, but find it almost impossible to enter, survive or let alone thrive in that hostile habitat. I have written about this abhorrent exclusivity for more than 20 years and to do so again feels like failure.

The beauty and fashion industries still maintain a closed shop when it comes to the selection and promotion of models. In women's magazines, on catwalks, even shop dummies, dark skin is rarely seen. They say it is because customers are put off by such unexpected, outlandish images of loveliness even though a recent special issue of Italian Vogue featured only black models and was sold out worldwide.

[…] And now, with 21st-century globalisation, the ugly rejection of darkness is getting even worse. European definitions of attractiveness – from thin body shape to light colouring – are sweeping the non-western world, making most populations feel envious and sometimes desperate. Ten years ago beauty lightening creams had all but vanished from these places as native pride grew and health risks were better understood. Today these products are shifting like never before. A trader in Acton has just been convicted for selling banned, toxic, whitening creams which can cause burns and rashes.

The issue is a lot more complicated than Alibhai-Brown is willing to acknowledge for after all self-derogation has as many internal factors as it has external factors. It is impossible to watch this commercial of a popular lightening cream featuring a famous actor (Shahrukh Khan) and not to realize that the issue is about much more than the dark color of one’s skin.

Describing a man of mystery

Sugary excerpt from Chris Petit’s Profile of French Director Jean-Luc Godard in the Guardian:

He suffers from vertigo (how appropriate). He admits to having no imagination and taking everything from life. When he was given a camera to use by film-maker Don Pennebaker, Pennebaker was touched by his incompetence, which included the beginner's mistake of zooming in and out too much. He was introduced to the fleshpots of Paris in the 1950s by an early mentor, film director Jean-Pierre Melville. Financial transactions with prostitutes were treated as potential mises en scène (Vivre sa vie, Sauve qui peut); cinema as whore. His handwriting features in many of his films; ditto his voice. He plays tennis, or did (he's nearly 80 now). When he passed on production money from a film to Italian revolutionaries, they used it to open a transvestite bar. He smoked a fat version of Gitanes called Boyards. In his Marxist days, he still travelled first class. He tried to avoid writing scripts whenever possible. His once great friend François Truffaut called him "the Ursula Andress" of the revolutionary movement. He is Protestant in temperament and an unforgiving moralist. He drops names. He lay in a coma for a week after a motorcycle accident. He can be nasty. He has been known to suffer hopeless crushes. In late adolescence he was committed by his father into psychiatric care. His on-set tantrums are legendary. He is the Saint Simeon Stylites of cinema, atop his pillar, or, as Truffaut described him, nothing but a piece of shit on a pedestal. For all his utopian ideals, conflict and rejection are the dominant impulses of his life and work.

I’ve always preferred Truffaut to Godard because Truffaut although he was as much of a tortured soul as Godard, he was more of a literary director in the sense that he could have been a good novelist if he had felt the same passion for writing as he felt for directing.

Private lives and politics

I'm sick and tired of American politicians going on television to admit affairs and offer themselves to a public stoning and to exhibit their self-flagellation just because they couldn't make the courageous and modern choice not to campaign with their family and not to expose them to the dangers of the public eye thus making those they claim to love more than anything victims of an idealistic, immature, and capricious electorate always hungry for more private and trivial details. Politicians should run for office without their family and without being required to open their private life to scrutiny to prove that they deserve to get elected . The trouble with America is that politicians can rarely successfully run for office without presenting the syrupy traditional and archaic picture of the family man person by using their spouse and their children to do so and that always lead to disaster. American politicians have to invite voters within their private space and to tell them things that are none of their business. People who have great families don't necessarily make good public servants. Most of all, there is something creepy, primitive, and perversely inhumane about the American need to believe that their politicians are virtuous people when experience shows that it takes, more often than not, a person with outstanding qualities and imperfections to be a great public servant.

Beijing

The Olympics have officially started and yet, I don't seem to be able to care because I feel that they have become just another huge sporting event, without soul. What used to distinguish the Olympics from other sporting events before was the sense they were different, because money and glitter didn't matter. It is no longer true. Another detail which I found amazing is that in the US the Opening Ceremony will be broadcasted more than ten hours after it has happened. I wasn't alive in 1976, but I feel as though we are back in those days when the networks believed that they could manufactured the Olympics experience of their viewers.

All about the glitz

Melanie Phillips reviews Peter Whittle’s latest book , Look at Me: Celebrating the Self in Modern Britain, which focuses on celebrity:

What Peter Whittle has grasped, however, is that modern celebrity is not characterised, as it was in previous times, by the idea of 'them and us', the sense of a curtain being lifted on a world ordinary people don't share and which draws its glamour precisely from its inaccessibility. On the contrary, the current obsession with fame actually represents a deeply narcissistic obsession with the self. What we worship most of all in the media are the first two letters of that word. Celebrities represent a star-studded mirror which mesmerises us because we imagine that in it we can see ourselves.

This is because the modern cult of fame derives from a culture in which the individual has become the centre of the universe: the sun around which everyone and everything else must revolve. With external authority now considered an affront to the self along with the religious doctrines that imposed it, morality and culture have been systematically privatised and relativised so that no one's values or lifestyle can trump those of anyone else. Every individual is thus a hero to himself.

If everyone is special, however, it follows that no one is special. So people can achieve fame even if they have no particular talent or have achieved nothing of distinction. They can be famous simply for being famous. Indeed, our super-egalitarian culture tells us that elitism is a bad thing; the very idea of a hierarchy of values offends our most cherished belief that no one can be judged inferior to anyone else.

Celebrity culture in our times has more to do in my opinion with the fact that people are obsessed with pleasure and that everything has become sexualized and not in a good way. Something matters nowadays if it is able to get to our G spot and to make us feel the big O. Everything and everyone has to be sexy. Celebrity is just a symptom of our impatience and our inability to make the effort not to focus on the now and to take the time to look for substance especially when it isn’t sexy and requires more than our senses. The point is that we live in a time when because of the compression of time and space and because more is always more chic than less, we have fallen in love with glitz and forgotten that what shines isn’t always better. The sad reality is that we are all overweight not because we eat too much, but because we live in society obsessed with their stuff and their dumbing down effects on our senses. After all, the point of celebrity is that it objectifies humans being, beings for themselves by transforming them into beings in themselves, into things that people can enjoy just like a sex toy.

Solzhenitsyn and the legacy of littérature engagée

Many superb and sometimes overindulgent have been written on Alexander Solzhenitsyn since his death on Sunday. The saddest thing is that most of them fail to remind the audience who Solzhenitsyn was and why he still matters. I think that Ned Richardson-Little comes close to forcing readers who have never read Solzhenitsyn to read him and to think about his literary legacy and whether it is magnificent because it cannot be separated from politics and history:

The mythology that Mr. Solzhenitsyn "revealed" the existence of Gulag to the West best serves those it exonerates — those who chose to ignore the truth of the Soviet Union's contempt for human rights. In providing wider publicity for what was a well-documented but not yet universally reviled system, he unwittingly provided an easy out for those who had turned a blind eye to the victims of the Soviet Union for decades and now needed cover for their political conversions.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn's exceptional work gave people the words with which to denounce the atrocities of the Soviet government; it was decisive in making the Gulag an issue that could no longer be ignored. The impact of The Gulag Archipelago speaks volumes to the need for great thinkers to push us to examine the worst that mankind is capable of. His evocative prose transformed the word "Gulag" from an obscure acronym for a Soviet department into a metaphor for cruelty, terror and inhumanity.

Yet, the question remains — how did so many who had seen the evidence choose to close their eyes to the reality of Soviet communism?

It is also the sad fate of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent most of his life giving a voice to the victims of the Gulag, to have unwittingly provided the excuse for those who refused to listen for so long.

Strangely enough I cannot think of Solzhenitsyn without thinking of Sartre who chose to bet his whole literary legacy by becoming an apology not only for communism, but for the Soviet Union. Fortunately for Sartre, his lunacy only damaged his person and not the strength of the writings. The question that I am asking myself in the case of Solzhenitsyn is whether the fact that he was about Stalinism elevates him as a writer. To ask the question differently, if Sartre was right and that communism, Marxism was the “l’horizon philosophique indépassable de l’époque” (the unsurpassable philosophy of our times), how much does the fact that writers were wrong or right on that issue matter to their literary legacies? Is Solzhenitsyn Solzhenitsyn only because he wrote The Gulag Archipelago if Sartre can remain Sartre in spite of writing Les Communistes et la paix?

Getting energized

When I have no energy, which in my case, these days, all I have to do is to read this kind of article to wake my dead brain up and to resist the need to fold.

Substraction

I'm feeling a bit sick today, which is just the wrong moment for me not to be in top shape for I'm in the final days (I hope) of my move to New York. What I've learned in recent years is to accept my moments of weakness and that doing less can sometimes be better than doing as much as possible. Anyway, it is the first Monday of August, I can believe that I've had another appallingly bad Summer.

Missing the jungle

I don’t whether to say ah ha or oh no when reading Kathleen Parker’s article in the Times of London:

The exemplar of the modern male is the hairless, metrosexualised man and decorator boys who turn heter-osexual slobs into perfumed ponies. All of which is fine as long as we can dwell happily in the Kingdom of Starbucks, munching our biscotti and debating whether nature or nurture determines gender identity. But in the dangerous world in which we really live, it might be nice to have a few guys around who aren’t trying to juggle pedicures and highlights.

Men have been domesticated to within an inch of their lives, attending Lamaze classes, counting contractions, bottling expressed breast milk for midnight feedings – I expect men to start lactating before I finish this sentence – yet they are treated most unfairly in the areas of reproduction and parenting.

Legally, women hold the cards. If a woman gets pregnant, she can abort – even without her husband’s consent. If she chooses to have the child, she gets a baby and the man gets an invoice. Unarguably, a man should support his offspring, but by that same logic shouldn’t he have a say in whether his child is born or aborted?

After reading that, I think that I have the answer to Parker’s quintessential question, which is where have all the real men gone: they are back to the jungle with the real women.

Life never s**ks

The article of the weekend is the one of Chrystia Freeland on her lunch with Gloria Steinem in the Financial times. It is a good read especially for this sugary excerpt:

The wave of enthusiasm for Clinton after she admitted defeat angers Steinem. “Women are liked better when they lose,” she explains. “Now that she has lost, people are paying tribute to her who were attacking her before.” Steinem describes this reaction as the “Enforcement of Gender Roles 101: You approve of women when they allow themselves to be dominated and not when they don’t. It’s the way you perpetuate a male-dominant society.”

Groundhog Day

I feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. I've been reliving the same day for a while which explains every news awakens within me a sense of déjà vu, which makes me want to bang my head against the wall and why this summer is about as fresh as the US presidential election. For the first time in my life, I'm looking forward to the fall because the summer and the beginning of the year have just been so disappointing.