The Republic of Dissent

The first Biracial president

Finally, Marie Arana, in the Washington Post, daresto say what I’ve been arguing all along: Obama is biracial. He shouldn’t be reluctant or scared to say it because America still has a problem with “race” which makes Americans unable to accept that being biracial or multiracial and identifying one as such doesn’t mean to deny one’s identity, but rather accepting all of its components by refusing to choose and by embracing the totality and the diversity of one’s heritage. To me the reluctance of Obama to say proudly that he is biracial tells me something about him that makes it very difficult to believe in him as an agent of change and to be convinced that his deeds will up to his rhetoric: his brilliance as a writer and the exceptional nature of his personal story don’t make him different from any other politician, at least not yet. Sugary excerpt:

Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black.

 We call him that -- he calls himself that -- because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There's no in-between.

That was my reaction when I read these words on the front page of this newspaper the day after the election: "Obama Makes History: U.S. Decisively Elects First Black President."

The phrase was repeated in much the same form by one media organization after another. It's as if we have one foot in the future and another still mired in the Old South. We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.

To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president. He is more than the personification of African American achievement. He is a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go.

 

 

Last Saturday of November

It's the last of Saturday of November and I'm ecstatic because there are so many things I'm looking forward to. I'm planning a trip, which is going to take away me not only for the holidays, but also for the whole month of January. It's when you plan a trip that you realize that it's a tough time out there because people aren't traveling as much as they used to . In any case, things are good and if you are looking for a good time at the movies, watch Australia,which is worth watching not because of the two big stars of the film Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, but for the other members of the cast, which make the movie good to watch even if it is a bit too long.

Pleasant sleepiness

I don't think it's the Turkey that makes people exhausted after Thanksgiving meals; I blame the weather and the start of the almost untenable exuberance of the holidays for this pleasant sleepiness that makes us believe that we should feel grateful because the end of the year is near. I can hardly wait for December this year because I know that it is going to be a great month since I know that I'm going to get the opportunity to enjoy some warm weather, which is going to be a luxury that I will enjoy without negative thoughts.  

Turkey

I dislike Turkey so much that I refuse to eat it on a day one is supposed to be thankful for what one has while ignoring what one lacks and be hopeful about what one wishes and desires. I suspect that that Turkey is the Thanksgiving bird because that Americans put too much emphasis on quantity because they tend to confuse it with quality. I would rather have a small piece of chicken than to have a flavorless big piece of Turkey with too much gravy and stuffing. 

Before T day

The best thing about Thanksgiving is that it feels like a bonus holiday, an almost magical time when I can catch up with my reading without the guilt that comes with not spending time with family and not doing anything extra special. My reading list this year includes books that I haven't read since I was a kid such as  George Sand's La Petite Fadette.What makes  George Sand's writings particular is that the reader can sense that she is making tremendous efforts to restrain her passion by molding it into something more earthy. Strangely, every time I read Sand, I think either of Colette or Kate Chopin and I realize that her writing has more bite than theirs. If I were to speculate on the reason for that difference, I would say that George Sand probably never saw herself as a woman that could write, but as a writer that happened, by a mistake of fate, to be a woman and which therefore was entitled her to be capricious and demanding because of her talent as a man would have been allowed to be. After, a  woman has to believe that she has balls,  to put things crudely,  to say No to Musset, to drive Baudelaire crazy, and not to sacrifice herself totally and eternally for Chopin.

The Left just wants to have fun

It's impossible to see the spectacle of the French socialists and not to be reminded of the Democratic primaries and to realize that the Left likes to tear itself apart just for the fun of it. Usually, an implosion is avoided when it finds either what it believes to be a charismatic leader or when it is able to rally against a cause, in recent years it was against Bush and the Iraq war for the American left. What I have realized in recent years is that in the Western Democracies, leftist leaders  to get elected have to be charismatic and willing to present a somewhat conservative image to reassure voters that they are adults who can make tough and unpopular decisions in a dangerous world. If there is one thing that Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Lionel Jospin, Romano Prodi, Gerhard Schröder, José Luis Zapatero, Gordon Brown, and finally Obama have in common is that they all talked explicitly or implicitly being part of a new left that was aware of the mistakes of its previous leaders and that admired some things about the right or the center. In order words, leftist leaders who have great ambitions are always aware that they are part of a group that has trouble with discipline because it confuses it with austerity and that  is willing too often to self-destruct because it views unrevolutionary and unaesthetic change as unacceptable and immoral.The genius of Obama was that he understood the importance of aesthetics to the left and its need to fall in love with somebody who would be their own Ronald Reagan (since the crisis, the left is asking Obama to be the new FDR). Obama is an uncanny mixture of Olivier Besancenot and Nicolas Sarkozy on steroids with a cunning understanding that politics is about flexibility and the ability to be ubiquitous and marketable. It is for that reason for  that it is so incredibly difficult for me to believe in the changes he wants Americans to believe in. 

The writer as an ordinary human being

J.M. Coetzee had an excellent article in the New York Review of Books, which is undoubtedly the one I’ve read on the subject, on Irène Némirovsky. Coetzee shows that it is possible to criticize the phenomenon, which she has become without being unfair and despicable by making definite assertions, which can be neither proven nor unproven and by questioning both the value and the popularity of her writings. Sugary excerpt:

As late as the end of 1941, Némirovsky seems to have believed that whatever might befall the Jew in the street would not befall her. In a letter addressed to Marshal Pétain, head of the Vichy puppet government, she pleads that as a "respectable" ( honorable ) foreigner—as distinct from an "undesirable"—she deserves to be left in peace.

There are two broad reasons why Irène Némirovsky should have considered herself a special case. The first is that for most of her life it had been her heart's desire to be French; and to be fully French, in a country with a long history of harboring political refugees but notably unreceptive to notions of cultural pluralism, meant being neither a Russian émigré who wrote in French nor a French-speaking Jew. […] The problem for Némirovsky as a budding writer in the 1920s was that aside from her facility in the French language, the capital she commanded on the French literary market consisted in a corpus of experience that branded her as foreign: daily life in pre-revolutionary Russia, pogroms and Cossack raids, the Revolution and the Civil War, plus to a lesser extent the shady world of international finance. In the course of her career she would thus alternate, according to her sense of the temper of the times, between two authorial selves, one pur sang French, one exotic. As a French authoress she would compose books about "real" French families written with an irreproachably French sensibility, books with no whiff of foreignness about them. The French self took over entirely after 1940, as publishers became more and more nervous about the presence of Jewish writers on their lists.

As for the exotic self, exploiting it required a careful balancing act. To avoid being labeled a Russian who wrote in French, she would keep her distance from Russian émigré society. To avoid being cast as a Jew, she would be ready to mock and caricature Jews. On the other hand, unlike such Russian-born contemporaries as Nathalie Sarraute (née Cherniak) and Henri Troyat (né Tarasov), she published under her Russian name, in its French form, until the wartime ban on Jewish writers led her to resort to a pseudonym.

The second reason why Némirovsky should have thought she would escape the fate of the Jews is that she had cultivated influential friends on the right, even the far right. In the months between her arrest and his own, these friends were the first people her husband contacted with pleas to intercede. To bolster her case he even scoured her books for anti-Semitic quotes. All of these friends let her down, mainly because they were powerless. They were powerless because, as it began to become clear, when the Nazis said All Jews with no exceptions they meant all Jews with no exceptions.

For her compromises with the anti-Semites—who, as the Dreyfus affair had made plain a half-century before, were fully as influential in France, at all levels of society, as in Germany—Némirovsky has recently had to undergo the most searching interrogation, notably by Jonathan Weiss in his biography of her.I do not propose to extend that interrogation here. Némirovsky made some serious mistakes and did not live long enough to correct them. Misreading the signs, she believed, until it was too late, that she could evade the express train of history bearing down on her. Of the large body of work she left behind, some can safely be forgotten, but a surprising amount is still of interest, not only for what it tells us about the evolution of a writer now in the process of being absorbed into the French canon but as the record of an engagement with the France of her day that is never less than intelligent and is sometimes damning.

It’s always easier to look back at the pre-second world word and the Shoah period and to argue viciously and arrogantly that it was impossible not to be one of the justes and that all of those who didn’t act sinned and should be stoned. It’s impossible to read Némirovsky’s writings without thinking of Anouilh’s Antigone and without realizing that Camus was right to focus his work on the human propensity to escape both the burden and the responsibilities of choice by focusing on traditions, societal rules, and guilt through denial, alienation, and a ruining desire for normalcy. Némirovsky can be blamed not for being a self-hating Jewas so many people have written, but for ceding to the temptations and the complacency of an unexamined, but comfortable and sheltered existence. She was so focused on retaining her life as a writer and on protecting her family that she became blissfully and probably willingly unaware of what was happening around her to ban reflection and thus, unquestionably, actions. Her moral compass, got shattered by her desire to survive and to be une française à part entière, a respected and respectable French writer. Those regrettable facts don’t make Némirovsky special, but alas just unflatteringly too human and too ordinary because that she acted as almost everybody else did in spite of her indisputable literary gifts. What is monstrous about the period within which Némirovsky lived and its crimes is the fact that they aren’t accidents of history, which happened in spite of the opposition of the majority that tried to resist the folly of the few. What is monstrous is the fact that during that time, the majority didn’t stand up and thus acquiesced to barbarity without realizing that one can get dirty hands as much by not acting than by acting. I think that Coetzee is able to get Némirovsky because he understands that it is impossible to separate her from her time and from her past by solely focusing on what she has become in the Twenty-First century.  

The American flag as a totem

Thomas Sugrue’s fascinating points on Old Glory, the American flag:

In the United States the flag has the status of a religious icon, a totem. It cannot be carried horizontally or flat, but must always be ‘aloft and free’. There is a protocol for folding it, it can’t touch the ground, it can’t be burned except when it is worn out or irreparably damaged and then only as part of a special ritual. Military men and women salute it, civilians hold their right hands over their left breasts when singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, and schoolchildren pledge allegiance to it. It is also a ubiquitous presence in the American landscape. The Red, White and Blue waves from people’s porches, flies over car dealerships and gas stations and adorns flower-pots; cars are festooned with it in the form of bumper stickers, window decals and antenna pennants. The flag decorates the altars of churches of every denomination except those of a few dissenting sects. And it has become a necessary accessory for political candidates. Early in his campaign, Barack Obama was criticised for his unpatriotic failure to display a flag lapel pin: as president-elect he now regularly wears one.

The status of the American flag is unique for a Western country because America isn’t just considered by Americans’ to be another country in the world, but to be the chosen nation, the only nation on earth where anything is possible and where dreams come true. Because the flag symbolized all of the promises of America, it is sacred because America religionizes anything that illustrates its history and its own holiness. The French don’t have the same adoration for their flag, which is usually used by extreme rights parties and organizations to express radical nationalistic and xenophobic sentiments. The French flag is used, therefore, solely during sporting and other national events such as Bastille Day. It is rare to see French houses with French flags and when they exist, the presence raises the immediate and explosive suspicion that its habitants are members of the extreme right. One of the most interesting moments of last year’s French presidential election happened when the left’s candidate Ségolène Royal called for the French to learn to love and to be proud of their flag again by not being afraid to use more regularly. She was widely criticized not by the right, but many in her own camp who even went as far as to suggest that she was using national socialist (Nazi) ideas to score cheap political points. America’s love affair with its flag is unique because America believes religiously not only in its uniqueness, but in its greatness. This ardent and unshakable faith in American exceptionalism explains why it views its flag like many religious people view the Torah, the Bible or the Koran, as something divine that represents a transformational force for good in the world.

Wine and chips

The best things about the last cold Saturdays of November is that it becomes more enjoyable to have a slow day by doing simple things such as drinking a great red wine and reading an interesting book, which has the potential to be unforgettable . I'm catching up with my end of the year book list. I have just finished Toni Morrison A Mercy and in my opinion, it is better than her last one Love and profound and perplexing, as almost everything that Morrison writes, to require a second reading. 

The genius of acting in politics

It feels good not to see that Jacques Alain Miller agrees with me on the fact that Obamania has a lot to do with acting, Hollywood, and the only thing new about it is simply the fact the man using old tools and skills masterfully is a métis. In other words, the only thing new about new politics isn’t or at least not yet the content, but simply the form and the perceived racial identity of its leader. Sugary excerpt:

Obama has indeed cleverly cultivated the image of the Savior and Redeemer of the world, he has promised to “heal” and he assured us “change”. His genius consisted in not to shy away from the “phony” (loufoquerie) and draw without shame or hesitation in the stock of ancient myths, of the oldest beliefs of humanity. And that works for him, even in our age, the age of science and impiety, even when we are supposed to believe that we no longer believe. At the same time, his campaign masterly utilized the latest fads and gadgets of technology. He knowingly played the part of the Messiah, while repeatedly modernizing the role with a Hollywood rhetoric: Obama talks like in a movie.

Desperately seeking a French Obama

The Guardian has a worth reading article on Rachida Dati,Sarkozy’s Minister of Justice, whom had become last year the symbol of a new France because of her Moroccan and Algerian origins. The article is titled “the rise and the fall of Dati” which I think is misleading because Dati’s popularity was always in limbo; it was based on the French hopes and dreams that she could prove to them that integration doesn’t have to painful and doesn't require more efforts on their part. The fact that Dati was a newcomer meant that it was always going to be difficult for her to live up to the hype. She had never dealt with people from her new milieu. It is always harder for symbols to last when they make mistakes, which reinforce the fact that their particularities make them neither particular nor extraordinary. That is at the crux of the matter because it seems that France’s Obama obsession is like its obsession with Zidane because it shows that it wants its immigrants and minorities to be special, to be extraordinary before it accepts them. What is interesting is that Angelique Chrisafis, the author of the article, deals with this new, obsessive, and desperate quest of French to find their Obama. She shows that Dati that it has both helped and handicapped by the French obsession to find or to grow little Obamas in their banlieues. Sugary excerpt:

Dati has been hailed as the nearest thing France's fractured society has to Barack Obama. The French justice minister was raised in poverty on a housing estate in deepest Burgundy. Sarkozy said appointing her sent a message "to all the children of France that with merit and effort everything becomes possible". He also hoped it would neutralise the bad feeling after the riots on the run-down housing estates and his comment likening the wayward youths to scum.

Despite scepticism that this "window-dressing" at the top did little to change the discrimination poisoning French society, Dati immediately became one of the most popular figures in France. The speed of her rise has been staggering. But that of her fall could be too. The Dati fairytale has started to go spectacularly wrong.

[…] Mainland France currently has only one non-white MP and, in a recent poll, 80% of French people said they might vote for a black person at president, but only 58% could bring themselves to vote for one of millions of the French citizens of Algerian, Moroccan or Tunisian descent. As a role model, Dati is perhaps not the easiest person to warm to. But her appointment under the patronage of Sarkozy, and more importantly her survival, which now rests entirely on his whim, shows the real depths of the problem for minorities in France, who feel they are not being allowed to rise of their own accord. Fadela Amara, another woman of Algerian parentage whom Sarkozy appointed as a junior minister, says an Obama would have got nowhere in France. "It couldn't happen in France unless Sarkozy turned emperor and appointed a black president himself," she says.

There is something morbid and self-derogating about the French obsession with Obama because it is a way to look for quick answers to complex issues, which cannot be resolved by finding perfect people who make perfect speeches about hope and its audacity. Rachida Dati shows that Sarkozy may love America, but that he doesn’t get it and more gravely doesn’t have an intimate connection to France to understand that fundamental and existential reasons explain why the United States is the country of Walt Disney and France the one of Charles de Gaulle. In other words, America not only has a different history and views of race, but it also is more willing to believe in Fairy tales. America is still an adolescent country, which believes that both childhood and adolescence are the best periods in one’s life. France doesn’t have the same history and views of race and cannot therefore look to America for solutions even though it may look to it for inspiration. France is an old country. The French are less willing to accept political experimentation even though they may long for it. They always convince themselves that they want political experimentation, American-like hopeful politics because it is new and hip when it is happening in America and because it is always hard and melancholic for grownups to realize that they have lost their innocence and have become cynical. It is as dreaming of marrying Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, but in real life, knowing that a former prostitute cannot become the housewife of a billionaire. It is hard to be an adult in front of an adolescent who still believes s/he can fly.

In any case, there is already a French Obama, but the only trouble is that she is a white woman, which means that she has no excuse for being naively hopeful, she was born in Dakar, she has four kids, and her hopeful speeches sound menacing and Forrest Gump-like to the French ear. She isn’t as popular as Obama in France because she is more French that he is (which makes her better and more political in my opinion) and thus more provencal and more difficult to be idolized by those who have given to Obama God-like Status in a country that he doesn’t know.

 

 

The perpetual quest for identity

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I agree almost totally with Kenan Malik except on his views of Multiculturalism, which suffers, in my opinion, from a lack of nuance and willingness to contest received ideas on that subject.

Cold like death

I'm having a tough week because I've got so many things to do  and not enough time to do them since next week is Thanksgiving. November is always a month that is either great or insufferable for me. There is no middle ground and this November is insufferable, but I'm trying to get things together. On a different note, I've started to read Toni Morrison latest book A Mercy and so far, it is like tasting a mature Bordeaux and wondering whether it aged perfectly or whether time wasn't so kind to it after all.

Writing about Africa

Excellent point from John Rylein his review of Richard Dowden’s book Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, the Guardian about the increasing numbers of books on Africa, which have nothing really to do with their subject matter:

In an important sense, "Africa" is a western invention. Despite attempts by visionaries to promote unity among the states that inherited dominion from Europe's retreating empires, African politicians have never paid anything more than lip-service to the pan-African ideal. African writers have an uphill task reclaiming the term "Africa" from the mythic associations it has in western literature. Most of these writers don't write about continental aspirations but about the worlds within a single country, leaving generalisations to World Bank experts, grandstanding politicians and Hollywood stars.

For outsiders, writing about Africa is full of pitfalls - patronising generalisations, resounding clichés, imprecision and untruths. As the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina puts it in his satirical essay "How To Write About Africa", published in Granta a couple of years ago: "Always use the word 'Africa' or 'Darkness' or 'Safari' in your title. Subtitles may include the words 'Zanzibar', 'Masai', 'Zulu', 'Zambezi', 'Congo', 'Nile', 'Big', 'Sky', 'Shadow', 'Drum', 'Sun' or 'Bygone'. Also useful are words such as 'Guerrillas', 'Timeless', 'Primordial' and 'Tribal' ... Mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can't live without her. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed."

The power of specificity

Malcolm Gladwell on race and specificity:

What I think can rescue us from our discomfiture about talking about race is specificity. It is not better or worse to be a particular race. It just depends on what you are doing. If you want to be an airline pilot, say, you might have an advantage if you are Western. If you want to do advanced maths, it might help if you are Asian.

The death of newspapers

I wish I could disagree with Kenneth Anderson, my second favorite law professor, who is giving up his New York Times subscription because he founds its coverage bias, but I cannot. One of the most difficult things for me in recent years has been to find newspapers, written either in French or in English (it is harder in English), whose coverage of the news I can trust. What is scary is that bias coverage of news events is even worse on Television, which is why I have stopped watching cable news channels and caring about what journalists think because it is painfully obvious that their opinion is restricting their ability to make informed analysis. I found myself missing the nineties, which were a time where at least news wasn’t essentially about opinion, gossip, endless chatter, and entertainment. Boy, how have things changed! Sugary excerpt:

Back in the ’90s, the Times decided to try and become the national general newspaper for elites across the country. In other words, become in the general newspaper category what the Wall Street Journal had already become in the national business category. Costs of printing and distribution had fallen greatly, thanks to improving communications technologies, and so the costs of national distribution were not completely off those of the New York City metropolitan paper. Combined with a rising, affluent urban elite in American cities, the strategy was far from crazy. I thought it very smart at the time. I even used to own shares of the New York Times corporation.

But what these elites sought nationwide was not so much information as attitude. They wanted confirmation of who they were, not merely news of the day. The basic justification of a daily newspaper — “this happened today” — is the fundamental assertion that the daily news doesn’t need to justify itself apart from saying, “it happened.” This wasn’t good enough for the emerging elite audience of a national newspaper.

The Times saw its target audience and with its desire to put sensibility over sense decided that instead of a daily newspaper founded around the facts of what happened, it would instead offer its readers a daily magazine.

Magazines are wonderful things. But there is a difference between them and daily newspapers. The newspaper says “this happened today,” and frankly that’s enough to justify the paper’s existence. The magazine, by definition, is an analysis and commentary on events — and for that reason, magazines are weekly or monthly events, not dailies. At their best, magazines are informed opinion — each of those a separate requirement. But they are always a matter of opinion. And that’s what the Times showcased on its front pages. A magazine of opinion.

Sex and Shame

It’s very Anglo-Saxon to refuse to dissociate sex and shame, sex and morality. In Anglo-Saxon countries, particularly in Britain and in the United States,  people believe that the type of sex that someone (and the amount of sex when that someone is a woman) has tells them everything that they need to know about that person. Christophe Caldwell makes the following point about the use of sex by tabloids four public shaming:

Sex has become a battlefield because the idea is prevalent that sex is who you “really are”. Tabloid editors believe this, too. Mr Dacre argued last weekend for the vital moral role of the “public shaming” that tabloids engage in. “If their readers don’t agree with the defence of such values,” he intoned, “they would not buy those papers in such huge numbers.” This is a brazen non-sequitur. It is not values that people buy these papers for. It is the thrill of seeing a fellow citizen humiliated and harmed, whether he has offended anyone’s values or not. There is nothing traditional about that. The traditional view of sex is that of Paul, who sees it (in Romans 7:23) as “another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind”. This Christian view, whatever its problems, was more tolerant than our own. It recognised that people sometimes “do that which [they] would not”. Once we understand that, then the way is open to mercy.

What makes such a public shaming possible is that the Anglo-Saxon idea that there is no true separation between private and public lives. According to this belief, there can be no possible acceptable contradictions between one’s public and private personae because if one is bad spouse, and enjoys exotic sexual practices then one cannot be trusted in public. Thus, good people shouldn’t have anything to hide and should be having “clean” sex (because sex is, in itself, bad and must have noble goals and be moralized/disinfected to be acceptable). I don’t think that Anglo-Saxon societies are more voyeurs than other societies, but they are just less able to view sexual matters just as sexual matters because they always become public scandals even when the link proving that there is correlation between sex and public deeds isn’t proven.

Nothing to declare

The best thing about getting a cold in November is that it forces you to slow down and to rest without thinking about the fact that another year is ending, that you have so much to do to make the holidays and whatever else is left of this year wonderful.

It takes a lot of spin to make Christianity modern

Interesting thoughts from René Girard on religion, human society, and culture :

[…] human societies are very different from what specialists call “animal society” because the former have religion. In archaic society religion and culture are absolutely one, even when they don’t seem to be. Religion, therefore, is a way that human beings learn, without realizing it, how to deal with violence in their midst. Here, sacrifice comes in as the killing of substitute victims. This phenomenon as a scientific entity should be explained in purely anthropological terms. It takes no religious conviction to be understood. It is a complete revolution in the way that even people unfavorable to religion understand archaic religion; to show that they are absolutely indispensable to the survival of man is a very important thing.

In a way, Christianity is the end of archaic religions because it reveals that the victim is innocent. When you understand Christianity correctly in its closeness and distance from archaic religion it is the same structure, the scapegoat phenomenon, that Jesus is victim of. Yet the text is intended to destroy your belief in scapegoat phenomenon instead of using it in order to have sacrifices. The relationship is very central and rational with all archaic religions in the past that may go back tens of thousands of years. This is very important.

Color and common sense

Finally, somebody, David Aaronovitch, who expresses very well part of my beef with Obama and his so-called post racial America, which is in fact one where being biracial or multiracial means having to choose a side in order not to be invisible and to be successful. Unfortunately, Aaronovitch is a Brit, which may explain why he gets what Americans in their euphoria, ecstasy, and hopefulness that a symbol can get them past the dark spots of their history, have trouble understanding. I have to say that I respect Tiger Woods a lot more than Obama because he has always refused to be called Black or African American not because he felt that it would have been prejudicial to him but because he understood that saying that he was Black might have helped society to categorize him, but would have meant erasing part of his identity since his mother is Thai:

If I have heard one phrase in continual use about Barack Obama, it is about how he “represents”, in himself, whatever virtue or trend the user wishes to associate him with. In particular, of course, he is continually referred to as the first African-American” or “black” president of the United States.

It seems pedantic, and something worse, to argue that Obama is, in fact, mixed race. In some mouths this sounds like - and probably is - an attempt to deprive black people of a victory. It's a bit like when the inevitable stupid soul, unaware of the origin of the term, objects that, since Arabs are Semites, one cannot appropriate “anti-Semitism” to mean Jew-hatred. I always suspect the motives behind such plausibility.

And in the case of the President-elect there do seem to be two Obamas. The Hawaii Obama, brought up on that mixed-race island group by a white mother and two white grandparents, and a later Chicago Obama, living in the black community, marrying a black woman, attending a black Church and seeking his lost black father.

“He had to leave the island to find himself as a black man,” David Maraniss wrote in The Washington Post.

“He's black,” a friend said to me yesterday. “Most people would look at him and see him as being black.” Certainly 1924 Virginians would. And if the man see himself as being black, then where's the argument? Except, he isn't. To say that Mr Obama is black is to say, in effect, that his mother had no race or that her race was somehow obliterated by her choice of husband. Is to say that no one much had realised, had quite noticed, that her son was, in fact, mixed race. Is to say that being mixed race is not also to be something.

Listening to Bernard-Henri Lévy

Listening or reading Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL) is like listening to a hip-hop; both the lyrics and the music have to complement one another for the experience to be pleasant, The problem for BHL is that in his latest book Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, there is no symphony and that the lyrics are uninspired because he doesn't say anything new and more importantly because he seems to want to engage in an original debate by provoking valuable discussions in America without the proper distance to understand its soul and without invoking his frenchness. Bhl can be great, but in this excerpt where he talks about Sarah asserting that she is on the right on the Neoconservatives, he misses the mark because he loves too much Blue America to get America and to accept the so-called Red America (which is supposedly going to disappear now that Obama is president) and listening to him  is like eating an Americanized version of Coq-au vin made with excellent products while drinking awful Californian pinot noir.

Loneliness in America

Sugary excerpt of the week from Rosie Blau’s lunch with Toni Morrison whose next novel A Mercy is out on Tuesday:

Previously unflappable, Morrison gesticulates as she talks. “People say, ‘Do you live alone?’ Or, ‘You raised your children alone.’ And I say, ‘I was never alone.’” Only recently has she become the sole occupant of her house: “I had a family, I’ve got sisters and brothers, my mother was alive and this, that and the other.”

Nevertheless, the theme of desertion and solitude is evident throughout her fiction. This is a reflection of American history as a whole, she says, which is defined by the immigrant experience, the lack of a motherland. “There is a sense of loneliness, deep loneliness in so much American fiction and life, like something has been taken away.”

Even the Religious is about sex

Thomas Laqueur on the Religious Right and sex in his review of Dagmar Herzog’s book Sex in Crisis: The new sexual revolution and the future of American politics:

The Christian Right, as both Dagmar Herzog and the Republican nomination of Sarah Palin make abundantly clear, is not anti-sex. “We are the ones with the babe on the ticket”, gushes the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh. “Run to the arms of your prince and enter your dream”, advises the author, media star and abstinence-before-marriage advocate Lisa Bevere in her book Kissed the Girls and Made Them Cry, on sale at Palin’s old Pentecostal church in Wasilla. Evangelical conservatives have outflanked their enemies: “Christian sex”, and not what the revolutionaries of the 1960s had to offer, turns out to be “the most amazing sex on God’s Green earth”.

[…]  For the Evangelical Right, premarital intercourse and adultery and even homosexuality have become not so much wrong as injurious to mind, body and society. Even the Right’s arguments about abortion are often now less about whether it is an act of murder than about whether social science finds it harmful. […] In other words, the religious Right created late twentieth-century sexual politics on the coat tails of the secular Enlightenment’s ways of arguing. Even if the state could not be asked to legislate morality – although in the view of the Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia this is precisely what it is and should be doing when, for example, it makes sodomy illegal – it did have a clear role in furthering the psychological and physical well-being of its citizens and, indeed, of people all over the world. It is by secularizing sex that the religious Right made it so central to politics.

Politics in America is more sexualized than in any other part of the West because it is more religionized. What I find difficult about the sexualization and the religionization of American politics is that it makes not only judgment, but also condemnation of what ought to be considered personal necessary. The most appalling aspect during the election about the attacks against Sarah Palin was the way liberals and others, who are normally the champions of tolerance, personal choice, and individual rights, went after Palin, her family, and her religion without second thoughts. They decided that she didn’t deserve the respect that they would have asked the Right to give her had she been on their side, the right side. To hear some liberals and Democrats challenge Palin’s ability to be both a mother and a vice-president was laughable. More importantly, to listen to the demeaning comments on her pregnant daughter showed that the culture wars in America have stopped to be about values, but have become about winning or rather making the other side lose even it means losing one’s soul. Both the American right and left when they are so self-centered and when they have an absolute belief in the righteousness are equally as intolerant and as willing to burn to the stake the people are they consider to be part of the others as the much chastised religious right. I have the sense that America is such a religious country that even the unreligious and the secularist have to religionized their politics, their values, and sex not to become irrelevant and invisible.

On Gay marriage

I don't like the term "gay marriage" because I believe that it is unnecessarily polarizing since it affirms the presumption that a marriage between two people of the same gender is different than any other kind of marriage when it isn't. I think that Prop 8 in California and other ballot initiatives in Arizona, Florida, and I believe Colorado, which aimed to forbid gays to marry as if their sexual orientation could ever justify that discrimination no matter what any religion says. However, I believe that these kind of ballot initiatives are popping up all over the place because Democrats stupidly, cowardly, and hypocritically, in order not to lose so-called value voters, never defend the right of gays, as any member of American society, to marry by hiding behind their religion and by giving themselves good conscience by proposing civil unions to placate gays as parents placate teenagers who are close from adulthood when they ask for more freedom by giving them more privileges to do insignificant things to keep them from becoming adults. The point is that when the new president-elect and other democrats state that they are for civil unions not gay marriage, but that nevertheless they are again ballot initiatives to ban the right of gays to marry because they are discriminative, they have already lost their argument because they have made the point that gays shouldn't be allowed to marry in the first place even if homosexuality isn't a sin or a reason not to give them the same rights as any other citizens. I remember that during one of the too many debates in the democratic primary, Melissa Etheridge, a gay singer,  told Hillary Clinton that she felt that her husband had betrayed the gay community because he allowed the Defense of Marriage Act to pass and that later she endorsed Obama because as all of America she wanted change instead of Clintonism, which to her meant unacceptable compromises in the name of the good, I wonder what she will say if President Obama doesn't do much of this issue and never does anything to have the Defense of Marriage Act repealed by a Democratic congress.

Symbols and fallacies

I've been wondering for a while how important are symbols and whether I'm wrong to insist that they are important, but that they shouldn't be allowed to overwhelm everything else. My friends are all jubilant because they believe that the United States has crossed an important milestone, but when I ask them what else this election meant to them, they are ambivalent, unresponsive, or dismissive because they believe that they are living in the best times of American history because it is going to change America and the world no matter what happens next because change is already here since it is symbolized by the president and that all he has to do is to be himself and to trust his instincts. I hope that they are right, but the example of another change agent Sarkozy shows that brilliant campaigners and excellent story tellers have trouble governing because they get bored when there is no action, no crowds, and nothing other for them to do but to govern calmly and away from the admiring gazes of people chanting that you are making history. Will Obama be a better manager, that is better at governing that Sarkozy? I don't know but I believe that asking that question is like asking whether Bruce Wayne can have a better ordinary life than Clark Kent.

President Obama and me

Well, it's official, America has its new king of the world. The one good thing about this is that it means that the era of George W.  Bush, which lasted too long, is officially over (it has been unofficially over for a long time). The bad thing  is that I have the sense that the United States is, as in 2000, about to embark in a long journey that will end badly. I hope that I'm wrong because I love this country so much because it has given me the few things that I have by shaping my essence. This election has thought me so much about myself. I have learned that I hate to go with the flow and tofollow the masses without thinking and without questioning the consensus and received ideas. I have also learned thanks to President Obama that I'm not an ideologue, not a leftist, and that what I hate above all is inauthenticity and unreflectiveness. I have also learned that I don't like to be agreeable and that I should just remain a biased observer of politics and not try to become an actor. I love individuals not people and the political process in America, France and else where drive me crazy because I have this sinking feeling that we live in an era where speed,image and the bling-bling kill depth, thought, and what should always remain after the light is gone. Thus, for the first time, it is truly possible for me to say than an election changed me and probably changed the direction of my life. If I were religious, I would say that I have been on the road to Damascus or that I am returning from Egypt, but since I'm not, I simply feel like Oedipus in Cocteau's play realizing that he was born blind and that he has been married to his mother. America has a new president because I love this country so much I hope that he will be a good president, if not at least better than the last one.

Election day

The weirdest about election day in the United States is that it happens on a week day and that thus, voters have to take some time away from their busy work schedule (Americans are big workers) to vote. I never understood why Americans couldn't vote on a Sunday and why they are clinging to this peculiar and meaningless tradition of having elections on the first Tuesday of November. So since we are finally at the end of this circus, I guess I have to give you my prediction for tonight given that this election is officially and unofficially as the Superbowl so here it is: Obama will win by 4 points. If McCain wins, it would be as big of an upset as the New York Giants defeating the undefeated New England Patriots last January and that would mean that the election would be close and might even be closer than the one of 2000. However, the odds of that happening are, in my opinion and I have been wrong too many times this year to count, about as high as Sarkozy keeping the same prime minister and the same government for the rest of his term in office and letting them have some power.By the way, I am more convinced than before than politicians shouldn't campaign with their family, which shouldn't play any role in the political process precisely because I don't want the death or other unfortunate event in a politician's family to be exploited by petty fools and because I think the family members of politicians should be entitled as the rest of the people to have a private life. People should elect a politician for s/he does not for the family person s/he supposedly is.

Sometimes, facts are just too stubborn

The best joke I've heard all year about the American presidential elections: How do you call a métis, a multiracial man who has successfully run as black man, has had the media eating in the palm of his hand, has raised the most money than any presidential candidate in the history,  is able to make Americans believe that he is the One and that racism would be the only reason for his improbable loss? A shoo-in to become president of the United States and to replace Jesus as the Messiah.

The aphrodisiac nature of power

Charles Bremner has what I think is the sugary excerpt of the week on Sarkozy's jubilation to be at the head of the EU during this financial crisis. It is interesting because I think that this is what the United States has to look forward to with an Obama presidency except that Obama is not as ready for primetime as Sarkozy even though I'm sure that he is going to love the spotlight and the action at least as much as Sarko does. Sugary excerpt:

The President is reported by visitors to be delighted with his crisis. "Imagine if I wasn't in the European chair and the union was being led by someone else," he is telling people. From there it has been only a short step to offering his services on a more permanent basis than the rotating presidency. His team has come up with the answer. Sarko, they say, should stay in charge of the euro-zone, the 16 countries that will be sharing the currency when the Czech Republic takes its turn in the  presidency on December 31. He could keep the job till at least January 2010. In this way, he could create the "economic government" that France has long demanded.  "In stormy times, the Union needs a strong hand at the helm," say his entourage.  They invite us to imagine Czech leaders going on behalf of Europe to sort out the world head to head with the new US President, the Russians and Chinese. 
There is of course a snag. No other state of importance likes the idea. The Germans are amused by the presumption of the "Napoleon of Neuilly", as some of their commentators call Sarko, referring to his base in the posh western suburb. Chancellor Angela Merkel is weakened by the start of an election campaign against the other half of her coalition but she is saying that she has had enough of Sarkozy taking himself for Europe's natural leader.  There is no prize for guessing the British reaction to the idea of Sarko as a sort of permanent European chief, even if the UK is not in the euro zone. 

The Weekend before the end

I'm trying hard not to focus on politics this weekend because it is pointless and so frustrating to realize that the focus is on the sleaze and the glitz  just like when the media covers a made for tv entertainment event or gigantic sports game. I cannot wait for November 5, no strike that I cannot wait for the end of January when Americans will soon come to realize that there are no miracles in politics and politicians who perform magic tricks during their campaigns usually make bad presidents because governing is about prose not poetry.