The Republic of Dissent

Excess and punishment

Sean Collins has a great response in Spiked to the Time's cover article by Kurt Andersen arguing that the crisis is good for America because it will force Americans to stop their excesses and to learn healthier behaviors:

Andersen blames people for taking on excessive mortgage and consumer debt; in other words, for living beyond their means. In doing so, he ignores systemic factors, such as government promotion of home ownership, the Federal Reserve’s lowering of interest rates, and the general expansion of credit facilities. Moreover, it is not a sin for people to want to take a bet on their own future success (especially when offered credit at very low interest rates): it is a personal financial judgment call. People should have the freedom to make their own decisions, including those that prove to be unwise ones. (...) In 1978, Susan Sontag published Illness as Metaphor, in which she criticised the notion that one’s character causes disease. Today, people like Andersen blame character for the economic crisis, a kind of Recession as Moral Fable. In Andersen’s world, there are no larger economic forces in play, no credit derivatives, no state intervention. Just immoral individuals who are getting what they deserve, and who need to reform.

I have to say that all of the American-centricism and Eurocentrism of the elites and analysts covering the crisis frighten me and force me to the conclusion they have never understood the globalized world. This lack of understanding explains, in great part, why the West is failing to even recognize that a global crisis requires global solutions and that global solutions aren't ones, which just concern wealthy or emerging countries. I don't think somebody  has yet made the case that in globalized world, local policies mean zilch if the context isn't taken into account. It is strange but there is about to be a G-20 summit without African countries except of course for South Africa and that nobody, not even Africa's great white hope (Obama) , find that appalling.

Rebranding and change

If there is one thing that is to be expected of journalists is that they are always able to get the required distance to see the forest through the trees long, long, long, long after what they cheered for or rather supported passively or silently by suspending their obligation to critique and to analyze happened. A good example from the Financial Times's Clive Crook:

Mr Obama’s campaign always exaggerated the difference he would make on foreign policy. His style could hardly be more different from the caricature of US supremacism projected by George W. Bush, but the underlying issues were unlikely to be any easier to deal with. So it has proved. In many areas of foreign and security policy, in contrast to the clear break he is attempting in domestic policy, Mr Obama is mostly rebranding Mr Bush’s approach.

The question then becomes whether the so-called post-racial society, which had to be created with the election of a multiracial president was the only change Journalists believed in because as Americans they believe that race is everything because minorities are so different in themselves that Obama, no matter what his policies were and no matter the fact his "yes, we can" simple meant "if you don't , you are not in," was going to be a different President than Bush II. If the only change we could believe in was simply racial, then Obama's election (not his years in power for we have to see where he will go from here)  reaffirms what Kipling and all of those happy and superior fools  believe, which is that race makes us who we are.

Inevitable clashes

The Times of London on Sarkozy, Obama, the G20 and the competition to win brownie points and  to be visible on the international scene during the economic crisis:

President Sarkozy yesterday threatened to wreck the London summit if France’s demands for tougher financial regulation are not met.
France will not accept a G20 that produces a “false success with language that sounds good but contains no commitments”, his advisers said.
(...) The French threat dramatically raised the temperature hours before President Obama arrives in London today. If carried through, it would ruin a summit for which Mr Brown and Mr Obama have high ambitions, believing it vital to international recovery. 
Mr Sarkozy, who blames the “Anglo-Saxons” for causing the economic crisis, told his ministers last week that he would leave Mr Brown’s summit “if it does not work out”.

Sarkozy is realizing that he has absolutely nothing to gain by letting Obama impose himself as the one taking the lead in these times of crisis and doing the most to solve complicated issues by investing more and by being bolder. Sarkozy's only choice is to recreate a barrier, which he has never really believed in, the one between the French and the Anglo-Saxons. He  is attempting to separate, to distinguish himself from Brown and Obama to remain not only relevant, but essential. The funny and execrable thing about politicians is that they have no shame, no hesitation about becoming what they despise when it is for the greater good, which in almost all the cases, is the protection of their political career. Sarkozy is doing a Chirac because he is slowly learning that it pays to standing out and saying no in times of crisis is  a better way to exist than just saying yes and following the leadership of the United States. Sarkozy doesn't want to follow Obama, he wants to be his equal, if he can't be an equal partner,  he isn't going to hesitate to become his foe, a sympathetic foe, but a foe nevertheless.

Obscenity and reality

Quote of the day from Annette Messager :

Vulnerability is so much greater in the world than in any artwork that it is impossible today to create anything more obscene than reality.

Capitulation

Excellent article in Prospect  on Hanif Kureishi, the Salman Rushdie affair, and writing about race and religion:

What particularly upset Kureishi’s critics was his refusal to play along with the idea that Asian writers had to treat Asian characters with respect. “I am a professional businessman, not a professional Pakistani,” the landlord Nasser tells his white sidekick Johnny in Kureishi’s screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette when he evicts a black tenant. “It was a new idea of being Asian,” Kureishi says, “not the traditional notion of victims cowering in the corner. I wanted to show that Asians were not all progressive or nice—so I had an Asian as a vicious Thatcherite.”
(...)The Rushdie affair, Kureishi believes, transformed not just his own work, but also “the very notion of writing.” The fatwa “created a climate of terror and fear. Writers had to think about what they were writing in a way they never had to before. Free speech became an issue as it had not been before. Liberals had to take a stand, to defend an ideology they had not really had to think about before.” How have they borne up to the task? “The attacks on Rushdie showed that words can be dangerous. They also showed why critical thought is more important than ever, why blasphemy and immorality and insult need protection.
But most people, most writers, want to keep their heads down, live a quiet life. They don’t want a bomb in the letterbox. They have succumbed to the fear.”

Kureishi is correct in his assessment that writers have capitulated to fear. I think that this capitulation is less about fear and cowardice, than about the fact that too many writers don't view writing as Sartre and Camus did and don't believe that they have responsibilities beyond the one to sell and to be cool. Littérature engagée is dead and that is a tragedy for a century  that needs it more than anything else.

It's everywhere...

I haven't heard much about this, and I wonder why:

The president of Brasil, Lula da Silva, at a joint press conference on the 27th of March 2009 with Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, made the following statement: “This crisis was caused by the irrational behaviour of white people with blue eyes, who before the crisis appeared to know everything and now demonstrate that they know nothing.”
That statement is not merely ignorant and stupid.  That statement is racist.  As a white person with blue eyes, I am offended by it.  I am waiting for Mr. Lula da Silva’s apology to the entire population of white people with blue eyes.

What amazes me is that Brown didn't stop him and I hope that it was just a case of something being lost in translation. Willem Buiter wonders if Lula's assertion is an example of acceptable racism  ( I think that the political correct expression for that is acceptable/tolerable bias) and that the fact that his question is a legitimate shows that all the post-racial stick is garbage especially in societies where it is tolerated to assume that race determines identity and behavior.

To count, to categorize and to discriminate

I agree with the sentiments expressed by Kenan Malik, but disagree with the substance of his arguments and his conclusion:

The foundation stone of the secular French republic is that all citizens should be equal and free from distinctions of race or religion. But senior politicians have begun to recognise that France remains deeply disfigured by racism. To combat this, Sarkozy argues, it is necessary to collect ethnically based data. The British experience suggests that such policies often do more harm than good.
Two assumptions underlie the argument for ethnic monitoring: first, that ethnicity and culture are the most important labels we can place on people; and second, that there is a causal relationship between membership of such a group and disproportional outcomes between groups.
(...) A system obsessed by ethnic categories, however, is rarely able to make those kinds of connections.
Ethnic monitoring does not just produce misleading data. The process of classification often creates the very problems it is supposed to solve. Local authorities have used ethnic categories not just as a means of collecting data but also as a way of distributing political power — by promoting certain “community leaders” – and of disbursing public funds through ethnically based projects. Once the allocation of power, resources and opportunities become linked to membership of particular groups, then people inevitably begin to identify themselves in terms of those ethnicities, and only those ethnicities.

If collecting ethnic/racial stats is to categorize and to force people to identity with an ethnic group, then why keep any kind of statistics at all, why count the numbers of men and women, of adults and children, of single and married people if the presumption is that they identify people according to certain traits, which shouldn't define them and thus fragment a society by encouraging discrimination and ghettoisation. I may be naive, but I don't think that stats lie and create different realities rather they just reflect what is happening because they are a tool. As all instruments, they become dangerous when people are allowed.able to use them to discriminate, which means that it is narrow-minded to argue that they are intrinsically bad and should be used. The point is that modern societies have never, for long, forbidden themselves from using informative tools as ethnic/racial stats based on what may happen, based on the possibility of mischief and of terrible wrongs happening. The sad fact is that we use tools  in our societies, which we wished we didn't have to use and which we know can have disastrous effects such as judging the accused and putting them to jail when they are found guilt. We do so even though we know that there are risks that innocent people can end up in jail or that punishment may never lead to rehabilitation, but an aggravation and a multiplication of dangerous behaviors. We do these things because they are necessary for the health of society, its stability and its evolution. We do them while taking all the necessary precautions to avoid wrongs. It is true that ethnic/racial stats are not a panacea and can lead to problems, but it isn't true that societies, which use them don't have choices and can't avoid the wrongs, which may ensue by utilizing them. There is no determinism here and more importantly, no fatality. I'm not going to say that there is no alternative to ethnic/racial stats, but rather that they are a tool not an end. What matters is the how, the hard work of creating policies, which make them use. Everything else, all the bad tings, which may happen depend on our ethics and our willingness to accept that policy still matters.

Mbeki and South Africa

Joseph Lelyveld reviews Mark Gessiser's book, A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream:

Gevisser's biography doesn't begin to resolve the issues of character it repeatedly raises. The chapters on Mbeki's handling of the AIDS crisis and his failure to intervene effectively before starvation and disease became rampant in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe leave the reader with a conundrum familiar to anyone who has tried from afar to keep up with these issues. Was it that Thabo Mbeki could not resist defying the conventional wisdom of those who were not black Africans—intrusive white busybodies of all description—or was he responding to political pressures the busybodies did not perceive or appreciate?
In the case of AIDS, Mbeki faced no significant resistance from within the African National Congress until Nelson Mandela finally made an issue of his denialism. In view of the scale and duration of the calamity, the question of why the government's unresponsiveness never became a burning political issue for the movement and its basic constituency can't be seen simply as a function of one man's overrationalized hang-ups. Obviously, there was a drastic failure of leadership. But if there were no cultural inhibitions in the way of common-sense public health policies, why wasn't this the issue on which he fell? Helen Epstein's 2007 book, The Invisible Cure, based on articles that first appeared in these pages, offers a more sensitive consideration of such questions than this study of the doleful story's central figure.

Unfortunately, the views of Mbeki on Aids just reflect a conspiracy theory view of reality and of history, which alas too many South Africans and Africans share. This is one of the reasons why most of the outrage of the Pope's views of condoms and aids was expressed in the West not in the countries, which he visited. Mbeki's time in power showed mediocre leadership in South Africa could have disastrous effects on its society. The good news is that he is gone, the bad news is Jacob Zuma is the next great white hope for a country, which can't afford atrocious and autistic political leaders unashamed to play identity politics.

Therapy culture

Sugary excerpt of the day by Jennie Bristow  in Spiked:

(...) the contemporary focus on emotions is anything but honest and open. It is highly prescriptive about the kind of emotions that people should display, and the ways in which they should display them.
For example, emoting about how you feel hurt by a criticism, offended by a joke, deeply saddened by Jade Goody’s death – all of these forms of emotional engagement are validated by contemporary culture. On the other hand, becoming angry with your partner, being passionately committed to an argument, feeling nauseated by the media circus surrounding Jade Goody’s death – these emotional reactions and interactions are treated as suspect and in need of suppression or careful management by a trained professional. Therapy culture does not prize the honest display of emotion – it seeks to train us in emotional etiquette, and proves itself viciously intolerant of those who refuse to play the game.

Bossnappings

The Guardian has an article on the current wave in France of Bossnapping, which is the kidnapping of bosses by workers in attempt to avoid firings or to solve other crisis in the enterprise:

France is braced for a wave of such "bossnappings", as desperate staff take desperate action. Mass layoffs blamed on the financial crisis have seen the protest movement splinter into spontaneous hostage-taking at plants and factories around the country. Chief executives arriving from Paris to announce redundancies find themselves barred from leaving. It is "our only remaining bartering tool" one union leader said.
France has a history of bossnappings dating back to May 1968 and the 1970s, when executives were held hostage in the struggle for rights. Today's demands are more mundane: hostage-takers range from single mothers to the nearly retired - they want jobs, proper pay and no brutal layoffs. The two "bossnappings" this month are the latest examples in a rise in radical gestures that has seen members of the public stage commando "picnics" in supermarkets, feasting from the shelves in revenge against multinationals, shouting "we will not pay for your crisis".

Bossnappings are able to happen in France because the French look at entrepreneurs and other's rich people who are at the head of a business with suspicion because to them, they aren't as honest and as hard working as their workers who are doing the real work, which is enabling them to get rich. The point is that in France, an successful entrepreneur is more often than not viewed as a opportunist who has been able to exploit his workers by taking full advantage of the fruits of their labor. The bosses who are the victims of these bossnappings will not be viewed as victims, but rather as people who are the causes of their employees' despair.

Obamanomics

Evidently, Obamanomics has created great expectations. Ambition is always good except when it becomes blinding and restrictive in the sense that the necessary and the urgent, but less glamorous doesn't occupy the first place:

(...) Obamanomics represents something even bigger than all that. At a moment when the fundamental precepts of market capitalism and government’s relationship to the economy are up for grabs, the Obamans are attempting nothing less than a redefinition of progressivism, which could alter the terms of political engagement and the ideological balance of power for decades to come. With their budget, they have laid out a vision that, as former Labor secretary Robert Reich puts it, “reverses and repudiates the economic philosophy that has dominated America since 1981.” Obamanomics isn’t merely the end of Reaganomics, in other words. It’s the end of Rubinomics, too.

Data is king !

Arthur Goldhammer on Racial stats and France:

(...) what we don't know in the French case, precisely because we lack adequate statistics, is the degree to which high observed unemployment rates are distributed among different groups issus de l'immigration: Is high unemployment primarily a phenomenon of the first generation? To what extent do the second and third and fourth generations also exhibit differential unemployment and education rates when compared with les Français de souche? How do neighborhood patterns vary with assimilation? None of these questions can be answered by inference from data on last names and parental origin alone. That is why better data are needed.

To put it simply, data is king especially if the goal is to have policies that aren't about fear and fantasies, but that actually try to address problems by being in touch with reality. The issue might be that in France as in most Western countries, immigration policy is about everything else but facts and data.

Writing about female sexuality

I agree with Steven Beattie when he writes this:

In both literature and film (think of Fat Girl, Boys Don’t Cry, or Lolita), Western society seems to find depictions of female sexuality troubling – a holdover from our patriarchal past, perhaps? Or perhaps it has to do with the men who still hold the reins of power in this country – despite protests of great social progress to the contrary – being threatened by forthright expressions of female sexuality. Whatever the cause, North American writers in general, and Canadian writers in particular, tend to shy away from frank depictions of sexual material, especially when they are told from the female’s perspective.

Facts that kill

Just the facts from Willem Buiter:

The US authorities have no money to fulfil their ambition of stopping large US banks from failing without taking them into public ownership.

Something tells me that in a couple of months, people are going to Obamanize Krugman by taking the worship of his person to unhealthy levels because he would have been proven right.

The Geithnerization of Obama

I watched for a while online the Town Hall meeting of Obama this afternoon. I couldn't help but to think of his Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner and to have this fear deep down my stomach that he is still an actor, a very talented one, playing a role that is too big for him or a singer trying to nail a song that he doesn't have the vocals to sing. The problem with Obama is that he was so successful at being a presidential candidate that he is reluctant to put the more austere clothes of the President. I kept following him his movements as he walked across the room and making grand gestures to convince the people that he is right and my only thought was, "Oh my God, does he know what he is doing?"Obama is either going to try to Obamanize  the role of President of the United States or to follow the examples of the old boring white (I heard through the grapevine that race is still important in America) males, which preceded him.

An agreeable and multilateral Hegemon

Sugary excerpt from the Day from Kenneth Anderson who wonders out loud what Raymond Aron would have thought of the idea of an Agreeable Hegemon who believes solely in multilateralism because it wants to be like and to the exercise of power in general when it isn't agreed to by the others makes America unlikable:

America has enemies who would rejoice if the US were to forsake its role as provider of hegemonic order. It also has friends and allies who would be glad to embrace a ‘multilateral’ America – not realizing that America has something else in mind, or perhaps realizing it, but still on multilateral-autopilot. But where is Aron? Where is Raymond Aron? Or for that matter, De Gaulle? What would they say? You can trust an America that is mostly about its interests, a little about its ideals, even if you have to denounce it sometimes as a unilateralist in order to keep it and you in the game; you can trust an America that undiplomatically, rudely even, declares its interests and its ideals, puts them first, and invites others to go along with it; multilateralism is great if it means you can have some influence on the plans of America, but only if you can still trust that America plans to carry out its plans because they’re still its rather than yours. An America that suddenly wants to work the hardest, most intractable, hard-realism problems through the UN? What is this? An America that believes that the multilateral processes of the Security Council are the right way to pursue foreign policy because those processes treat the US as just another of the big boys in the world? The biggest, sure, indispensable, even, if you want to play the flatterer, but that’s neither here nor there – hey, we’re just another player in the game, everybody, even if we’re big or even the biggest, hey, we’re just another player. What would Aron say to that?

Aron would have scoffed and predicted that the idea of  an agreeable and multilateral Hegemon is about appearance of change (symbol not substance) and the reluctance of a new administration to appear bullish because for now, it cherishes its popularity abroad, which is of course based on the fantasy that it will be agreeable and multilateral all the way. The trouble about being a hegemon is that sooner or later the realizations hit you that it is impossible to win and that it is best to protect your interests as other countries are without asking for permission, without placing the emphasis on agreeability. The point is that all the bla bla about smart diplomacy, reset buttons and everything else is theater to hide the fact that American foreign policy has to be about America and its interests first and everything else afterward. All one has to remember is that Bush II during his first presidential campaign talked about humility and that it all went out of the window when he realized that at the end, America will always share the responsibility and more than likely the blame because it has the power, which might as well give it as much freedom as possible especially from those, who will always be ready to condemn it solely for being at that position of power.

Turning men into readers

Jean Edelstein offers some suggestions to make men read more:

But how can the publishing industry exploit this potentially under-served market of Slow Worm men, transforming them into Page Turners and Double Bookers – or, at least, into Serial Shelvers, since they're fairly profitable for publishers as well? Thanks to the endurance of the stereotype that reading is for girls, is it too late to persuade those in possession of Y chromosomes that enjoying a book (or two or three simultaneously) is a perfectly masculine activity? It doesn't help, of course, that so many books are clad in covers which are bright pink or otherwise offensively girly. I don't want to read them on the bus, so I can only imagine that men must be even more discouraged.
Real change won't occur until publishers band together and make a concentrated effort to re-masculate reading. One option, I suppose, would be to publish special gentlemen's editions of books that are currently targeted at women, but might actually have male appeal. Female protagonists could be given male names, and romantic plots could be tweaked slightly to be more about football.

I'm not sure that I'm for the re-masculinisation of books. I hate the idea that writers have to write with a specific gender in mind. All we have to do is to look at movies to see what masculinization does to an art especially when it assumes that virility is about testosterone and brutality and that feminization forces to see movies, which assumes that women's lives revolve around fighting their Prince Charming.

Worrisome gap

Worth noting post on the Executive Watch from  Duke law School on the similarities between Bush and Obama when it comes to terrorism:

The gap between symbol and substance is also evident in recent litigation challenging the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance and rendition programs.  Even though Candidate Obama criticized these activities as unlawful, the Obama administration now endorses the Bush administration’s argument that the “state secrets privilege” bars lawsuits challenging these programs.  In the words of the ACLU, “Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama’s Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue.” (...) We have no particular quarrels with the substantive positions that the Obama administration has taken so far in the war on terrorism. Our point is simply that there is much less distance between those positions and the positions of the Bush administration than many people would like to acknowledge. Neither verbal gymnastics nor partisan hyperbole should obscure this fact.

Does this mean that Bush wasn't that bad or that Obama is just simply not the candidate of Change as so many thought he was going to be? Does the fact that he is actually a pragmatist a sure sign that all the idealists who worship will be disappointed? I'm wondering what my favorite law professor and Maryland State Senator , Jamin Raskin thinks of all of this.

Key issues

From Andrew Brown, a good summary of Gilles Kepel, criticism of the British and in my view Anglo-saxon version of Multiculturalism and identity politics:

The fundamental criticism of multiculturalism and identity politics, raised by the French sociologist Gilles Kepel amongst others, is that it creates a class of politicians with a vested interested in separatism and extremism, because without it no one would care about them.

In my view, there is a difference between identity politics and multiculturalism even though in the mind of most it is no longer to differentiate the two. In any case, Kepel with whom I don't agree often, puts his finger on the key issue, which is the one of power in a system where race and other categories, which reinforce identity politics are valued and recognized as legitimate basis for social and political identities. Kepel's criticism reminds of Professor Anderson's pronouncement during the presidential campaign that Obama was part of the new class, which has a vested interest in creating conflicts in order to solve them:

Obama is a classic New Class elitist, by education, outlook, everything. So is his wife. Their professional lives have consisted in - community organizing? please - the elite management of the poor and, of even greater importance today, management of, but also production of, communalist tensions through multiculturalism and identity politics. That’s what the New Class does; that’s what it exists to do. Along with, to be sure, extracting rents for managing social conflicts that it also has much interest in creating.

In America, the fact the NAACP still exists and will never disappear proves in a way Kepel's point that separation and extremism are political sources of power in a system where social and political dialogues aren't possible without shaming and without recriminations. Unfortunately, the French approach to these issues is not better as proves the fact that France is still debating whether to use ethnic statistics to count its minorities. It is,  in my opinion,  as bad even though it is based on the noble idea that color, race, religion or whatever else shouldn't matter to the State.

The possibility of failure

I guess hope and change can't hide the fire when it is getting close to the believers' home and that some of them, John Ibbitson in this case, are force to face the possibility that the hopeful one can fail:

We could be entering a future that none of us wants to face, a future in which we will be much poorer, a future in which we realize that everything Barack Obama tried only made things worse.

Finding beautiful symbols

This is precisely  the reason why I hate the increasing popular idea that diversity is all about image and that putting people who look different, but are beautiful and attractive (beauty is stereotypically a sign of intelligence) in position of power absolves States from elaborating coherent policies to fight discrimination and to decrease inequalities whether they are about race, gender or simply class. The fact that Sarkozy is thinking about replacing Rachida Dati with a beautiful black journalist proves my point. Symbols when they are only symbols and valued simply for what make them difference are just figure-heads and are almost condemned to fail because they are expected to be perfect or at the very least not to be their authentic self if that self isn't what people expect or desire to see.

The Sarkozy syndrome

Obama is suffering from the Sarkozy Syndrome, which is that disease that politicians get when they believe that they must constantly be on the move, on TV, in action to produce results or at least convince the people that they are doing something. Sarkozy was on French TV to explain his economic policies. Obama is going on TV for the thousand times tonight to assure Americans that he has things under control. Is that a coincidence? I think not. The problem with the Sarkozy syndrome is that eventually it leads to paralysis especially when the attractiveness of having a president who moves and communicates constantly stops being new to the press and to the voters. The problem for Sarkozy today, who has been in power for almost two years now,  is that his words and his actions don't mean anything because they haven't led to change (ah yes here is that powerfully empty word again). The danger for Obama is exactly that, the loss of credibility and irrelevance. I wonder if in a year, people are still going to listen to him and to feel something move within themselves if nothing has happened or rather if the economical situation in America hasn't improved. 

Escaping mastery

Interesting theory about the reason why Beckett chose to leave English to write in French (hat tip: conversational reading). It is interesting, but I'm not buying it even though the quote Wyatt Mason uses to support his theory makes it legitimate and persuasive:

It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used when most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping though–I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.

I'm not buying it. I know from experience that to decide to write in another language than one's native one isn't about escaping one's mastery of it.  It is about falling in love with another language and realizing that it is possible to do things with it that you can't possibly do with your own language. I don't think that French was to Beckett a way to escape English or to pursue new challenges, I think that it was rather a vehicle, which enabled him to reach his purpose as a writer without feeling limited and austere. I have never been able to give up French for English because it never made me fall in love in it. It never made it believe that it was more magical than French even though it is more permissive and inclusive.

The laments of the superpowerful

It is hard for me to share James Surowiecki's sense of injustice over the fact that Europeans are once again taking advantage of America without doing their fair share. It is a familiar refrain and I have to say that given the status of America as the sole superpower, it is hard to empathize (easier to sympathize) because after all with power comes great responsibilities as well as great freedoms. All one has to do is to read Krugman's post  last week on Spain (even though he shares the views that Europeans aren't doing enough. An official of the European Central Bank responded to this assertion in the Wall Street Journal) to understand why Europe can't follow the "lead" of United States especially given the fact that its president doesn't seem to know its own mind when it comes to economic issues. Sugary excerpt:

The thing about government spending is that it “leaks”: a good chunk of our stimulus package will buy other countries’ goods. So Europeans can avoid getting too deeply into debt and still reap some of the benefits of our borrowing. This is unfair: in effect, Europe is refusing to carry its share of the global economic burden and is piggybacking on us. But it’s hard to see how things could have turned out otherwise. The U.S. economy, much more than Europe’s, is like the proverbial shark: if it doesn’t keep moving forward, it dies (or at least creates a lot of misery). In some sense, we need economic growth more than Europe does. It’s not surprising that we’re going to be the ones who end up paying for it.

The impossibility of a dialogue

As John Jackson shows in his account of a discussion about race and racism, which occurred on HBO on the Bill Maher's show, it is still impossible to talk about race in Obama's America. My suspicion is that it is because the goal of the participants isn't to have a dialogue, but to score points and win the argument to be able to dictate to the others what they should believe and do. Having a dialogue about race in America remains impossible because the main goals aren't to reconcile and to move forward, but to divide, to shame, to castigate, to vex, and to gain privileges and power that would be unchallengeable. Sugary excerpt:

Breitbart was debating Georgetown’s Michael Eric Dyson during the telecast and arguing (it seems) that any and all invocations of racism are bogus. They simply end debates with a broad-brushed attempt at categorical demonization. Label someone a racist, he says, and you can silence them.
For instance, Maher called Rush Limbaugh’s antics racist, including the radio host’s giddy promotion of that “Obama, the Magic Negro” song. Breitbart took offense, calling the accusation utterly ridiculous. A liberal journalist coined the phrase, he responded. So, isn’t that journalist also a racist then?
Breitbart reminded Maher that “there was no greater defender of Clarence Thomas than Rush Limbaugh.” The crowd laughed.
Dyson and Maher pushed back, at which point Breitbart chalked all of this “hypersensitive” race talk (and seemingly all racist accusations) to strong-armed indoctrination and intimidation by the powerful “black studies intelligentsia crowd” that forces other African Americans to give lip service to the belief that racism is everywhere.

None of these three people wanted to listen to the other. Their goal was to express an ideological point of view and to get the other to shut up or to contest it so heatedly that the reaction or rather the over-reaction would be interpreted as an admission that the ideological viewpoint can't be illegitimate if it can't be challenged rationally. My point is that in America, people talk about race the way they talk about God, Jesus, and religion. To them, facts don't matter since they already have the truth on the side and are fervent believers in their dogmas.

The power of a funny review

This review of Charlotte Roche's controversial book Feuchtgebiete in the Sydney Morning Herald makes me want to read it and to hopefully find it humorous. I don't know why, but the peculiar idea of reading about female hygiene interests me in this circumstance. I can't bring myself to diss Roche as an exploiter of woman sexuality to sell books without giving it a chance. Sugary excerpt:

Wetlands, Roche says, had originally been intended as a serious polemic against the tyranny of female sexual hygiene. "The first idea I had was a nonfictional thing against chemicals. People think the smell and the liquid in the vagina are dirt and they have to get rid of it. But it's like in the nose - you need the liquid. They think they have to shower three times a day and then they ruin the body's own barriers.
"But then I thought it would be too much like a teacher talking at them, this TV host telling them . . . " - she wags a finger - " 'That's the way I want you to treat your vagina.' And so I thought maybe it's better to have someone who can do all those things who wasn't me and that's when Helen was invented. It was much more fun. I was sitting there laughing. I didn't know that all these things were in my head.

Politicians and the bad use of language

The Times of London  has an article discussing Sarkozy's conscious butchering of the French language almost in the same manner Bush II used to butcher English. The difference, here, is that the French to the contrary of Americans, take their language seriously and usually expect their politicians to use it perfectly. Yet, in a very American way, Sarkozy believes that speaking French badly connects him to the people who otherwise would see him just as the republican monarch who loves Rolexes. Sugary excerpt:

Stressing his youth, President Sarkozy makes informality a mark of office. He uses the familiar tu form of address to people he has never met. He mangles his pronunciation, in a manner reminiscent of Tony Blair's glottal stop. He makes grammatical mistakes, such as removing the ne from the ne ... pas construction. Purists are unamused. They condemn as philistinism the President's partiality for colloquialism.
The critics have a point. Language is a social medium. A politician who fails to speak it clearly and ignores grammar risks giving an impression of arrogance - as if only those in subordinate roles need trouble with linguistic convention. Politicians who lack the facility to speak their own language comprehensibly are ripe for mockery.

What disturbs me is, to quote one of Bush II's most famous expressions, the soft bigotry of lower expectations. The fact that politicians believe that the people want their politicians to come down to their level instead of wanting to get up to theirs when they are sophisticated and well-educated is a disturbing global trend, which shows that, more than ever, artificial and pompous populism works. There has been a globalization of political strategy  in the sense that nowadays, politicians spend too much time copying each other, sharing the same image consultants, pollsters, and policy advisers without taking into consideration the fact that differences matter and that what works in Washington doesn't work in Paris and shouldn't even in some cases be tried because local sensitivities and traditions are sometimes crucial. People may live in the same interconnected world, but they are not the same. Simplicity is dangerous when it becomes about oversimplification and the sacralization of the grotesque and of mediocrity.
What bothers me with Sarkozy and its contention that orthographic and grammatical errors make him part of the people and demonstrate that he is at heart a simple man is the fact that he is dumbing down French politics and putting down the French language by making the point implicitly that it is too complicated and that speaking it unwell on purpose without making the effort to perfect its usage is a sign of welcomed simplicity and of populous nobility.

Postmodernism and evil

Garth Risk Hallberg has a great post on the Millions Blog on Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, Holocaust, Evil and Postmodernism. It is a bit long, but it is worth reading. Sugary excerpt:

Under the old dispensation, writing about the Holocaust was seen as brave precisely because one owed it to one's subject to also be good. Under the new one, you can dedicate your novel to "the dead" and still have your readers walk away remembering mostly the masturbation fantasies. If no one will honor your bravery, it's only because you've managed to annihilate the source of any risk you might have run.
Such is our current situation. We've moved from the Eichmann in Jerusalem controversy to the Angel at the Fence kerfuffle, from The Drowned and the Saved to BOY IN PJS. We've crossed the great divide between reverence and "meh." This movement is called postmodernism, and in abler hands than Littell's, it may yet prove itself capable of finding new ways to speak about the unspeakable. And yet it's worth remembering that its direct forerunner, Friedrich Nietzsche, called not for the abandonment of all values, but their revaluation. The example of The Kindly Ones suggests that that revaluation becomes more difficult, not less, in the absence of something to rebel against. When nothing is sacred, there can be no sacrilege.

Having read the book both in French and in English (it was a better read in English because French can make the mundane and heavy prose so irritable and depressing that reading it feels as one felt as a child having to read part of the Bible, which didn't talk about sex, romance or some form of betrayal), I never felt that I was reading something masterful, but rather a work of art,  something on which somebody had worked hard. I guess is that sense of hard work, which make people can it masterful. My point is that Littell's book is about the desacralization of its subject matter and not much else. I don't remember any of its sentences. I can still see some of its gross imagery, but everything else is gone and disappears in the abyss of pompous noise and grandiose-like literature enamored with the easiness in which it can deconstruct something sacred or important. The book isn't about the banality of evil, because that would me it reflective and philosophical, it is about its nihilation. The more its narrator talks, the less we see and feel. He doesn't have a face and what he did is evil,but it is mostly about nothingness. The Kindly Ones doesn't horrify, it doesn't leave me perplexed, I read it like I read my chemistry book in English in High School. I was having a hard time understanding English and yet, I had to try to understand a subject, which I hated. It was an interesting exercise because I had to try to make Na-Cl mean something. I was never successful,but still, I couldn't help but to try fearing that I was missing, which is probably why I read The Kindly Ones in both French and English. But the way, I managed to get a C in chemistry and that should tell you a lot about my ability to complete atrociously boring tasks.

Counting the Blacks, the Arabs, and the Others

France has had a remarkable tradition (remarkable in every sense of the word) of not counting its minorities. This reluctance to use statistics to identify its minorities has made it harder for the State to fight discrimination or to even fight the increasing accepted idea that there are too many people from the wrong kind of minority groups in France. The problem is that there is no other to even start to deal with minorities and the problem, which they face without using statistics, which actually inform the country about its ethnic, racial make up or whatever else you want to use to acknowledge the fact that France in 2009 is very different from France in 1909. A sugary excerpt from Charles Bremner on this issue:

The idea has split the country -- and not always along the usual lines. Some anti-racism groups are heavily against it while others support it. Fadela Amara, the feminist activist of Algerian background who is Sarkozy's Minister for the Inner City, said: "Our country must not become a mosaic of communities. No-one must ever wear the Star of David again" -- a reference to the war.(...)Louis Schweitzer, head of the High Authority for the Struggle against Discriminations and Equality (Halde) is strongly opposed to ethnic statistics. "There is only one human race," he says in today's Libération. "In creating ethno-racial statistics you create a reality. You risk turning these categories into reality." 

It is very romantic and idealistic to believe that France is one republic, which shouldn't be divided by numbers even though those numbers reflect only a reality that is irrefutable. The trouble is that even in France, romance doesn't erase human prejudices, doesn't fight discrimination or facilitate integration. France has been increasingly divided by the fact that visible differences are still equated to foreignness and  have become the fantasies not only of the extreme right, but of those who believe that it is hard, not to say impossible, to be /to become a normal (read acceptable) French citizen when one looks a certain way, has a certain religion or comes from particular places in the world. It isn't pleasant to count the Blacks, the Arabs, and the others, but until Earth becomes a magical land where ethnicity, race, and all the other categories, which too many love to taut or to decry, don't matter, it is an act, which countries are going to have to do. 

Seeking reasons to make religious faith relevant

Since he started to answer to exclamations such as "Yo Blair!" and since he started to hang out with Berlusconi and Sarkozy, Tony Blair scares me. When he writes this, I wonder what has happened to him and I'm really starting to pity him:

In this globalised world, we are more than ever interconnected, but we are also more uncertain. What were firm boundaries of race, culture and identity are becoming fluid. In such a world the involvement of religion becomes ever more crucial. It can either play a positive role, helping to deepen understanding and working for the common good, or it can be exploited to become destructive, emphasising difference and reinforcing distrust of the “other”.
Religious faith and how it develops could be of the same significance to the 21st century as political ideology was to the 20th. It could help guide and sustain the era of globalisation, lending it values, and, in bringing faiths and cultures to a greater understanding of each other, could foster peaceful coexistence. Or it could be a reactionary force, pulling people apart just as globalisation pushes people together. Whichever route develops, it does mean that all leaders, whether of religious faith themselves or not, have to “do God”.

Deconstructing Sarkozy

I'm going to stop criticizing Sarkozy because it is becoming a pedestrian and common exercise because everybody is doing it. Bruce Anderson has an op-ed in the Independent, in which he just tears the roi-soleil apart and I'm wondering where have all of his fans gone. Where are the people who were explaining to us that he was the best thing since steak au poivre and that he was going to Thatcherize or at the very least blairize France ? Well, les temps changent. Sugary excerpt:

But Mr Blair can relax. His record in the missed opportunity stakes is being effortlessly broken – by Nicolas Sarkozy. Two years ago, M Sarkozy appeared to be a man of immense promise. Part Jewish, part Hungarian, he was an outsider in a political culture which had come to be dominated by a sclerotic, self-regarding clique. It seemed a good idea to have a President of France who had not been at l'Ecole Nationale D'Administration.
Enarques had been running the country for too long, to little effect. M Sarkozy had told David Cameron how much he admired the Thatcherite economic reforms of the 1980s. Perhaps he would be the man to take on French vested interests and push through the necessary changes. Fat chance. (...) In addition to rudeness and frivolousness, the President infuriates his staff by hyper-activity. That might seem to be a good quality, and so it could be, on one condition: that it were deployed in pursuit of a strategy. But there is no strategy. M Sarkozy has been President for nearly two years. We still do not know what he believes in or what are his plans. He makes it and them up as he goes along. A despairing French diplomat threw up his arms and summarised the Sarkozy regime: "This is no longer the Fifth Republic. It is Louis Quinze and Madame du Barry."

Foreign legion

Jeremy Harding in the London Review of Books on the French Foreign Legion:

Francophone to the last, the Legion is praised for being monocultural despite the diversity of volunteers. But the core of the organisation is French: about half, according to Tony Geraghty’s rollicking history, March or Die (1986). That figure has remained more or less steady since the 1980s, despite the recent appeal of the Legion to Latin Americans and Eastern Europeans like Svarusko.

I've always found the Foreign Legion fascinating because it embodied for a long time the idea that nationality could be earned by fighting for France. I think that it isn't what it once was because France has changed and because the French have become ambiguous, not to say reluctant, to have certain groups of people earned citizenship.

It takes a leader

Quote of the day from Philip Gould's review of Stanley Greenberg's book Dispatches from the War Room: In the Trenches with Five Extraordinary Leaders on his years as adviser to Bill Clinton and Tony Blair :

What is clear is that the conflict between public opinion and political leadership is an intrinsic part of modern politics, and that this conflict will intensify. We now live in a world where Google can say that data is God, and where the clamour for public participation will rightfully grow; this really is the century of empowerment. However, we also live in a complex and fragmented world, in which chaos is never far away, and in which the value of leadership will never be more prized.

The question, which still remains unanswered because it is the most difficult is what does it mean to lead in our age. Does it mean to be popular, to sell, to get elected, and to make people, especially women nod or something else? Is leadership something, which you recognize when you see just as obscenity according to Justice Scalia? I'm looking for a leader, who isn't going to fear to be unpopular not because s/he will believe God showed her/him the way,but because s/he will dare to say to the people that s/he doesn't agree with them and that they aren't always right even though they have the power to take her/him down

Fiction and truth

Titillating assertion from Erica Wagner:

There is an argument to be made that truth - such as it is - can only be found, not in memoir or biography, but in fiction. Fiction recreates the world not in fragments, but miraculously as a whole; you will learn more about life, your own and other people's, from Middlemarch, Madame Bovary or Moby-Dick than you are likely to from yards and yards of memoir.

I'm having a hard time disagreeing with Wagner on this one.

A meaningful Non

Obama isn't apparently going to Normandy for the 65th anniversary of D-Day. One of the reasons for this decision not to go with Sarkozy to commemorate D-Day is the anger of Angela Merkel, according to Vincent Jauvert, over him going to France before going to Germany. This Non, if it is confirmed, just shows that I'm right so far in my contention that Obama is leery of Sarkozy and his ambitions and that thus, he is looking more to Merkel because he believes that he doesn't have to compete with her for attention and for the leadership of the world..

Appearance without presence

I guess it takes a Canadian, Rex Murphy, to make a pertinent observation about the American president:

And where is Barack Obama in all this. Well, Mr. Obama is acting curiously. He doesn't so much preside over the crisis as act like America's chosen master of ceremonies, who appears on stage to introduce its component segments. Good patter, well-chosen appearances. There's no centre to his performance. We hear as much about the First Dog (chosen, but yet to be installed) as Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner (installed, but yet to act).
Mr. Obama drops in to everyday events more than he actually manages them. He's very cool, as always, but he lacks affect. He doesn't seem to connect with the great swirl of events around him. He shows up. He doesn't act. He likes to tour, and visit happy places. He was, for example, on Jay Leno this week. If things get really bad, I expect he'd take the centre seat of that dread couch on The View. Chat up Joy and Whoopi. The President of the United States as permanent celebrity guest. And if things go completely berserk, there'll be a Barbara Walters special, the President emoting to Babs, sandwiched between teary featurettes on OctoMom and Lindsay Lohan.

It is fair to say, in my opinion, that Obama is everywhere, but that yet, his appearances don't have a presence, a meaning because he is without depth, he doesn't yet have a personality, except the one of the next big thing who is savy, sharp, knows how to campaign, to make great speeches, and to preach. Obama is great on TV, but the problem is that unlike great actors, he has to do more than to entertain and to push dust away from his shoulders. The big question is still the same as it was since he started his campaign: who is he and why does he want to do with power?

Foreign Aid and Africa

Old arguments from Dambisa Moya on the debate on the utility of foreign aids in Africa:

The aid advocates skirt over the point that the Marshall Plan interventions were short, sharp and finite, unlike the open-ended commitments which imbue governments with a sense of entitlement rather than encouraging innovation. And aid supporters spend little time addressing the mystery of why a country in good working order would seek aid rather than other, better forms of financing. No country has ever achieved economic success by depending on aid to the degree that many African countries do.

What has always been missing from this somewhat annoying debate because it is self-indulging is the acceptance of the fact that foreign aid is not and has never been about development or modernizing. Foreign aid is about real politik, buying influence in natural resources rich African countries. Sometimes, it can be about avoiding greater disasters that can make whole regions explode and lead to great humanitarian crisis that will cost more. Thus, in fact, the discussion is futile, because it is based on a faulty assumption that foreign aid for Africans has grand ambitions when its purpose is to preserve the status quo ante and to advance real politik's objectives. There is no charity in international politics.

A good translation

Interview of Charlotte Mandell who translated Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) from French to English. She did such a great job that the novel is better in English than in French because it feels less stuffy and less forced. Sugary excerpt:

People talk about ‘free translation’—and they usually mean something that I’d judge sloppy or pretentious. For me, my real freedom as a translator is to follow strictly, alertly, joyfully, the moves and rhythms of the original text. I want the reader to know exactly what the author thought—and when he thought it. That means I want the translation to present ideas, images, events in as close as humanly possible to the order in which those ideas, images, events occur in the original. I want the reader to hear the author think.

The consequences of racial politics

In the Globe and Mail, an eye-opening article on the consequences of racial politics in Zimbabwe. One of them is the disappearance of White Farmers, who have had their farms taken away/invaded in the name of racial and social justice even though these type short-sighted actions have led to the famine in the country:

Nine years ago, Zimbabwe had about 4,300 white-owned commercial farms. Today only about 300 remain, and many are reduced to small plots of land. Many of the invaded farms are sitting idle or neglected despite a desperate need for food in Zimbabwe, where three-quarters of the population is dependent on food aid from foreign donors.
Largely because of the invasions, Zimbabwe's farm output has dropped by 50 to 70 per cent in the past seven years, and most people subsist on one meal a day.
After reaching a peak of brutal violence during the national election last June, the invasions stopped for a while. But in recent weeks they have accelerated again.

I'm wondering what factors would explain the fact that Zimbabwe is in ruins and that South Africa has been able so far to survive the same problems of race, social justice, and economic inequality. Zimbabwe got its independence in 1980. Apartheid ended in South Africa at the beginning of the nineties. Can the differences in their fates since then be solely justified by political factors?

Making the right diagnosis

Arthur Goldhammer has a great post, which has the merit of seeing the forest through the trees in the situation of France without focusing on the folklore:

Democracy is fickle that way, and often a disappointment to the rational calculators. Sarko was never one of those, but he has experienced the fickleness and no doubt figures this latest episode will also pass. Nevertheless, his nervousness has been apparent in his recent public statements: sniping at the weak-kneed members of his own party, imprudently insulting teachers and professors, and still insisting that he was elected not to raise taxes but to "reconcile" France with "enterprise," as if either of the two parties to that divorce were in the same condition they were in 2007. France is morose, and enterprise is prostrate. If the president hopes to be their marriage counselor, he needs to acknowledge the sad state in which they find themselves.

Reading as a political act

Only in France is buying and reading the President's most hated book, Madame Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves,  considered as a way to show contempt and spitefulness for their monarque's literary tastes. It shows that to the French, reading and books have more importance and more symbolic meaning than to Americans. We don't even know what is the book, which Obama hates. The reason for this is that Americans don't care. As a matter of fact, I'm not even sure that we know what are his favorite authors for all matters to the people who elected him is that he reads, which after Bush II is a sign of sophistication and intelligence. Literature isn't as chic in DC as it is in Paris.

Unhelpful stereotypes

A post from J F Qurackenbush on a great site, Wet Asphalt (which makes the post even surprising) about the perceptions of the French strikes. It isn't original. It is filled with stereotypes. Well, at least,  it shows that lack of knowledge and depth particularly when it comes to a country as complex as French is scary especially in a complicated, but tightening world. Ignorance will never again be bliss in a time where it is easy to learn about "others"rather to remain stubbornly stuck into the mud of unauthentic stereotypes.

It's part of history already

 Elizabeth Drew has an excellent article in the New York Review of Books on the first 30 days of the Obama administration. Great read and here is my sugary excerpt, which shows my biases and my inability to join the hopeful crowd even though I would like to able to; it is always more comforting to be cheer-leading than to be analyzing mercilessly:

A prominent House Democrat told me that the decision, reached before Obama was sworn in, that the stimulus bill should be limited to $825 billion "was made from a political perspective, not for economic reasons." He said, "I think the economic argument for going over $1 trillion is pretty good, but we feared that $1 trillion would produce sticker shock. We feared it would frighten off the Blue Dogs [conservative Democrats] and that Republicans would attack it." It was assumed that the number would rise as the stimulus bill went through Congress, since that's what normally happens with spending bills. Of course the Republicans attacked the lower number anyway.

Porn and Art

Good bet to make:

In any case, the fact is that most readers—or so I'd be willing to bet—tend not to remember the "dirty parts" in Lolita. For whatever reasons, the first tentative gropings and fumblings, and the scenes in which Humbert possesses his adored Lo, are not what lodge in our minds.

I've always wondered why a book such as Lolita couldn't be pornographic and still be literature, art. Can porn never be artistic or rather does it become something else when it is literary or artistic just as a grilled cheese sandwich becomes a croque monsieur when it is about more than bad cheese and cheap bread glued together?

The Beef is gone

I agree with this:

In the recession so far, popular outrage against the establishment has focused mainly on ‘greed’. Yet alongside impulsive disgust about avarice lies another sentiment: anger towards politicians’ manifest incompetence. (...) The main thing to grasp is that, both in Britain and abroad, incompetence rests upon a profound lack of political direction. If there existed party-political goals more tangible and more exciting than ‘values’, ‘fairness’ and ‘tolerance’, society would throw up people who had the imagination and the competence to see those goals reached.

The French and Faulkner

Well, the French love Faulkner. I don't find this love affair strange or surprising because Faulkner is the type of writer that people like when they have the vision of America as a country where civilization hasn't reached every corner and where biblical stories, that is tales with characters that are larger than life and with sceneries, which are very Ben-Hur, are possible. The French love Faulkner because his writing makes America exotic and magical in the way Conrad did with the Congo and J.K. Rowling does with Hogwarts.

The French streets

Charles Bremner writes on today's French strikes . He explains how they relate to Sarkozy. He has this sugary excerpt in his post, which I find hilarious:

No matter how often you have watched this ritual, it's always impressive to see the degree to which public opinion and the media approve of the widescale disruption and mass protest. Radio and TV are out this morning with busloads of protesters as they make their way to the demos like supporters ahead of big matches. The state radio stations -- whose staff are on strike -- are broadcasting up-beat music like Soviet radio used to do on May Day mornings.

Only a Brit can compare France to the Soviet Union without even feeling the desire to be provocative or to keep alive the dying hope that Sarkozy will still save France from itself.

The Freedom to chew coca leaves

Evo Morales, Bolivia's president has an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune appealing to the international community to decriminalize the use/ the chewing of coca leaves.  Of course, there is no chance that what he asks will happen, but the fact that he is asking for it, shows that something is happening in South America, which the United States isn't going to like. I'm wondering what will Obama do about the "war on drugs" and whether he will be hopeful or normal. My little finger is telling me that he can't afford to be hopeful.

Talking about IT

When Glenn Loury talks about race, I listen because he doesn't preach and is willing to go there intellectually without holding on to a complex of superiority or inferiority that would make discussion, challenges to his viewpoint impossible. Sugary excerpt:

No big city police officer is “colorblind” nor, arguably, can any afford to be. Crime and punishment in America have a color — just turn on a television, or open a magazine, or listen carefully to the rhetoric of a political campaign — and you will see what I mean. The fact is that, in this society as in any other, order is maintained by the threat and the use of force. We enjoy our good lives because we are shielded by the forces of law and order upon which we rely to keep the unruly at bay. Yet, in this society to an extent unlike virtually any other, those bearing the heavy burden of order-enforcement belong, in numbers far exceeding their presence in the population at large, to racially defined and historically marginalized groups. Why should this be so? And how can those charged with the supervision of our penal apparatus sleep well at night knowing that it is so?

The rain is coming

More trouble for Sarkozy as France and his government brace for another day of strikes tomorrow. I wonder how far and how long those expressions of anger will go. Sarkozy must be happy that his only true rival in the mind of the French is the far left  leader Olivier Besancenot.