The Republic of Dissent

Mourning

Nadal lost at the French. I'm taking a break to mourn this heartbreaking loss.

Sports fever

I'm having a delirious, studious, and sports-centric weekend, which of course, means that it is both exciting and chaotic. I can't wait for tonight's game between the Magic and the Cavaliers even though I think that it is going to be a blowout and that the Magic are going to win to then be swept by the Lakers. What a shame!

My head is too heavy

My migraines have come back as they usually do at this time of the year so I'm taking a little break. 

The dirty circle of American politics

The most discouraging and disgusting about American politics is that the sleaze is the same, making cheap points works, and that journalists just complain just to complain and to feel, for a second, clean before covering the whole demolition derby like their sport colleagues cover major sports events. Here is an example of this vicious circle:

What is absolutely extraordinary at this moment is that anyone, anyone, is opposing Sotomayor on the matter of intellect, or, God help us, so-called temperament. Senator John Ensign (R-Nevada) wonders if she has “the right intellect.” (The mere phrase “right intellect” boggles our wee mind. Is that too big or too small? Or perhaps the good senator invokes a Buddhist interpretation of intelligence? OK, never mind.) Unnamed sources in Jeffery Rosen’s New Republic piece sniff “she’s not that smart.” Come on.
It would be a stupid mistake for conservatives to take the road most traveled by the left in its decimation of Sarah Palin. Republicans or Democrats who resort to suggesting that smart women aren't should be sent to the political dunce’s auditorium, the wilderness dutifully staked out by the Republican Party. Why? I’d like to say because respecting women’s intelligence is the right thing to do. But I’ll be more practical. Question the intelligence of a woman who has worked hard and achieved much against odds, and you will really irritate women. Really. Ask those Hillary Clinton supporters and those Sarah Palin supporters. They didn’t agree on much, but neither group liked watching male politicians diss women.
Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh already know this. That’s why they’re hanging their Sotomayor attack hats on her “identity politics,” which apparently means the politics a woman espouses when she notes that her life experiences are, well, a little different than Newt’s and Rush’s.

This type of articles just make me tired. They are easy to write, they are predictable, and we know that they never lead to anything in great part because the writer after complaining stops and goes on to better and bigger things.

Old identity politics

Interesting assertion from Krugman on the nomination Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, Conservatives, and Identity politics:

The thing that is really driving conservatives crazy, I think, is that their identity politics just isn’t working like it used to. Their whole approach has been based on the belief that Americans vote as if they live in Mayberry, and fear and hate anyone who looks a bit different; now that the country just isn’t like that, they’ve gone mad.

Theory and higher education

Sugary excerpt from Andrew Seal's review of Walter Kirn's Lost in Meritocracy:The Undereducation of an Overachiever:

In many ways, the undergraduate student is trespassing on the domain of Theory with inevitably mixed emotions: there is a sense in which the famous Emerson quote "What Plato has thought, he may think…" when updated to Derrida becomes a more perilous boast, and for that peril, more exhilarating, but also "hollow and vaguely hunted." And perhaps the fear that one can get the Theoretical code-words wrong is similar to the fear of being suddenly asked to leave an opulent party for not being properly dressed.
Yet affect is not reality—though the emotions may be similar, the upshot is not: there seems to me to be very little overlap between the academic effects of one's bluff being called on Theory and the social effects of having one's class inferiority reinforced, and not even that much overlap between the social uses of Theory and the social uses of class. I haven't been involved in too many social interactions where getting Theory wrong or not getting it at all has truly detrimental consequences, most often only causing passing anxiety or frustration, whereas the effects of class distinctions are less likely to be merely ephemeral, or to derive from such immediate origins.
The indiscriminate grouping of elitisms has, I think, profound consequences in talking about higher education, among other things. The ready association of intellectual pretension with class privilege makes it far too inviting to take the former as a valid substitute when it comes to the resentment and, more seriously, when it comes to critique. Reverse snobbery toward theory, in other words, becomes a sort of fillip of objection to other, more pervasive and more detrimental structures of inequality.

Still Shakespeare

More from John McWhorter on Shakespeare and I have to say that I agree with his view point:

No one would expect modern English speakers to rise to the "challenge" of Beowulf (Old English) or Chaucer (Earlyish Middle). On the other hand, we figure that if the language of a Congreve play of 1700 is somewhat formal and dense at times for modern tastes, it is hardly unreasonable to expect people to just listen closely. Shakespeare is an intermediate case.
Many take as a given that the solution for this intermediate case is simply that one should have read the text beforehand. Certainly, reading, which is slow and allows backtracking and checking helpful notes, allows comprehension of the language.
(...) In the old days it was common for anyone with even pretensions of literacy to regularly peruse Shakespeare editions - Abraham Lincoln's fondness for such is often adduced. However, these are different times. We recede ever more from serious engagement with print / text. It is unclear that this powerful trend can be retarded.
As such, an expectation that one has read a Shakespeare play before seeing it will result, it would seem, in the current situation unchanged: a select few who pride themselves on having done their homework, while the majority sit through the plays genuflectively
Because Shakespeare is such imperishable material - something I am well familiar with despite the impression some seem to have that I must be deaf to poetry or unable to appreciate challenging writing - I see this as unfortunate, and perhaps even elitist. Countless Americans do not have access to the quality of education that allows previous readings of Shakespeare plays. Is Shakespeare only to be available to the hyperliterate?
I sincerely understand if some would say, perhaps ruefully, yes. However, my preference is that Shakespeare be more widely cherished than that, and that as such, the language be "translated" into the one we speak - available in assorted translations just as Beowulf and Chaucer are. 

The perils of unrealistic ambition

The understatement of the day:

All in all, Obama’s goal of closing Guantanamo by the beginning of next year is beginning to look, well, a bit ambitious.

The politics of sexual appetite

I had a lot of fun reading Lucy Wadham's article on Sarkozy's manliness and the desire of France to be taken by a macho man in the Prospect Magazine. After my laughter stopped (it took a long time), I had to wonder what is it about the French that make Americans and Brits focus solely on their sexuality by using the excuse as one of my best friends used to put it that they are the horniest people in the world. Sugary excerpt:

My son, Jack, a French philosophy graduate, has a theory to explain the president’s success: the upstart Sarkozy is the conquering hero, the Nietzschean superman, whose will to power sets him above the constraints of conventional French morality. This, for Jack, explains his election and his massive, if short-lived popularity, as well as his ability, where others have failed, to push through difficult reforms.
I would go one step further, however, and suggest that it was also Sarkozy’s conquering libido which, more than his policies, explain the labels “courageous” and “dynamic.” Borrowing from my sisters’ rich vocabulary of male sexual stereotypes, I would describe Sarkozy as a sex dwarf. To my mind, what defines France’s president and explains his magnetism is not simply his “will to power,” but the particular circumstances that drive it: his small stature and his large sex drive.
In a culture unreconstructed by either of the great movements that have fashioned Anglo-Saxon society (Protestantism and feminism), the libido is still a force to be reckoned with in France. The last presidential election was not a battle between left and right but rather a contest between two “styles”—one gentle, the other tough; one consensual, the other coercive; one feminine, the other masculine. In the end, the French opted, not for the reassuring arms of Ségolène Royal and her “gentle revolution,” but for Nicolas Sarkozy, the libidinous sex dwarf. All the iconography of the presidential campaign pointed to the subliminal forces in the battleground. Picture Royal, dressed all in white, as if in homage to that alliance of virginity and female power embodied in such icons as Elizabeth I and Joan of Arc. Now picture Sarkozy, short and strutting in an oversized and sweat-stained suit, like France’s favourite dictator, the potent and charismatic Napoleon Bonaparte. Sarkozy, like Bonaparte, has all the characteristics of the sex dwarf: he is short, shamelessly flirtatious and tireless in his pursuit of women.
No record of his sexual conquests has seen the light of day, but I don’t need documentary evidence to know that Sarko is a sex dwarf.(...) There is something baffling about Nicolas Sarkozy’s rise to power, not only to the millions of people who didn’t vote for him, but for many of the millions who did and who now, like my own children, regret it. His success can only really be explained in psychosocial terms: that it was the collective desire of the French people to be represented by a dominant and libidinous male, rather than a dominant and matriarchal female. This particular fantasy could only have found an outlet in a society unreconstructed by feminist ideology—in short, a patriarchy. For France, despite its many powerful women, still wants to be controlled by a man.

I can't wait for somebody, an analyst, a journalist to dare to write about Obama and America in the some way. If that day ever comes, it doesn't take much to know what will happen, to guess the outrage that will follow and the accusations of racism, of using old and disgusting images of Black males as having a bestial sex drive and of some white women being curious to go black. Because if we apply Wadham's analytical frame to America and that we go along with the assertion that sexual innuendos are permitted in political analysis then what we could say about Obama and America ? Would it be permissible to say that Obama is a sexy poet and that America, after years of being taken by a cowboy who was obsessed with forceful penetration, has decided that it wants more foreplay with a sexy poet whom it imagines must have the legendary appetite of black males (since it views Obama) making it possible to assume that after the gentle foreplay, the sex will be incredible?
When I was in High School,  there was the hyped perception among my peers that going out with black guys (black girls weren't as popular, they weren't available mainly because going white for a black girl gave the impression that she was settling for milk when she should get coffee because she couldn't handled the real deal, a man of the same race who can match and more than likely surpass her own sexual insatiability) was the coolest thing, it was a way to break away with your parents's generation, appear ethnically cool and culturally radical while at the same time showing that you are in vogue and in touch with the Boys II Men era. If I wanted to be creatively mean and shallow to make a cheap point about Obama and America,I would say that we are in American politics, in the Boys II Men era and America, like a teenage girl who wants desperately to be popular and to be in sync with pop culture, has decided to go black. But I know better, I know that sex, sexual appetite in politics is important, but becomes seductively and dangerously limiting when it focuses on fun, exciting, but cheap stereotypes.

Trust in politics

I agree with this:

For all the talk of trust in political circles right now, there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of trust. For trust is not simply a passive relation, in which one side painfully, excruciatingly exhibits its trustworthiness to the other. Rather it is an active relation in which both parties assume something of each other. Trust is not based on knowing, but presuming. Trust, properly speaking, exists in the absence of guarantees. It is an everyday leap of faith, a reliance, indeed a belief in others to behave as you would expect them to.
In this sense, the focus on trust as something to be constructed so as to eliminate the corrupting self-interest of parliamentarians does not seem to have much to do with trust at all. In fact, the attempts to prevent so-called abuses of trust, under the rubric of accountability and transparency, serve only to undermine the conditions of trust. For trust rests on a belief in others, not on their guaranteed compliance. In this sense, trust is something that people actively place in politicians on the basis of a politicians’ vision. Trust cannot simply be created by politicians in lieu of the very thing worth placing trust in them for: namely their politics.

The fear to be forgotten

I don't agree with John Sutherland on this:

The fact is, all poets – while feeling the spur in their buttocks – are haunted by a fear. They will be forgotten, with all those other Courthopes of literary history. Any laurel – however withered – is lusted after by versifiers, as straws by drowning men. It guarantees permanence, or the hope of it. But there are so few laurels that the faded leaves are fought over, ruthlessly. No trick is too low to get that coronet on your brow. (...)Poetry has never been a fair fight. It has always operated by clique and manipulation. Were it not for Ezra Pound pulling strings, TS Eliot's career would never have got airborne. That's how "schools" of poetry get started – cronyism. Padel's (unlicensed) cronies won – if only for a week. The record books will, forever, have inscribed on them that she was professor of poetry at Oxford – briefly. And that piquant detail will stimulate curiosity and, who knows, readers. In the long run, it will have been a good disaster for her. And as for Walcott – he's got the Swedish laurels. Two losers, two winners. Read on. Or, perhaps not, if it's poetry.

Shifting principles

Oliver Kamm on Liberalism, its ideals, and their degeneration:

Liberalism, in its broadest sense, has become suspicious of its own ideals.
Notions once considered reactionary, even extreme, have insinuated themselves into the mainstream of right-thinking (that is, left-thinking) social idealism.
The degeneration of progressive idealism has many roots. But among the most important is the instinct that the ideas of Western liberty are specific to time and place — that they are Eurocentric. Almost coincident with the revolutions of 1989, which testified to the power of the human instinct for liberty, was a far more atavistic political movement. (...) there is a type of left-wing thinking that regards militant Islam almost as idiosyncratic liberation theology. Verso, the left-wing publishing house, has produced a volume of the thoughts of Osama bin Laden entitled Messages to the World. To read the editor’s annotations is to gain the impression of a revolutionary figure who daringly challenges Western oppression. The mass murder of American and other civilians on 9/11 was the expression of a nihilistic, millenarian doctrine of religious absolutism. Yet for a certain type of critic the greatest war criminal of our age is Tony Blair.

I'm tempted, really tempted to agree totally with Kamm, but I can't because he doesn't present the whole picture. He sees a lot of the trees, but rearranges them to depict the forest that he wants to see.

The art of discussing complex and explosive subjects

hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm:

Still another obvious reason why one might pick Israel out for particular criticism without, for that, being an antisemite, is that Israel, unlike, say, Sudan, purports to be a member of that abstract community of civilized nations that we call 'the West'. Israel is a product of the Enlightenment: it is a multiparty democracy; it has its own Rousseau Society; it produces books about multiculturalism; it sends contestants to the Eurovision song contest; etc. None of these things is true of Sudan. For better or for worse, this means that Israel is held up to different standards. My questioner wants to know why critics of Israel do not turn their attention to Myanmar or Sudan. I want to say: what a fine comparison class! One may indeed ask how much remains of the decent, liberal, humanist legacy of Israeli society when these are the countries that suggest themselves for comparison.

Something about this line of reasoning bugs me and I just can't put my finger on it, no I can't, I just can't express as satisfactorily as I would like. I think it has to do that the argument starts in the gutter and never gets out of it.

...

I'm shutting up to take full advantage of Memorial Day.

The dangers of mediocrity

Tim Rutten reviews Bruce Bawer's new book on his favorite topic of the West, Immigration, Islam, Dechristianization, De-westernization, and terrorism, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom:

A mediocre book on an important topic always is disappointing.
When the treatment also is shallow and vulgarly argued -- as is the case with Bruce Bawer's "Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom" -- this reader is inclined to get up with a sour sense of resentment over time wasted, the sort of feeling that comes from being seated next to a garrulous bore at a dinner party.
A literary critic and writer for various neoconservative cultural and political journals, Bawer is also openly homosexual and has written extensively for a number of gay publications. He and his partner have lived in Europe for some time, and since moving there, Bawer has become one of those writers alarmed by what he sees as a cultural fifth column of Islamic immigrants gnawing at Europe's traditions of tolerance and democracy.
There certainly are dangerous, intolerant Islamists among Europe's immigrants, and their allies, he argues (not always inaccurately), are the dogmatic multiculturalists who find cultural equivalency between Magna Carta and sharia. The problem is that Bawer spins glancingly off that interesting, rather important point into descriptions of a vast, interlocking conspiracy of cultural, literary, journalistic and even entertainment elites he believes want to appease fundamentalist Islam and sell out the West's tradition of individual and civil liberties.
Why they're engaged in this betrayal is anybody's guess. That doesn't stop Bawer from enveloping one alleged case in point after another, rather like the rhetorical equivalent of a kudzu vine -- and with about the same logical structure.
Too often Bawer simply gets things wrong, both factually and by degree. For all his academic prominence, the late Edward Said never enjoyed anything close to the influence Bawer imagines for him; the notion that his debated book "Orientalism" changed the way the majority of Western writers and intellectuals perceived Islam simply is preposterous.

The Churchill Gene

Phillip Hunter on the Churchill Gene, the idea that drinking affects (positively) creativity:

Most people use alcohol as a social rather than creative stimulant, banishing cares with a potation or two after work; lubricating discourse rather than inspiring the intellect. Yet a number of our greatest writers, painters and musicians also seem to have relied on it as fuel for their muse. Winston Churchill claimed it crucial for The World Crisis, his six-volume memoirs, stating: “always remember that I have taken more out of alcohol than it has taken out of me.” Novelist William Faulkner drank more intermittently, but claimed not to be ab le to face a blank page without a bottle of Jack Daniels. Beethoven fell under the influence in the later part of his creative life. Among painters, Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon and many others liked a drop or two while working.
Such figures make alcohol part of the territory of creativity. An exceptional few seemed to thrive on drink, leading to the idea of a “Churchill gene”: where some have a genetic makeup allowing them to remain healthy and brilliant despite consumption that would kill others. Mark Twain endorsed this view saying: “My vices protect me but they would assassinate you!”
No doubt some real genes—especially those with a high expression of alcohol dehydrogenase and tolerance of alcohol breakdown products such as acetaldehyde, the “hangover” chemical—contribute to this theory. Yet until recently science has had little to say about alcohol and the creative process, confining itself to studies of damage, tolerance and addiction. Over the last few years, however, evidence has emerged that some have, if not a Churchill gene, then a creative cocktail gene.

Most people create/write better when they feel fearless and are able to disconnect themselves from the pressures of their environment. The desire to be carefree and to have no inhibitions explain the attraction, which writers /creators have toward narcotics or anything that gives them wings.

Question d'humour

The Economist has the best article I've read today. It is onthe presidents, comediants, The Onion and the difficulty/impossibility  of making fun of Obama. Aucun commentaire nécessaire:

The real Mr Obama baffles other comedians. David Letterman, a talk-show host, describes him as “cogent, eloquent, and in complete command of the issues” and sighs: “What the hell am I supposed to do with that?” The new president is “not fat, not cheating on his wife, not stupid, not angry and not a phoney”, complains Bill Maher, another small-screen joker. Chris Rock, a stand-up comic, likens Mr Obama to Brad Pitt. “There’s no Brad Pitt jokes,” he told CNN. “You know, what are you going to say? ‘Ooh, you used to have sex with Jennifer Aniston. Now you have sex with Angelina Jolie. You’re such a loser’.”
At the White House correspondents’ dinner this month, Mr Obama was the guest of honour. The traditional task of roasting him fell to Wanda Sykes, a comedienne. Visibly star-struck, she ignored the crowd and addressed herself to the president, who was sitting nearby. (...) The writers of the Onion are unencumbered by any obvious party loyalty. To fit in, you have to hate everything around you, muses Joe Randazzo, the editor. Hence the headline that greeted Mr Obama’s election victory: “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job”. The Onion News Network, an online video venture, did a segment entitled “Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters to Realise How Empty Their Lives Are”. The camera showed pitiful young campaign volunteers lying comatose on a couch or wandering aimlessly through a park. “Who will take care of these people?” asked the anchor. “We really don’t know. Many have already driven away their friends and family with months of endless praise for Obama’s latest speech and constant reminders to vote,” said the breathless correspondent on the scene. “That does sound annoying,” said the anchor.

The past is alive!

Well so much for letting go of the past :

Mr. Obama sought Thursday to distance himself from the policies of the past — and ended up reliving it.

The greatest political gift

Quote of the day from Daniel Drezner:

Politically, Obama has inherited George W. Bush's greatest political gift -- having adversaries more boneheaded than himself.

Censorship and bad fiction

The Guardian on Sherry Jones and her assertion that her book The Jewel of Medina about Muhammad and one of his brides,  hasn't found a publisher/distributor in the UK because of their fear of being targeted by Islamists:

Jones has now revealed on her blog that despite attempts to find a new UK distributor for The Jewel of Medina, "everyone, it seems, is too afraid". "Although the extremists lost in court, they have apparently won where it really counts – in the UK's book stores," she wrote. "The 'thugs' have accomplished their task — and freedom of speech, the first freedom to go when fascism gets a foothold, has taken a blow in the western world."
She called on "the people of Great Britain" to "speak out against those who are limiting their right to read, think, speak, listen, debate, discuss, criticise". "I hope the people of the UK can find the power, and the courage, to raise an outcry against censorship," she said. "Now it's time for the rest of us, including moderate Muslims and the press, who cherish our culture and our freedom, to raise a cry louder than that of radicals, so we don't lose that most precious, and crucial, of freedoms."
British publishers, however, disputed her claim that they were too afraid to publish The Jewel of Medina. "I've read the reviews and it sounds absolutely awful – beyond being offensive. If it were good we would actively consider publishing it, but an anachronistic bodice ripper – why would we be interested?" said Jon Wood, Orion publishing director.
Another publisher, who didn't wish to be named, agreed, pointing to the less-than-positive reviews of The Jewel of Medina in America, where the New York Times described its prose as "lamentable", and the LA Times said that it "suffers from large swaths of purple prose".

Warren Buffett and Success

Michael Lewis reviews Alice Schroeder's autobiography of Warren Buffett, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life:

There has never really been a bad time in the last fifty years to be Warren Buffett, but just now would seem to be less favorable than most. If Buffett still measures his life by the book value per share of Berkshire Hathaway, then for the first time in forty years he must feel like a wasting asset. His share price is still off more than 40 percent from its highs, underperforming even the S&P 500. He railed against derivatives as weapons of mass destruction, and now turns out to have been sitting on a $68 billion pile of credit default swaps and exotic put options on various stock market indexes. And having vowed never again to become entangled in a big Wall Street investment bank, he has gone and sunk $10 billion into Goldman Sachs, a virtual re-enactment of his investment in Salomon Brothers -- cash for reputation. The difference this time is that he has gotten himself a sweeter deal than not merely ordinary shareholders, but also the U.S. Treasury.
On the surface at least, he seems like a guy who has spent the last few years ignoring all of his own best advice. What does Schroeder make of this? By September of last year, when Berkshire's share price began to collapse, The Snowball was already in bookstores. Its final chapter has a rushed, panicky feel to it, as if the author sensed that she was going to watch some meaningful part of her story unfold after she told it. If so, she was right: Buffett's role in the current crisis is likely to be as interesting as any episode of his career.
Still, while Schroeder could not have foreseen the sensational reversal in Berkshire's fortunes, she offers, inadvertently, an explanation for it: the impulse to grasp for things before they all slip away. Susie Buffett, diagnosed with cancer the year before, died in 2004. "Before 2003," writes Schroeder, "Buffett's need for attention had been satisfied by a few interviews a year and the shareholder meeting. He had always been careful and strategic in his cooperation with the media (if not always forthcoming about just how cooperative he had been). But starting around the time of Susie's illness, for whatever reason, he had begun to need the mirror of media attention, television cameras especially, almost like a drug. The intervals he could tolerate without publicity were growing shorter. He cooperated with documentaries, spent hours talking to Charlie Rose, and became such a regular on CNBC that it started to prompt puzzled queries from his friends."
Thus she leaves open the possibility that Buffett might have gone a bit soft in old age. "Basically, when you get to my age," she quotes him telling a group of business school students, "you'll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. I know people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them." Where there was once only the time value of money, there is now also the time value of love. My God, he's even given his fortune away!

The last paragraph catches my attention because it shows how single-minded Americans (I share that single-mindedness) are about measuring success in the sense that Buffett is considered to be a successful and genius because he was once the richest man in the world. What I have been wondering if how if he would have been judged if he had never made it to the top of the mountain or if he had just made a couple of million dollars. In other words what I'm wondering is whether all self-made billionaires the most successful and the most gifted people?

Sonia G

Jonathan Power on his meeting and interview with Sonia Gandhi:

I am ushered into Sonia G’s office. She barely acknowledges my presence. “Buon giorno”, I say. There is no reply. I have been warned that she’s cold and she doesn’t offer me a hand. She walks over to me and asks me to sit down.
I look her in the eye and ask my first question to the Italian widow of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was cruelly blown to smithereens by a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber.
“Do you mind if I begin with a personal question?” “Yes”, she says. I ask her, as the victorious chairwoman of the Congress Party, whether it was difficult to decide to go into politics, given the toll it has taken on her family. “I am at peace about that”, she replies. “I have thought it through”. Then she suddenly interjects, “I hope this isn’t an interview. I just want us to get to know each other a bit.” I reply defensively that Prime Minister  Manmohan Singh (who fixed me the introduction) had said it could be an interview.
We continue, but without me writing in my notebook, and I lapse into a gentler, more conversational style. “Why did the pull of politics overcome your inhibitions?” “Congress was in disarray. It couldn’t win an election. And we need to keep India as a secular state, encompassing all religions.”
I ask her about her own religious beliefs and, like her mother-in-law, the murdered Indira Gandhi, she replies, “I’m not religious: my parents are not particularly religious although my mother sometimes goes to church. “So on what basis do you make moral decisions in family life or in politics?” “I suppose Catholic values are at the back of my head.”
I push on. “What about nuclear weapons? You are one of those with your finger on the button.” She grimaces. A God-spare me kind of look. Clearly, with her and Manmohan Singh in charge, the Pakistanis must know that the India will never threaten to use its nuclear weapons. Why that doesn’t lead to disarmament is a question that nobody would give me a straight answer to.

Femininity, empathy, and the law

Hmmmmmmmmh?!:

Women need to avoid the temptation to claim that they bring some special superjudicial quality of sensitivity to the bench or that it's somehow natural for women judges to be empathetic while it's equally natural for men to be dispassionate and reasonable. What women do bring to the courts are diverse views and experiences, and that is more than enough. It's enough to say that the court lacks women. It's a mistake to say women will necessarily increase the court's capacity for empathy.

Power, civil liberties and intellectual dishonesty

Glenn Greenwald on Obama, War powers and civil liberties:

Even if it's due to perceived political necessity, the more Obama embraces core Bush terrorism policies and assumptions -- we're fighting a "war on terror"; Presidents have the power to indefinitely and "preventatively" imprison people with no charges; we can create new due-process-abridging tribunals when it suits us; the "Battlefield" is everywhere; we should conceal evidence when it will make us look bad -- the more those premises are transformed from right-wing dogma into the prongs of bipartisan consensus, no longer just advocated by Bush followers but by many Obama defenders as well.  The fact that it's all wrapped up in eloquent rhetoric about the rule of law, our Constitution and our "timeless values" -- and the fact that his understanding of those values is more evident than his predecessor's -- only heightens the concern.
So now, we're going to have huge numbers of people who spent the last eight years vehemently opposing such ideas running around arguing that we're waging a War against Terrorism, a "War President" must have the power to indefinitely lock people away who allegedly pose a "threat to Americans" but haven't violated any laws, our normal court system can't be trusted to decide who is guilty, Terrorists don't deserve the same rights as Americans, the primary obligation of the President is to "keep us safe," and -- most of all -- anyone who objects to or disagrees with any of that is a leftist purist ideologue who doesn't really care about national security.  In other words, arguments and rhetoric that were once confined to Fox News/Bush-following precincts will now become mainstream Democratic argumentation in service of defending what Obama is doing.  That's the most harmful part of this -- it trains the other half of the citizenry to now become fervent admirers and defenders of some rather extreme presidential "war powers."

What bothers me is that politics has indeed become about good and evil since it is no longer about actions, but about personality, about who people think the person in charge is or rather how good/evil he is. The recent months have shown at least one thing and it is that Democrats would have had no problem with the Bush policies if they had been enacted by Al Gore or any good Democrats. In a strange way, Bush was right, everything is about good and evil, good guys and bad guys, those in power who are scared out of their mind to have another 9/11 happen on their watch and the public who doesn't want to ask question so that it can be outraged at the excesses committed in their name, for their security later.

Fake showdown

Katia Bachko in the Columbia Journalism Review on the media-hyped showdown between President Obama and Former Vice-President Cheney:

(...) it’s completely unreasonable to frame these two speeches as an actual debate between two equals. We have a democratically elected president, and an unpopular former politician who are not directly engaging with one another. The question of national security is too important to important to sidestep in favor of a falsely construed schoolyard fight between a bully and the class president. What’s more, to set up these speeches as a contest presupposes that there might be an actual winner. But this sort of shallow, politics-as-a-game coverage only makes losers—of the press and of the public.

Journalists love feuds especially ones where they are able to take sides while pretending to be professionally objectives. Al the morning shows this morning covered the so-called feud between Obama and Cheney as if they were covering a wrestling match without ever acknowledging that it was much to do about nothing and that they could cover the differences between the different approaches on the War on Terror, which in my opinion are more about style than substance (which greatly explains the emphasis on fluff) without personalizing and caricaturing them.

Women's body and fantasies

Few articles leave me speechless, but this article does. It is on women's bvelies and I don't know what to make of it. If Julia Roberts can't get the perfect stomach after becoming a mother, who can?

Stomaching real change

David Simon on Obama, Change, and Americans's readiness for a revolution:

I do not believe that we have the stomach for serious change. The war on drugs is as disastrous as any government policy has been over the past 50 years, but I do not believe Obama and his people will use their political capital to end it ... If a policy failed this unequivocally in any other part of US life you would cashier the generals. But the drug problem oppresses the poor. If rich kids were wandering the streets stealing car radios we would not be so complacent. But it is easier to brutalise the poor and discard them. We are not a manufacturing economy any more and we don't need our least educated people, so we marginalise them. The cynicism of Reagan and Thatcher still applies.

What amazes me is that too many Obamaniacs are already constructing the meme that Obama can't change America because Americans don't want to change and because structural forces won't let him change the country. In other words, Obama may be the Man, but he will always get the presumption of good intentions and the excuses given to the little guy and to underdogs. I'm willing to bet my left pinkie that in 3 years his election is going to be against Washington and about the fact that although it is morning in America again and that he is fighting for change, powerful forces in DC or the gangs of DC as Thomas Frank would say is making it difficult for him to change America. He will run Reagan's 1984 campaign and the faithful will love it.

Extremism and European Elections

The Telegraph on the rise of Nationalist and Eurosceptic parties during the elections for European Parliament:

From Stockholm to Sardinia, Waterford to Warsaw, a noisy and eclectic band of nationalists and eurosceptics are on the campaign trail hoping to unseat their mainstream rivals in the European Parliament.
Dutch anti-Islamists, Hungarian nationalists, Italian separatists and an Irish-backed anti-Lisbon Treaty party are all clamouring for seats when Europe goes to the polls between 4 and 7 June. And a combination of dismally low voter turnout and the economic downturn looks set to play into their hands in the vote. Job losses and the grimmest economic forecasts in decades have created the ideal conditions for single-issue candidates and marginal groups hostile to the EU to win seats in the Strasbourg assembly.
"It's a worrying trend" says Urszula Gacek, a centre-right Polish MEP whose country is itself home to several arch-conservative Catholic parties and headed by a eurosceptic President, Lech Kaczynski. "The extremists are better at mobilising their voters, by playing on citizens' fears and talking up the need for protectionism and the closing of borders."

The real issue is that European elections are the best election for those groups because it offers them a forum to vent and to have a chance to gain power because their countries's political system, more often than not, marginalize them by making difficult for them to have a voice in their own domestic parliament or to be something other than a minority group, which has to lend its support to a majority group. The point is that European elections are the only elections where the most extreme groups can have their voice heard because they express concerns, which voters have because Europe still feels foreign to them and that none of the regular political parties have a marketable and coherent vision of Europe, which palliates the fears and anger within their countries.

Finding Shakespeare in translation

I agree with John McWhorter on this:

The irony is that people in foreign countries often possess Shakespeare to a greater extent than we do, since they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the language that they speak. Shakespeare is translated into rich, poetic varieties of these languages, to be sure, but since it is the rich, poetic modern varieties of the languages, the typical spectator in Paris or Moscow can attend a production of Hamlet and enjoy a play rather than an exercise. A friend of mine has told me that first time he truly understood more than the gist of what was going on in a Shakespeare play was when he saw one in French!

I think that Shakespeare's poetry and verses are great in French for the simple reason that there isn't such a thing as English poetry. While translating Shakespeare's verses in French, an imaginative translator gets to rewrite them by focusing not on the words, but on images and on meaning, which make them new and fresh instead of just being translated poetry, which is what occurs when French poetry is translated into English. What I'm trying to say is that French deals better with Shakespearean complexity than English for the simple reasons that the French language loves difficulty and rigor.

Reaganisn and intellectualism

Krugman on Reaganites and  American Conservative intellectualism:

(...) the truth is that the Reaganauts were a pretty grotesque bunch too. Look for the golden age of conservative intellectualism in America, and you keep going back, and back, and back — and eventually you run up against William Buckley in the 1950s declaring that blacks weren’t advanced enough to vote, and that Franco was the savior of Spanish civilization.

I think that intellectualism has less and less to do with politics, which is becoming more and more about celebrity, pop culture and populism. Moreover,  there is an anti-intellectual movement not only on the left, but on the right, the key difference is that the left always believes that its anti-intellectualism is precisely about intellectualism and opening it up to common folks and thus achieving the greater down by dumbing down complicated, but brilliant ideas with emotional and flashy junk.

Abortion and torture

Dominic Lawson compares Liberals who are pro-choice with those on the Left who argue in favor of torture or in rather in favor of enhanced interrogation techniques such as water-boarding:

The most passionate proponents of abortion rights tend to argue that the unborn child is not really a human at all. "It" might have a cerebral cortex and a beating heart, they admit, if pushed – but these attributes are not enough to guarantee "it" any moral status. They argue that the unborn child has no status other than being "wanted" or "not wanted" by the mother. So just as there is no law against people destroying their own possessions, however valuable others might think them, the foetus, in this view, is equally the mother's to do with as she wishes, whether to cherish or destroy.
This depersonalisation of the unborn child is tellingly similar to the view of terrorist suspects taken by those who advocated barbaric interrogation practices – and I should remind readers that three years ago in this column I described the American government officials who authorised it as "using Gestapo tactics in the name of freedom" and of "behaving like secret policemen in a two-bit dictatorship".
The American Constitution guarantees those foreign terrorist suspects the same fundamental right not to be tortured in US custody as any American, based on its framers' belief that the very act of being human entails certain "inalienable rights"– which is why George Bush and Dick Cheney are vulnerable to prosecution.
This explains why those associated with the "enhanced interrogation techniques" argued so fiercely with Obama that photographs of the victims under interrogation not be released. It is when people actually see the evidence that they fully understand what is involved, and how degrading it is, not just to the sufferers, but to the nation carrying out such practices: that was why the leak of pictures of Abu Ghraib prisoners being abused caused such a furore back in 2003. For many people, only the image triggers empathy.

Imaginative, but worthless arguments for Lawson who never explains why torture is similar to abortion and why it is fair to argue that proponents of the two have essential things in common except their passion and their liberalism .

The freedom to hate

Alexander Cockburn argues against the Hate Crimes Prevention Act :

The problem with the Hate Crimes Prevention Act is that it creates a thought crime. After all, violent acts like assault or murder or rape carry specific and very serious penalties for the perpetrators, if convicted. (The Laramie roofers were convicted of murder anyway, and will spend the rest of their lives behind bars.) Motive does not enter the matter. And how will a prosecutor prove that a lesbian was murdered because of her sexual preference or because the mugger who stabbed her in the darkened entry to her building did so because she refused to give him her handbag?
As Representative Lamar Smith, ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, protested: "All violent crimes must be vigorously prosecuted. Unfortunately, this bill undermines one of the most basic principles of our criminal justice system - equal justice for all. Justice will now depend on the race, gender, sexual orientation, disability or other protected status of the victim. It will allow different penalties to be imposed for the same crime."
Advocates insist that the Hate Crimes Act will deal only with crimes of violence and have nothing whatsoever to do with limiting free speech or thought. But given the way case law evolves, and the manner in which ambitious prosecutors advance their political careers, there will be an irresistible incentive to bring indictments against anyone speaking hatefully about members of protected categories of people. Speech itself will become a 'violent act' and therefore unlawful.

I agree with the assertion that Hate Crime Prevention Act will have dangerous consequences and that it will not be an effective mechanism against hate crimes. I would like to be on the popular side on those who argue for that legislation because it would give me the feel good illusion that it is an act that would stop horrific crimes, but I know better. What worries me the most about such kind of legislation is that it places the emphasis on what differentiates people instead on reasserting the fact that they shouldn't matter because we are all equal under the law and that a crime is a crime is a crime. I think that the issue here is that the Hate Crime Prevention Act in fact reaffirms the viewpoint of those who commit crimes against gays, blacks, or any other group of people, it reaffirms the idea that those differences matter and are of so importance that the law must take them into account. The purpose of the rule of law is not to satisfy any emotional need that people have whether they are victims or not or whether those needs are justified or baseless, the rule of law exist in society to remind people precisely that people aren't slaves to their passions and that punishment isn't about vengeance or making a great emotional point about hate and other vile motives that criminals have. In modern societies, people even when they are capable of barbaric actions must be allowed to hate and it is the responsibility, the obligation to find other ways than punishment through laws to change their ways. It is difficult to resist the temptation to obtain absolute justice in our societies, but we must resist it because as Camus asserted absolute justice negates freedom.

When politics is personal

I don't like quoting Frank Rich except when he says something that is true and relevant without tainting it with too much ideology, which is the case here when he writes the following:

TO paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.

What strikes is how comfortable, calm and at ease Rich is with the notion that Obama can't turn the page on Bush and the fact that he isn't accusing him of dishonesty, of putting political convenience and pragmatism before doing the right thing, on being Clintonian (which to Rich is one the worst thing to be). Throughout the democratic debate, Rich was writing incendiary op-ed on Hillary Clinton and her campaign, which led readers to the conclusion that for him, she was really different than Obama and that Rich believed that she wouldn't be able to turn the page on Bush. So it is amazing that not even 6 months within Obama presidency, Rich writes a column, which shows the obvious that the most important thing to him is whether he likes the president and whether he believes that he can have some influence on him. I don't even want to imagine what he would have written if Mrs Clinton were in charge and he had concluded that she couldn't turn the page on Bush. Of course, Obama is a good person, when the Clintons were bad people willing to take the votes of racists to win, willing to do anything to govern. I wonder what Rich will say if it becomes obvious that Obama is willing to do anything to remain president.

Old mummies

I'm not sure how to feel about the fact that it is becoming possible for old women (women in their sixties) to give birth (hat tip: Chicken Yogurt). I have trouble condemning it because old men who will more than likely not see their kids grow up do it all the time, but at the same time, I have always found that creepy and selfish. I am against old people having kids period especially if they are not going to raise them. What bugs me about the video is that the comic is perpetuating the assumption that old women are so gross, so useless, so repulsive that scientists shouldn't focus their energy on giving them what Nature/God didn't (wisely) want them to have. To make my point concise and clear, I'm against old people giving birth but since selfish old men have been having kids for years, it is only fair or at least less gross that old women be able to have kids. I just hope that they have them with younger men. I have to say that I love the idea of women of my mom's age going out with men who are my age. Why? Because they are the patience to baby them, to help them grow up, to teach them things, which their mothers didn't/didn't teach them and that frankly, I don't have.  Cougars (I hate that term) are the new humanitarians of the twenty-first century because they are performing a great service to society.

An obsession with time

I'm trying hard to relax and to enjoy my weekend. But it is impossible because I keep anticipating next week's events. I'm obsessed with time. The problem is that it doesn't seem to like me. Anyway, I'm reading Hugo's Les Misérables for the first time in 13 years and it is still a great and fresh read.

Celebrity activism

Nathalie Rothschild on Celebrity activism, which she has trouble to view as selfless:

Farrow and her fasting buddies are presenting their efforts as selfless sacrifices, all done for the sake of suffering Darfurians, to ‘raise awareness’ of their plight and put pressure on the ‘international community’ to intervene. But rather than shedding light on the conflict in Darfur, aloof celebrity activists are primarily drawing attention to themselves while at the same time obscuring the facts on the ground, which are, in reality, complex.
However, for Farrow and other celebrity activists, like Matt Damon and George Clooney, the conflict in Sudan is a black-and-white issue. They present themselves as the virtuous good guys in a morality play where the Khartoum regime are the evil barbarians, the people of Darfur the pathetic victims and Western celebrities are the heroes coming to their rescue. Clooney, for instance, once said of the conflict in Darfur: ‘It’s not a political issue. There’s only right and wrong.’
(...)From celebs demanding, in neo-colonialist fashion, that the West intervene to save Africans from themselves, to greens claiming to represent ‘The Planet’ against mankind, many protests today are staged ‘on behalf of others’ – even if those others have not asked for it. Farrow’s diet for Darfur is part of this contemporary trend. These days, it seems that protests that lack celebrity endorsements and which are staged by those who are actually affected by the conflict they are trying to end, get little attention or airtime.

I'm agnostic on the subject of celebrity activism because celebrities have the right as any citizen to get engage in causes. Nevertheless what I deplore on these celebrity campaign is that they end up being about celebrity and good and evil which is not solely the fault of celebrities, but also of the media, which loves nothing much that syrupy tabloid like of serious topic without feeling questioning their own ethics while being ensured to get a wider audience. Thus the trouble isn't that celebrities don't get celebrity and are unable to be selfless even for good causes, the trouble is that the globalized media likes so much beautiful and effective storytelling that it has let celebrities become the better advocates for causes, which have more knowledgeable, but less flashy advocates.

Beef and fluff

The Guardian on the fall from grace of Rachida Dati, France Sarkozy's justice minister who, no so long ago, was celebrated as a successful example of integration à la française only to be dismissed from the Sun king's court for her exuberance and luxurious taste:

Rachida Dati, the beleaguered French justice minister, may have been lampooned for her devotion to wearing ostentatious catwalk fashion at inappropriate moments, but having been forced by Nicolas Sarkozy to run in the European elections as a way of sacking her from government, she remains defiant in her choice of footwear.
Once she was Sarkozy's handpicked symbol of change, hugely popular with the public as the first Muslim woman to hold a major government post. Now, after a spectacular fall from grace, Dati is using the European election campaign to fight back.
Despite trying to prove her commitment by returning to work five days after giving birth by caesarian section, Sarkozy ordered her to run in order to sack her after the 7 June vote. She felt "humiliated", according to the former prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin.(....) Dati wants to repair her own personal standing in order to be able to pursue her ambitions to become Paris mayor at a later date.
But even her symbolism as a hero of France's new ethnic minorities has taken a dent. "With her tenacity, she's a total inspiration," said Madad Zineb, 25, a student at the meeting. "But I think after Dati it now might be even harder for the young generation of ethnic minorities to break through in politics. There is now so much focus on personal history and all the tiny details of your private life. France has gained new ­hunger for that."

The problem for Dati is that she is no longer useful to Sarkozy precisely because she was solely a symbol. In politics, as anywhere else in life, it is always possible to replace symbols where they are no able to become gain some substance and gravitas by proving that they are about more than their gender, their beauty, their race or their religion . In Dati's case, she remained the glamorous and ambitious woman of Algerian and Moroccan origin, with a admirable life story, but never became fully a political woman with ideas and indispensable skills. In other words, she is just a celebrity and people don't take her seriously because she is perceived as one of Sarkozy's creatures who needs to accept her bannishment because she didn't seize the chance of a lifetime. Most people want her, especially her peers who are competing with her for the king's attention,  to fade in the background or to just die of boredom in Strasbourg. The saddest thing about Dati is that she is worth more than her caricature even though she was content with being fluffy because she thought probably that her status as a symbol would protect her from political and public attacks and would stop the French from viewing her as a cold calculating woman who did everything to succeed except studying her craft to become competent. Rachida Dati suffers from the same ill that plagues Sarah Palin, the airhead syndrome except that in her case her minority status and the fact that she does have a compelling rise from poverty to riches immigrant story makes her more sympathetic  and less contemptible because some fills that she had/has no control over her political fate and that she had/had few choices in life.

The intellectual decline of conservatism

Sugary excerpt of the day from Richard Posner's post on the intellectual decline of conservatism:

My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.
By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.

The Rebellious French Left

Mark Mardell on Olivier Besancenot and the popularity of the French extreme left:

Olivier Besancenot has enough charisma and charm to be able to stress that policies, not personalities, are what matter. But I think my mum would like him. A good-looking, well-groomed young man, casually smart in jeans and a black shirt, who sounds like he cares. But he is not leader, for there is a collective leadership and 10 people share the platform. [...] Besancenot tells me: "There is a new political space opening up. We feel there is even a part of the French political class that is taking up ideas which only we were expressing four or five years ago. That allows us to go a bit further. But our discourse only makes sense if there is a mass of the population who thinks politics belongs to them, not professional politicians."[...] My feeling is that if there is something of a resurgence of radicalism in France, it is a mood, not a movement. But that stylised megaphone does make a lot of noise (ah yes, we in the media amplify the phenomena). And we will have to wait until 7 June to see who is marching to a post-revolutionary tune.

I have never liked Olivier Besancenot precisely because he s only in perfect control of his image, which he uses to mask the fact that his ideas are as odd, outdated and uncool and he appears to be young, hip, and modern. The problem, as Mardell points out, is that there is a political vacuum in France created by the divisions within the French Socialist party and the absence of opposition to Sarkozy who is extremely happy to have Besancenot, who is not a real threat to him in the sense that he will never become president, rise in the polls and become his sole political opponent.

How to get banished in America

Michael Tomasky explains what it takes to never get a second act in America and be banished:

In America, as you know, everybody gets a second chance. Upstairs doing heroin while your young son almost drowns in the pool? Hey, Natalie Cole, no problem! Clean up, then write a book. We'll welcome you back into polite society.
I've spent the last 14 years thinking well, we've finally learned in America what you have to do to be utterly banished -- you have to literally get away with murder, or two of them (oops, I forgot this is Britain; I mean allegedly! Allegedly! And did I mention that he was acquitted by a jury of his peers?).
And now we add to the category a second condition: if you cheat on your cancer-stricken wife with another woman and still decide you can run for president, and you get busted, you're pretty much finished. Yes or no?

Tomasky is wrong and that America is such a diverse country that even the people responsible for the most despicable acts will always get a chance. They will be able to at least get more time in the limelight to either provoke more public anger or disgust, to become the pubic punching bag or worst to atone in public thus giving people the opportunity to feel that even at their worst, they will never get that bad and to indulge in their need to judge and to condemn sanctimoniously.

The case for enlargement

Borut Grgic makes the case for further enlargement of the European Union, which both Sarkozy and Merkel oppose:

The EU is a project in the making, which is why we have an enlargement policy, which has been the single best tool for reuniting the Continent. It has turned Europe into the biggest market in the world, and it has injected dynamism into the European economy. Now, it seems, someone wants to reverse this progress and halt enlargement.
The story of Europe, the dreams of Churchill and Roosevelt and Truman, later embraced and championed by Helmut Kohl, was a united, free and prosperous Europe. When the Berlin Wall fell, tyranny cracked. Millions of oppressed were free to speak, to act and to create. The splash of creativity that was reborn in the East is still surging and radiating energy across all of Europe. This is what the European dream is all about -- hope. Enlargement is the policy that gives our European brothers and sisters stuck on the margins of Europe the hope to be brave, to continue with reforms and political transformation despite the risks.
Enlargement is not about the political elites, but about the European citizens. It was always about improving the lives of the citizens across Europe. It is easy to dismiss our eastern neighbors on account of their leaders. Eurocrats with big egos dismiss the prospect that Ukraine, Georgia or Azerbaijan may one day become full members of our EU family. They criticize their leaders and their systems: there's too much corruption, too little political pluralism, and they are too slow at embracing economic change.
This all may be true today, but enlargement is about tomorrow. Having a strategy is having a vision, and the EU has no strategy for the East, which suggests there is no vision of what Europe ought to look like in 2030.

The problem for those who favor further enlargement of the EU and the reunification of Europe is that it is still dealing with the 2004 enlargement . Moreover,  without the support of France and Germany, which is unlikely to come any time soon, it is impossible for more countries to join the union because those are the two largest and most powerful of the union and that their support is essential. Enlargement of the EU is a romantic notion on paper, but it has started to be viewed by the most powerful countries, which favor a deepening of ties, as a hindrance to the growth of the EU as a rival to both China and the US especially in the times of economic crisis.
The elephant in the room is Turkey and the fact that the EU has started enlargement talks with that country even though many countries don't it to become a member makes it more difficult for the EU to open up to new countries while it hasn't found a solution to its Turkish problem.

The power of received ideas

Peter Baldwin on Europe, America, the perceived and real differences between the two continents:

(...) the European press wants the juicy, titillating lowdown. And America certainly dishes that up. Is there any other nation that washes its dirty laundry so publicly? Hence that genre of such fascination to the European chattering classes: the tedious travelogue by the sophisticated European, whether BHL, Baudrillard or Borat, observing American yokels and reporting back with the smug assurance of superiority to other sophisticated Europeans.
Moreover, Europe’s various cultures are ones still steeped in the lore of national stereotypes and quite happy to wring whatever elixir can be had from them. Who can forget Edith Cresson, Mitterrand’s prime minister, convinced that no Frenchman was gay, while the English were all limp-wristed poofs? Or consider the extent to which no Europeans, however otherwise politically correct, can be shaken in their conviction that the Roma really are shifty and thieving. (...) Here, we come to the grain of truth to the Atlantic divide. If there is anything that most separates American society from Europe, it is the continuing presence of an ethnically distinct underclass. Even as other outsiders have successfully assimilated, the tragic resonances of slavery in the black urban ghettos of America continue to prevail. (...) And if it is this distinct urban underclass that most distinguishes the US from Europe, Europeans should take notice. Europe’s birthrates have plummeted and immigration continues unabated. It is a demographic certainty that an ethnically and religiously distinct lower class in Europe will grow in the decades to come. Perhaps Europe will turn out to have been lucky. Having instituted universalist social policy, highly regulated labour markets and redistributive fiscal policy in the belief that it was all, so to speak, being kept “in the family,” Europe may weather the expansion of its social community. On the other hand, the social fabric may fray.

Staying a kid

I'm currently reading Losing Mum and Pup by Christopher Buckley which is a book on the life and the death of his parents. It is a fun read even though it makes me wonder whether it is possible not to be mark by your parents's worst traits especially when you don't have their strength of characters what it takes to live with them.

Keeping things simple

It's an acceptable day in New York even though the rain is threatening to come back. I'm staying in doors because I have a lot of books to read and a stressful week coming next week. Well, here is a song for the road.

The indispensability of frivolity

Quote of the day from James Garvey:

I wonder if the childishness, the playfulness, the fundamentally goofy nature of humanity is somehow required for the achievements we’ve managed.  Could we have the magic headset without the baseball players?  Would we have the internet without pornography and talk shows?  We are ridiculous and generally base, and the planet should almost certainly start over with insects, but before we sweep what’s most embarrassing about us under the carpet it might be worth wondering if it all goes along with, somehow enables, those parts of human nature which make us most proud.

European cowardice

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on what she believes to be an identity crisis in Europe, which makes Europeans unwilling to die for their values such as free speech and willing to tolerate the intolerable from Muslims :

Europe has become a place for new religions, new creeds, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism. Everything is thus relative. This is an uncertainty that the Muslim does not share. The Muslim ethic and tribal spirit are far more resilient and fierce in war than the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.
(...)Take the debate on freedom of expression. In 1989 and afterwards, the provocations in the name of Islam were greeted with a confident, "No way! This is Europe, and you can say what you like, write what you like," and so on.
Two decades later, Europeans are not so sure about the values of freedom of expression. Most members of the media engage in self-censorship. Textbooks in schools and universities have been adapted in such a way as not to offend Muslim sentiment. And legislation to punish 'blasphemy', if not passed, has been considered in most countries - or old laws that were never used are being revived.
(...) Muslims try to abolish freedom of expression using the vocabulary of freedom
The terrifying paradox about these developments is that Muslim immigrants were admitted into European borders on the basis of universal rights and freedoms that a large number of them now trample on, while others perhaps watch passively, or seek to defend only the image of Islam.
(...)In reality, if Europe falls, it's not because of Islam. It is because the Europeans of today - unlike their forbears in the Second World War - will not die to defend the values or the future of Europe. Even if they were asked to make the final sacrifice, many a post-modern lily-livered European would escape into an obscure mesh of conscientious objection. All that Islam has to do is walk into the vacuum.

I don't know, but there is something is this Ali's arguments that seems artificial and even insincere. I think that Glenn Greenwald is right to assert that people such Ayaan Hirsi Ali go out of their way to clash with Islam because they believe in global clashes and that there is indeed a clash of civilizations, which must be won by the West by taking the fight to the barbarians. However,  it is difficult to deny that there is a malaise within Europe caused not solely by Muslim immigration, but also by the critical debate, which has yet to happen or to least lead to some decisive political action about what it means to be European and whether nationality and citizenship can be about something other than culture especially when the later clashes with the present social compact.

The beautiful game

David Post has a great post on Chelsea vs. Barcelona, which explains why there are few things in sports as thrilling as a soccer football game. I have to admit that I was happy about the outcome of the game because I hate Chelsea with a passion almost as much as I hate the New York Yankees. Thus, I was ecstatic to see them lose the way that they did and the behavior of their players at the end of the game confirmed my suspicion that they are disgraceful losers for after all, there is no crying in football especially when the losing team's players had chances not to let the referee 's poor decisions matter by scoring more goals. The great thing about the beautiful game is that those who think that they can only win by uglying it and by killing its soul more often than not lose and do so spectacularly.

Sarkozy and the objectification of Europe

Charles Bremner has a good post on Sarkozy's latest new remixed ideas about Europe as he launched the European elections in France. Sugary excerpt:

Sarkozy sees the economic slump as a chance to assert France-friendly regulation in the Union after two decades in which, in French eyes, Europe has worshipped at the "liberal" -- meaning free market --  altar. He wants an end to competition among states on tax rates and an end to market rules that block mergers between big European companies, he said. A "European preference" must also be applied to favour the goods and services of the Union over those from outside. That was a Sarkozy campaign promise in 2007, but we had not heard about it since then. 
Looking to the outside, Sarkozy said Europe "must cease diluting itself in an endless enlargement. Europe must have frontiers." Turkey could never become a member but should have a special partnership. Russia should have the same, he said. That goes down well in France and Germany but not with Britain -- nor the United States, as we saw when Barack Obama called last month for Turkish EU entry.  Sarkozy has not been so tough in practice as in his rhetoric. He has not attempted to stop Ankara's accession negotiations, which began in 2005. 
(...) Sarkozy is of course telling voters what they want to hear ahead of an election which will serve as a referendum on his two years in power. He is echoing the public mood. The Socialist opposition wants roughly the same though it disagrees with Sarko's hostility to the Commission and Parliament. Northern Europeans do not generally realise it, but Europe has been widely seen in France for the past 15 years as a British-backed plot to undermine the French welfare state and way of life. Sarkozy is posing as its saviour. Or, in the gushing words of Luc Chatel, the Government spokesman, today: Sarkozy's vigorous leadership has revived in Europe "la pensée universelle française". 

The sad truth is that Sarkozy is not really an European in the sense that he has solely an ideological view of Europe, which explains why Europe is an object in his political campaigns, which he uses to talk about France, its fears, its aspirations and the sense that the many French have that Europe to be acceptable must be French or rather France with bigger frontiers. I will start taking Sarkozy's ideas about Europe seriously when they are about something other than grandstanding and winning elections or rather showing that his political party is more patriotic and nationalistic than the French Left. The saddest thing is that the French Left cannot counter successfully Sarkozy's grand European ambitions or at least bash them for their insincerity because it too has objectified Europe by making it about Sarkozy and Neoliberalism. Europe is a subject which divides the French Left's electorate and upon which its leaders do not want to have to take a definite stand, which means that sadly elections, which are supposed to be about Europe are about nothing else than France.

Sexual politics

What I dislike about sexual politics, especially in American, is that it is never about anything other than good and evil, the hunter and the hunter, the villain and the victims, and the naive and the all powerful. Susannah Breslin talks about the whole John/Elisabeth Edwards affair, which I don't want to talk about because something about that just repulses me, but nevertheless Breslin's points are relevant even though she starts by agreeing with Maureen Dowd. I have the strong suspicion that we are in for more sex scandals not in American politics, but in international politics (the Berlusconi divorce affair shows that there is a good chance that I'm right) because politicians are now first and foremost celebrities. Last week, Charlie Rose compared Obama to Michael Jordan and I thought that it proved that we are living in a time when politicians are performers who not only want the ball, but want people to admire them and to scream their name as they are making the last and most amazing  shot.

French and a rush of blood to the head

When I'm brain dead, surprisingly it becomes impossible for me to write in English, which explains why I haven't been posting as much as I want to. I'm suffering from chronic fatigue, which just drains all of my energy and makes it impossible for me to write bilingually because I have this awful sense of being near death because my brain has frozen. Luckily, I live in a city where getting a cab is easy and where you can do everything else on the net such as buy decent groceries. English may be my lazy language, but I have the feeling that in these times when it is difficult for me to find the energy to do what I want /have to do, I revert to French not to feel useless and dead.