The Republic of Dissent

The sky has fallen

I'm dealing with a lot of crappy thing, excuse my French. So I will blog irregularly for a while. I mean hell when you starts getting dirt on your shoulders, it just invites more problems.

Punitive sentences

Bernie Madoff is getting over 100 years in jail. Somehow, this sentence just feels shallows to me . It isn't punitive. It doesn't even serve as deterrent for all the crooks out there. After all, if you can steal billions of dollars, live the life of a super-rich most of your life and then just spend your old age in jail, why wouldn't want to be Madoff and try to f**k, beat the system?

Quilibet audendi potestas

I'm daring to take some time off this week-end. I'm braindead...

Too much

I believe that in our time the hardest thing to find is balance. Everybody is talking about Michael Jackson and the media is, of course, one more time, overdoing it, because it's the only thing that it knows how to do in these cases. The saddest thing  is that you realize very quickly that the show is about something else and that the deceased has been depersonified, objectified and that the feelings expressed by individuals who are, often too exhibistionistic or too manipulative (which doesn't mean necessarily that they are insincere) , are about the ones expressing them not the person who died. Tragedies don't have to become spectacles.

Love, weddings, marriage and other catastrophes

I agree with Jessa Crispin on this:

Marriage has freaked me out since I received a proposal at the age of 21 from a nice young man who didn’t see why I needed to work. My mouth said, “Umm, I need to think about it;” my brain said, “Run.” Ever since that event, I have fled all the men who prefer to set up a house, packing my bags the second he starts hinting about rings. It’s a difficult position to take in a culture so marriage obsessed. Let me rephrase that: Wedding obsessed. Engagement ring obsessed. Proposing on top of the Empire State Building obsessed. The crushing need to find that man, get that ring, and pick a date permeates movies, books, television, and the commercials. Even in that horrible Sex and the City movie, after one attempt at a wedding goes awry, our heroic couple reunites to wonder why they needed to get married in the first place. Couldn’t they just be together? The sentiment only lasts a moment, and then they’re off to the altar again.
And a wedding is the assumed goal of any love story. You can be one of those crazy couples together for 10 years, but when you fall in love, those around you immediately start asking when you’ll get married. Yet never has marriage seemed less appealing. Divorce is not only probable, but expected, to the point that the cynical phrase “starter marriage” has entered our vocabulary. The great love stories of our time are tabloid wedding photos of celebrities, everything airbrushed and shiny and choreographed to the last second. The same tabloids will stop at nothing to find cracks in the marriage only a few issues later, and will shame and pity a divorced or single woman until that rock is on her finger. It’s love as business arrangement, as item on a checklist, as social conformity.

I can see things clearly now

Now that Jonathan Chait has figured Obama out (hat tip: Norm Geras), everything makes sense. I get it just like those cavemen in the Geico commercials do:

Obama began his presidency by elaborately courting the opposition party. Republicans in Congress believed that, by flamboyantly withholding cooperation, they could deny Obama his stated goal of bipartisan harmony and thus render him a failure. Instead, they wound up handing Obama the alternative victory of appearing to be the reasonable party. Polls showed that the public, by overwhelming margins, believed that Obama was trying to work with Republicans and that Republicans were not reciprocating.
Likewise, by defusing the complaint among Islamists that the United States disrespects their religion, Obama can more easily force the Iranian leadership to negotiate on the terms of its stated goals. This is actually "a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers," as American Prospect editor Mark Schmitt wrote in 2007. "One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in," Schmitt explained, "treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem."
This apparent paradox is one reason Obama's political identity has eluded easy definition. On the one hand, you have a disciple of the radical community organizer Saul Alinsky turned ruthless Chicago politician. On the other hand, there is the conciliatory post-partisan idealist. The mistake here is in thinking of these two notions as opposing poles. In reality it's all the same thing. Obama's defining political trait is the belief that conciliatory rhetoric is a ruthless strategy.

Remaining America

I agree with this:

The White House Press corps loves to laugh condescendingly at Helen Thomas because, tenaciously insisting that our sermons to others be applied to our own Government, she acts like a real reporter (exactly as -- according to Politico's Josh Gerstein -- White House reporters "could be seen rolling their eyes and shifting in their seats" when Obama called on The Huffington Post's Nico Pitney, who has done some of the most tireless work on Iran, gave voice to actual Iranians, and posed one of the toughest questions at the Press Conference).  The premise of Thomas' question was compelling and (contrary to Obama's dismissal) directly relevant to Obama's answers:  how is it possible for Obama to pay dramatic tribute to the "heartbreaking" impact of that Neda video in bringing to light the injustices of the Iranian Government's conduct while simultaneously suppressing images that do the same with regard to our own Government's conduct?

Becoming Robespierre

Stuart Jeffries on Sarkozy, the Burqa, and its assertion that it isn't welcomed in France (hat tip Arthur Goldhammer)

Sarkozy now goes further, following revolutionary logic in not just chasing those who dress in ways he and French political culture finds intolerable out of public spaces, but pursuing those who dress in a way that is a rejection of western values even into their private worlds. He said: "The burka is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience. It will not be welcome on the territory of the French republic." Even religious justification is bad enough, run the suppressed premises of this argument, but the absence of such despicable justifications is worse.
The woman in a burka is revealed as subservient to patriarchal culture. She must be made free to choose to be more western. Sarkozy proposes, in giving his backing to the establishment ofa parliamentary commission to look at whether to ban the wearing of burkas in public, that such imposed freedom would improve her lot.
French venerate such abstract freedoms. We needn't. They were, for Hegel, the basis of the revolution's collapse into the Terror in which, he argued, individuals were sacrificed to the ill-conceived pursuit of abstract freedoms. Sarkozy is thus a modern-day Robespierre, proposing some women – whom he presumes to have been silenced by patriarchal society and whose voices he doesn't want to hear –be terrorised in the name of the kind abstract freedoms France has venerated for 210 years. Let's see if he succeeds.

Writing about sex

Jean Edelstein on the difficulty for women to write about sex:

It is true, I think, that some women find it harder to write about sex than their male counterparts – I know I find it difficult, and I'm pretty sure that it has a lot to do with the fact that readers are informed by the sexual double standard when they react to sex writing: men seem to be able to do it with impunity, as confirmation of their virility, whereas women who write well about sex are assumed to be somewhat loose living. I can't deny that this affected my decisions when it came to writing the chapter about sex in my book – and it took me twice as long as the other chapters, such was the challenge of hitting the right tone, neither prudish nor graphic. Perhaps I'd have been less sensitive if I'd been a man - but then again, perhaps the end result would have been less useful to readers, many of whom also struggle with the inherent ambivalencies of sex.

I'm wondering if the problem is that women aren't allowed to write about bad sex or rather to write badly about sex without it becoming a statement not just about their femininity (frigidity or wantonness) , but also their ability as a writer.

Slavery, Race, politics, pain and apologies

Something about these assertions from Carol Swain bugs me:

I am astonished at how easy it is for some Republicans to deny their party has a serious race problem. In a few days, I anticipate releasing an advice letter I wrote to President Bush about this matter. I am very aware of the grand history of the Republican Party and would love to see the party reclaim the mantle of Lincoln and integrate its membership with Americans who share the values it once espoused.
Lastly, my desire to pursue an apology came after I became an active participant in the reparations debates associated with Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree and TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson. Although I oppose slave reparations, I believe much good could come from an apology. I have heard scores of elderly African-Americans state that they had no interest in monetary reparations. In fact, many said that there was not enough money in the world to repair the damage done to their ancestors. They expressed a desire for the government to acknowledge the injustice of slavery and the Jim Crow period that followed.
Likewise, I have had numerous Southern white women approach me with tears in their eyes to offer personal apologies for what their people did to my people. Clearly, I am not the appropriate person to receive an apology for what the U.S. government failed to prevent. My pursuit of an apology is a consequence of my hearing the pain of real people. It is clear to me that America would benefit by dealing with this issue in a forthright manner. The voice-vote Senate apology fails to meet my standards for how the matter ought to have been handled.

Barack Obama and Soft Despotism

Something about Mark Steyn's point about Obama, Paul Anthony Rahe, and Soft Despotism rubs me the wrong way. I think that it is the fact that it isn't totally absurd even though it comes from an individual whose views on Europe, France especially I despise:

To the new Administration, American exceptionalism means an exceptional effort to harness an exceptionally big government in the cause of exceptionally massive spending. The can-do spirit means Ty’Sheoma Bethea can do with some government money: A high-school student in Dillon, South Carolina, Miss Bethea wrote to the President to ask him to do something about the peeling paint in her classroom. He read the letter out approvingly in a televised address to Congress. Imagine if Miss Bethea gets her way, and the national bureaucracy in Washington becomes responsible for grade- school paint jobs from Maine to Hawaii. What size of government would be required for such a project? And is it compatible with a constitutional republic?

Discrimination and Banishment

I wonder if Frank Furedi would apply the following principle no just on the British National Party (BNP), but on every shameful views including those who advocate for example the Burqa for women, deny the Shoah, and favor violence:

Discriminating against people on the grounds that they hold the wrong views is no more legitimate than discriminating against individuals on the basis of their religion or race.

I believe that the banishment is an admission of powerlessness, a confession that one doesn't possess the tools/doesn't know how to educate society and to persuade it to make good decisions on important subjects. There is such a thing as the duty, an obligation to persuade/to educate for those who believe fervently that they are on the right side of any issue, especially  when those issues are decisive to the overall health of a society.

As manly and as Italian as Berlusconi

Gideon Rachman on Berlusconi, his love of young women, and Italian Culture:

Whatever the truth about these strongly-denied stories, Berlusconi - now in his seventies - has never made a secret of his liking for young women. I once went to a dinner he gave in Rome for European journalists. He ensured that all the prettiest women were seated at his table. One young Turkish woman, who had evidently missed the journalism-school lecture about “not getting too close to your sources”, ended up sitting on Berlusconi’s lap.
Many Italians find their prime minister’s behaviour acutely embarrassing. One commentator on the BBC this morning groaned that it is like “having Benny Hill as prime minister”.
I sympathise. But I also think that Berlusconi is representative of something broader in Italian culture. If you watch Italian television it seems to be absolutely stuffed with game shows, full of giggling scantily-clad models who are being leched over by much older (and often shorter) men.

I've heard this before. It seems to me that every time a man acts like a pig, he will always find an excuse by talking about his genes, his manliness, his culture, his upbringing or just the fact that all the women he had/took/seduced were either willing or just bitches who haunted him until he game them what they wanted.

Sarkozy and the Burqa

Neil Clark on Sarkozy and his willingness to put the Burqa at the center of the French political debate:

The secret of Sarkozy's success is that he knows how to spot a vote winner. While the left sought to focus on the underlying causes of the riots which plagued Paris in the autumn of 2005, Sarkozy, as Minister of the Interior, simply sent in the riot police and denounced the rioters as racaille or 'rabble'.
Faced with the impact of the global recession, he ditched his flirtation with Anglo-Saxon capitalism and adopted more traditional dirigiste Gaullist policies - in the process completely wrong-footing the left.
Now it seems he's played another trump card by announcing on Monday the establishment of a commission to consider banning the wearing in public of the burka - the garment worn by some Muslim women which covers the entire body, including the face.
His argument for doing so is not just that the burka represents an assault on French secularism, but that it is degrading to women. By championing the rights of women, Sarkozy is able to pose as the defender of the founding principles of the Republic. He also gains kudos for dealing with a hyper-sensitive political issue head-on. And here's the really clever part: he manages at the same time to expose divisions on the left. 

This debate about the Burqa frustrates me because it is clear that it isn't about the burqa, but about something else, about identity politics, defining/redefining what it means to be French and what/who cannot become French. I don't mind having such a debate, but it isn't cheap to confine it to the interdiction of the Burqa of French society when the issue is about finding the balance between liberty and religion, all religions not just Islam for after all, if as Sarkozy asserts the Burqa is about foreign traditions and cultures, then what is the problem? Can women wear the Burqa if they assert that they do it just because they like it, just as they would wear fur or a thong?

Adoucir les moeurs

Sh*t happens!

I'm having a tough weekend so far...I'm struggling with so many issues that I wish I could just scream in the streets of Manhattan to let my frustration out instead of letting it build inside of me. Well, the good news is that all I have to do is to learn how to be more patient and master self-control. The bad news for me is that I'm not sure that I can do it.

Because Tennis shouldn't be a religious experience...

I won't be watching Wimbledon this year. Nadal just withdrew. What a shame! Tennis isn't just the same without him. We are just back to a few years ago when it was Federer all the time and when nobody could even managed to give him a fight because they thought he was a Tennis God. I know that Federer got devoted believers and I have to say that I like the guy because it is hard not to be amazed by his grace and his talent  ( I was never able to even watch Sampras), but he doesn't do it for me because Tennis to me isn't about religion, it is about the divine or the sublime, it is about battling yourself, your opponent, overcoming your pain or making him feel the pain. Without Nadal, WImbledon becomes just another boring and apparently larger than life religious temple. Because I hate religious experiences, which are about nothing more than praying for the divine and being in awe of its beauty, I'm skipping Wimbledon this year.

Taking the time to enjoy Sushi

I'm almost done reading L'Elégance du Hérisson. It is taking me an usually great amount of time because I have no free time and because I have decided to make the experience last a little while. I'm at the end of the novel, I'm wondering if I'm love, in lust or just hypnotized by something unfamiliar, too peculiar not to be more than alright. That's the only subject I'm allowing myself to ponder, for now... I will finish it this weekend.

Just another almost revolution

Douglas Muir explains why Ahmadinejad will win. I have to say that I can't believe that serious people are thinking that he will lose and Iran will have changed regime in the next couple of weeks. As I have said previously, we have seen this movie before.

Sexual moralism and hypocrisy

This argument defending sexual moralists and their frailty both disgusts and bugs me:

Sexual moralists do not typically claim that they are immune from temptation. To the contrary, as illustrated by the odd behavior noted in that Washington Post article, they sometimes have a hyperawareness of their vulnerability to it. Those who succumb to temptation are weak, but they are not necessarily hypocritical.
John Edwards cheated on his wife while promoting a campaign narrative in which he portrayed himself (with Mrs. Edwards's cynical collaboration) as the devoted husband of his cancer-stricken wife. Now that's hypocrisy. From the available evidence, John Ensign is nowhere near as bad a hypocrite as John Edwards. How's that for faint praise?

Only in America and in religious/fanatically religious countries would one even write about sexual moralism without questioning it, without finding the fact that women can still be perceived by men in power as solely sexual creatures through whom the devil will eventually tempt them to betray their faith and their God. Was it the difference between Ensign and Ahmadinejad on this issue except that the latter would tolerate a woman's presence if she is properly covered so as not to provoke him to take or to have impure thoughts when he isn't in the proper forum to mount her to say things vulgarly.

Wake me up at the end of the movie

I can't bring myself to be riveted by the whole Iran thing because the story  is hyped by the media which, I sense is waiting with unhealthy anticipation for an explosion, for the image, the interview, the thing, the moment that will bring more attention not so much to Iran, but to the courage of journalists covering the story. I feel as if I'm in a crowded theater watching a poorly made movie with an average cast who lacks the patience required to let the story evolve and speak for itself. I've seen all of this before and what are missing in this case, yet again, are distance, good reporting and something other than expected and cliché analysis about the struggle of a people for freedom. It's sad to say but I think this story will only become compelling at its end when the emphasis will shift from speed to accuracy and from syrupy clichés to singularity and fractured realities.

The same eternal struggle

Another one of Bruce Bawer's alarmist and ridiculous assertion on Europe, Islamofascism, Muslim Immigration, and Pim Fortuyn's heirs who are  battling courageously for its soul:

Who will win the war for the soul of Western Europe? The Islamofascists and their multiculturalist appeasers, many of whom seem to believe that their job is not to defend democracy but to help make the transition to sharia as smooth as possible? The nativist cryptofascists? Or Pim Fortuyn’s freedom-loving heirs? Interestingly, while Western Europeans have been heading in one direction, Americans have chosen to go the other way, replacing a president more loathed by the European elite than any in history with a man whom the same elite has celebrated to an unprecedented degree, often depicting his election as a mystical act of atonement for all of America’s past sins, real or imagined. The final question, then, is whether the Western European Left’s condescension toward America, and the American Left’s habit of holding Western Europe up as a socialist paradise, can survive the combination of Europe’s right turn and the elevation of Barack Obama.

Being a woman and a writer

Toril Moi on Women, gender, writing, and literature:

If I try to imagine a situation in which a man might say "I am a writer, not a man writer", I can only think of it as a response to some kind of provocation from a feminist. Even when they work in a profession dominated by women, men do not appear to feel compelled to deny their sex or gender. In the USA, I have discovered, a man trained as a nurse is called a "male nurse". (...) For writers who are women, it can be incredibly frustrating to be told that they have to write as a woman or like a woman. For what is this supposed to mean? That she has to conform to some stereotypical norm for feminine writing? (,,,)
Literature is the archive of a culture. We turn to literature to discover what makes other human beings suffer and laugh, hate and love, how people in other countries live, and how men and women experienced life in other historical periods. To turn women into second-class citizens in the realm of literature is to say that women's experiences of existence and of the world are less important than men's.

The winds of change

I didn't watch the Bill Maher's soft take down of Obama and his love of TV last week on his show because I stopped watching it more than a year ago. I thought that he had stopped to be funny because he wanted so much to believe in the audacity of hope. In an op-ed in the LA Times, Maher writes:

I'm still a fan, but there's a fine line between being transparent and being overexposed. Every time you turn on the TV, there's Obama. He's getting a puppy! He's eating a cheeseburger with Joe Biden! He's taking the wife to Broadway and Paris -- this is the best season of "The Bachelor" yet!
I get it: You love being on TV. I love my bong, but I take it out of my mouth every once in a while. The other day, I caught myself saying to a friend, "Don't tell me if he's fixed the economy yet, I'm Tivo-ing it."(...) It's getting to where you can't turn on your TV without seeing Obama. Who does he think he is, Dick Cheney? Come on, sir, you don't have to be on television every minute of every day. You're the president, not a rerun of "Law and Order." Save some charisma for a rainy day. (...)I'm glad that Obama is president, but the "Audacity of Hope" part is over. Right now, I'm hoping for a little more audacity.

I guess the fact that he can criticize Obama by daring to ask him to be more substantive rather than to act as if he were president in a Hollywoodian movie means that it may become easier for comedians even when they are first and foremost fans, to make fun of the president. Who knows may be change is coming...

Faith and political reforms

Oliver Kamm on Obama's Cairo speech, Islam, and political reforms:

I'm uneasy about an American President (or sometime British Prime Minister, for the same applies to Tony Blair) declaring as a matter of policy deep respect for Islam. I can see the political imperative for doing so and (in the case of the statesmen concerned) the sincerity of the sentiment. But the proper attitude of a constitutional democracy towards religious faith is not respect but disinterest (i.e. neutrality). Our societies defend religious liberty and conscience. That's the least, but also the limit, of how the state should treat religion.
There's a pragmatic reason for such a stand. The Islamic faith is a fact of life and a huge influence on the world order. It's essential for peace and justice that Islam be dominated by elements that make their accommodation with democratic values, modern mores and secular education. To speak in an undifferentiated way of Islam and its achievements does not give the right message to those elements: to political reformers, religious moderates and heroic secular forces in autocratic states. Their voices need to be heard and encouraged, in the same way that dissidents in the Soviet bloc were given heart by an explicit commitment (in the Helsinki Final Agreement of 1975) to human rights.
That was the missing element in Obama's address. And when you see the pictures of demonstrators demanding freedom in Tehran, you have to conclude that the omission was not even good politics.

I'm agnostic on this issue as I am on most Obama's speeches because I don't think that speeches are good substitutes for policy. Kamm has a point, but I wonder if all of this fluff matters.

Stats don't lie !?

Oh boy!:

The truth is, violent white-on-black crime is a rarity in Britain, by comparison – although white-on-Asian crime is rather less so. The overwhelming bulk of violent street crime in London is committed by young black men, and in numerous cases against white people, although one would not impute a racial motive; the statistics suggest that young black male criminals are quite happy to stab or shoot anybody who hoves into view with either a bulging wallet, a mobile phone or an assumed reflection of disrespec’ in their eyes.
Apologies if this offends – but that’s how it is. At most, the African Caribbean population of London is about 12% of the whole. But black males are responsible for nearly 60% of arrests for robbery – and the overwhelming majority of gun crime, most of it black-on-black violence.
We skirt this issue, mostly for decent, if deluding reasons – that a proportion of young black males is more likely to commit violent crime than other sectors of the population. It is a form of racism, though, to assume that the problem is simply a given, and unalterable – but we have been hamstrung in our attempts to deal with it for reasons of political correctness.
The propensity of some young black males to underachieve at school and later commit crimes of violence has been seen for too long as a roguish expression of cultural diversity, exacerbated by our own inherent racism and economic oppression; in other words, it’s not their fault. Indeed the culture of violence, misogyny and epic drug abuse, exemplified in rap music, has been lapped up by a bovine liberal white culture that finds the vibrancy and “edginess” of gangsta rap something in which we should all exult and indeed emulate.

Race people

No comentario:

Democrats have long ago bought into the idea that minorities can only relate to people who look like them and must be coddled by people who do not. The Party of Lincoln, on the other hand, carries the unenviable burden of telling black, brown, and yellow people that it welcomes them, even as it insists that they have no special place, purely as a result of their race, in the party's core beliefs about the free market and individual freedom.
So the black man in the White House came to power by incessantly invoking his biography and identity. Barack Obama reminded everyone every day on the campaign trail that he is the son of a man from Kenya and a woman from Kansas. Michael Steele, the black man at the center of Republicans' political comeback efforts, prefers to talk about "personal freedom, liberty, and the desire for self-governing."
It is a stark contrast. Unfortunately, political realities skew in favor of the man of biography and the party of identity politics. Racial entitlement often creates a corrosive effect on minorities. Some brazenly demand jobs, college admissions, or business transactions based on race or gender, while others insist that identity trumps ideas or objective considerations. In that vein, Obama's Supreme Court nominee believes that "a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Le net

David Post has an excellent post on France, the EU and Internet Speech, which is a must-read. My only criticism is that it asks more questions than it answers. The reason for that is that we are at a time where nobody quite knows where the law will go if the two options concerning Internet Speech remains between total freedom and censorship.

It's always about rythm

Well, nil novi sub sole, my life is about work, work, work, work, espresso and fatigue. I listen to Keziah Johnes a lot not to fall asleep and let my brain die.

Home office

It is more exhausting to work at home than in an office. I have been working from home for almost a week now and I am more tired than I was before. I'm refusing to accept that anemia is a real sickness so I'm blaming everything on the fact that I'm not as organized and focused as I should be. Apart from that, the weather in New York just sucks to say thing prosaically and bluntly. It feels like there was never any spring and that summer is cheating with winter because it is actually cold.  I only have a simple wish right now; it is to find the strength to exercise, just a little bit, to feel useful physically. I have no energy. I can't focus. I feel like I live in a coffin. What a year!

Personal taste

I'm ambivalent about this:

Criticising someone for their taste is plainly silly. Liking one particular cultural artifact over another does not and cannot make you a better human being than anyone else. We like what we like. Doesn't criticism takes that for granted? In the same way, we accept that e.g. football isn't the be all and end all of everything... and then we enter the fray regardless; and, on entering, at that point we believe with Bill Shankly that football is not a matter of life or death, but actually much more important than that. We cast off our neutrality because engagement is life. This is not too far from the view held by Alain Badiou when he argues that it is only through passionate allegiance to an event that we become authentic subjects...

Anything but a smooth transition

This week is another tough one for me so I won't post as much as I want to. I have so many things to do and an apartment to order. My anemia makes me feel like I weigh 500 pounds and like my brain is a thousand years old. I have just ordered a new computer and new "smartphone" so I'm in what I like to call a transitional period that hopefully will make my world and my work more technologically savvy. After I heard the news yesterday on the new Iphone, I was so happy I resisted the urge to get one last week. The trouble that I have one is that I don't see the point of getting one if I constantly need to worry about the fact that it is costing me way to more that it ought and that Apple will in the next month come up with something better. I think a phone company should do an Ad comparing the its product to the Iphone just like Apple does with pc with those persuasive commercials on TV, which make you want to get a  Apple computer just to avoid having to deal with Vista and other silly Windows updates. That said, I'm going to get a Macbook Pro fairly soon, but I will wait another year to get an Iphone.

Liking the sound of one's voice

Quote of the day from Stanley Fish:

It’s one thing to be calling the tune; it’s another to proclaim it in every sentence. Someone is going to say, “Am I the only one who thinks that Obama likes the sound of his own voice?” (...). Of course we all like the sound of our own voices. The trick , which Obama will probably learn down the road, is to avoid making it too obvious.

King of Paris

Well, Federer won the French Open... He deserves it for he has shown throughout his career that he is better than Sampras and probably the best player of the last forty years. I have to admit that I have only eyes for Rafa Nadal and that my heart is aching for him right now for I have the suspicion that his body is going to stop him from becoming the best player that he can be. The funny thing  about this French Open is it confirmed the fact that to be adopted by the French crowds one has to do three things: to be the best at what one does, to do what one does beautifully and elegantly, and to be cultured or to speak French fairly well which always give the appearance of intelligence, finesse, and of a great education (when one looks a certain way or possesses the other two attributes).  Those are the reasons why the French crowd in Roland Garros loves Federer and has always believed that he is one of the them. I can't help but thinking how far Obama would be if he learned only a few words of French, but he is ,in the eyes of most of French, Frenchlike since the one thing that he can't do is to speak French.

Happy and blissful America

Why do I feel like weeping when I read this?:

For eight years we could, in equal measure, mock and pity America: for its culture wars, its nut-job religiosity and redneck unreason. We could sympathise with liberal friends about their word-fumbling comedy president, his sulphurous VP, torture, rendition, provincialism, paranoia... Not any more. Watching a dazzling Obama address the Muslim world you suddenly remember the point of America: its big-picture optimism and modernity, its epic generosity and can-do attitude. And Britain seems by contrast self-loathing, curdled, introspective, hopeless and small.
America - at last - has its real-life Jed Bartlett: we're stuck with a bunch of Alan B'stards. Now we have a PM bothering himself with failed candidates on Britain's Got Talent; they have a President who makes scholarly jokes, quipping that his classically trained spin doctor Rahm Emanuel “was the first to choreograph a ballet version of Machiavelli's The Prince”. A leader who can both wield the Koran and has a butt which, running up the steps of Air Force One, looks hot in white jeans. A President who has not only watched The Wire but is unafraid to say his fave character is Omar, a gay stick-up artist.
Why didn't Gordon Brown get out more, take his forbearing wife to the theatre, attend just one event that wasn't based on horse-trading or appearances? It would have lightened him up, given him oxygen and perspective, won a little public love. Instead he retreated to his gloomy bunker, surrounded himself with unworthy hatchet men and acolytes, anoints Lord Sugar of Amstrad, concentrates ever more on the internal and recondite.
Meanwhile, Mr Obama walks boldly into the heart of Islam, doesn't balk at raising women's rights and, more than that, demonstrates them by having Hillary Clinton beside him in a mosque. Imagine, a man with the cojones, the diplomacy and grace to award that great office of state to his fiercest former foe.

Well, I guess America is back to the end of the eighties when its favorite tune was one of the worst songs I've ever heard (in English anyway) Don't worry, be happy.

Il pleut doucement sur la ville

I'm working from home today. I'm physically exhausted and I'm braindead. I have no energy. The fact that it is raining buckets in New York doesn't help. Anyway, I've started reading L'Elégance du Hérisson and I'm waiting to finish it and to digest it to write anything on it. In other words, I don't know whether I like it or not, it is a little bit like the first time you have sushi, you have to finish the meal before you decide whether you like raw fish.

Ze speech

I'm having an awful week. My anemia is back in full force and it is kicking my you know what. Nevertheless, I wanted to write on Obama's speech in Cairo today. My personal opinion is that it will matter not in the immediate future, but in the next decade if it is followed by change (there is that awful word again), by something more substantives than syrupy words and good intentions. Speeches matter in international relations when they are followed by actions and that they announced the beginning of a new era in a country's foreign policies. It is for that reasons that although George W. Bush speeches were criticized for their dullness, arrogance, and their simple-mindedness, they were meaningful. In simpler terms, Ze speech will matter if it is the beginning of something new, the first step in the creation of a new era in American foreign policy (I have my doubts, but hey, I could be). Reza Aslan has a more critical take on the speech, but I think that it is because he bought in the whole messianic mystique that came with Obama's election:

Obama should have chosen Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, a moderate, pluralistic, wildly successful democratic country whose citizens just last month overwhelming voted for secular and moderate Muslim parties over the country’s more radical Islamist groups. Instead, by choosing Cairo as the backdrop to his speech, Obama has in effect rewarded Egypt’s president for life, Hosni Mubarak, for his bloody, blatantly anti-democratic, and dictatorial rule.(...) While it is becoming increasing clear that the new administration has abandoned the half-hearted and ultimately hypocritical democracy-promotion program of the previous administration, it is equally clear that the Muslim world has done no such thing. On the contrary, as I have written in these pages before, the overwhelming majority of people in the Middle East (78 percent, according to Gallup International) consider democracy “the best form of government” and continue to clamor for greater political freedoms, especially in countries like Egypt.
What the Muslim people want to hear is what kind of pressure America is willing to place on its dictatorial allies in order to force them to address their people’s aspirations for genuine political, economic, and social development. The truth is that, after four months of Obama in the White House, the Muslim world has had its fill of his platitudes about “mutual respect.” They want to know what actions the Obama administration is willing to take to fundamentally change America’s relationship with the Muslim world. Chiefly, they want to hear about Obama’s specific policy recommendations for dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

God as Commander in Chief

 Kathy Gilsinan reviews Reza Aslan's How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror:

In the author’s view, Christians, Jews, and Muslims have all fought cosmic wars of comparable viciousness throughout history and up to the present. “Lord, give us patience, make us stand firm… God [will be] victorious”—the words are Osama bin Laden’s, but they could have been uttered by almost any wartime American president. And when George W. Bush initiated what came to be known here as the War on Terror, and what came to be known elsewhere as the War on Islam, he announced that America would “rid the world of evil.” Nor did the theological rhetoric end there. In a flourish both apocalyptic and childish, Bush refused to mention Osama bin Laden by name for months after the September 11 attacks, referring to him only as “the Evil One.” All of which is to say that both sides in this “cosmic war” believed themselves to be reporting to God as Commander in Chief.

Powerful narrative, useful resentment, and change

ahhhhh...the beauty of perceived powerlessness:

Most Middle Eastern states have very little incentive to work towards a two-state solution.  Within many Arab countries, domestic resentment can be channeled into anger at the Israelis and symbolic support for the Palestinians.  Why would governments in the region want to turn off that very useful spigot?

Secularization, Christianity, and Europe

Terry Sanderson on Secularization, Christianity, and the future of Europe:

A Eurobarometer poll (pdf) reveals that when asked about what they value most, only 7% of Europeans nominated religion. That same poll tells us that about half of Europeans think that religion is afforded too much importance. When asked about what values the European Union represents, the ranking starts with human rights (37%), then peace (35%), democracy (34%) and way down last again is religion with only 3%.
So, if Christianity is not the future of Europe, will the continent become Islamic?
The answer is again, no. The capitulation of western governments to the violence of Islamic jihadists and the subsequent channelling of all discourse about Muslims through religious representatives has created the impression that all Muslims are deeply pious and inimical to western values. They are not.
We have been bamboozled by the term "Islamophobia", which suggests that Islam is under systematic persecution in the west. But new research by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (pdf) shows clearly that while people who identify themselves as Muslims are, indeed, victims of much discrimination, by their own account hardly any of it is because of their religion. Another poll showed that young Muslims have a strong desire for westernisation, which again contradicts those who have been appointed to speak for them from the pulpits.

Love and knitting

It's good to have a cathartic laugh in the morning:

I am in love! Obviously, it’s lust really. Infatuation. Isn’t it always at this stage in the game? Love comes lately if the bastard ever shows at all - even on a promise.
But never mind semantics now. I’m beyond that. Just look!
Oh it’s craziness incarnate. Did you ever see a more incompatible pairing as that pattern and me? It’s never going to work. I don’t have the time. I don’t have the skill. That, that *thing* is going to be my undoing. My unravelling. I don’t mind a bit of colourwork.Remember my houndstooth check? The pattern I eventually convinced myself didn’t look too alarmingly like a tessellation of swastikas? Well, that, you see, that, that was tricky, a little attention required, but eventually it assimilated into my brain. It’s just a four row repeat, see. Two rows with mainly the background colour, two with mainly the contrast colour. Knit it for an inch and you’re not really thinking anymore. Okay, so I did louse it up on a hot train diverted one afternoon from London Bridge via Elephant and Castle and had to spend an evening ripping the wrong part back while trying to like Dollshouse (Whedon not Ibsen - which probably serves as a three word review).
But what future me and this thing? This new/shiny? This distraction-havoc wreaked on my brain by the seductive power of Vogue Knitting? Oh the strange lands you encounter if you let Ravelry be your guide. Ravelry is like facebook but with the addition of knitting - and the subtraction of anything that isn’t knitting. (Well there is crochet but, obviously, no one cares.)

The ego of the Man in the Mirror

Ahead of Obama's visit to France thus to Sarkozy, it was predictable that Americans journalists and others were going go be tempted to remake the portrait of Sarkozy and to point that he never become what they expected him to be. Here is an example from the Economist (hat tip: Schott's Vocab)

Or take François Bayrou, a centrist leader, who kicked off his campaign by publishing a vitriolic book entitled “Abuse of Power”. Describing France under Mr Sarkozy as an “egocracy”, he refers to the president variously as “a blind monarch” and “a barbaric child”, who “believes himself all-powerful and imagines that the world starts with him and is in his hand”. Magazines devote many pages to analysing the president’s psychological make-up. The French blogosphere, too, is filled with caustic anti-Sarkozy commentary, mocking everything from his taste for Rolex watches to his overbearing posse of bodyguards and his tough policies on crime.(...)Above all, it is Mr Sarkozy’s style and method of governing that prompts real passion. No president under the fifth republic has run so much directly from the Elysée Palace. Presidential advisers are as likely to decide policy as ministers. The prime minister’s job has been downgraded to that of manager. Mr Sarkozy’s network of business chums invites suspicions of cronyism. Moreover, by opening up his private life to public inspection, he has made his own behaviour, with all its quirks, a legitimate subject of debate in a way that would have been unthinkable in the past. He recently posted on Facebook a video of himself and two dogs dropping in on Carla Bruni, his wife.

I have always believed that Sarkozy was a politician in the wrong country and that he would have made a popular president of the United States. The funny thing about all the articles on anti-Sarkozysm and egocracy is that their authors haven't yet realized that Sarkozy has a lot in common with Obama, that he is Obama's twin; his main problems are that he reigns in an environment where all his faults overshadow his qualities. If I wanted to be cute, I would says that Sarkozy is Danny de Vito in the movie Twins and that Obama is Schwarzenegger. The difference is that both are very good at what they do and that one, unfortunately, in part because he has the looks and governs in the right environment gets all of the praise and of the adoration while the other has to pick up the flowers. Sarkozy must wake every morning and see Obama in the mirror, but Obama is too beloved right now to see himself in Sarkozy.

Impatience and fear

I've just realized that impatience has a lot to do with fear and that sometimes, it is closely related to self-derogation. I just got a copy of Muriel Barbery L'Élégance du hérisson (The Elegance of the Hedgehog). I will read it tonight and probably finish it if it is half as good as the person who offered it to me says it is. In any case, I don't think I can get anywhere without patience, but at the same, what do I do with my quenching thirst for speed. My favorite song in High School was Let is Flow because at the time, I already knew that I had a problem with time, with letting go, with being Zen, may be that's why I liked my Judaism's class so damn much.

The glitz of minority status

This assertion from Elaine Lafferty is hilarious, but it also exposes a truth, which worries me almost as much as it makes me uncomfortable:

But here’s the good news for those doomed identity-less white guys. You actually do have an identity! You are in fact a minority in America. Embrace your status, file a brief, find your own voice. Because judges like Sonia Sotomayor, what with their identity and their empathy, who have spent a lifetime outside your members-only clubhouse, may be more willing to listen to you than you ever thought possible.

Wonder and the unconscious

I agree with this;

For many adults however, wonder is a guilty pleasure like reading comic books, singing karaoke, or eating Hostess Snowballs. It's something for kids — childish and beyond a certain age, vaguely embarrassing. Not something you admit doing if you want to keep your good standing in the Adult Community.
On the other hand, mention names like Murakami (giant talking frogs), Gogol (detached noses found in loaves of bread), Ionesco and his rhinoceroses, Jonathan Lethem (animal private investigators), the wilder short stories of Hawthorne, Julio Cortazar and his human axolotl, Goethe and Christopher Marlowe (Dr. Faustus, I presume?), and the literati quickly bow their heads in deference.What is more realistic than a bed? Where do we let our guards down more than when we slide beneath the sheets at night and say okay, I'm done? Then we switch off the light, expecting both us and this hour to fade to black.
But do they? What about that little engine called the unconscious that never stops working and never stops surprising us with its remix tape of our day? How many times do we wake up in the morning and the first thing out of our mouth is where did THAT dream come from?

The remains of Empire

Sugary excerpt of the day from Johann Hari:

(...) in Britain today, there is a blood-encrusted blank spot about Empire. On the reality show The Apprentice, the contestants recently had to pick a name for their team, and they said they weanted “something that represented the best of British” – so they settled on “Empire.” Nobody objected. Imagine young Germans blithely naming a team “Reich”: it’s unthinkable, because they have had to study what their fathers and grandfathers did, and expunge these barbarous instincts from their national DNA.
This failure to absorb the lessons of Empire is not only unjust to the victims; it leads us to repeat horrifying mistakes. Today, we are – with the Americans – using unmanned drones to bomb the Pakistan-Afghan borderland, as we did a few years ago in Iraq. Nobody here seems to remember that the British invented aerial counter-insurgency in this very spot – with disastrous consequences. In 1924, Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris bragged that all rebellion could be stopped with this tactic. We have shown them “what real bombing means, in casualties and damage: they know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed,” he said. Yet instead of “pacifying” them, it radically alienated the population and lead to an uprising. If we knew our history, we would not be running the same script and expecting a different ending.
Gordon Brown said last year (in India, of all places) that “the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over.” The survivors of England’s blanked-out torture camps are entitled to ask: when did we start?

Kierkegaard versus Ayn Rand

My first thought on the following sugary excerpt from Emmanuel Paparella's article on the crisis is that it makes the complex even more complicated in attempt to reach acceptable conclusion:

Perhaps Kierkegaard had it more on target: the crisis is not one of intellect but one of spirit. Its symptoms are visible in lives of “quite desperation” that many people live in a capitalistic system which alleges to be the best system that the world will ever muster. But as a wise man in Palestine once said: “By their fruits you shall know them.” The fruits of the capitalistic system are that in the 21st century, globally speaking, we have one man for every three living on $ 2 a day. That kind of mere subsistence level on the part of one third of the world’s population (approximately 2 billion people) is surely not something for capitalism to be very proud of as a system and as a “non-ideology,” and to continue to tolerate it means that one has become an ideologue who believes in the social Darwinism or survival of the fittest, a la Ayn Rand.
It is urgent therefore that a new system be imagined and implemented. As Barack Obama would phrase it: we need the audacity of hope. But audacity without wisdom can easily turn into recklessness. Rather, we need rather a conspiracy of hope, as Silone, a disillusioned Communist who  eventually found his moral bearings, used to say. But it certainly cannot be the cynical system of politicians and ideologues still smarting under the idea that Communism did not win in the 20^th century and now find themselves with no ideological compass by which to proceed and all they can do is carp. They are ever ready to complain and shed tears about the poverty and the injustice in the world but at the same time they shoot down any new idea that is not a mere political ideology. As mentioned in the previous article, one thing is sure: any new system has to come up from the people up, democratically, and has to take into account all of the people for as that other wise man in the US said once: “one can fool all of the people some of the times; and some of the people all of the times, but one cannot fool all of the people all of the times.” 

I am of the opinion if one takes on Kierkegaard's view and argues that the crisis is one of spirit then it is impossible to make Ayn Rand's vision of the world the problem. One of the biggest problems of our times comes precisely from the fact that the spirit has been separated from the intellect and the prevailing opinion is that feeling good means to stop thinking, questioning to be Obamamically cheerful and hopeful about change and the word. The current crisis just shows that existence has become about the material and that the material has become spiritual and that being the fittest is about having more, consuming more, and not being ashamed of being bulimic. The issue is no longer whether there are alternatives to systems, policies that brought chaotic and devastating results, but still whether modernity, technology have made humans better enough to accept to take the challenge and the danger not to repeat history and to dare to invent something new to remind themselves that existence is still the most precious gift of all.

Communism and Fukuyamism

Sugary excerpt of the day from Slavoj Zizek

To treat communism as an eternal Idea implies that the situation which generates it is no less eternal, that the antagonism to which communism reacts will always be here. From which it is only one step to a deconstructive reading of communism as a dream of presence, of abolishing all alienating representation; a dream which thrives on its own impossibility.
Though it is easy to make fun of Fukuyama’s notion of the End of History, the majority today is Fukuyamaist. Liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally found formula of the best possible society; all one can do is to render it more just, tolerant and so on. The simple but pertinent question arises here: if liberal-democratic capitalism is, if not the best, then the least bad form of society, why should we not simply resign ourselves to it in a mature way, even accept it wholeheartedly? Why insist on the communist hypothesis, against all odds?
It is not enough to remain faithful to the communist hypothesis: one has to locate antagonisms within historical reality which make it a practical urgency. The only true question today is: does global capitalism contain antagonisms strong enough to prevent its indefinite reproduction?

Twitter and race

Interesting stuff from  Caitlin Moran:

(...) my biggest discovery has been on the subject of race. An internet facility that allows connection with the whole world gives you a deeper and a richer understanding of different people and their problems. It makes you rethink things you had blithely taken for granted.
The big revelation I have had is that the phrase “mixed-race African-American” takes up 26 letters, from the available Twit-posting-limit of 140. The descriptor for a white American, meanwhile, would be simply “American”, a mere eight letters.This glaring disparity gives a Twittering advantage to white Americans — they have an extra 18 letters to communicate with. Mixed-race Americans, however, have to spend so many letters simply defining themselves that their actual announcements, jokes and links to duff YouTube clips are brutally curtailed. We can’t shillyshally around this — that is a racial disadvantage. In the interests of an equal and happy world, we have to find a snappier way to describe people’s ethnic heritage or Twitter will turn into a ghastly WASPy golf club and die of whiteness.
This is given added impetus because we now live in a post-Obama world. Obama is the most famous mixed-race African-American in history. Given how many times a day Obama is written about, discussed or name-checked, if we don’t tackle this “mixed-race African-American” problem soon, millions of people are going to be crippled by RSI. As the world is an increasingly mixed-race, mixed-nationality place — because of the unstoppable forces of a) increasingly cheap international travel and b) hot lust — it behoves us all, in our global brotherhood, to chip in with suggestions on this pressing linguistic problem.

I have to say that the fact that  Moran's observations about the linguistic and racial problems of twittering are interesting, they don't make me want to care because she is addressing mundane, pc, and fluffy issues, which come to the center just because they are modern even though they should force the technically aware crowd to the realization that some worldviews and categorizations are just too old and too odd for the new world.

A simple fact

A factual statement, which hasn't yet become relevant or rather which is relevant, but accepted at the moment

The press has become Obama's silent ally and seems in a state of denial.