The Republic of Dissent

Too easy to say

The worst thing about this quote from Gore Vidal isn't the quote itself, but the sad reality that he is asserting something that most of the planet believes...it is heartbreaking to say, but the rest of the world loves Obama because like the birthers, they believe that he isn't really American, (Africans believe that he is African because his father was Kenyan, Europeans believe that he has a European sensibility because he spent some of his youth in Indonesia and because he is well-read and went to Harvard, People in the Middle East believe that since his father was a Muslim, he has to be on their side,..etc.):

Does anyone care what Americans think? They’re the worst-educated people in the First World. They don’t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke.

Libenter homines id quod volunt credunt

I don't know what to say or do except shake my head and deplore the fact that some men are still apes. Is virginity still a sign of virtue in our times? If it is, why does it only apply to girls/women especially when they are victimes of rape? By the way, Mickey Kaus shouldn't talk about anything other than basic American politics.

Competition of victimhoods

Interesting, disconcerting, but I'm afraid true analysis from Brendan O'Neill (I promise to get over my Polanski's obsession soon):

But perhaps the worst aspect of the Polanski affair is the competition of victimhoods. It is testimony to the domination of the victim culture in contemporary society that both Polanski haters and Polanski defenders, both sides in this bizarre re-enactment of the Culture War of the 1960s and its aftermath, have used the language of victimology to make their case. For many American and British commentators this is all about Samantha Gailey, whom they have transformed into the archetypal and eternally symbolic victim of the alleged great evil of our time, Child Abuse. ‘Remember: Polanski raped a child’, says a headline in Salon, in an article that provides sordid, misery-memoir-style details of what Polanski did with his penis to Gailey’s vagina and anus. For European observers, by contrast, Polanski’s actions can be explained by his own victimised past, especially during the Holocaust. We have to understand his ‘life tragedies’ and how they moulded him, says one filmmaker . Anne Applebaum, the American commentator who spends much of her time in Europe, says Polanski fled America in 1978 because of his ‘understandable fear of irrational punishment. Polanski’s mother died in Auschwitz. His father survived in Mauthausen. He himself survived the Krakow ghetto.’ (Applebaum fails to disclose that she is married to the Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, who is actively campaigning against Polanski’s extradition.)
This spat in victimology confirms that the politics of victimhood, the pursuit of law, politics and morality in the name of respecting and helping victims, dominates debate on both sides of the Atlantic, but in the Anglo-American sphere it is the victim of child abuse that is most sacrosanct, while in Europe it is the victims of the Holocaust who enjoy the greatest, most unquestioned moral authority – to the extent that Polanski’s pretty cowardly fleeing of America in 1978 can be excused as a latent reaction by a tortured man to the emotional horrors of Auschwitz

Disgusting mise en scène

Bill Wyman has a great article on the Polanski Affair, the salacious documentary that confirmed the fanatical belief of many of his admirers that he was the true victim in this care, and on the role that the media plays in this case. Disturbing sugary excerpt:

In "Wanted and Desired," it's weird how detached Zenovich [the director] stays from the victim, and how she undermines her in subtle ways. The tone is set early on, when a friend of Polanski's tells of being woken up and informed that the director had been arrested. The moment is actually played for laughs, with interspersed shots of a worried Mia Farrow using the phone in a scene from "Rosemary's Baby."
A filmmaker attuned to the psychological undercurrents of the characters in her drama might have been conscious of the state of a 13-year-old girl, who had just been drugged and raped and had spent the next period of time at a police station reliving the incident; and shaken by the story of "Rosemary's Baby" -- that, too, about a horrifically abused woman.
But the scene isn't used to illustrate the victim's story -- it's about poor Roman. He's the person making the desperate phone call. It's an odd juxtaposition when you think about it. That's when the friend, having just been told Polanski has been arrested, says, "This is somebody who could not be a rapist!" Here again, Zenovich is playing with semantics. It's obvious the friend was saying he couldn't imagine Polanski, say, following a woman down the street and grabbing her in an alley.
If Zenovich wasn't tipping the scales in Polanski's favor, she could have asked the guy, "Well, what about statutory rape, having sex with an underage girl? Could you imagine him doing that?"
We also hear people note, meaningfully, that meeting someone like Polanski could help a potential young actress's career. Such a remark about a grown woman would be slightly offensive; about a 13-year-old it's exceedingly so. The girl told police at the time she had repeatedly told Polanski no; on the screen Zenovich runs a line to that effect from the girl's grand jury testimony, but immediately follows it with a quote from Polanski's: "She was not unresponsive." This creates a subtle he-said-she-said dynamic that, in a case in which consent isn't a issue, represents another bit of moral prestidigitation.
It's strange to see a female filmmaker anchor her documentary's arguments with such atavistic attitudes. It gets worse: In the media circus of the time, some of the European press reported that the victim hadn't been a virgin.

I feel dirty just hearing people doing everything to justify having sex with a 13 year old girl just because they love the movies or are moved by the personal history of the man who had sex with her. In many less developed countries. perverts who have sex with little girls always argue that their victims are women, that they provoked them, that they wanted it or that they weren't pure anyway. I guess that we can no longer argue that the "West" cares more women than the rest.

Justice for all

I agree with this:

It is easy for people to be swayed by considerations of personality in such cases as the Polanski arrest. In general the law does well if it addresses itself to individuals and their circumstances rather than imposing rigid blanket laws that contradict justice as often as they serve it, precisely because they ignore the special individual circumstances. But with the great crimes of rape, murder and genocide, prosecution and punishment are about society’s struggle to protect itself now and in the future against the worst aspects of its own members’ behaviour. There is room for a degree of compassion towards prisoners even if they have committed monstrous crimes, but there is no room for failing to punish the crime itself.
In line with these thoughts, and with the regret that comes from having to acknowledge yet set aside two things, namely the existence of human frailty and the contribution gifted individuals such as Roman Polanski make to society, I conclude that it is right that the United States authorities are seeking to extradite him to serve his sentence for rape. Neither fame nor wealth, neither time nor distance, should render anyone immune to laws protecting against serious crimes against other human beings.

Sex crimes and hypocrisy

I can't muster enough energy to be outraged about the arrest of Roman Polanski in Switzerland. I don't have any bone in this fight, but what gets to me about this  murky affair is how much it demonstrates that sex crimes, especially in America where morality can't be separated from anything, aren't about the act, the sex but about, sorry to be crude here, but I believe that crudeness is necessary in order to get my point across, who got fucked, who did the fucking, and how society feels about these people. What do Polanski, Michael Jackson, R. Kelly have in common ? If your answer is nothing, then you must be living in a world where Obama can still walk on water or where God chose Bush over Gore. Can we please be consistent or at the least stop to act as if societies, no matter how modern they are, view certain sex acts as criminal for all their citizens. I'm trying to say that when it comes to sex, the views of most societies are not only sexist, but elitist. I'm not worry about Roman Polanski, he is going to be just fine even if  he is shipped to California.

Time out

I'm taking a time out probably until Monday, but before I go, I will leave with you this sugary excerpt, which just reinforces my antagonism to Supernanny and to other shows that make a mockery of the complexity of parenting and of children:

Sure, Supernanny remains must-watch TV for millions, bookshop shelves are cluttered with child-raising manuals and newspapers continue to report a constant stream of advice from the government and official bodies on how to raise children and run family life. It remains true that it’s a rare mum or dad who doesn’t obsess about their child’s safety, diet, educational attainment, social skills and general wellbeing. But it was inevitable that the current level of scrutiny given to private family life, and the social expectation that not only does ‘every child matter’ but that we should always be ‘putting children first’, would rustle up resentment.
And so it has – particularly among many middle-class mums who, while often believing that other people need advice and intervention, resent being addressed themselves in the patronising tones of expert advice. Having been sold a philosophy that the general troublesomeness of children is the product of dysfunctional parenting, they struggle to explain and accept their own battles at bed times, meal times, bath times and more or less any time when something needs to be done. Having been sold a promise that parenting ‘when done properly’ is stimulating, engaging and rewarding, they are bemused and frustrated with the stultifying tedium that comprises so much of domestic life. A domestic crisis becomes a personal crisis of being; it wasn’t meant to be this way.
“The slummy mummy rebellion is about as full of insight as a toddler’s tantrum”
This mother-malcontent has been reflected in an ever-growing genre of mummy-lit that sticks up two fingers at the orthodoxy of perfect parenting, pokes it in the eye and celebrates the dysfunctional chaos that is normal family life. But while we take to our hearts the fictional mothers who distress shop-bought mince pies to make them look home-made for the school cake sale, and we smile at tales of ‘cocktail playgroups’ serving martinis to mums, we put the books down unsatisfied. However entertaining they might be, they seem shallow; as raucous as a cheap laugh. This is because the reaction is just a reaction, and as full of insight as a toddler’s tantrum. Just as a two-year-old refuses to behave and tears the ribbon out of her hair, so the self-styled slummy mummy refuses to behave and reaches for the Chablis.

Conservatism and socialism

Thought-provoking sugary excerpt from Roger Scruton:

(...) conservatism isn’t goal-directed in the way that socialism is, and some, though not all, forms of liberalism are. Articulating it is first of all a matter of describing what it is and bringing out that in it which is loveable, acceptable, or in any case jeopardised by unthinking reform. That’s a huge labour of description and evocation. It must be conducted against a background of professional disillusion with the idea of goals in politics. We can’t know how to proceed towards some ideal in this world and it’s foolish to try, and the evidence of history is that people who have tried have ended up in situations of mass genocide. Isn’t it better to look at what we have and see the ways in which it secures equilibrium, satisfaction happiness etcetera for the people who are involved in it? (...)That’s a much more difficult thing to do, I think, than to articulate a forward-looking socialist doctrine. If you look at Marx in particular, he says almost nothing about the communist future. It’s just an abstraction. Everything is about how hateful this and this is in the present and anyway history is going to sweep it away. My view is that is morally irresponsible and that really one must begin from an understanding of the virtues and the defects of the thing that one has.

Critiquing Cultural studies

Michael Bérubé on Cultural Studies (hat tip: Bill Benson):

(...) cultural studies now means everything and nothing; it has effectively been conflated with "cultural criticism" in general, and associated with a cheery "Pop culture is fun! " approach. Anybody writing about The Bachelor or American Idol is generally understood to be "doing" cultural studies, especially by his or her colleagues elsewhere in the university. In a recent interview, Stuart Hall, a former director of the Birmingham Centre and still the most influential figure in cultural studies, gave a weary response to this development, one that speaks for itself: "I really cannot read another cultural-studies analysis of Madonna or The Sopranos."
Finally, cultural studies has had negligible impact on the American academic left in a political sense. (I make this argument at greater length in my forthcoming book, The Left at War.) That is because much of the American academic left continues to subscribe to the "manufacturing consent" model, in which people are led to misidentify their real interests by the machinations of the corporate mass media. The point to be made in response is not that corporate mass media don't dupe people; on the contrary, they do it every day. The point, rather, is that work like Hall's on the ideological underpinnings of deregulation and privatization under Thatcher (which he called "authoritarian populism") shows that the situation is much more complicated than that propaganda model. The left's task would actually be easier if all it had to do was expose lies as lies. Instead, you have to do a great deal of groundwork in civil society to try to forge an egalitarian response.

The Battle at OK Corral

I agree with this, but I'm afraid that one side has already lost the battle because it has deluded itself into believing that it can win by not gunning for what it knows is right because it is so scared of losing anything/everything:

For liberals, ObamaCare is the Gunfight at the OK Corral, the last battle for universal insurance. After 70 years and the Obama media blitz, the public once and for all either wants this, or doesn't. If it doesn't, the Baucus bill will be crammed down via reconciliation. If so, the post-partisan president may make worse, if that's imaginable, one of the most partisan periods in our history.

It's always about exploitation

Sometimes, in spite of himself and I would say by pure luck if I wanted to be needlessly mean, Nick Cohen gets things almost just right:

According to the received wisdom of our times, we are living through a phenomenal feminist advance. Women have stormed the bastions of male privilege and cracked, if not smashed, the glass ceiling.
But the success of women is based on exploitation of women. The households of privileged families and a large proportion of the middle class could not function without the labour of servants fleeing the Brezhnevian tower blocks of eastern Europe, Asian slums and poverty and oppression the world over. Our social structure would collapse were it not sustained by shadowy legions of women, living outside the law as illegal immigrants or living outside the welfare state in the black economy.
Stern left-wing writers in the 20th century told their readers that their wealth depended on the exploitation of far-flung colonies. Lectures on how our clothes and trainers come from the sweatshops of the east remain a standard of liberal journalism today. But the line between the rich and the poor worlds does not run between north and south or east and west but through British homes, touching the most intimate aspects of family life – the care of children and the happiness of marriages. Small wonder there is a gap between public pronouncements and private behaviour.

Choosing the right representative

Through quite innovative means, I'm able to watch Gadhafi (Gaddafi)'s performance at the United Nations. I'm using the word performance because that's what it is. His goal isn't to convince people that he is right, but to put himself in the spotlight. He is talking about an important issue, the need for the African Union to have a seat on the Security council but nobody is taking him seriously because he is an actor who, just as Joe Pesci in Casino or in Goodfellas, captivates/scares people, but doesn't inspire them or make them believe in what he says. Africa needs better spokespersons,  someone who can at least appear to be credible and not just what Africans want to hear about Western hypocrisy and double standards, colonization, and reparations.

Giving Brigitte Bardot a second look

For some reason, I've never been able to like Brigitte Bardot or to look at her as someone other than a racist old and bitter woman who loves animals more than she loves certain types of people. I think that it is due to the fact that I didn't live during the times when she was the sexiest woman in the world and that I hate with an Heathcliff-like passion her most celebrated movie And God created Woman. However, I'm tempted to give Bardot a second look after reading this from Agnès Poirier, whom I have no trouble liking:

In 1958, Raymond Cartier, then editor of Paris-Match, dedicated eight pages to an investigation of "le cas Bardot". He summoned psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists to try to unpick the roots of the Bardot phenomenon, and to ask what lessons could be drawn about "the modern crowd's psychology and the evolution of today's mores" that could be used in helping to turn back the tide.
He scrutinised in particular the events in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Providence and Memphis, where cinema managers were arrested for showing And God Created Woman and judges in wigs and robes showed up in delegation to express their outrage at its licentious nature. Would Bardot be banned from American screens? Paris-Match psychoanalysts proceeded to delve into her comfortable childhood and upbringing in the smart 16th arrondissement of Paris, near the Eiffel tower. She lived in a seven-room apartment with an older sister, a nanny and parents whom she spoke formally to, using the term "vous" rather than "tu". The family cat Crocus, "having become as bourgeois as its owners, didn't even think of devouring" the birds that lived in a little white cage.
Eight pages later, Cartier concluded: "Bardot is immoral, from head to toe." Agreeing with the American censors of the east coast, he declared: ban Bardot.
Faced with the bourgeois backlash, French intellectuals suddenly understood that there was much more at stake than just the lovely curves of a young star. In a 1959 essay about Bardot called The Lolita Syndrome, Simone de Beauvoir foresaw Bardot's entire life with its upheavals and triumphs. She called Bardot the "locomotive of women's history", and compared her irruption into French society with existentialism, presenting Bardot as the first and most liberated woman of postwar France.
De Beauvoir wrote: "When Marlene Dietrich exhibited her silk-wrapped thighs while singing in her husky voice, she was casting a spell . . . Brigitte Bardot doesn't cast spells; she acts. Her flesh doesn't have the generosity that symbolises passivity. Her clothes are not fetishes and when she undresses, she reveals no mystery. She simply shows off her body, which is in constant movement. She walks, she dances, she moves. In the hunting game, she is both hunter and prey. Males are an object for her, as much as she is an object for them. This is precisely what hurts males' pride." It was clear to all that Bardot, like Albert Camus's stranger, experienced the world through her senses.
Nowadays, feminists both in Britain and the US would shriek in horror at the thought that Bardot might be heralded as the emblem of the liberated woman. But that is just how designer Nicole Farhi remembers her: "Bardot was totally liberated; it was extraordinary to see, especially at a time when no women were allowed to be, and it was all the more unusual that she came from a bourgeois family. It was fantastic to see that she could just throw conventions away. She lived the way she pleased, she dressed the way she wanted; in that sense her freedom was very provocative."

The only Nkosi

I agree with Stanley Fish on this:

(...) because he is the object of unceasing criticism, Obama is also the object of unceasing attention. Day after day and night after night his is the face we see and the voice we hear. (On Sunday, we could have seen and heard him on five networks.) Like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, he bestrides the political landscape like a colossus. Every administration takes its name from the president, but in this administration the president seems to be the only one performing.

In other words, Obama is just like Sarkozy. He loves the spotlight and hates sharing it when it doesn't suit him as all actors who know how good they are, more often than not , do. No wonder, Sarkozy wasn't here to clap as Obama gave his speech at the United Nations

Almost there, but not quite

I agree with the last part of this statement even though I hates the way Katha Pollitt frames the issue, but if feminists were innovative and problem-solvers, feminism wouldn't be as dead as socialism:

If women's equality is the great cause of our time--and I hope it is--we'll get further by acknowledging it as a challenge no country has yet fully met rather than by framing it as a Western crusade.

Pirates as globalized individuals

Interesting excerpt from Antoine Garapon, I don't quite agree with him even though his metaphor is quite imaginative:

A pirate is the purest kind of rational agent, motivated solely by a desire for gain; free of loyalty towards any flag, he is subject to no system of taxation. In that sense, the pirate symbolizes the globalized individual, free of ties, who behaves solely in response to his animus furandi, his predatory instinct. Since pirates are hostile, a priori, to any legal constraints, they refuse to "play the game"; rather than feeling bound by the social contract, they create their own, accepting only the law that they have made for themselves. "In the modern liquid world, loyalty is a source of shame not of pride"; paying taxes somewhere appears on the debit side of the balance sheet: it is the sign of a lack of creative accounting ability. If there is any form of loyalty deemed worthy of respect, it is loyalty to one's group, and in particular to one's fellow professionals. Indeed, globalized law has its origins in such peer groups. Such law dissolves the ties between the effective standard and the symbolic institution: pirates are not just anti-political, they are anti-institutional too.

Sense and nothingness

I would like to be able to always take Terry Eagleton seriously but I wonder sometimes if he is able to see trees because he needs to be a true believer to have a purpose to live and to make sense of the meaninglessness of religion or rather of the constructed religiosity of nothingness (hat tip: Norm Geras)  :

Religion has become a very comfortable ideology for a dollar-worshipping culture.  The scandal of the New Testament -- the fact that it backs what America calls the losers, that it thinks the dispossessed will inherit the kingdom of God before the respectable bourgeois -- all of that has been replaced, particularly in the States, by an idolatrous version.  I'm presently at a university campus where we proudly proclaim the slogan "God, Country, and Notre Dame."  I think they have to be told, and indeed I have told them, that God actually takes little interest in countries.  Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless.  He can't be used as a totem or fetish in that way.  He slips out of your grasp if you try to do so.  His concern is with universal humanity, not with one particular section of it.  Such ideologies make it very hard to get a traditional version of Christianity across.

C’est la même chose

At the eve of every international summit, it's always the same story about a French president and the Anglo-Saxons especially when the former is thinking about reelection and is unpopular at home:

In time-honoured French fashion, Mr Sarkozy is happy to make himself a nuisance to les Anglo-Saxons as he preaches his doctrine of “remoralising capitalism”. He calculates that with elections facing Mr Brown and Ms Merkel, he is the pre-eminent European, at least for the moment. He is busy cultivating Latin America and the East. He may have rejoined Nato but France is back to playing its old Gaullist game of middleman between Russia and the US. On Iran and its nuclear programme he is talking tougher than anyone outside Israel.
The French President is attempting a little one-upmanship over Mr Obama. He has made no secret of his frustration over the US leader’s failure to respond to his overtures. Privately, he sees Mr Obama as overrated and now politically weakened. He is said to have given him “9 out of 20” for his speech on the economy and healthcare this month.

What is funny about this new and phony gimmick is that nobody seems to remember how much Sarkozy loves America (he spent his first summer vacation as president in New Hamsphire  and  how much America, at least some its too eager journalists (Roger Cohen) and its fashion victim politicians (New Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani) used to love him. What happened? Sarkozy realized that in France it never pays to be an Atlantist and that it wasn't in his interest to be as close to Obama as he was to Bush given that closeness in this case since Obama has been sanctified as the new Messiah even though he is losing his mojo, looks like weakness and subservience while in the case of Bush, it looked like an act of political courage given the fact that he was a president in a friend on the international scene .

Bad politics and great acting

I can't help thinking while watching this scene from Nixon, probably the last decent movie Oliver Stone made,  that we live in an era where where politicians are great at acting and bad at politics.

Time of the seasons

I'm simply enjoying a great Fall Saturday. One of the reasons why it is great is because I'm reading Marylinne Robinson's Housekeeping, which elevates my mood

We are all Dan Brown

I agree with this:

Might our communal antipathy towards Brown in fact be a displacement of the energy that fuels the oft-unspoken but pervasive anxiety that the even attainment of longed-for commercial success is no guarantee that we are actually any good at writing? And yet would we keep writing at all if we didn't still have a shred of hope, deep down, that it might be possible that we might be brilliant? We are all Dan Brown. Except for the staggering wealth.

I have to admit that it is difficult for me to take somebody seriously who is devouring  a Dan Brown in the train, the Gym or wherever else because I make the snobbish assumption that they read just like too many Americans eat, just to put something in their mouth and to feel full.

Guilt and Aid

Ian Birrell on Paul Kagame, Rwanda, Britain, and Aid:

Britain is Rwanda's biggest donor, pumping in £52m this year in direct contributions, a form of aid-giving reserved for those that have proved good governance. But human rights groups are increasingly concerned by restrictions on freedom of speech in Rwanda; even the BBC has not escaped a ban on its local language service. And other major donors, including the Netherlands and Sweden, suspended direct aid after a UN report highlighted Rwanda's role in eastern Congo, where war has claimed the lives of six times as many people as the Rwandan genocide.
Paul Kagame, Rwanda's charismatic president, plays the guilt card with such skill that his regime has, literally, got away with murder. His defenders point to impressive economic growth rates, improved health and education, and the healing of some of the genocide scars. But the case of Rwanda illustrates a glaring problem with British foreign policy, most notably in Africa. And it is a problem that raises uncomfortable questions at a time of looming spending cutbacks.

After reading Birrell, one has to wonder whether there can be such a thing as a good or rather non creepy African president for after all, what is the standard, what are the criterion not to be belittled or to be considered just as acceptable because one isn't Mugabe or Libya (Yes, Libya is an African country)?
In other words, I'm wondering is history, biases, guilt, resentment, egocentrism always has to color political analyzes especially of complex places such as African countries.

The ME era and civility

I know it's painful, but try hard to read this:

Over the past seven days, we have been treated to obnoxious outbursts by leading figures not only in politics, but in sports and pop culture as well. In addition to the heckle heard round the world issued by Rep. Wilson, there was the verbal attack launched by Serena Williams against a line judge at the U.S. Open, and the boorish behavior displayed by rapper and music producer Kanye West when he grabbed the microphone from award winner Taylor Swift at MTV's Video Music Awards.
All of these stories are rooted in the same basic fact: speakers who think it's all about them. And if it isn't about them, they seem to think it must be about some other individual who is even more important than they are. Apparently though, it's beyond any of the offenders' ability to appreciate that civility is about all of us.
Civility is about creating a culture of mutual respect, not simply making sure that the biggest celebrity in the room has their moment. But Serena doesn't get that, and neither do Kanye or Joe. And that's why they can not or will not offer meaningful apologies for their bad behavior.

I wonder on what planet Brad Hirschfield is living or rather whether he has been living in America for the last fifty years, which is the place where stars whether they are in politics or in entertainment apologize, cry, communicate on their private lives, make speeches about race, terrorism or whatever else when it is good for them, when they will be rewarded by the press (journalists are people too) or by the public through opinion polls or an election or the box office. We live in the ME era not only America, but pretty much in most of the rest of the world. Civility isn't about mutual respect, it is about the people asserting that certain behaviors stop because they find it repulsive through their vote or their pocketbook. But the trouble is that the joke is on them, because they/we have become mostly addicted to all of it because it make us feel good about ourselves since our dream is to be like them so we could indeed be masters of our domain.

It's an incurable disease

I'm speechless after watching this tape. I'm not just asserting it, I'm really describing my state of my mind. I have the feeling that America is stopped in the middle of nowhere and that it is going to waste a lot of time not on becoming a good country, but an impossible "clean" country. If I wanted to be bluntly cute, I would wonder at aloud whether if wouldn't have been a good thing for the US if the South had been able to form its own country.

Propagandists

Interesting...:

There is a difference between most people and professional propagandists. The latter serve their cause by repeating a false statement of “fact” so often and with such emphasis that decent people think there must at least be a modicum of truth to it.

The only problem is that in society, nowadays, there is no longer such a thing as the Truth, there is something else, which is a lot messier/nastier than truthiness.

Short-sightedness

Easy and worthless commentary, but not totally untrue:

Vanity, thy name is Sarko … Le président de la république Française made un peu d'un idiot of himself in front of the press by trying yet again – and failing yet again – to hide how short he is. He has previously been discovered standing on a box to give a speech, wearing shoes with heels notably higher than those of his supermodel wife (apparently confined to ballet flats since she married) and standing on tippy-toes during photos with the Obamas.

Redefining assimilation

I don't fully agree with this, but it just shows that too many feel that integration isn't working, I'm wondering if that perception isn't just based on the sense that there isn't enough pie left to share:

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues that the "agony and splendour" of assimilation has come to an end in Europe, both for Jews and other groups. The life and death pressures to homogenise are no longer there. The means of reshaping our identities – through cosmetic surgery, dress, internet personas, photoshop – are accessible to millions. At the same time, as Gabriel Sheffer's work shows, such processes can also be used to maintain the distinctiveness of Diaspora groups, which are not disappearing as many have predicted, again reducing the need to fear cultural oblivion.
We would all be far better off if we took a more relaxed attitude to assimilation. A strong society can accommodate fundamentalist religious groups that want to keep themselves apart from society, as long as they accept the fundamental principle that "the law of the land is the law". And if, for example, Muslim or Jewish groups wish to mitigate the effect of assimilation on the identities of their youth in non-coercive, voluntary ways which are compatible with common values, this too poses no danger to society and can be of mutual positive benefit.

Taking it easy by just needing love

I don't love the Beatles (one shouldn't love the same singers as one's parents), but I love this song even though it is too corny to be true and that its message is too syrupy to be simply erroneous.

Forgetting 9/11

September 11 happened 8 years ago and it's incredible to realize what has changed and what hasn't. It's sad to admit, but I don't think that the US dealt well with 9/11 because all the attention went to the wrong things and that there was never any deep national reflection because we entered immediately in state of war where the goals were protection, retaliation, security, and punishment. The problem is when actions which have grave and long lasting consequences happened in the absence of  reflection, of opened dialogue, they undermine the cause that they are defending and make it difficult to ask people to sacrifice because a great cause has neither been contextualized nor explained despite savvy political speeches about the divinity of America can't become a personal one for every citizen. All one has to do is to look at the US efforts in Afghanistan and the current dilemmas facing the current administration to realize that few of the people in charge 8 years ago thought about the long term because they were so obsessed with the short-term and the possibility that they were going to be responsible for the end of America.

The Outsider

It's always interesting and alas too predictable to see Tariq Ramadan skillfully portray as a victim:

The rector places me outside the Western world. But I was born in Switzerland. I grew up and I was educated in Europe. I am a part of this continent. And I would not understand the West? It is ironic that the way I am being treated in the West is a lot like people are treated in Eastern, non-democratic countries. What has happened here is not Western. It is only by casting me as an outsider who just doesn't get it that the rector can justify his decision.

Letting government do and be good

I agree with this:

And sooner or later Democrats have to take a stand against Reaganism — against the presumption that if the government does it, it’s bad.

The only problem is that I have the strong suspicion that Obamamism and Reaganism agree on that presumption and that Obama is more interested in symbolical change than in structural change, which requires more than hope and a Michael Jordanable politician.

More than words

I can't believe that I live in an era when political speeches are more important than deeds. Why on earth does an address to Congress on Health Care supposed to reset the debate when  it is painfully obvious that what is needed on this subject is fearless presidential leadership? How many speeches, new conferences, presentations, interviews will Obama give before he realizes that at some point, he is going to have to do things instead of making people nod or cry? All I needed was to take a trip the ER of a New York hospital last week to realize that there is something wrong when going to the hospital in the US feels like taking a trip to a place where people are barely viewed as commodities.

War and sexual violence

Thought-provoking sugary excerpt from Louise Du Toit :

(...) the exceptions that war allows for and creates are simultaneously deeds of self-sacrifice and deeds of violence and cruelty; often, of course, these are complicated in real life. War is thus seen as a situation of emergency and urgency: the means are usually justified by the ends, whatever rhetoric is used to cloth those ends. In my understanding, it is this exceptionality associated with the war situation that leads to escalating levels of sexual violence. Since time immemorial, women's sexualized bodies have been seen as part of the soldier's booty. It is not very different today. The masculine project of war is overtly constructed (whether rape is actively encouraged, or limited, or whatever), it usually has a subtext about how that sacrifice entitles the hero/warrior/soldier to female sexuality.
War even plays the role of initiating young men and boys into adulthood, and mature masculinity is often culturally and religiously conflated with sexual control of women. A vivid example of this is the way in which female ANC "freedom fighters" or "comrades" were detained as sex slaves in camps around southern Africa; this was their way of "contributing to the struggle". The women who wanted to be part of this armed struggle had to accept men's terms for entering "male territory", and clearly, part of this tacit agreement was sexual availability. During the rape trial of Jacob Zuma, the current president of the ANC, his struggle credentials were often quoted to support the idea that he was entitled to women's bodies, and was thus in a weird sense "incapable" of being a rapist.

Fighting Canada

To end my long break with a bang, here is a video, which summarizes perfectly the pettiness of the politics of the health care debate in the US. (hat tip: Harry Place)