The Republic of Dissent

A week to reflect

I'm taking the whole week off in an effort to find things to be grateful about. I'm trying to say that this isn't for me the most wonderful time of the year, at least not yet, and that I'm desperately trying to find, to buy, to steal some perspective not to be bruised terminally by self-doubt, self-derogation or self-pity. To make this less personal, what it means that I just have to read a great book and I'm planning to read Le Rideau by Milan Kundera, which is a literary essay so it can only put things in their right place. Happy Thanksgiving! Don't follow my example, just enjoy life and its simple pleasures without intellectualizing every single damn thing !

Filling up space

Interesting and sad:

As an anorexic teenager, I never went anywhere without the slogan "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels" written in a notebook or on my hand.
I had found the words in a women's magazine, along with yet another editorial designed to persuade women readers that shrinking our bodies would improve our lives, and I adopted them as a mantra to help diminish the terrible hunger I felt inside. I was ferociously hungry, not just for the food I was avoiding, but for love, learning and adventure – all the good things in life that felt out of my reach.
Like most anorexics, my eating disorder was not a girlish fad or a diet gone wrong but a private, violent strategy for exerting control on the body when life felt beyond my control. Eating disorders can strike people of all ages and both genders, but for young women like me, growing up in a society which demands impossible perfection and peddles airbrushed beauty, eating disorders pose a particular threat.
I soon discovered that skinny tastes of nothing at all. Living with an eating disorder is a bland, cold, joyless experience. But it took me five years to let go of the idea that in order to be loved, I had to take up as little space as possible.

It is not about health care

Simplistic, but I think truthful assertion, which I'm allowing myself to make since I'm under the weather and incredibly busy: the health care debate in the United States Senate isn't about about health care, but about America and its identity

She deserves all the crap she gets

The fact that so many are willing to jump on Palin and to accept sexist attacks on her by using stereotypical refrains such as "she deserves it," "she did it to herself," "she objectified herself so others are allowed to do the same," "she is ripping what she sow" shows that in our world, the dominant opinion is that it's okay to attack bimbos if they are bimbos and to  forget that discrimination, demeaning treatments are unacceptable no matter what the person they "punished" did or is doing. In other words, sexism isn't about the goodness or the purity of the victim, but about the ethics of the sexist and of the people agreeing with her/her.  Situational ethics have always been problematic to me because they justify the unjustifiable by too often putting the burden of proof on the object of the attack to show that it doesn't deserve be attacked, to prove that s/he is good enough to be defended. Sugary excerpt of Lindsay Beyerstein's post arguing that Newsweek's cover is wonderful because it exposes the real Palin's problem (hat tip : 3quarksdaily):

There's nothing scandalous about Palin showing some skin, or wearing Spandex. But this cover image is deliberately styled to make the then-governor of Alaska look like a Vargas pinup girl. Unlike the other images in the series, this one references her status as a governor. As she poses like a swimsuit model, she's clutching one icon of political power--the Blackberry--and leaning on another. The theme isn't Sarah Palin, athlete. The theme is Sarah Palin, Sexy Governor. (As in: one of those dime store Halloween costumes: sexy cop, sexy lady bug, sexy sanitation worker...)
Predictably, Palin complained that Newsweek's use of the image was sexist. Yes, the image was plucked from its original context. The whole point was that the picture was appalling it its original context. Newsweek is holding this picture up to the world and asking: Who does this? 
The bottom line is that Palin's a clown. She doesn't get a pass because her chosen clown persona is stereotypically feminine.
She caricatures herself. Day in and day out. Good for Newsweek for pointing and laughing.
The story is about why Sarah Palin is a problem for the GOP. The picture answers the question. She's a problem because she's a freak with no judgment who regularly makes a spectacle of herself.  Obviously, she's a potential problem for America because she's an incompetent leader who supports terrible policies. But that's not Newsweek's question.

I wonder whether we can go there with race, whether we are willing to say that some Blacks who use race solely to guilt others and for profit can be depicted using racist imagery. Would it have been acceptable for Newsweek to do a cover with Jesse Jackson or Al Sharton in a plantation or just chained as Charles Barkley was on a cover for a sports magazine a few year ago? I wonder why so many women are unwilling to defend Palin on things that they would usually find offensive just because they think that they would be legitimating her.  Why has Sarah Palin stopped to be a woman for too many women to become an object or rather her political views? I thought that we live in an era where the consensus was that women were people too and that thus, there was no need to attack their gender to attack their beliefs. Are we still living in an America where people, most specially women think that despicable bitches deserve to be beaten, rape, humiliated, belittled just because they aren't good people or don't believe in the right things? Apparently, we do.

Question de main

As France is wondering whether it should be proud of the way it qualified for the World Cup (Soccer, football), it got me thinking whether the United States would be tormented by such a question and agonized over the fact that it got through a major competition because of a mistake by the referee to say things politely. I have no idea. I have the strong suspicions that Italy wouldn't give a damn, but I wonder about the good, old, and moral U.S. of A. Sarkozy was too happy to have avoid the risk that having a whole nation not distracted by football next year could have been for him, that he just rejoiced in the win while praising les Bleus's fighting spirit. Would Obama have done the same thing ?

Scaring Women to death

I went to see the doctor and it was an interesting visit because it made realize how easy it is to scare women about their health and to make them feel inadequate. I went for a somewhat issue and I ended having to hear about breast cancer, the new flu, kids, and menopause (that is so far away I hope). As I was there almost freezing to death, it became clear that women aren't supposed to own their bodies, that they have "to get buns out the oven" to be useful. Even in the United States, as in some barbaric countries, women are born to breed or rather to be breed and filled by divinely manly seed. All over the walls of my doctor's office, there were advertisement about weight loss, plastic surgery, getting great eye lashes, regaining a super body after giving birth, and I thought:  Man ! No wonder women are so hard on themselves and on each other. They are taught that not to be picky with guys, but to have impossible standards when it comes to other women and their own bodies. What are the benefits of having an uterus if you don't see as your God given duty to procreate? I remember that as a kid, the expressions that I hated the most were in English "she is with child" and the following question in French that was popular when a young girl got pregnant and that of course, the coward who had knocked her up had all but disappeared :  "qui l'a engrossée?"

Harmful sex

I don't know what to feel after reading this :

I am pretty confident that that sex is more likely to be physically harmful for girls than for boys: Obviously, only girls can get pregnant (something that isn’t strictly a physical harm, but that is often harmful when unintended, and harmful because of the physical consequences of the sex). Also, unless I’m mistaken, females are more likely to get HIV from males than vice versa; females are more likely to suffer directly from the effects of HPV, such as death, illness, or infertility caused by cervical cancer; and females are more likely to become infertile as a result of various sexually transmitted diseases than are males.I’m less confident (hence the “I suspect”) about the emotional matter, but my sense is that at least in our society today females are still more likely to feel used and degraded as a result of a sexual relationship that has not gone as they had hoped, and in particular that involved less emotional commitment from the other person than they had hoped. Perhaps this is something that is innate; I can see why it might be, though I don’t know if there is any serious evidence of that. Still, whether this stems from nature or nurture, my sense is that this is indeed the case today in America.

I "suspect" that there is something fundamentally wrong with Eugene Volokh's views of gender and of sex and that he interprets his facts wrongly not to say ideologically; I guess the most important thing is that his views don't offend me (it's so easy nowadays to use offensiveness as an excuse to avoid debate and to shame the other into submission), but they do bother me very much because they are restrictive and lead to the conclusion that nature is queen when it can be wrong.

Going rogue too

I'm going rogue too: I  just borrowed a copy of Sarah Palin's book, which I'm going to skim. I'm just borrowed and skimming it because as a matter of principle, I almost never buy or read books that politicians write to talk about themselves especially when they are still trying to conquer power. In any case, I'm going to skim Palin's book because I'm trying not so much to understand why people hate her, but to have a better sense of what America is to her and why I have the conviction that she has a lot in common with Obama. As I have said before I like Palin as I like Obama and Sarkozy; when I use the work "like" what I'm saying is that I would shake their hands and even talk to them about my mother. However, I don't think that liking someone is enough to vote for them or to support their politics. It is for this reason that I never understood why people needed to hate Palin to attack her politics or to vote for Obama because they thought that he was the coolest thing since Coke Zero or since the last Air Jordan shoes. An Ambassador once told me a few years ago that George Bush was really cool and extremely personable as if that was supposed to make a difference and to change one's view of his politics. I'm trying to say that in our century if politics is solely about the person, the personal, the ME, then Politics with a capital P is doomed. Thus, I will skim Palin's book to remind myself that you don't have to believe that someone is retarded not to support their politics and there is something about our time that makes it easy to make women the epitome of dumbness and of anti-intellectualism.

Revelation

Well, Maya Angelou still has enough guts and lucidity to say provocative things such as this, I guess we have to burn her at the stake now :

The terrorist action of 9/11 gave birth to President Obama's entry to the White House

Le jour le plus court

I've been moving non stop this Saturday, catching up on my work, reading a lot while watching soccer, football. The only good thing about watching football is that it makes you forget that you are not feeling well (wink to Craig to apologize for everything and to promise that we will get together in DC before December!). In any case, it is almost 11 and it doesn't look like I'm going to be able to go to sleep for I still have so much to do. What it is with New York and the rain this year? It makes me wish that it were colder so that we could at least get some sunnier weather.

Une chanson douce et simple

Well, if there is one reason to love Aznavour when you are not your parents is that he understood that love songs don't have to complicated and that sometime all you need to do is to say it.

Picky women

Interesting,but I don't know what to make of this and I'm bothered with the implicit assertion that "pickyness," fussiness for women is such a problem that it has to be explained:

(...) it seems women are pickier because our institutions make them pickier.  If speed dating was organized to instead make men pickier, I’m guessing men would like it more, but women would soon just not show up to such events.  So yes there is a sense in which women are pickier, but it is more in wanting institutions that make them picky, rather that in being pickier given neutral institutions.

Different realities

The following criticism of Bernard Kouchner (French foreign minister) by Evelyn Gordon,  shows how wide a gap there is between Americans and the French on the Israel-Palestine Question for Kouchner in France is considered to be pro-Israel when here in the US, he is considered as a leftist ideologue who doesn't understand facts and hate force even though he supported war in Iraq, supports the one in Afghanistan and has somewhat of a tough stand on Iran (less tough than Sarkozy's); that being said, I agree that he has been a terrible foreign minister in part because he is too emotive and too willing to take criticisms as attacks on his sublime aura; I have the feeling that Kouchner likes too much the role of the martyr, he liked being the martyr of the socialists throughout much of his career and now he is enjoying being the one of Sarkozysm:

Bernard Kouchner is “hurt” and “shocked” by Israelis’ “vanished” desire for peace. Israelis of all political stripes would undoubtedly be equally shocked at the French foreign minister’s ignorance — and at his willingness to hurl false accusations without even a minimal effort to check his facts. (...) But Kouchner couldn’t be bothered with the facts; he preferred to simply accuse Israelis of not wanting peace. Perhaps it’s his background as a human-rights activist showing: hurling accusations at Israel without checking the facts is practically de rigueur among human-rights organizations these days.

The death of idealism

I agree partly with Ian Buruma on this:

The way it looks now, liberals, in the “progressive” American sense of the word, may actually have been among the losers of 1989. Social democrats were always despised by communists, and vice versa. But many social democratic ideals, rooted in Marxist notions of social justice and equality, were thrown out, like the proverbial baby, with the bathwater of communism.
This process was already under way before the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the free-market radicalism of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Society doesn't exist, Mrs. Thatcher once famously declared – only individuals and families count. Everyone is for themselves.
For many people, this had the ring of liberation – from overregulated markets, from overbearing trade unions, from class privilege. That is why it was called neo-liberalism. But free-market radicalism undermined the role of the state in building a better, more just, more equal society. Neo-liberals are less interested in justice than in greater efficiency, more productivity, the bottom line.
While the neo-liberals were slashing and burning their way through old social democratic arrangements, the left was dissipating its energies on cultural politics, “identity” and ideological multiculturalism. Democratic idealism was once the domain of the left, including social democrats and liberals. In the United States, it had been the Democratic Party, embodied by John Kennedy, that promoted freedom around the world.
But in the late 20th century, it became more important to many leftists to save “Third World” culture, no matter how barbaric, from “neo-colonialism” than it was to support equality and democracy. People on the left would defend brutal dictators (Mao, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, Ruhollah Khomaini) simply because they opposed “Western imperialism.”
As a result, all politics derived from Marxism, no matter how loosely, lost credibility and finally died in 1989. This was, naturally, a disaster for communists and socialists – but also for social democrats, for they had lost an ideological basis for their idealism. And without idealism, politics becomes a form of accounting, a management of purely material interests.

Unconscious

I've had an unconscious Sunday in the sense that I'm just waking up and it is almost 11 pm. I guess it means that I'm going to spend the night working. Well, the good news is that it seems that I didn't lose much by oversleeping even though I lost my Saturday by watching the House of representative debate the Health-care bill. As I watching it, I realize that there is really at least two Americas as the politician that we all love to hate now, John Edwards, used to love to say. I mean what is it that make both Republicans and Democrats Americans beside the fact that they were born in the US. Why is abortion an obsession for males who seem not know anything about women?

Vibrant recent history

I can't believe it has been 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell, that's probably because I was too young when it happened to understand the meaning of the moment and the fact that East Germany was hell as this sugary excerpt shows ... :

The brutal nature of the East German regime means that Monday's celebrations will be tinged with melancholy. Dozens died while trying to cross the barrier which divided Berlin and Germany in two while the Stasi squelched all protest in the German Democratic Republic, as communist East Germany was called. Ziehm says that, with attention focused on reunification, many from the former East are revisiting the past in a much more personal fashion. In the last year, tens of thousands of people have headed to the Birthler Authority to finally take a look at what their Stasi files contain. Interest has been so high, in fact, the waiting list is now two years long.
The files -- which occupy over 100 kilometers of shelf space (not including the 16,000 sacks of shredded documents the Birthler Authority is currently trying to reassemble with the aid of computers) -- are testament to a darker side of humanity. And Ziehm says that films like "The Lives of Others," which indicate that many were coerced into spying on friends and neighbors, don't come close to plumbing the depths that some ultimately fall to. Friends informed voluntarily on friends and spouses even tattled on each other.

Defining national identities

I would like to say amen to these words from Jim Wolfreys on the debate on the definition of Francité (Frenchness) that is occurring in France, but a part of me is resisting it:

At one extreme those who find themselves concentrated in the poorest areas of France do so not out of choice, but through ethnicity and income. Neither Islam nor "ethnic communitarianism" are responsible for such divisions: they are the product of social deprivation and racism. At the other extreme, however, is a section of society that wilfully separates itself from the rest of France. The top 10% of earners choose to live in the most segregated areas of the country, well-heeled districts like Neuilly and St-Cloud on the outskirts of Paris. It is they who have created what Maurin calls "the bourgeois ghetto".
If the present debate is to reassert the historic republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity then government priorities will need to be overturned. The targeting of "illegal" immigrants – Besson aims to deport 27,000 people this year, more than double 2002 levels – focuses attention on a tiny proportion of the population. Likewise, high-profile campaigns to impose a republican dress code on Muslims are a distraction from more fundamental divisions shaping French society, divisions determined less by religion than by poverty, racism and inequality. In France, as in Britain, if debates on citizenship are to involve denouncing the extreme right while pandering to its bugbears, they will only obscure the real issues – and in so doing become part of the problem.

I believe that the trap of any debate on national identity, whether it be French, British, Moroccan, or Nigerian, is to cast it in the terms  Wolfreys is choosing to frame by emphasizing the risks as if nationals of a country should be afraid to define/decide who they are or who they would to be.There is this morbid and unhealthy connection between patriotism, any attempt to show national price and fascism and there is one between any admission that national identity can grow, change or even be redefined drastically with self-hatred, deculturation, Arabization, de-europeanization, and dewesternization.

Light Mourning

I'm still trying to get over the Yankees's win and over the fact that I'm going to have to survive their parade tomorrow. Let's hope that they don't do it again next year otherwise, I will just have to stop watching Baseball.

African literature

Interesting thoughts from Aaron Bady:

(...) after all, what is African literature? The more one thinks about it, I find, the more it falls apart as a category. Which is to say, while it certainly exists in a phenomenological sense, trying to place that phenomenon in any kind of empirical context is a project of fast diminishing returns: the more seriously you attempt to group the literary production of an entire continent into a single term, the more you occlude the fundamental fictions of that categorization from your vision. I’m not going to go over all the different kinds of linguistic, cultural, historical, geographical, and racial categories that different critics have tried out in their search for a securely definable field of “African literature” (each of which is at least usefully wrong) but to treat any of them as anything but imperfect fictions is to naturalize (and thus sacrifice the ability to think critically about) those very discursive narratives.
If once wishes to wax Foucaultian, though (and “one” does wish, in this case), it does exist as a set of institutional practices that produce a coherent discourse. And if we are invested in thinking empirically about the basis on which the literary production of African literature happens, that institutional discourse certainly does exist as an expression of a commercial desire mediated by a particular messy set of critical taste-making devices. Which is to say, somewhere between the publishing industry’s attempt to create a product to market (and a market for their product) and the desire by writers and readers to have a relationship through by that marketplace we find the effort by critics of all sorts to make it happen, and concrete institutional structures through which they do it.

There isn't such a thing as African literature because there isn't such a thing as an African identity or even as Africanness, Africanity or an African citizenship. The fact is although there is a continent called Africa, there are no Africans and therefore African writers don't exist.There is as wide a gap between Chinua Achebe and J.M. Coetzee as there is between Philip Roth and Gabriel García Márquez. It might be worth our while to wonder why some are obsessed with defining non-whites by what sets them apart rather than by what they have in common with the rest.
Marie Ndiaye won the Goncourt prize yesterday and although she is very much a French writer, at the beginning of her career librarians wanted to classify her work in the African literature part of their bookstores because she had a Senegalese name and because she looks black since her father was in fact Senegalese even though she has grown up in France and never went to Senegal until she was an adult. Already the Los  Angeles Times literary blog has called her the first black woman (Americans have a problem with race and with the idea that métisse doesn't mean black and that black doesn't mean much) to win the prize even though she isn't black and doesn't describe herself as such (to the contrary of Obama who did for political reasons), which shows that she refuses to be defined by what  race conscious people perceived as essential existential categories. 

Consenting to sex

Great question from Jenny Diski taken from her article on the idea of Rape-rape in the London Review of Books:

What got my interest finally and fully engaged was the idea of a 13-year-old consenting to have oral sex with a 44-year-old film director. Not, of course, that children aren’t sexual or even apparently complicit sometimes in sexual play. She was clearly not an innocent. (Though previous sexual experience is not a bar to a rape conviction even where the victim is over the age of consent.) Nevertheless, in order for her to consent to oral sex, Polanski must have asked her. How did he ask? Some questions are more like questions than others. What is it like to be 13, a wannabe movie star (nearly all 13-year-olds are), in the presence of a powerful movie director in the house of a famous movie star (Jack Nicholson), being given a powerful drug and alcohol and then invited to give the great man a blow job or make yourself available for cunnilingus?

I wonder if we would ask the same question for a thirteen year old boy. If a female movie star had sex with a thirteen year old boy, what questions would we be asking ourselves?  I'm willing to be that the question of whether or not he gave his consent wouldn't be one of them. Consent is used in almost any society where the only ethical and god accepted sex is manly sex to clear conscience and to sustain barbaric traditions and norms. Remember the Jacob Zuma case where the question wasn't the age of consent, but rather  the one of the manner of consent. In other words, "no," "maybe," "I don't know," embarrassed or confused silence mean yes when the right people, which are almost always the most virile, want to fulfill their "natural" desires.

The essentiality of oral sex

Via Feminist Philosophers, which is a blog that everybody ought to read, I found the following tidbit on oral sex and nature great, but I have absolutely no understanding of my reaction:

Oral sex is surprisingly rare in the animal kingdom. Humans do it, of course. As do bonobos, our close relatives. But now researchers have observed the practice for the first time in a non-primate. During intercourse, female short-nosed fruit bats lick the genitals of their partner, a possible ploy to increase copulation time. The discovery suggests there may be a biological advantage to fellatio.

Les mêmes choses

After reading the following assertions from Yasmin Alihbai-Brown, I am reminded how much the fact that the only connections that our times to race are racism, ethnicity, and identity blocks any forward thinking because the focus is placed on particularities and différence and on the erroneous assumption that self-derogation is solely ideological:

So much of the media is embracing the new world, and today's most popular TV programmes, especially reality shows, feature a cornucopia of racial types. Yet "ethnic" psychosis persists and is manifestly getting worse.
On Asian marriage sites or matchmaking newspaper adverts, third-generation British Asian men want "wheaten" brides. In black communities western features are craved, hair is straightened, skin lightened for reasons profoundly disturbing. Jet gets herself a pointy, long nose. Now, she says, she looks rich enough to shop in Waitrose.
Back in the 1960s the Black is Beautiful movement in the US spread across the world and made us proud to be who we were, even in Kampala, Uganda where I was growing up. I stopped ironing my hair to look like Jean Shrimpton's, and my African college room-mates went Afro. No more burnt hair in the sink and a new dawn, we thought. For a few decades, yes. Now comes globalisation spreading Starbucks and standardised western notions, and with it a surge in "ethnic" self-loathing and self-mutilation.
What is different now is the absence of any political and social fightback. Race is dispensable, can be wiped out if you can pay for the privilege.

Daylight saving hour blues

I'm just trying to enjoy the extra hour that I gained yesterday. Well not really. I've always wondered what was really the point of backing time an hour during Winter to then return to the right time during Spring.  It's dumb and more importantly it shows just how arrogant we can be in our attempts to control time and to fool ourselves into thinking that we are masters of our universe.